tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-133360392024-03-06T21:48:59.563-06:00crooked letter, crooked letterDavid Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.comBlogger121125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-12681827242295809832010-03-30T12:02:00.000-05:002010-03-30T12:02:01.233-05:00bow ties and the venn diagram of all things<i>from a recent email to a dear friend</i><br />
<br />
Just got back from a conference in way upstate New York (SUNY Plattsburgh, which is like an hour south of Montreal). Presented some research I'm pulling together around an oral history project I've been involved in. Exciting to frame, package, and present work. In conversations with others at the conference, it seems like I'm not completely off track. Can't wait to press the big pause button this summer and start connecting the dots. And, if nothing else, write. <br />
<br />
That being said, it's hard defining one's interests by negation, which is seems like I'm doing a lot of. Walking around with a bundle of ideas A, B, C in my hands, and peering in doors 1, 2, and 3 to see if I want to bring my things inside, and winnowing. Mostly a sense of: no, I don't really walk into the Literature door; no, I don't really want to walk into the Composition door; I'll but a little sticky note by the Rhetoric door but I'll walk around some more; oh, I haven't thought about the MFA door in a while; didn't there used to be a Cultural Theory around here? A Postcolonial door?; hey you, just walking out of the Writing Studies door, what was it like in there? Of course, the fantasy is that the direction would be reversed. That I could stand on a park bench somewhere with a big sign that says: "This guy wants to think about the following things: (a) the rhetoric of community identity and community change (b) social networking, user adaptive databases, and public discourse, (c) Mississippi ethos shifts in the post-segregation moment, (d) public discourse on cultural symbols and the legacy of race, (e) national conversation about governance and social policy and the right wing of American politics, (f) the composition of pedagogical exchange and distribution, (g) et cetera." And then have the occasional person come up and say, "Hey, a bunch of other people and I are thinking about similar stuff. We should hang out. Do you mind teaching undergrads? No? Cool. Sign here." <br />
<br />
I'm sure it's somewhere in the middle, as most things. Certainly not a linear hallway with discrete, mutually exclusive doors. Maybe closer to the Library of Babel. Or the Venn Diagram of All Things. And maybe not a park bench, but a school dance. The tying of ties, the two step.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-7205392712263809892010-03-04T19:45:00.000-06:002010-03-04T19:45:33.395-06:00on admiral ackbar<i>i was asked to weigh in on the visitsouth.com "<a href="http://visitsouth.com/articles/article/admiral-ackbar-for-ole-miss-mascot/">points of interest</a>" blog post about the strange and growing campaign <a href="http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/02/admiral-ackbar-poised-for-ole-miss-glory/">to name admiral ackbar the new on-field mascot for the university</a>. thought it was worth re-posting here:</i><br />
<br />
"A sense of humor and a bit of playful irony is pure catharsis for a conversation that usually entails a very complicated negotiation of terms. University symbols (official or not) like Colonel Reb, "From Dixie with Love," the Rebel Flag, etc. are deeply entrenched in both complicated/problematic history and significant tradition. It's very hard, if not impossible, to respect all the interests at hand: tradition-maintainers trend towards suggesting these symbols are so flexible and contextual as to not mean anything other than "tradition" itself in some settings (which at times comes across as a cover for the ability to apply more concrete meanings to these symbols in other settings), and proponents of change trend towards viewing these symbols as being so rigid as to not having any room to grow beyond their more difficult meanings. Ackbar is, in short, a breath of fresh air: a welcome departure from the head-butting of both well-trod "Save Colonel Reb" pleas and of arguments for change that seem to lack the strength of argument about possible destinations that they have for the need for moving forward.<br />
<br />
Also, of all the signifiers at play, I personally think that "Rebel" is the most flexible and the most likely to endure. (Even more so than "Ole Miss," to go out on a limb.) And, Ackbar, admiral of the noble underdog Rebel Alliance, is a perfect example of the kind of symbolic rearranging that may help the University turn the corner on the mascot issue (more so than Rowdy Reb, at least). Of course, there's always the possibility of conversations tailspinning into discussion of the politics of the actual rebellion that provided impetus for the school's association with the term "Rebel", but I see more hope for transition on Ackbar-like grounds than I see in things like a Colonel Reb-or-no-mascot-at-all stance. There's something about the spirit of things in the against-all-odds, fighting-the-good-fight, David-and-Goliath realm that has people pointing at Ackbar as a possible avenue for retaining the valuable notions of "being a rebel" in a way that can dislodge the direct ties with the irresolvable local politics of that the Colonel will always be a visual tie to. And, the tongue-in-cheek adoration we see in regards to Ackbar is I think a legitimate commentary on how self-important the Colonel Reb discussion can feel sometimes. It kind of boils down to: weeks of tail-chasing back-and-forth about "Dixie with Love": not-awesome; blowing up the Death Star: awesome. If only it were that simple."<br />
<br />
<i>note: i've recently been writing as the <a href="http://oxford.visitsouth.com/">oxford insider</a> for visitsouth.com, often finding myself writing (no surprise) about race & history:</i><br />
<ul><li> on the <a href="http://visitsouth.com/articles/article/james-meredith-monument-oxford-ms/">james meredith monument</a></li>
<li>on <a href="http://visitsouth.com/articles/article/square-books-oxford-ms/">square books</a> </li>
<li>on <a href="http://visitsouth.com/articles/article/travel-guide-to-oxford-ms/">visting oxford</a> </li>
<li>on <a href="http://visitsouth.com/articles/article/the-university-of-mississippi-in-oxford-ms/">the university of mississippi</a> </li>
</ul>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-13592909487810044752010-02-01T23:14:00.000-06:002010-02-01T23:14:06.804-06:00prosepost: the house on the empty lot<i>for lizzie. a half-fiction about trees. </i><br />
<br />
One-Nine-Seven-Six-Oh South Sagamore Fairview Park Ohio Four-Four-One-Two-Six.<br />
<br />
Two were in the front. One a scraggly crab apple thing that filled the ground with devilish green marbles for twisted ankles and bruised arms and which rotted faint and sour. And its neighbor, of the suburban pastoral: sturdy hips at the trunk underneath a robust, leafy afro. Lower branches both imminently reachable and lovingly sturdy. Thick, well-spaced diversions with climbable veins up nearly to the height of the house. The only mistaken branch was a perfectly horizontal hangnail, bark bare and peppered with wormy intrusion--it gave way once while I was dangled on it, considering a pull-up.<br />
<br />
Then the immense, shady resident of the empty lot between our house, the sturdy house (with the sturdy tree and the crab apple thing), and the blinding-white-with-black-shades house of the neighbors. Googie and Peg, mother and daughter, lived there. Googie had hair like snow or cotton and seemed to subsist on hard candy and daytime television. Peg was (looking back on it) a smoker and a dancer, with hair kept meaningfully short and gray with knowing. She died of breast cancer after moving to Texas. Googie just sort of evaporated, like sunshine. They kept the most vivid garden, with colors clear and bright enough to be painful, so you always kind of looked beyond the petals or at some buzzing speck. I was behind the garden digging when I chanced upon an odd thing--corpse white, with candy red dots for eyes. It was the size of a wine cork, and looked like an albino bee with no wings and mantis claws. I touched it with my finger and it pinched me hard enough to scream, ripping the thing in half as I yanked my finger back. Its insides were an oatmealy pulp, the same color as its skin, and the candy eyes never looked away. <br />
<br />
The tree there in the empty lot was like a gigantic god that you didn't have to think about being there or not, and seemed content to be generally ignored as it went about its business of shade and squirrel-bearing. At the back of the lot was Googie's chalk-white bird feeder that seemed as ancient as she was and in which I thought the coldest water sat. I knocked the basin off the bird feeder once and stood there watching the slimy soot at its bottom glisten in the sun, while the gigantic tree looked down on me and smiled in kindness.<br />
<br />
Pines lined the side of the house facing the empty lot. I knew they were pines because of the needles, and the sap that stuck on my fingertips even after washing, and the shale-chip bark that would jump off if you ran a stick up and down the trunk. <br />
<br />
Two of the pines went down while we lived there--felled by lightning just months apart. Mom said it was because of the young boy who died of cancer and who lived in the house before we did. He didn't want us to move. I wasn't sure about the lightning, but I was sure about these things: (1) that his name was Michael (like my brother's), (2) that he appeared in my dreams once: <i>lying in bed and someone coming up the stairs very bad. run to parents' room and knock frantically. no answer. try the doorknob and it doesn't turn, except it finally does and open the door to see two people sitting straight up in my parent's bed who aren't my parents. someone coming up the stairs very bad about to turn the corner and back in bed pull sheets over. then the shadow bending above and through sheet two eyes glow electric red. </i>(3) that he helped me once. We were moving out of the sturdy house into another one in the same neighborhood. My sister Sarah was a surprise--she was the last and I was the first--and after Mikey had a hard time sleeping in the room with her we switched rooms because I was able to handle the ceaseless whirr and whine of the hamster wheel when we had a hamster and now I would handle the excited squat-thrusts of a diapered baby when we had a baby. Sarah held onto the crib railing and bobbed up and down and talked to the universe. We needed a bigger house so we moved to one, and along the way lightning hit two of the pine trees on the side of the house facing the empty lot. On one of the moving days, Dad was yelling at me and backed me into the open trunk of the station wagon, and instead of being afraid or sad I became angry back, spitting red electric angry, and told him he better not. After which Dad went back in the house, slamming the screen door, and I stayed in the station wagon still aglow. Some minutes later Dad returned impossibly quiet, and with an absence he finished packing the car for a trip to the new house. Later, Mom said that he had gone up to my old room to get some boxes, and saw that the floor was covered in wood splinters. A baseball bat--bisected lengthwise and upon which was attached some wooden knobs, thereafter nailed to our childhood closest wall for the hanging of our childhood jackets--had been torn off the wall and broken in half. No one else had been in the house, except maybe Michael.<br />
