Aesthetics of Everywhere

Advice given to me at graduation by one of my English professors, Judith Plotz: “Carry a good anthology of poetry on your travels.”

As a scholar of Romanticism, Professor Plotz introduced me to some of my (now) favorite poets, including the English peasant poet John Clare. She taught me to memorize poetry, believing in its powers to sustain a person. She measured her love for poetry like the cadence of one’s gait, each word dropped like a step upon the earth. I’m thinking back to her advice now, as I do more walking and prepare to spend over 8 hours straight walking in the Sierra Club’s annual One Day Hike.

Recently, another of my former English professors, Margaret Soltan (University Diaries), has begun to record an online poetry lecture series at Udemy, called Modern Poetry. Her focus is on Modernism and Post-Modernism. It’s a free online course, so no risk in poking around and seeing if you enjoy it. Every human being owes themselves this appreciation of language and its power. In particular, Professor Soltan goes through detailed analyses of certain famous poems, such as Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror“. But it’s also just nice to listen to her speak of poetry in general.

Give poetry a chance, especially if you’re only ever been forced to read it. Especially if you find it challenging. Poetry expands your understanding of the breadth and depth of human experience, shaping language to express desire, pain, tedium.

“The present moment is constantly slipping into the past…”

Here’s to the end of 2011. It’s been quite a busy and eventful year. I’m pleased with how I’ve been able to keep up with posting what I’ve learned every day, even if I didn’t keep track in June (posting instead about my trip to Korea). One blogging tip I have – especially for longer term projects like my “Everyday Lessons Learned” – is to set aside time to post. Otherwise it’s easy to forget and realize that you’ve fallen behind. If you set a personal schedule of posting and set yourself to it, it’s not hard to keep a blog active.

22: This year was the first year in over 3 decades in which we sentenced fewer than 100 people to death row. From a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, as reported on NPR’s Morning Edition. Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, says one factor in this is crime rates:

This year the murder rate fell to where it was in the 1960s, meaning there are fewer people to charge with capital murder. That’s an enormous drop from the 1990s — when the U.S. executed more inmates than in at least half a century.

23: Did anyone else attempt to read the dictionary as a kid? I’m reminded of my short-lived attempt to read (not necessarily memorize) every word in the dictionary when I see this list of words David Foster Wallace copied out of a dictionary. My bookmark while I read DFW’s Infinite Jest was a sheet of paper on which I wrote all the words he used that I didn’t know the meaning of.

24: Together with the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) forms the Triple Crown of long-distance hiking in the United States.  It’s 3,100 mile long, and runs along part of the North American Continental Divide. A thru-hike (a complete hike of the entire trail from end-to-end) of the CDT takes around six months at a pace of 17 miles/day. Add that one to your bucket list.

25: The East Coast Greenway (ECG) is a 2,500-mile, car-free path planned to go from Calais, Maine to Key West Florida, spanning huge distances with a continuous path. Currently over 25% is already on paths free of motorized vehicles, and the rest consists of interim on-road routes while the rest of the paths are being constructed. The goal for the ECG is to link all the major cities along the way, creating a safe way to travel by non-motorized means between these places on the eastern seaboard.

26: Some of the benefits to having a green roof:

There are many benefits to a green roof including a decrease in heating and cooling costs, which in turn mitigates the urban heat island effect. Other benefits include a natural filter for rain water, an increase in the life span of the roof, a natural habitat for animals and plants and a reduction in dust and smog levels. (via ArchDaily)

27: Detroit is planning a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system that will span 110 miles with these dedicated bus lanes. This would make Detroit’s BRT system the largest in the United States. (The largest in the world is currently Jakarta’s TransJakarta BRT system.) Stephanie Lotshaw at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy says that all current BRT systems in the U.S. are under 20 miles.

28: As described in the New Yorker, the Pitch Drop Experiment is the world’s longest running lab experiment, in which University of Queensland physics professor Thomas Parnell poured hot pitch into a glass funnel, tracking how long it would take for a drop to fall. It look eight years for the first drop of pitch to fall, another nine for the second drop, and so far there have been eight drops. The professor currently overseeing the experiment, John Mainstone, predicts the next drop will occur in 2013 – no one has yet witnessed the actual occurrence of a falling drop.

29: Layaway programs are regaining popularity in America with the depressed economy. These allow shoppers to make payments on the full price of a product, only getting the product once it’s paid off. However, there’s usually a $5 service fee, which means that it would typically cost more to buy something on layaway. The option of paying for things on layaway has recently returned to Walmart. Some of the appeal of layaway is that it forces you to put money aside for a specific product, rather than spending it elsewhere, especially because of the sunk cost of the service fee and the extra fee for cancellation if the shopper doesn’t make all the payments.

