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!

Dr. Cornel West is an incredible speaker. I went to see him speak on Thursday as the keynote presenter for “Democracy and Public Argument”, a series hosted by the George Washington University’s writing program. Having a background in civil rights and democracy struggles along with degrees in Philosophy from Harvard and Princeton, Dr. West is equal parts intellectual and activist.

Courage was a recurring theme throughout his speech. Dr. West poetically emphasized the courage and conviction necessary to uphold a democracy – to never take your rights for granted. At one point he claimed, “I am an anti-imperialist even when America is the empire.” So much of democracy relies on critical public discourse.

Other topics ranged from the Occupy movement (of which Dr. West is a strong supporter, speaking often with Occupy groups across the county), the Obama re-election campaign, the history of democracy in America from the time of our founding fathers, and the necessity to shed one’s ideologies to find the common truth of humanity. You can’t find the truth in a person or a civilization unless you listen to its suffering.

01: My pasta tells me the longer I cook it, the higher the glycemic index (GI) level is. Hmm, so is that good or bad?The glycemic index is a rating of how carbohydrates affect blood sugar levels, and apparently a lower-GI food is preferable because your body will digest the glucose more slowly and evenly.

02: A coworker makes her own masala chai and gave me a run-through of how it’s made. Quite simple. She also tells me that “masala” is the Hindi word for spices, and “chai” just means tea.

03: “The Answer to the Riddle is Me.” David Maclean shares his experience of losing his memory in India: ”On October 13, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad, India, with no passport and no idea who I was or why I was in India.” Listen to his story here.

04: Cape Froward (Cabo Froward) is the southern tip of South America. And my friend Tif’s been there on a five-day hike. Awesome.

05: A pantoum is a type of poem that uses a formal pattern of repetition and originated from a Malay song form. The pantoum was adapted by French poets in the Age of Imperialism. (Source and example here.)

06: Learned about Super Bowl betting squares – and won a nice chunk of cash at the end of the 3rd quarter.

07: Grid cells are neurons that overlay a grid made up of equilateral triangles onto our field of vision – and work together with other cells (border cells, head-direction cells, place cells, etc) to orient you in a space. It’s what you need to navigate a physical space. Kind of weird to think about.

It’s true: You learn something new every day. I’m starting a running list of one or two things I learn each day in 2011. Here’s the summary of what I learned each day in January. It’s a long list… click on to see the rest after the first week.

1: Learned what a body roll is (in dance, not automobiles). Also, all real bellydancers should have a belly.

2: I wrote 60 new posts in 2010 and my top ten most popular blog posts of last year were:

Thanks, WordPress stats!

3: Galaxy Hut is a sweet spot in Arlington with a cool (non-bro) crowd and an even cooler beer list. Or, as my friend Hyunoo summed up: I learned that beer is still good.

4: Urban scaling is an alternative way to rank cities – perhaps some of our larger cities are not unusual cases after all. According to this kind of analysis, NYC could be perfectly “normal” for a city of its size.

5: People do a wide range of research projects under the Fulbright Program, including research on topics like fashion. Browsing through some of the project topics is great.

6: Local music appeals to me because of the connections you make with people based on a mutual passion for music and community-building. Writing a nice letter to a stranger can make their day, and a reminder that a friend of a friend isn’t such a stranger after all.

7: Learned what a cassoulet is. “Each bean tastes like it was read a bedtime story.” I also read up on West Timor (the Indonesian part of Timor) and the Indian Ocean earthquake disaster of 2004, which devastated Indonesia.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dear friend,

I am penning you this letter (Yes, literally by pen, not pencil, for I feel it is an apt homage to permanence in the name of our history and continued role in each other’s lives, for though our time on earth be short I hope earnestly that our correspondence be long, and so in choosing to take up the pen I forego those hasty tools of wood and graphite, for why not wield the tools which now present (and market) themselves to us? I find myself drawing a blank (figuratively this time) attempting to balance this assertion with a view in favor of the pencil. For have we not all found the conviction to put our thoughts in ink, after a youth spent writing exercises in pencil? Does the artist disagree? Are such leanings a result of the misplaced faith in verity amidst an ungrounded world?).