<br />
There is a house now on top of the empty lot. It sits uncomfortably, faceless and forced like it's filling in for a dead guitarist. The house is right there where the gigantic tree was, and the bird feeder. The sturdy tree and the crab-apple thing are gone, too--replaced by teenage-looking implants, gangly out of proportion and awkwardly not-yet-full. I still drive past sometimes, when I'm in Cleveland, and try my best to remember. But I'm not sure what happened to the rest of the pines.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-55396041484020232612010-01-13T12:01:00.000-06:002010-01-13T12:01:50.598-06:00you were in my dreamso in my dream there is a slumber party. it is in the basement of my childhood home, but the ground floor is a beachside vacation condo. i go down in the basement, and my brother mike has woken up in a panic because he saw a spider. he says he just touched it but his finger is bleeding, and the spider--a small thing--runs under a dusty, cobwebby coffee table. we both get down on the floor to try and find the spider, but don't see much other than dust and dead ants. i go upstairs for a bit to watch a car chase explosion action movie with some people in the living room, but then go back downstairs with a flashlight, determined to get the spider. i get down on the floor again, and survey the space beneath the coffee table. seeing nothing, i move the beam up to the underside of the table. there, in a corner thick with spider webs and dead insects, is a spider--but no the one that had startled mike. that one was common and brown, this is stark white, with a body massive in relation to its legs, and covered in something between feathers and hair. i move the flashlight closer, in an attempt to provoke this dangerous-looking thing out of its corner so i can crush it. instead of creeping away from my advance, the spider's body opens up from the center and balloons out into a puffy bulge with bright red markings that evoke the red eye and mouth makeup of a clown. this inflated body rattles and shakes, making an intense clicking noise as it swells violently before suddenly collapsing back into the spider. stunned, i test the thing again with the flashlight. again, the rattling clown face. i push the flashlight even further into the cobwebs, almost nudging the spider, and it suddenly jumps out of the corner and begins to run frantically around the coffee table and floor, expanding and contracting erratically. at this point you come down stairs with a mason jar, corner the spider, and capture it. you show me the closed jar, and tap on it--provoking the clown face. <br />
<br />
later, in perhaps another dream, i'm sitting on a sidewalk, talking to some girl. between the sidewalk and the road is a ditch, which trends towards a drainage pipe and a small stream that leads in between some houses. suddenly, you walk out of my childhood house, and toss the spider-containing mason jar towards the stream. the girl and i jump away as the jar catches the edge of the drainage pipe, and breaks. the white spider, collapsing and expanding, now the size of a small mouse--scampers through the brush and onto a fence, heading back between the houses. i pursue it, tearing through fallen branches and leaves. i corner the spider on a fence post, and proceed to crush it with my hands. the clown face collapses in a noxious puff. my fingers burn.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-31538385575996518012009-11-16T14:38:00.000-06:002009-11-16T14:38:34.653-06:00letter to a amherst grad, nervously considering the teacher corps<i> my graduation speech to an audience of one. for ameerah. </i><br />
<br />
it seems that this has been your existential crisis for months now. which is understandable, and in a long tradition of anxious/brilliant amherst grads who look towards the wilderness with unease.<br />
<br />
all i can say is what i've said before: you're going to figure it out. it's less about the right decision (in your case, "knowing what to do"), than in decisions you can live with. <br />
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in regards to the teacher corps, the question is whether you can live with committing yourself for two years to the daily grind of improving the lives of mississippi children, and whether you're willing to commit yourself in full knowledge that (a) you don't know exactly what that daily grind entails, (b) and that all accounts of that daily grind are riddled with exhaustion, suffering, and failure (and rightfully so).<br />
<br />
however, there are many upsides to this commitment, some of which you must come to terms with as being selfish, not the least of which is that it allows you to put off the "i don't know what to do [with my life]" dilemma for two years, during which time you're going to flesh out a lot of those unexamined contours of yourself that someone don't get taken care of in a world of valentine, frost, and jchap--and somehow do get taken care of in a world of incompetent administrators, dehumanized youth, and lesson plans. that was, at least, my experience. and i'm well aware that it's not universal: that many teacher corps folks don't have the experience that i had, and that you can certainly develop and grow as an individual in ways that don't involve teaching people how to graph lines. <br />
<br />
also, let's return to the anxious/brilliant amherst grad dilemma. you probably have other options after leaving amherst (or, if you don't right now, you will): academic, professional, personal, whatever. and this is perhaps the most troubling part of the situation: people have an almost endless capacity to craft narratives to explain themselves and/or their odd journey. which means that, regardless of the decision you make, it is always within your means to re-contextualize the decision, to re-write the context and to re-write the decision. furthermore, given that you're going to be in some sort of self-definition crisis for at least the next 10 years, the context, the decision, and the relationship between the two are all going to stay in flux until somewhere down the line where it seems we all get struck with a kind of amnesia that leaves us with silly things like college being the most formative time in our lives, with otherwise arbitrary decisions being "meant to be," and a strange fascination with raising children (who will themselves become anxious/brilliant grads themselves in shock with the sheer breadth of adult possibility). in short, it doesn't matter which path you take, because even though they both are equally uncertain right now, someday you'll be saying with a sigh that you took the one less traveled, and are better for it. <br />
<br />
so, all of this is to say that this "next step" decision both means a lot, and that it doesn't really matter what you chose. make a decision you can live with, do you damn best to live with that decision, and don't be afraid to change course if things are actually unbearable (but certainly don't change course at first sadness, and for god's sake do not leave a classroom of mississippi children without a teacher). this is also to say that i know that most of what i'm telling you if rightfully meaningless, and has been the last three or for times i said it. which isn't to say it isn't valuable (i hope that it is), but it's a value almost without meaning. because the meaning isn't made yet, which is of course exactly the problem; and i must say that for me it's hardly made just five years removed from my own version of your anxiety. this wilderness has been bizarre, though i'm glad to have my stubbornness chipped away at by way of it: so that i'm starting to get a sense of how young i am, how little i know, and how much i need to listen, and to be patient. along the way, i've been able to teach some math, to help some young people engage in inquiry/dialogue focused on critical citizenship, to support local struggles for reconciliation and renewal, to fall deeply in love with a place (and its many places, often in conflict), and to live alone. i'm glad that i've done these things, both proud and humbled by many of them, and while i'd do it all over again i'm not going to harbor the pretension that these dots were all meant to be connected, and in this order, and at this time.<br />
<br />
this has, of course, become a long letter, and i imagine unexpected in response to your message of seven words. but they are massive words, and they are universal (except the dave part, of course): "I dunno what to do Dave...eek!!!!!!!" so, in responding to them, i seem to have wandered down a rabbit hole of my own struggle with things massive and universal. i hope that's ok; i have my own next-step looming (the search for the big phd in the sky), and my own "I dunno what to do Ameerah...eek!!!" it's different this time, and i'm glad for that, but also sobering to be reminded that i'm so thinly removed from that anxiety of graduating from amherst, and that while i've begun to come to terms with the wilderness and the as-yet-meaninglessness, the accompanying pain is not wholly rescinded, nor the fears resolved. so, i don't know what to tell you. i don't know what to do either; my most productive recourse has been to let go of the knowing and the meaning, at least on the front end. (i'm sure i've abandoned my avoidance of the trite much earlier, but this will certainly kill it:) rather, i'm much more concerned with the "doing" part of that anxiety. i've gotten to a point where i just let the "knowing" and "meaning" piece pass some sort of sufficiency threshold, where i know enough about a particular course of action and enough of its potential meanings fit in well with whatever hodgepodge of values they interact with, and i just start to pick away at the doing part. because, and i've learned this lesson well as a teacher and at the winter institute: most of the stuff we start isn't going to take hold, both in ourselves and in others, and the real returns are so poor on meaningful action that it's not worth my while to wait until everything makes perfect next-step sense to start investing. this is a major divergence from the relatively healthier returns of being an undergrad and investing in meaningful action about undergrad things (most of which get a nicely concrete beginning-middle-end arc at the outset, and culminate in an everyone's-a-winner degree at the end). rather, it's imperative that i keep moving, and in many directions at once, and with a long view towards the big threshold, when meaning starts to collect and leans towards a kind of knowing--that what is happening is a good thing. and, as long as i'm growing and shifting and looking for meaning, it doesn't really matter what i'm doing, so long as i can live with the doing and that i can learn from it. <br />