30: The Teapot Dome Scandal was an incident considered the greatest scandal in American politics, before Watergate. In 1922, during President Harding’s administration, the Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted huge bribes from oil companies to grant them production rights without competitive bidding at Teapot Dome, an oil field in Wyoming. Fall was the first Presidential cabinet member to be imprisoned for his actions while in office.

31: Just to come back around: In 2011, Arlington may have had its first year since the 1950s without a single murder. DC’s also experiencing a decline in murders.

For some other notes in the year-end roundup, keep reading.

Traffic to my blog grew by more than 65% over last year.

Most-read posts on Aesthetics of Everywhere from 2011:

1. Everyday Lessons Learned: May 2011, Week 3
2. T-money for transport and more in Seoul
3. Spa Land in Centum City, Busan (and this one I just typed out quickly on my iPod)
4. Seersucker Social 2011 Photos
5. “Hamtdaa: Together” at Artisphere

Cheers to the New Year! Make 2012 count.

I hope by now everyone’s wrapping up the year and spending a lot of time with family and friends. Here’s my roundup of 2011 roundups. Add your own in the comments!

• Zeitgeist 2011: Year in Review Video (Google)
• Best Maps of 2011 (Spatial Analysis)
• Best Memes of 2011 (Know Your Meme)
• Best Websites of 2011 (Time Magazine)
• 10 Worst Social Media Marketing Blunders of 2011 (Advertising Age)
• Top 10 Best TED Talks of 2011 and Top 10 Culture-Tech Stories of 2011 (ReadWriteWeb)
• Another List of Lists at Listgeeks Staff Picks for Best of 2011
• Rusty’s Top 30 Songs of the Year and Top 50 Albums of the Year
• The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2011 (FlowingData)
• From one of my favorite new art blogs of the year, A Colossal Year
• Conversational Reading’s Favorite Films of 2011
• Doree Shafrir’s Top Longreads of 2011
• Ryan Little’s 10 Best Local Tracks of 2011
• The Most Important Graphs of 2011 (The Atlantic)
• The Geography of the Year in Music (The Atlantic Cities)

In 2011, I…

• Kept a running list of new things I learned almost every day.
• Read fewer books than I did the previous year, which isn’t a good thing – but I have a long commute by bus/Metro so I’m looking to up that number in 2012.
• Joined – and became slightly obsessed with - Quora. It’s the way online Q&A should be done.
• Cooked a lot and tried out many new recipes, including a bunch of kale soups, pierogies, kimchi chigae, the best sweet potato fries recipe ever, and homemade salsa and tortilla chips.
• Traveled to South Korea for a few weeks with my brother and my boyfriend. Went hiking on Soraksan, danced in Korean clubs, visited royal palaces, and made new friends.
• Took shorter trips to Philadelphia, Austin, New York City, and Baltimore. All of them are exciting cities with vibrant cultural and artistic life.
• Greatly expanded my knowledge and study of urbanism, public transit systems, and mapping projects.
• Rode my bicycle all over DC, and on fun rides like the Seersucker Social, the Tweed Ride, and bike caravans with friends.
• Started taking Capoeira classes. Fun, challenging, and an incredible workout.
• Moved to the Bloomingdale neighborhood of DC, which is definitely my favorite place I’ve lived in Washington, DC.

Looking forward to setting some new goals in 2012!

Happy September!

01: Your senses are delayed by about 80 milliseconds. Your brain can align inputs from simultaneous sensations (traveling from different distances through your body) so they’re experienced in sync – in a way, your brain waits before registering the information it has gathered from your body.

02: According to a recent CDC report, 5% of Americans drink over 550 calories of sweetened drinks daily. Teenage boys drink the most of the sugary stuff.

03: Caleb Chung, the creator of the Furby, wanted to improve upon the electronic pet idea (like the Tamagotchi and Giga Pet – very popular in the 90s) by creating a toy that could appear to be responsive and emulate machine learning. The more you played with a Furby, the more its vocabulary seemed to grow. It was programmed to gradually move from an unintelligible “Furbish” language to the English language, though the toy itself couldn’t actually hear or understand anything that was said to it. The Furby’s emotional expression are tracked to its ears – essentially serving as both its eyebrows and its arms. (Radiolab)

04: Pickling cucumbers doesn’t require many ingredients: cucumbers, water, vinegar, sugar, salt, garlic, and dill. I haven’t tried making them myself but hope to soon!

05: Verbal overshadowing is a term used to describe the strange effect studied by Jonathan Schooler: those who wrote down a description of a bank robber immediately after a staged crime actually had a harder time remembering the details later than those who didn’t describe the person right afterward. But his data began to regress towards the mean… (This one’s fascinating. Listen to the whole story here.)

