a newsworthy week

First off, my uncle died last Sunday, 2/21. He was 87, and had been in a nursing home situation since July when he had fallen and broken his back. My parents saw him in November and reported that he was alert and responsive, but my aunt and cousin have both said that he had significant mental losses and although he could recognize voices on the phone, he just "wasn't totally there."

(Heartbreaking: when I greeted my aunt this morning in church and murmured my condolences, she said, "Don't be sorry. I'm SOOO jealous of him: now he is with P. in heaven and can talk to her" (my cousin, who died of cancer about 2 years ago).)

Well, B and I sat through an aggressively activist mass and then we deconstructed the texts afterwards. (Foucault would be proud.) This church (which my grandparents helped to found in the 1950s) has always been socially responsive at all scales - to the homeless in Cambridge; to the sick and dying of the members; to responsible eating (there was to be a CSA session at the social hour following) to the current crises in Haiti and Chile. I am sort of ok with that - active involvement in the world rather than spiritual navel-gazing. But the texts du jour were so militant that it was shocking. The covenant with Abraham: Israel "should extend" from the Nile to the Euphrates (look it up: Genesis, I think ch 15); all the battles and fighting and killing.

We were appalled. I began the day thinking that I believed in God (although organized religion mostly pisses me off) and shortly thereafter that I could not believe in any deity whose "might" would intentionally kill thousands through "natural" disasters. Oh, it was just a rhetorical horror-show. Much more thinking about this is needed....

generalization versus particularity

I am working on class notes for two sessions on planning and zoning law (one of my favorites, and one that I know a lot about, so the question is always, what must I cut?) and all of a sudden a memory of my grad school frustration (design school) with certain classes came into view.

Our professors would NEVER tell us anything about usual practice or rules of thumb in actual construction, and it made us nuts. How many inches of gravel (or is crushed stone preferred?) under a brick walk, we'd ask. "Well, it depends on the situation," they'd say. I began to think that they really didn't know - that they were so far removed from actual bricks and mortar that they really weren't able to tell us.

Now I am feeling a bit the same way - I am starting my Wed class with a broad philosophical discussion of the concept of property. I want to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of zoning in contemporary thinking about land use, not how to measure a front setback. Yet there might be real value in locating the general into specific practice, through some exercises.

Such exercises feel a bit too easy for me - but if there sadly is one thing I have learned about teaching at state college, it's this: what seems like a 6th grade exercise to me is usually a challenge for at least 1/3 of my class. (This was borne out by my fall classroom evaluation, by the way, in which the evaluator opined that I went too fast, tried to cover too much, and didn't give students the context (he meant indoctrination into the "correct" way of thinking, actually) to make the proper value judgments about the topics.)

workers of the world untie

Well, I've been sick nigh on two weeks now, but am finally on a variety of medications to clear up what is apparently a collateral-damage sinus infection.

In addition to revising lecture notes every day as I try to manage my ever-changing course schedules (lost 2 class days this week AND a snow day) I've been trying to do some reading for The Book.

First up: an archival look at Moscow's proletariat in the 1918-1929 period. I had had the picture of enormous intellectual and social ferment in the 1920s, most of which of course comes from an architectural history lens. Constructivism, the influence of the International Style - real excitment about making new forms for new ways of living.

Yet my most recent reading paints a different picture: for the masses, Moscow (and the other Russian cities) was hell on earth - low wages, famine approaching starvation, no fuel for heating and transport, tremendous shortages of housing. Crime, prostitution, drug use. And the parallel universe of a limited market economy that the overlords deemed necessary to ease the transition to pure socialism. So while you were starving, you could see your merchant neighbor digging into a juicy roast in a spacious, overheated apartment.

It's a bit peripheral to the larger story of how a political system imposes order - yet some really useful bits.

pictures from the past

My father's aunt (his father's youngest brother's wife) died last week, the last of that generation. My dad's cousins sent a giant envelope full of family photos and we looked over them last night. They were mostly taken by my grandparents, and many are annotated on the back.

A poignant touch - my grandmother labels herself simply as "Fatty" in some of the ones that include her. (I guess I come by self-deprecation and body image issues honestly enough, then.)

My grandfather was one of eight children, fairly spread out in age, and my father doesn't really know or keep up with his cousins much. This makes the photos all the more delightful - that they took the time to sort and send them. One of my favorite ones (unlabeled) was what I think is my grandfather's whole family. I recognize his father, whose portrait hangs over my bureau, but I can't tell which of the boys is my grandfather. Plus, there are only seven kids, so I don't know if the portrait was taken after one of the oldest boys had died, or whether Uncle F. hadn't yet been born. Unfortunately, I don't think Dad's eyesight is good enough to sort it all out - the photos are small and faded.

Aunt G. was 94, so that's Dad's new benchmark. His mother was 94 or 95 when she died. We kidded him a little - "Seven more years!" He professes not to want that much time, and he talked last week about funeral plans, so obviously this topic is something he's thinking about a lot.

I have no voice

This is usually a metaphor for talking about the marginal and/or disenfranchised - their opinions cannot be heard in the political forum.

In my case, though, it's quite literal. My throat has been sore all week and it has been difficult to generate the vocal volume necessary to teach. I REALLY tried hard yesterday - and then after work, my voice was just gone. Today I feel ok, though. Just the silence.

I keep forgetting about it -- and it's frustrating too for B, who has to be looking at me to read my whispered lips. If it's not back by Monday, I'll have to improvise - type on a screen; have someone else read my lecture notes; whatever. On IM, B and I are discussing what films would fit for the topics I'm covering right now in the Tuesday classes....

the suspense is, you know, killing me

So, back in early November I applied for an overseas summer fellowship that would take me to Europe for about 2 weeks. We should have been notifed in late January - still no word.

That can't be good - they've notified the winners but are waiting for acceptances to notify the losers, in case some losers can become winners by attrition? I really thought this one was a go. Sad.

In other news: a word many of my students didn't know on today's quiz: "facilitate." I sometimes forget that, in general, they aren't readers. (Yet this is the class with all the Latin and French and German language training - unlike the usual section, which is, yawn, a semester or two of Spanish. I remember signing up for high school courses in 8th grade - I chose Spanish because I thought it was more relevant to daily life (even then) and my English teacher (a bit of a literary snob) talked me out of it because there was "so much great literature to read in French.")