<br />
you are, of course, in a different position. it's all happening at once, and it's all happening on the front end. you're trying to make a decision that would involve something you've never done, and because of that there's no way of knowing whether it's a good thing (and, regardless, it seems to be a painful thing). and even if it is something you've done a little of before, the scale and context of it all is a massive departure from extracurriculars and summer internships. i know for sure that there's no amount of writing that will ease this anxiety. but, i can tell you that it's up to you to turn it into a productive anxiety, to make a decision you can live with, and to live with it. whether you come teach public school in mississippi or not, you're going to be fine. you're going to good things. i think that if you weren't going to do good things, then you wouldn't be so anxious. and, even after you make your big-next-step decision, you're going to continue be anxious, and you're going to still have to turn it into a productive anxiety. it is the fire in the wilderness that lets us see ("terras irradient," anyone?), but is fire nonetheless. tend to it: don't let it consume you, don't let it die out. it is often all that we have.<br />
<br />
so that's all i've got. 1500 words and all i can tell you is that there isn't a knowing what to do, if there were it isn't worth your time to wait for the knowing and the meaning before the doing, and that the anxiety that you feel is sometimes the only thing that proves you still exist, and through which you can do good things so long as you don't explode or fizzle out (which you probably won't). and, so long as you can hold on to this anxiety about the knowing and the meaning while in the wandering, it doesn't really matter what you're doing, because you're going to do good things. and it's going to be ok. so just let yourself commit to something, finish your damn degree, and welcome to the wilderness.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-61365085821294611692009-10-22T21:45:00.000-05:002009-10-22T21:45:37.261-05:00book review: “The Education of Mr. Mayfield”<i>recently wrote a book review for the jackson free press. a surprisingly rewarding experience--the act of reading, analyzing, processing. hope to do it again soon. </i><br />
<br />
At first glance, David Magee's “The Education of Mr. Mayfield” (John F. Blair, 2009, $19.95) gives the impression of a Good Will Hunting knock-off set in the rural South. Race replaces class, Ole Miss replaces Harvard, "Dixie" replaces Elliot Smith, and somewhere down the line we've got an O Brother, Where Art Thou? for Grove-tented book clubs. However, Magee's M.B. Mayfield comes across with little of the psychological complexity or mere depth of character of his South Boston analogue, Will Hunting, though it’s unclear as to whether this is a reflection of Mr. Mayfield, the person (which I doubt), or a consequence of Magee's treatment of what seems to be an otherwise compelling story. Though Mayfield often finds himself at the schizophrenic intersection of black working class and white high society, in the text he is only barely self-aware of the conflicted and ambivalent reward of significant talent amidst the inertia of caste. Rather, Magee keeps him on the naïve side of aloof for most of the book—an “unassuming” and “almost apologetic” figure on a strange journey of history, race, and class. <br />
<br />
To best approach “The Education of Mr. Mayfield”, a reader must jettison the notion that M. B. Mayfield---a reclusive, mostly self-taught artist from Ecru, Miss.---is the protagonist of this book bearing his name, or even that Stuart Purser--then chairman of the Ole Miss Art Department and Mayfield's unlikely teacher and patron---shares the spotlight. Rather, over the course of the book a reader must watch Magee abandon the story of these two men in the interest of exploring the book's real main characters: an idyllic Oxford and (always by extension) its symbiotic foil, the University of Mississippi. <br />
<br />
Though in the Ole Miss of his childhood "anything colored in red and blue glistened on even the darkest days," Magee abandoned Oxford in his adult years, "frustrated by the university's obvious historical flaws." Recently discovering Mayfield and Purser's barrier-crossing, history bending story, it seems that Magee has found in researching and writing this book his pathway to reconciling with his "small, picturesque hometown." <br />
<br />
As a heavy-handed parable of the Jim Crow South, the narrative arc in “The Education of Mr. Mayfield” begins reasonably enough. Purser and Mayfield grow up in not-dissimilar settings; Purser on the white side of a Klan-dominated Louisiana mill town and Mayfield on the black side of a poverty-stricken hamlet in Mississippi Hill Country. In adulthood, both men gravitate toward art as a means of escaping their situation---for Purser, out towards college, the Art Institute of Chicago, FDR’s Work Projects Administration, and finally a plateau of fledgling Art Departments in the South waiting to be created or chaired; for Mayfield, in and away from a troubling admixture of social anxiety, physical toil and lingering poverty.<br />
<br />
Mayfield and Purser finally cross paths while Purser is on a search for inspiration in the "less traveled roads of rural North Mississippi," and runs across a house adorned with a prominent bottle tree and large busts of Joe Louis and George Washington Carver. The house, of course, is Mayfield’s—who is living there with his mother and had been creating art as a way to “[channel] his loneliness.” Upon realizing Mayfield's talent, Purser devises a situation in which he can informally instruct M.B.: by hiring him as a janitor, and allowing Mayfield to listen in to lectures (sometimes literally from the broom closet). Two months later, M.B. Mayfield's status at the periphery of both the Ole Miss classroom and Oxford art circles becomes a gentle challenge to the perils of segregation.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, after Mayfield moves to Oxford, attempts at a meaningful relationship with Purser are quickly eclipsed by diversions into a larger-than-life Oxonian menagerie. Loyal Blind Jim Ivy, visionary Johnny Vaught, inscrutable William Faulkner, inflammatory Albin Krebs, and even maverick James Meredith are all there in full caricature, and serve mostly as distraction for the rest of the book. While some inclusions are reasonable---Faulkner befriends Purser and helps purchase art supplies for Mayfield---it's never clear why Magee indulges the reader in the virtues of Vaught's "Split-T offensive formation," or the growing pangs of his "mandated platoon rules" for the university's football team. <br />
<br />
Rather, these indulgences in Ole Miss nostalgia serve mainly to gloss over (or reinforce) unexplored assumptions about gender, sexuality, grammar (perhaps my favorite dangling modifier of all time: "[Mayfield] wiped bits of food from the meals he made from the corners of his mother's mouth"). Above all, race gets superficial treatment. In the same vein as a tense trip to the Brooks Memorial Art Gallery in Memphis (a resolvable faux paus regarding segregated operating hours), the author rarely presents racial difference as much more than a jarring anachronism or a nuisance of otherwise-redeemable heritage.<br />
<br />
Over time, Purser grows professionally restless and dissatisfied with Ole Miss’ unremitting segregation, eventually leaving to start yet another Art Department, and Mayfield remains relatively undiscovered but otherwise unruffled, eventually resettling in Ecru to dangle on the precipice of obscurity in between occasional re-discovery. What's left is a book "detailed in outline but scant in depth" (to borrow Mr. Magee's phrase about Mr. Mayfield's work), and glaringly uninterested in its own assumptions, outside the occasional right-thing-to-say about the evils of the Klan, the n-word, the logic of segregation, the assassination of Dr. King. <br />
<br />
What is more, while it's self-described as "An Unusual Story of Social Change at Ole Miss, The Education of Mr. Mayfield” remains well within the bounds of the usual and the never-really-changing. It indulges so much in the noble premise of Stuart Purser's "discovery" of M.B. Mayfield's "primitive" art that it neither questions these terms nor explores their gaping corollaries, while Mayfield is limited to the promotion from janitor to security guard as his sole significant opportunity for job advancement, Purser seems to have the luxury to pack up and go create an Art Department somewhere else whenever he feels restless. This is, of course, not to suggest that Purser shouldn't have been allowed the accolades resulting from his work, nor that those talented artists previously unknown should not benefit from public recognition, only that so much of the distribution of power (and the power of naming) in this and many other situations in the book is racially and/or socioeconomically obvious. Instead of coming across as problematic, it's coming across as quaint. <br />
<br />