06: The first Piggly Wiggly supermarket opened in Memphis, TN on this day in 1916. It was the first of its kind: a fully self-serve grocery store, in which customers could pick their items off the shelves without having to write an order to the clerk. According to the commemorative plaque at that site, “shoppers presented their orders to clerks who fetched goods, ground coffee beans, measured flour and sugar, and then added the bills in pencil on the back of sacks.”

07: An interesting analysis of China’s dependence on tobacco:

Smoking in China remains a highly gendered behavior with 57.4% of men and 3% of women smoking, respectively (WHO, 2010). The concentration of smoking among men reflects advertising and marketing strategies that have linked tobacco to traditional notions of masculine identity (nanzihan - 男子汉), political leadership (imagery of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping smoking) and expressions of nationalism and patriotism (cigarette brands such as Zhonghua – 中华). Anthropologists such as Matthew Kohrman have described how exchanging cigarettes forms the currency of male networking and friendship in rural and urban China (Kohrman, 2007).

Going through old emails is a fun jaunt into the past. You never realize quite how much you’ve grown until you’re looking back several years in your inbox.

I dug up a few emails from July/August 2006, when I took a trip to Switzerland with one of my best friends to visit her aunt’s family, who lives in St. Gallen. Comments and excerpts, for nostalgia’s sake:

• The first day we arrived in Switzerland was the first time I tried grappa, a strong Italian drink.
• I noted that the calcium levels in the tap water were very high: “…so it’s good for you, but showers hurt if the levels go unchecked.”
• One of the main things I noted was how much environmental consciousness informed all aspects of daily living:
• Bike lanes are ubiquitous because they discourage driving if you can bike instead. Example: At the train stations, the bike parking area is much closer to the platforms than the car parking spots are.
• Trash bags cost 15 francs (at the time) for 10 bags. This works out to about one US dollar per trash bag, and the only way your trash will be collected is if you use these special bags that are specific to the area you live in. The money you pay for the trash bags covers some of the local government’s cost to pay for the maintenance workers and trash servicemen. People default to recycling if at all possible – it’s just too pricey to throw a lot of garbage out in Switzerland.
• We were told it was typical that most houses aren’t air-conditioned. I wonder if that’s still the case now, or whether it’s changing. It’s also not common to have a refrigerator in a Swiss household; my friend’s aunt had to special order theirs (she grew up in the United States and was used to having a fridge in the kitchen). I found out that fresh eggs don’t need to be kept refrigerated, like we see in most US grocery stores.
• “Beautiful mountains.” (You know I’m a fan.)
• Huge drug problems among the teenagers there. Some public restrooms have blue lighting installed, so that intravenous drug users can’t find their veins to shoot up.
• While in St. Gallen, we slept with the windows open and breakfasted on the terrace. Such idyllic days.
• “The cheese is wonderful, and the Swiss are very proud of their cows, so you see cows wandering everywhere, even across roads. They are sweet and wear cute bells.”

Cows allowed to wander. After I returned from the trip, I summed it up this way: “It was amazing and refreshing and I ate tons of delicious food and took many photos (all while missing the DC heat wave).”

I give thanks that again that long nights, though they’re lonely, are lit by stars and end with suns that climb. And the moon will back me up on this, just look up. - The Microphones, ”Thanksgiving”

In 2010, I’ve had much to be thankful for. At breakfast with my family, we’ve gone over the ones we like to remember each year (if not each day). Friends. Family. Health.

And also… it takes time after traveling to internalize the depth of one’s experiences abroad. Being in a new place makes me want to run around and take it all in completely, pushing myself to be more active – the obvious compression of time makes it feel necessary and of course the air is surged with excitement – and there’s less time for introspection. Most of my thoughts are saved to be written down in the stale air of an airplane or to the rattling of a rail car, but often just lost to time. My memory isn’t so great. So as time passes, there’s the test of what comes back: the sound of screaming cockroaches in a concrete shower, feeling warm and embraced by a roomful of strangers singing along to American songs in Bandung, watching the afternoon rains from a window in Bangkok.

My addition to my list of thanks in 2010 is this: Recognizing that I am one of many living in a world that does not deal evenly with all people, and yet it is no reason to lose faith that it gets better. I’ve seen a little more of the world: cried in a bedroom on an island far from home, made friends abroad who have loved unconditionally across oceans and sent their tidings across years, and found utopia in the most inconspicuous places.

Working full-time means any salvaged weekday energy goes towards the anticipation of weekends. You think, This is going to be the best weekend ever! and it usually is, each time.