Though I suppose everyone emails nowadays.

Crystal

In case anyone is interested in languages in Morocco, I’m posting up the handout for the presentation I gave during my recent geography course in Morocco.

Morocco is a nation with a rich history of ethnolinguistic diversity. Situated in North Africa across the Straight of Gibraltar from Western Europe, its extensive coast and geographic variety has brought the country into communication with different societies, both inside and outside of its political borders. Its languages range from the ubiquitous Moroccan Arabic (Darija) spoken widely by its citizens, to the vestiges of French and Spanish colonial influence, to the medley of indigenous Berber tongues branching throughout Morocco’s history. In the Kingdom of Morocco, where equality is considered a central tenet of law, the spectrum of language is ever present in its cultural landscape. The peoples of Morocco endeavor to build a nation unified under diverging banners of speech and script.

Read on, there’s plenty more.

Extended observations on the state of our reading, by Sam Anderson:

“Bolaño’s relationship to narrative grew organically out of his many years as a poet, but it resonates nicely with our new habits of web-inflected incremental reading. We are increasingly fluent in (to quote 2666) “images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments.”

Read more: Sam Anderson on When the Meganovel Shrank – The 00′s Issue — New York Magazine

This also reminds me that I intend to read some Bolaño this year. His books have been personally recommended enough times now for me to act. Persistence is key with a memory like mine, heh. Martin Amis is another author that has been suggested to me multiple times, so I’ll make time to read more of his work soon. My first read of the year, however, will be the short novels in Kenzaburō Ōe’s Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness (another recommendation from a friend).

End of 2009 reads were Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, David Benioff’s City of Thieves, and J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K. All three are quick, compelling reads.

I’d say 2009 was a good year for my blog – the first complete year of blogging, and I kept with it fairly well. I found that writing a blog is easy: it’s all about showing up. And I am sure that 2010 brings glad tidings. Bonne année, с новым годом, 새해 복 많이 받으세요!

Published about two years ago in The New Yorker magazine, John Updike’s “Outage” ties nicely into some scenes from my experience of the recent snow storm here on the east coast.

The course of this story follows a man’s observations as his neighborhood loses power in an autumn storm – as he weans himself off the temporarily-obsolete technologies of his home and those systems upon which he has come to rely. The bank cannot operate without power (his money electronically filed away); his refrigerated food bides its time in the dark; indeed, he begins to hone his awareness of the machines in his life and finds it strange when his car does indeed start up. As he walks along he meets with others, also expelled from their homes – “Without electricity, there was nothing to do.” He pays with cash. He visits a neighbor’s house for the first time. And as with many of Updike’s characters, adultery is unrestrained.

During our blizzard, the city of Washington DC – like many others in the region, I’ll venture – came together in ways I’m not used to seeing. Vehicles were mostly useless, buses had stopped running, and Metro could only operate its underground stations (once the electric third rail’s covered, it’s a no-go for the outdoor tracks). A person revving futilely in the snow had a half-dozen strangers attempting to push or dig, brought together by mutual liberation from their schedules and obligations. Tasks meant to be accomplished slept for another weekend. Roads were two feet of powder hiding dirt and grayed asphalt, tracked with bold bootprints. While the snow still fell, I traced my way and stepping high through the steps that went before me, pioneers of the cold. Once the roads were paved, couples held hands making their way casually along the middle of the street at night.

I’m always surprised at how Updike seems to have a story for every scene and situation. It’s to be expected, I suppose, considering the number of stories he wrote during his extremely prolific lifetime: twenty-some novels, hundreds of short stories, and plenty of literary criticism. He has a thought to match every idea he comes across, and a practiced way of relating every facet of American contemporary life. His very short tale of a teenager who quits his summer job at the A&P (plainly titled “A&P”) has stuck me since I’ve read it – it’s a rare gift to be able to capture that youthful feeling, the tender freedom to quit one’s job for one’s ideals. It’s also worth reading.

The full text of “Outage” by John Updike is available online.