Ultimately, it is the comfort of the quaint and the pastoral that drowns out the best interest of David Magee's work, and through which a potentially humanizing and redeeming story barely survives as a kind of historical near-fiction, bloated with allegory and glistening in red and blue.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-15473075196703968122009-07-31T11:36:00.002-05:002009-07-31T11:45:21.694-05:00poempost: buncombe<span style="font-style:italic;">an old poem. a villanelle, oddly. was reminded of it during a recent bout of disgust with a mode of writing that promotes a toxic admixture of the confessional moment and the esoteric (self-)reference. twitter can so easily become the world's bathroom stall.</span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">All you anonymous kings<br /> - for a gas station in Buncombe, NC</span><br /><br />Caught between the curtains of duty, some<br />let the moment bring what it brings, <br />others scribble speeches for Buncombe.<br /><br />Perhaps, when the service has begun,<br />the honey-scroll is all ink and wings;<br />stuck on the feverish mind, it must become.<br /><br />Or, someone left a whisper in the drum,<br />and, fear – lest the ugly-horns sing – <br />yields a toneless whistle for Buncombe.<br /><br />Maybe it’s truth <span style="font-style:italic;">– bitches crave my cum;<br />Friday. 11:30. The Real Thing – </span><br />crammed a whisper away from someone. <br /><br />Since dogs hide what they have done,<br />it could be the dirt and grass they fling<br />to avert the noble eyes of Buncombe.<br /> <br />But, I am loathe to follow the lonesome<br />strings of all you anonymous kings,<br />so fixed to a minute’s naked wisdom<br />on an awful soapbox in downtown Buncombe.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-13677942956501287742009-06-24T11:25:00.002-05:002009-06-24T12:23:20.912-05:00wellspring article, director's cut<span style="font-style: italic;">it kind of saddens me when i think about this, but i've recently gotten much, much better at distancing myself from text once it's sent to an editor for print-ready slimming. i still lack the ability to abbreviate my writing process, much less depersonalize the act itself--but once a piece is out of the nest, it's out of the nest.<br /><br />at the winter institute, we have a bi-annual newsletter entitled <a href="http://www.winterinstitute.org/pages/wellspring.htm"><span style="font-weight: bold;">the wellspring</span></a>, and every summer and winter staff and interns get quasi-assigned topics and articles to write. as it's been one of the rare moments that i'm forced to (a) write lengthy informational prose and (b) share my thoughts about our work, my articles seem to require a sour gestation--riddled with mood-swinging ambivalence and alternating bursts of writer's block and logorrhea. that being said, once i've hammered out a completed piece, its trip from </span><span style="font-style: italic;">my computer to the printed copy</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> negotiates a minefield of residual pride/vulnerability and territoriality.<br /><br />after a heated back and forth during the editing process of piece for this past winter's article (reaching crescendo with the suggestion that i "need to expand my skill set"), i have become determined to, essentially, detach myself from whatever i've written (</span><span style="font-style: italic;">an ironic contraction: </span><span style="font-style: italic;">writerly addition-by-subtraction)--finding quiet solace in the fact that my semicoloned curlicues can be delightfully unread here in pretentious blog limbo. while i've still reserved the right to try and put my foot down if/when an editor makes an historical overreduction, a rhetorically inappropriate paraphrase, or a grammatical mishap, i've come to terms with the death-to-nuance approach of would-be journalism, and can finally--for the sake of a story being told--admit that i err on the side of: (a) not particularly caring about audience or reading level, (b) caring way too much about word-smithery and/or exhaustive rhetorical precision.<br /><br />so, an article will be published in this summer's <span style="font-weight: bold;">wellspring</span>, and it will bear passing resemblance to the following:</span><br /><br />***<br /><br />Wellspring – From Dialogue to Action: St. Andrew’s “Welcome Table”<br /><br />In March of 2008, parishoners from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral in Jackson reached out to the Winter Institute in an effort to initiate dialogue about the legacy of race in the Jackson Episcopal community. As is the case with the origin of many community dialogue groups that the Institute works with, those participating were trying to come to terms with what they felt were critical issues in their community for which real solutions required an honest, open engagement in the way race and its legacy play a role—either implicitly or explicitly—in their community’s history, identity, and outlook. In regards to the cathedral community, dialogue participants initially centered on two major spaces of inquiry: the need for a more comprehensive narrative of the Episcopal community’s response to local civil rights and desegregation activities, and concerns about diversity of access to and equity of benefit from the Jackson area’s increasing interest in downtown development and urban renewal—in which the cathedral’s location in the heart of downtown Jackson would make participation nearly unavoidable.<br /><br />Dialogue centering on race, the Episcopal community, and urban renewal in the Jackson area continued through the fall of 2008, as the group expanded its circle of participation beyond the cathedral community (as well as beyond the Episcopal community), and hosted meetings throughout the diocese—at St. Mark’s, St. Christopher’s, and St. Alexis’ Episcopal churches—as well as St. Andrew’s Cathedral. Through this process, recurrent themes emerged as key areas for further study and action: economic justice, neighborhood organizing, media activism, young people/education, diverse and representative participation, and anti-racism training. Furthermore, by August group members were anxious for action steps to compliment what had already become an empowering and challenging conversation about race in the Jackson area—itself “a sign of hope,” and something “valuable even if we all want to be out there doing,” as group participant Chuck Culpepper, pastor of St. Alexis Episcopal Church, noted in a June meeting.<br /><br />Thoughts of action gravitated towards both youth engagement and a desire to help ensure that that Jackson equitably maintains its urban fabric—seen by the group as a “unique blend of economic, racial, and cultural diversity”—in the midst of increased downtown development. In September of 2008, the University of Mississippi’s hosting of the first Presidential Debate—between then-candidates Barack Obama and John McCain—offered the group an unexpected opportunity to jump-start this shift towards action. In late August, the Jim Hill Civil Rights/Civil Liberties (CRCL) group, which the Winter Institute was assisting in coming to Oxford to participate in pre-debate activities, reached out to the St. Andrew’s group in search of a potential site to host a Jackson youth viewing and discussion of the debate. The viewing, which was attended by a diverse group of over fifty youth from public and private schools throughout the Jackson area, solidified the St. Andrew’s group’s commitment to youth—as evidenced by the fact that since the debate viewing CRCL members have regularly attended and actively participated in group dialogue and action.<br /><br />In January of 2009, the commitment by members to develop a single, comprehensive action project that would encompass the central themes of their nearly yearlong conversation about race finally bore fruit. The group, its own composition moving towards the racial, economic, cultural, and faith diversity that comprise Jackson’s “urban fabric,” began to envision an institution that would attract a diverse and representative constituency, serve as an anchoring imprint of the group’s vision for a unified Jackson, and address the group’s concerns about downtown development and urban renewal. Discussions of such an institution’s mission eventually centered on the essential and universal task of preparing and sharing food, which took the form of a non-profit restaurant that would engage diverse constituencies as stakeholders in each stage in its establishment and operation—literally, a “Welcome Table,” as the group would come to refer to itself.<br /><br />Specifically, the St. Andrew’s Welcome Table project seeks to establish a non-profit restaurant that doubles as a youth mentoring and workforce development site and is committed to the inclusion of local, organic, and sustainable agriculture in its menu. It is inspired by many similar projects throughout the county—most notably Café Reconcile, a similar institution established in New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood. In operation since 1996, Café Reconcile and its accompanying Youth Workforce Development Program (established in 2000) “meet the needs of youth who [have] experienced an array of socio-economic challenges, including poverty, homelessness, arrested educational achievement, substance abuse, and participation in the juvenile justice system.” In its first seven years of operation, the program successfully graduated 400 young men and women between the ages of 16 and 24—many of whom go on to work for Café Reconcile’s many partners and advocates in the New Orleans entertainment and hospitality industry. In February of 2009, a group from the St. Andrew’s Welcome table project traveled to New Orleans to tour Café Reconcile’s facilities and—of course—to try out its cuisine. This trip provided members with both a strong sense that the Welcome Table was a feasible—albeit ambitious—project, as well as an invaluable source of firsthand knowledge regarding the mission, challenges, and triumphs of a like-minded organization.<br /><br />Back in Jackson, the Welcome Table entered its second year of dialogue and action with a flurry of planning and partnership building. In April, the group completed a mission statement and project proposal, and began to seek out funding and grant opportunities for the establishment of both the restaurant and the accompanying youth workforce training and mentoring program. Around the same time, the St. Andrew’s Cathedral leadership showed its support of the project by offering to temporarily host the Welcome Table on cathedral grounds—with the hope that the restaurant would utilize the cathedral’s beautiful courtyards and full kitchen, and that the youth workforce and mentoring program could utilize its amble classroom space.<br /><br />Last May, a participant in one of the Welcome Table meetings noted that “hope comes from giving up the things we can’t control, and loving and helping things grow in the way we can.” In many ways, the group’s journey from dialogue to action exemplifies this sentiment: their initial year of honest, open, and often difficult engagement in the history and legacy of race in themselves and in their community can been seen as a meticulous identifying and untangling of those things that they could reasonably control in regards to realizing their vision for progress and reconciliation. Incredibly, what has emerged from this process is a comprehensive, ambitious plan to create an imprint of their vision in the heart of downtown Jackson—through an institution that will provide diverse and representative stakeholders, community members, and hungry customers with a place at the table of a unified, equitable Capital City.