New jobs mean exhausting oneself fully trying to get caught up — “learning the ropes” is a complicated process depicted fairly well by the phrase — and learning the value of sleep. With sleep taking precedence over going out, you think to yourself, It’s inevitable. I’m aging just as quickly as the others. (I’m past this part, even coherent and somewhat social on weekday evenings now.) My roommate just started her new job, so she’s still in the stage of collapsing into a puddle of tired by sundown.

Moving house means investing lots of time and energy into getting your basics set up. For me, this includes Internet. Why does Verizon think it’s acceptable to have so much of their support lines automated? Can you havepeople answer your phones, Verizon? It takes me through an aggravating maze of prompts, advertising, and hold music before getting through to a real person. Every single time I’ve had to call. Which has been many many times, because the information they give you is confusing and incomplete, and in the end they didn’t show up for their appointment (which had a time frame of  ”between 8am and 5pm”). OK, /rainy day rant.

I recently read a prediction that public libraries would be facing the same plummet as newspapers and other printed media: shuttering more doors and leaving a gaping hole in freely available resources to the community. Is this a valid concern? Libraries play an essential role in cultural preservation, and even with the digitization of printed sources, they may be losing ground. I wish I had some stats here, to gauge how worried I should be. But by no means is a copy an absolute replacement of the original.
From Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (required reading in any critical theory course),

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.

Am I the only one, or did your elementary school (or middle or high school) librarian also tell you that it was no longer a library but a media lab? That memory blipped back into my consciousness a moment ago. I like print media and some things deserve preservation. Which things? That’s tougher to say. More questions than answers here.

Consider the guidelines used to designate UNESCO’s World Heritage sites. Pages upon pages of characteristics based on the type of site, but they’re necessarily general so sites must undergo a nomination process. The driving purpose states, “Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations,” and so: “The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) seeks to encourage the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity.” Preservation of sites such as these is important because the World Heritage sites are seen as interconnected to the lives of all people – a global history. The task of determining what is and isn’t included as “cultural heritage” is too specific to each culture to accurately represent the collective landscapes of the world. There are overlaps and missed spaces. Are there peoples that participate any less than others in history?

The GW English Department, the coolest kids in school.

“Sticky Words” project, a selection of beloved quotes by students and faculty.

I noticed this notice on my professor’s office door: “NOTICE: Thank you for noticing this new notice.”

Square 54 in progress by Clark Construction Group.

Overlooking the space between buildings from a window within the Academic Building.

Flying to Paris this coming Friday with my friend Jenna. I’ll be walking those pleasant streets for a week, and this time around I have more a vague wishlist than an itinerary.

1. Visit Père Lachaise Cemetary.
Last time I was in Paris, I was on a three-day trip with a group from my first high school, and we ran out of time to see this. It was a whirlwind tour, practically running between the Louvre and Sacre Coeur and la Tour Eiffel and the Opera Garnier and the palace and gardens of Versailles in the daytime. At night, I recall the usual high school antics in our hotel rooms. And one memorable cruise upon the Seine – Let’s just say a classmate certainly left his mark on the river.

I’m excited about Père Lachaise because many great French writers, philosophers, and leaders are buried there. Imagine there invoking spirits past, amongst them Proust, Bizet, Théodore Géricault, Édith Piaf, Paul Éluard…
But not only the French! The tomb of Oscar Wilde stands in Père Lachaise, though he was Irish. The grave of American poet Gertrude Stein, with her partner Alice Toklas engraved on the reverse side. Jim Morrison too, buried in the city where he died. ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ.

2. Eat a macaron.
This may sound like a dull goal, but I never have, and I figure Paris is the ideal place to have this confection for the first time. WeLoveDC just wrote a post on these, “Is the Macaron the new Cupcake?“, if you’re curious. I am. They’re colorful, hinting at a fun texture with a spectrum of different flavors to try.

3. Take some 5 year photo reshoots.
My previous visit was in spring 2005, so it will be almost five years exactly when I return. I’ll do my best to see some of the same places to record differences in scenery, personal sentiment, and my relationship to the urban landscape.

I was in high school then, I’m almost a college graduate now. We’ll see if I’ve grown up any.

4. See a concert.
Something intimate and not too expensive if possible, since my budget only amounts to pennies (or euro-coins?) by Parisian standards.

Not picky about the music. I’d say in this case, atmosphere trumps all else. Recommendations?

5. Try out the Paris Vélib’ bike sharing system. As long as you return the bike to another station (and there are many) within half an hour, you can ride as many times as you want for a Euro a day… it looks like a great way to get around.

I’m comfortable with cycling through 16th Street during DC rush hour, so hopefully I won’t die. And if I do, I wonder how one goes about being buried in Père Lachaise…

If you’ve been to Paris, what stands out as most memorable for you?