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-3894853273470565582009-06-14T17:48:00.003-05:002009-06-14T17:54:08.937-05:00buttons!for a couple years now i've been making found-art buttons and collage from old magazines. i've just started up a shop on etsy.com to see if they're of any interest. still testing out pricing, shipping, etc. so only listing a few at a time. <br /><br />will have a badge on the right of the blog layout. like this one:<br /><br /><script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.etsy.com/etsy_mini.js'></script><script type='text/javascript'>new EtsyNameSpace.Mini(7273342, 'shop','gallery',2,2).renderIframe();</script>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-3162301619695145142009-06-02T12:43:00.003-05:002009-06-02T12:55:12.356-05:00what i've been up to recentlyteaching myself the drupal development platform, and setting up the county project site (www.mscivilrightsproject.com) to host and stream media. given that i have a very meager grasp of html, php, css, etc. the work is 70% learning curve, 27% messing something up, 3% blind-squirrel-finds-a-nut. <br /><br />what should follow is an embedded video that i've been using to configure the video player i've installed. the clip is an excerpt from a interview/oral-history i did with my great aunt, sister mary william sullivan, who is a retired nun and was active in chicago's south side during the 50s and 60s. by "active" i mean engaging in and organizing neighborhoods around issues of educational equity and housing access. so, she's a bona fide OG. <br /><br /><embed src='http://www.mscivilrightsproject.com/modules/swftools/shared/flash_media_player/player.swf' height='320' width='400' allowscriptaccess='always' allowfullscreen='true' flashvars='volume=100&logo=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mscivilrightsproject.com%2Fmodules%2Fswftools%2Fshared%2Fflash_media_player%2FURL_logo.png&skin=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mscivilrightsproject.com%2Fmodules%2Fswftools%2Fshared%2Fflash_media_player%2Fsnel.swf&link=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mscivilrightsproject.com&file=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mscivilrightsproject.com%2Ffiles%2Fplaylists%2Fa022210a936ab7efb024f165b819794e.xml&plugins=viral-1d'/></embed><br /><br />next up on the site development: figuring out image uploading & hosting and image gallery construction. then setting up streaming audio. then teaching interns on how to post and upload. then developing an educational resource template, which essentially will be a wik-ed 0.9 (if you were once a beardy-face vaguely-to-very jewish teacher corps member--or dave jones--you'd know what that meant). <br /><br />that being said, it's all work perfect for the mississippi summer, which amounts to floating between refrigerators and saunas.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-37418661094944359192009-05-22T14:59:00.002-05:002009-05-22T15:09:42.384-05:00James Meredith begins "Walk for the Poor" on Sunday<span style="font-style: italic;">i know very little about this, other than it's happening. just got details today. there is only one james meredith. </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br />an interesting opportunity for some twitter/youtube/flickr-engaged spontaneous visibility. word-of-mouth as web-of-link.<br /></span><br /><a title="View James Meredith's Walk for the Poor on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/15730706/James-Merediths-Walk-for-the-Poor" style="margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block; text-decoration: underline;">James Meredith's Walk for the Poor</a> <object codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" id="doc_62265611948408" name="doc_62265611948408" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" align="middle" height="500" width="100%" rel="media:document" resource="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15730706&access_key=key-16t6rc6j89wwerwveodb&page=1&version=1&viewMode=" media="http://search.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/media/" dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"> <param name="movie" value="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15730706&access_key=key-16t6rc6j89wwerwveodb&page=1&version=1&viewMode="> <param name="quality" value="high"> <param name="play" value="true"> <param name="loop" value="true"> <param name="scale" value="showall"> <param name="wmode" value="opaque"> <param name="devicefont" value="false"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"> <param name="menu" value="true"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"> <param name="salign" value=""> <embed src="http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=15730706&access_key=key-16t6rc6j89wwerwveodb&page=1&version=1&viewMode=" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" play="true" loop="true" scale="showall" wmode="opaque" devicefont="false" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="doc_62265611948408_object" menu="true" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" salign="" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" align="middle" height="500" width="100%"></embed> <span rel="media:thumbnail" href="http://i.scribd.com/public/images/uploaded/32754351/GkyrO0Zz2L1kH_thumbnail.jpeg"> <span property="media:title">James Meredith's Walk for the Poor</span> <span property="dc:creator">hennahackles</span> <span property="dc:type" content="Text"> </object> <div style="margin: 6px auto 3px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block;"> <a href="http://www.scribd.com/upload" style="text-decoration: underline;">Publish at Scribd</a> or <a href="http://www.scribd.com/browse" style="text-decoration: underline;">explore</a> others: <a href="http://www.scribd.com/explore/Research/" style="text-decoration: underline;">Research</a> <a href="http://www.scribd.com/explore/Books/" style="text-decoration: underline;">Books</a> <a href="http://www.scribd.com/explore/Books/Nonfiction" style="text-decoration: underline;">Non-fiction</a> <a href="http://www.scribd.com/tag/bible" style="text-decoration: underline;">bible</a> <a href="http://www.scribd.com/tag/walk" style="text-decoration: underline;">walk</a> </div>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-12514233693587379832009-04-14T15:29:00.005-05:002009-04-14T16:08:09.344-05:00teacherpost: rec letter for KB<span style="font-style: italic;">an overly-common observation: i have a love-hate relationship with letters of recommendation. most of this is derived from the fact that i can never bring myself to write anything that feels like a template or a re-write (enter margaret with an i'm-dave-molina-i-question-the-very-premise-of-your-question jab); i force myself to construct some sort of custom narrative of personal involvement with whomever i'm writing for (enter jake with a stop-making-it-about-yourself jab), and i often ask people i haven't talked to in a while to send me a couple key moments or experiences that stand out in our work together (enter sarah roth with an actually-you've-just-desciribed-a-template and/or a skip-the-parentheticals-and-get-to-the-point jab). the flipside is that i've always regretted not giving myself a more consistent and/or thorough structure for reflecting on my teaching experiences (now that i'm out of the classroom and have new context) and my work at the winter institute (now that i'm in it and have little or no context), and that shoehorning myself into a place where i try to remember what it was like to meet and/or appreciate someone for the first (or second, or third) time tends to dislodge enough material for unexpected reflective high notes to nestle in the stitching as i pull myself back from the vertigo of half-memory to some sort of near statement of why some young person or other is likely to "change the world," or whatever the accolade, scholarship, or institution begs for.<br /><br />anyway, i spent a bit of time this afternoon on a last-minute rec letter for a former CRCL member, and in looking it over i've noticed the following:<br /><br />(a) though the narrative details are particular, much of the nature of the appriciation and praise holds common ground with my experiences with so many of the CRCL leaders<br /><br />(b) i think i'm starting to get better at unraveling what happened (and what didn't) at CRCL, and<br /><br />(c) i'm hopeful that (b) implies that i'm going to get better at unpackaging the innards beneath the birth, life, and death of these groups.<br /></span><br />***<br /><br />I first met KB in the spring of 2007, when she came to Jim Hill High School to attend a visit by former Mississippi Governor William Winter. The Jim Hill Civil Rights/Civil Liberties (CRCL) group, a group I helped establish while I was a mathematics teacher at Jim Hill during the 05-06 and 06-07 school years, sponsored the event. At that point, CRCL participation included students from both Jim Hill and St. Andrew’s Episcopal school, and Gov. Winter’s visit provided an opportunity to reach out to more schools in the area. If I remember correctly, KB had heard about the event from her Latin instructor, Mr. J, and decided to attend with her mother. Afterwards, I remember KB staying to talk about CRCL and asking if she could come for the regular group meetings. Though it was immediately clear that CRCL had found itself a new member, it became quickly obvious that the group had gained so much more: a new leader.<br /><br />Looking back, much of the continuity and growth of CRCL throughout that spring and the entire 07-08 school year relied on the involvement of KB. She was one of those rare young people whose composure, diligence, and intellectual maturity completely masked her age; every year since KB was a freshman I’ve been convinced she’s a senior. Her natural capacity for critical inquiry provided a steady anchor for the group’s youth-directed philosophies, and in time developed into an outstanding and unobtrusive model for other students in their quest for critical citizenship. Furthermore, KB’s clear commitment to intercommunity dialogue ensured that the group would always push to maintain CRCL participation from as many school and neighborhood communities as possible. She not only cultivated a core of Murrah students to attend Jim Hill meetings with her, but in the spring of 2008 KB and some fellow Murrah students attempted to establish a stand-alone group at their own school, which brought even more young people to CRCL despite the group’s short lifespan. For example, a current CRCL standout, Murrah junior HW, found her way into the group by way of KB’s leadership and outreach.<br /><br />Although KB’s active participation in and promotion of CRCL meetings played a huge role in the group’s continued activity, the most crucial role she played was behind the scenes. That is, KB so valued a space after school to state her own views and engage responsibly in the opinions of a diverse set of her peers that she spent a considerable amount of time—Friday after-school meetings at Cups in Fondren, phone calls throughout the week, endless debriefing after weekly CRCL meetings, etc.—helping the group transition seamlessly through the loss of its original moderators (Mr. Jake Roth and myself) and into a new phase of increased student management and oversight. Through KB’s initiative, manifesting itself in everything from planning and running meetings to typing and printing agendas, the Jim Hill CRCL evolved into a student organization that can constantly reimagine itself—surviving not only changes in adult leaderships, but in its youth leadership as well.<br /><br />In my current position as project coordinator for the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, I spend much of my time trying to develop a systemic approach to cultivating what KB and her peers at the Jim Hill CRCL have done so naturally: establish, support, and maintain a space committed to critical inquiry and intercommunity dialogue. Through looking back on now four years of the group’s activity, and in meeting other groups throughout the state, I am constantly amazed at what these young people at CRCL have been able to do, and KB especially. Though it is incredibly cliché to remark on children as our future, I can not help but wonder that hope for democracy, citizenship, and civic responsibility lies in young people like KB, who are ready to engage directly in the crucial issues of our time, and just need space to do so, faith that they will, and equal parts challenge and encouragement.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-65417814258632012622009-03-04T16:35:00.000-06:002009-03-06T14:14:35.387-06:00winterpost: SA oral history project + the jackson movement<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">for ben guest</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1. SA oral history project</span><br /><br />over the past couple of months i've been helping out with an oral history project that's grown out of the work of a self-sustaining CRCL group that's started at <a href="http://www.gosaints.org/home/home.asp">st. andrew's episcopal school</a> in jackson.<br /><br />(n.b. for those unaware with the acronym, CRCL stands for civil rights/civil liberties--and these are civil engagement high school groups dedicated to critical inquiry and intercommunity dialogue. throughout its four years of activity, the jim hill CRCL group has had members from jim hill, st. andrew's, murrah, lanier, and wingfield. murrah was the first school to attempt to start up its own building level group, but that didn't stick.)<br /><br />the st. andrew's oral history project will focus on the school's journey through external and internal changes in regards to race relations and access to education in the jackson metro area from the 1940s to the 1980s. this particular project grew out conversations starting last fall, wherein a small core of motivated st. andrew's students reached out to the winter institute in an effort to spark a critical dialogue on campus that would hopefully lay the groundwork for the development of a CRCL group there. some of the students had at one point been regulars at the jim hill meetings--and wanted to start a satellite at their own school so they could expose their peers to a more accessible CRCL and build a foundation before reaching back out to jim hill. others were students who knew about the jim hill CRCL but hadn't been able to make it over for a meeting.<br /><br />dialogue around the questions "what is the story about your community that isn't told," and "what is frustrating about the community you belong to" led to a couple realizations:<br /><blockquote>(1) while st. andrew's is admirably diverse when it comes to race and ethnicity, students felt that economic and neighborhood diversity was lacking. furthermore, there seemed to be some connection between this set of observations and the post-segregation development of madison county, just north of jackson: which made the usual quick transition from farmland to a middle- and upper-middle- class suburb.<br /><br />(2) when it comes to race at st. andrew's, many students felt that the conversation begin and ends with "we're not a segregation academy," meaning st. andrew's wasn't established during the 1969-1973 emergence of private academies and white citizen council-developed "council schools" throughout mississippi--which effectively re-segregated schools (likewise, maintained age-old channels of social/political/economic capital) in nearly all communities that had significant black populations (i.e. somewhere over 25-30% i imagine; it's a statistical analysis i'd love to take the time to do); in mississippi that means a lot of communities. in many ways, this is the historical retort to the popular red herring that "90% of MS's school-age youth attend public school." that and the fact that white attendance is often front-loaded in elementary and middle school in areas where there is a significant black population; many academies (many of which are still or nearly all-white) don't start until 7th or 9th grade, simply because it's not economically or educationally viable for many communities and parents to develop a PK-12 private institution, though many certainly do exist. nevertheless, the trump card of "we're not jackson prep" seemed to gloss over a couple things in these student's minds: they had no sense of the circumstances surrounding st. andrew's admittance and graduation of its first african american student, no narrative of race relations at st. andrew's through the civil rights era, and no narrative of the relationship between desegregation and the development of st. andrew's school over time--which in the 1980s moved from a site in jackson proper to a site in madison county, a move planned sometime after acquiring "75 acres of open, rolling meadowland" in 1976. </blockquote>momentum from these conversations--participated in and encouraged by teachers and administrators--lead to the conclusion that these stories should be told, thus birthing an oral history project. armed with flipcams and a .ning site, the CRCL group has been steadily building a vision for the project, training themselves in oral history, and educating themselves on relevent historical context: the history of school desegregation in MS and general civil rights related history in the jackson area.<br /><br />a project description clip from some of the CRCL members themselves, shot on flipcam and uploaded to .ning:<br /><br /><br /><embed wmode="opaque" src="http://static.ning.com/sawinter/widgets/video/flvplayer/flvplayer.swf?v=3.14.3%3A17089" flashvars="config=http%3A%2F%2Fsawinter.ning.com%2Fvideo%2Fvideo%2FshowPlayerConfig%3Fid%3D2687270%253AVideo%253A623%26ck%3D1013153332%26x%3DjOryHqSVF5cfAacyYFes9gEdmEUaPfj1&video_smoothing=on&autoplay=off" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" scale="noscale" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" align="center" height="364" width="448"></embed><br /><small><a href="http://sawinter.ning.com/video/video">Find more videos like this on <em>St. Andrew's - Winter Institute Project</em></a></small><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2. the jackson movement</span><br /><br />on the winter institute end, i've been advising students on the project, and developing oral history training and historical context materials/presentations. this brings us to the "for ben guest" header on the post: a few weeks ago i began to develop a condensed timeline of essential civil rights related history in the jackson area. surrounded by obsessively highlighted and tabbed books, i was on the hunt for any local civil rights activity as well as any national/regional civil events that passed through the jackson area. i had a sense of a couple obvious landmarks (though many of them i'd never really researched): the formation of the white citizen's council, the tougaloo nine, the woolworth's sit-in, the freedom riders arriving in jackson, the jackson state shootings, the march against fear, medgar evers' assassination, etc. what i didn't have a sense of was that there was a bona fida jackson movement, albeit short-lived, intense, and rather tragic--in the sense of organizational territory and politics draining local momentum (and in some way foreshadowing bigger meltdowns in the late 60s), and in the sense of the loss of someone as talented as medgar evers in the midst of an internecine maelstrom. on that note, over time i'm realizing more and more how important medgar was to mississippi civil rights veterans: after asking hollis watkins (the first local mississippi youth to join SNCC’s work in mccomb, and now president of <a href="http://southernecho.org/s/">southern echo</a>, one of the best community organizing/empowerment and youth activism vehicles in the state) what he did for inauguration, he calmly replied, his eyes still with memory, "i went by medgar's house."<br /><br />synopsis of jackson movement:<br /><blockquote>1961, march: the jackson NAACP youth council protests segregated libraries in jackson. given that they're "the only such group still active in the jackson area and composed mainly of black high school students," and given that direct action isn't usually the NAACP's cup of tea (litigation/legislation and voter registration is) here <span style="font-weight: bold;">we've got a local initiative</span>.<br /><br />1961, may: the SNCC freedom riders come into jackson, refuse to post bail upon arrest, and make the call for more buses to head to mississippi. 328 riders are arrested that summer, and many spend their time in parchman. once they get out of jail, <span style="font-weight: bold;">we've got some lingering SNCC and CORE presence in MS</span>.<br /><br />1962, december: the jackson NAACP youth council form a picket line outside of woolworth's in jackson, and try to initiate a city boycott of downtown merchants. they receive little support from SNCC (now drawn to greenwood), CORE (who feel like the boycott is started without sufficient community organization), and NAACP (again: they don't really do direct action). so, still a local initiative but now<span style="font-weight: bold;"> we've got some attempted coordination with regional/national organizations</span>.<br /><br />1963, may: NAACP switches course and makes jackson boycotts a priotity. reasoning: mlk's recent success in birmingham; roy wilkins is worried that jackson will be SCLC's next target. an ultimatum is made to jackson mayor allen thompson, negotiate or else face mass demonstration. after waffling for a bit, the mayor rejects all demands. the next day is the woolworth's sit-in by jackson NAACP youth council and moderator: a three hour, very violent affair. picketing increases dramatically; high school students begin walk outs and marches, with violent police response. <span style="font-weight: bold;">we've got momentum, but we've got ulterior motives. </span><br /><br />1963, june: increased activism has drawn in staff from national NAACP, but this results in a shift in the movement coordinating committee from an activist, youth-oriented aproach to a more conservative, NAACP/black minister & businessmen-led effort to broker a deal. right when direct action begins to escalate into a snowballing youth movement, mass marches and protests are halted, community momentum is lost, and attendance at nightly meetings declines. june 6: the city of jackson obtains an injunction forbidding further demonstrations. june 8: first day without demonstration or picket line. afterward: a "coalition of national NAACP officials and the traditional middle-class leadership of jackson [agree]... that although the boycott should continue, there [will] be no further mass demonstrations and that the movement should initiate another voter registration drive in the jackson area." june 11, medgar evers assassinated (more below). after his funeral procession, several hundred young people begin singing freedom songs and walking towards capitol street area. they are met with police, and, for the first time, fight back. a riot is only narrowly avoided. june 18, the movement's strategy committee announces a deal struck with mayor thompson, which amounts to a set of concessions previously rejected by black leaders: an agreement to hire six black policemen, a handful of promotions in the sanitation department, and a promise to "continue to hear black grievances." in essence, jackson remains a jim crow city. <span style="font-weight: bold;"> we've got ideological shifts that cut the legs out from under the movement, which crumbles: taking medgar evers and leaving nominal progress and entrenched segregation.</span><br /><br />aftermath: jackson continues as a central headquarters for civil rights organizations in the state, but never again sustains a movement of it's own. <span style="font-weight: bold;">we've got a locally initiated movement that gets coopted by national interests, leaving a community in the dust. </span><br /></blockquote>medgar:<br /><blockquote>throughout the entire jackson movement, NAACP field secretary medgar evers "[straddles] the divide" between the direct action campaign of the jackson NAACP youth council and the hesitant involvement of the national NAACP. in the process, evers becomes the "acknowledged leader" of the jackson movement, "the one who [stands] up to mayor thompson, who [negotiates the young people's] bail, who [receives] nearly all the death threats." on tuesday, june 11, the day "john kennedy gave the strongest civil rights speech of his administration," evers is at a poorly attended mass meeting, where "instead of singing inspiring freedom songs and listening to fiery oratory, the audience [hears] staff members promote the sale of NAACP t-shirts." he returns home after midnight, extra t-shirts in hand. as his wife myrlie and his children come to meet him at the door, evers is shot in the back by greenwood citizen's council member byron de la beckwith. he dies that evening.<br /><br />other stuff medgar had been involved in: investigating the emmett till murder, attempting to enroll at ole miss (and thus setting the stage for legal campaign culminating in james meredith), assisting with organizing on the gulf coast--site of an early mississippi direct action campaign (the wade-ins) and voter registration push, filing a school desegregation lawsuit against the jackson public schools, which culminated in a freedom of choice ruling in 1964: a crack in the wall that leads up to the 1969 forced desegregation victory.<br /></blockquote>expanded text, with source list, included <a href="http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcxg9vbr_60fhd49dfx">here</a>.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-45518427932758936192009-03-02T16:52:00.002-06:002009-03-06T11:27:26.308-06:00prosepost: dream: two rats & twenty and sixty snakesin line at a movie theater with mother, brothers, sister. have a hard time finding the ticket; stumble through pockets in my jacket and pants, and eventually come upon it: nondescript, red, "admit one." hand it over to the ticket collector, an older black woman, large, dressed as a bellhop, blue and gold. takes the ticket, hands over a styrofoam cup of hot water, and points to the refreshments area.<br /><br />supposed to use the cup of hot water to make coffee. <i>a week earlier, i went to the movies with my father and brother. the coffee stand only had a fully-automatic espresso machine and a hot water spigot; all "coffees" were actually americanos, and for each drink the attendant would walk from the automatic espresso machine to an otherwise unused industrial-size percolator, which would dispense hot water. </i>told to take one the small plates of food spread out on a cafeteria table with a white table cloth. all of the plates have french fries on them.<br /><br />reach out to a plate, but my sister warns there are rats on the table. look across and see two portly rats wandering around, trying to get some french fries. stuck now between stopping sarah from petting the rats <i>carley told me she had a pet rat as a child</i> and stopping rats from stealing french fries. little success.<br /><br />one of the rats--the yellow one; the other is the usual dusty gray--does not have a face. has a mouth, but nose and eyes are reduced to a fleshy twig. try to scare the faceless rat away with a lighter <i>i had failed to get a fire started two evenings in a row</i> but, disinterested, it grabs a french fry and ambles away.<br /><br />french fry plate in hand and turn to go to the movie. take a sip of coffee: something moving in my mouth. try to wash it down with more coffee. more things in my mouth. purse my lips and pull at something barely fixed between thumb and forefinger. a tiny snake; thin, about three-inches long. fling it away and another appears--tail just breaching my lips. frantically pull about twenty out. look into my coffee cup. just below the thinly brown water: tangled, dormant coils.<br /><br />later. at a child's birthday party in the party room of a party warehouse. talking to a young latino boy--chocolate hair, caramel skin, t-shirt, jeans. in the midst of conversation, picks up a cup of coffee. warn him of the snakes. doesn't seem to mind; tells me he'll just eat them. after drinking a bit of the coffee, smiles at me with a tangle of purpley snake heads and tails in his mouth. a dramatic munching gesture, smiles again, and says "60."David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-7008081682699055832009-02-22T14:52:00.001-06:002009-02-22T15:00:56.840-06:00poempost: another from the hermitage<div style="text-align: left;"><i>cabin: afternoon</i><br /><br />the drunk wasps--they<br /></div>come from under the wall.<br /><br />the farthest they make<br />it is the screened windows,<br />my chair, the light<br /><br />in the kitchen. i kill them<br />with my shoe or magazine<br /><br />and sweep them under<br />the wall, where they are<br />reborn. air in the ice<br /><br />in the bourbon whistles;<br />it either rains or snows.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-31096633989437641792009-02-18T08:40:00.001-06:002009-02-22T15:32:48.729-06:00US students fight for education rights -17 Feb 09<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><p><object height='350' width='425'><param value='http://youtube.com/v/tGElD9srKmU' name='movie'/><embed height='350' width='425' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://youtube.com/v/tGElD9srKmU'/></object></p><p>well done, al-jazeera.</p></div>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-15746642975698579832009-02-16T13:17:00.002-06:002009-02-22T15:19:03.513-06:00poempost: two from a january hermitage<span style="font-weight: bold;">1. highway seven<br /><br /></span>In the hills, a mountain<br />fog: each house consumed<br />despite all anxious light,<br />and ghosts too soon.<br /><br />The car ensures the road<br />beneath—a drive both dream<br />and ritual: exit right,<br />three lights, twenty-seven<br /><br />miles before the turn.<br />The last match crumbles<br />cold against the box—its<br />smoke would last forever.<br /><br />Between rains, some dogs<br />beside the road: a cloud<br />of orphans—delinquent notice<br />to feed the withering gods. <span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2. the death of the impatient tree<br /> or: a seasonal poem<br /> or: a poem written in the voice of a seventh-grade literature textbook<br /><br /></span></span>The death of the impatient tree,<br />who thought each sun was spring,<br />the forest all considered strange—<br />though hardly a surprise.<br /><br />“He trembled,” said the oak,<br />“for every landing bird.<br />As if each winter rest would bring<br />an hour more of sun.”<br /><br />“And hoped in every leaping fish,”<br />returned the nearest pine,<br />“an oracle of thaw, so thirst<br />more than ice would give.”<br /><br />“So fully did each season love,”<br />joined his mistress birch,<br />“that hardly could he sleep,<br />nor hardly wake, in such<br /><br />“Uncertain times as winter fades<br />to spring. We could sit<br />more calm in ambiguity;<br />an early bloom, a late<br /><br />snow were such a mystery<br />that hardly do I doubt<br />he worried through more vital truths<br />than any our roots could tell.”<br /><br />Throughout the spring, as Nature’s hand<br />distributed their friend,<br />each considered quietly<br />and with different claim:<br /><br />whether the impatient tree<br />had rings so tightly wound<br />as to approach infinity,<br />or whether he had none. <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><br /></span></span>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-15137116544509396652009-01-08T19:15:00.002-06:002009-02-22T15:19:03.513-06:00poempost: untitled night poemit is the cuyahoga snow.<br /><br />it is a whippoorwill--<br />it is ten whippoorwills.<br /><br />it is a ranch house bay window,<br />barely divulged.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-87413564781328861852008-12-20T12:35:00.002-06:002009-02-22T15:19:03.514-06:00poempost: some dogs (fragment)between rains, some dogs<br />beside the road: a cloud of orphans--<br />delinquent notice to feed<br />the withering gods.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-13112695268000289222008-12-01T11:23:00.001-06:002009-02-22T15:33:05.450-06:00belated guestpost 2: frederick douglass<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">in the wake of the obama election, and in some ways intertwining with my <a href="http://dmmolina.blogspot.com/2008/11/transposing-rhetoric.html">transposing rhetoric</a> post, my dear heart douglas ray sent two textual moments my way. here's the second:</span></span><br /><br />"Frederick Douglass"<br /><blockquote>When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful<br />and terrible thing, needful to man as air,<br />usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,<br />when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,<br />reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more<br />than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:<br />this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro<br />beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world<br />where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,<br />this man, superb in love and logic, this man<br />shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,<br />not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,<br />but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives<br />fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.</blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">--Robert Hayden<br /><br /></span></span>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-73785856485019969932008-12-01T11:13:00.002-06:002009-02-22T15:33:05.450-06:00belated guestpost 1: jim bond<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">in the wake of the obama election, and in some ways intertwining with my <a href="http://dmmolina.blogspot.com/2008/11/transposing-rhetoric.html">transposing rhetoric</a> post, my dear heart douglas ray sent two textual moments my way. here's the first, with d ray's voice sputtering about: </span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">I. Apéritif</span><br /><br />I love the excitement of a proposal – it’s simulated entrepreneurship for poet / academic. So here’s one for Harper Collins. Or FSG (Oh to be published by Lorca’s publisher! Aye! Wounded Lilies! Sweet dahlias! Flourish the zithers! My orange heart!):<br /><br />Dear Smartly-Clad Sirs,<br /><br />For three months, I will practice, religiously, the <span style="font-style: italic;">sortes Vergilianae</span>. But not with Vergil’s works – funeral pyres are not for me. A Mississippian, instead – Faulkner, Welty, Morris, or Percy perhaps. The Moviegoer as guide-to-life is workable. I’d probably go for Williams, though. John Waters could write the forward. Mark Doty could blurb me. Oprah could review me. Gail could edit Oprah.<br /><br />Regards,<br />Undersexed Underpaid<br />Oxford, MS<br /><br />P.S. SASE enclosed for your timely reply.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">II. Meat of the fruit</span><br /><br />Faulkner isn’t my usual election day reading choice, but this year I was reading a brilliant article about the “erotics of the gap” (!!!), “an ethically, not ontologically constructed homosexuality,” and “a coming-out historiography” in Absalom, Absalom!. We’re queering the canon, making queer canons, and queering the history of canon-making. But, I felt the need to review the novel a bit before delving into the article. The final chapter (9), I remember being super-charged with the erotics of narration (erotics of confesston, I suppose). I ran across this gem and exploded in the margins:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><blockquote>“Then I’ll tell you. I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.”</blockquote></span><br /><u>A. Context in the novel</u><br /><br />Shreve (Shrevlin McCannon) is talking to Quentin Compson (of The Sound and the Fury fame) in their dorm room at Harvard. It’s 1910, and they’re trying to piece together the mysteries of Sutpen’s Hundred and an experience that Quentin had in Jeffererson with Rosa Coldfield (Faulkner’s representation of a providential view of history).<br /><br />This passage is the final one of the book – (leading to Shreve’s famous question – “Why do you hate the South?”), and it seems all too prophetic…Old Testament-ish, like the titular reference to King David’s cry for his son. Jim Bond – slackjawed and oafish – is the son of Charles Bon (who fought with the University Grays and died in 1865) and his black wife.<br /><br /><u>B. Resonance</u><br /><br />What Shreve imagines is akin to the picture of SimEve – Time magazine’s rendering of generations of interracial breeding in their Fall 1993 issue on immigration, which casts the United States as the “World’s First Multicultural Society.” Of course, one need look no further than Time magazine covers again – for the face of Shreve’s prophecy made manifest – President-elect Barack Obama (he, like Jim Bond, performs a mixed-race identity). What’s fascinating is that, in Absalom! Absalom! in which he grapples with history more than in any other in his oeuvre, he ends with this flourish of foresight.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">III. Gratias Tibi Ago</span><br /><br />Well done, Bill. Kudos to you, Shreve. You were right: this didn’t happen quite “in your time” – just 99 years later. Pop the prosecco!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br /></span></span>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-91395944905714838012008-11-24T15:36:00.003-06:002009-02-22T15:19:03.514-06:00poempost: a quarter dilemma (fragment)i am done with vision;<br />time to stand by this pond<br />and let a branch reach<br />out of the water and point:<br /><br />across many waves,<br />at many leaves.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-84598478133569358002008-11-05T13:19:00.002-06:002009-02-22T15:33:05.450-06:00transposing rhetoriclast night,<br /><blockquote>"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.</blockquote>became<br /><blockquote>"And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright-- tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope."</blockquote>and<br /><blockquote>"And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land."</blockquote>became<br /><blockquote>"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there."</blockquote>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-26784067130063837802008-10-28T17:12:00.004-05:002009-02-22T15:25:12.820-06:00photopost: new england wandering (parts 2-5)<span style="font-weight: bold;">part 2: amherst walk + drive</span><br /><br />in the heart of fall, when the air has the quality of vodka--good vodka--that's been left in the freezer for a long, long time. a place where i can have absolutely nothing to do and be content for days. also, the land of good beer.<br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" height="375" width="500"> <param name="flashvars" value="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608452695961%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608452695961%2F&set_id=72157608452695961&jump_to="> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608452695961%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608452695961%2F&set_id=72157608452695961&jump_to=" height="375" width="500"></embed></object><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">part 3: the <a href="http://www.thekitchencabinet.net/">kitchen cabinet</a> band practice</span><br /><br />a detour to the city. made it in time to hang out with <a href="http://www.candlemakesbomb.blogspot.com/">mikey's</a> band. stuffed in a columbia dorm room and unplugged except for the bass. beautiful people + beautiful songs.<br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" height="375" width="500"> <param name="flashvars" value="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608448483032%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608448483032%2F&set_id=72157608448483032&jump_to="> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608448483032%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608448483032%2F&set_id=72157608448483032&jump_to=" height="375" width="500"></embed></object><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">part 4: nyc to providence</span><br /><br />woke up at 8am on john's birthday. every intention of leaving in time to make it to brown for lunch. then, the realization that i hadn't closed my tab at the club we were at last night (where, strangely enough, moby was the dj). had left to walk an old friend to the train, with all intention of returning. had not returned. a morning/afternoon of wandering chinatown, soho, little italy in search for a bowtie for john. ended up with mugs depicting chinese erotic art and a bag full of other treasures from a grocery store eerily similar to one i frequented in beijing. then, to john--on his birthday. <br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" height="375" width="500"> <param name="flashvars" value="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608448452268%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608448452268%2F&set_id=72157608448452268&jump_to="> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608448452268%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608448452268%2F&set_id=72157608448452268&jump_to=" height="375" width="500"></embed></object><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">part 5: brown</span><br /><br />simply, epic. a poem to follow. these pictures are from the peripheral moments of a maelstrom.<br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="375" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"> <param name="flashvars" value="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608456653957%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608456653957%2F&set_id=72157608456653957&jump_to="></param> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927"></param> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"></param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" bgcolor="#000000" allowFullScreen="true" flashvars="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608456653957%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608456653957%2F&set_id=72157608456653957&jump_to=" width="500" height="375"></embed></object>David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13336039.post-39301489758583498842008-10-21T10:43:00.004-05:002009-02-22T15:52:07.584-06:00photopost: new england wandering<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">part 1: stang's wedding</span></span><br /><br />a rare collection of odd & beautiful creatures; loves that i had forgotten. pictures before and after the ceremony/reception, which is a debaucherous blur.<br /><br /><br /><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" height="375" width="500"> <param name="flashvars" value="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608212872494%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608212872494%2F&set_id=72157608212872494&jump_to="> <param name="movie" value="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=61927" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" flashvars="&offsite=true&intl_lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608212872494%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fdmmolina%2Fsets%2F72157608212872494%2F&set_id=72157608212872494&jump_to=" height="375" width="500"></embed></object><br /><br />i have fragments for a lake placid poem, but they're not coming together. strangely, i can't get over the image of these particular railings on the roadside during the drive up and back.<br /><blockquote>these roads have beautiful hips:<br />ochroid railings, low and sturdy;<br />nothing like the floppy-eared,<br />directionless steel i'm used to--<br />punctuated with concrete blocks<br />and Midwestern cities. no, to be<br />a runner in these hills must require<br />a conversation with this railing,<br />appearing and disappearing quietly,<br />modestly hugging you away from<br />the adirondacks, their hoary birches<br />and vagrant ponds insatiable. <br /></blockquote>and so on.David Molinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00838975063151389311noreply@blogger.com0