University of Wisconsin, Parkside
California State University, Dominguez Hills
Created: January 9, 2010
Latest Update: January 9, 2010
takata@uwp.edu
jeannecurran@habermas.org

Topic of the Week : Memory Sculptures

What They're Made Of

Rose Necklace - Crocheted

This necklace was crocheted as a memory sculpture for a friend. The memory: that there are good things happening, despite the dire financial straits the country is facing. The necklace was a reminder to think good thoughts. Now we recognize that optimism is under heavy attack these days, but the combination of anger and frustration and gloom over a long period of time, just isn't much fun. Those who are claiming that optimism harms us have gone a little overboard. It isn't optimism that is harming us; it's the denial of reality in assessing how well we're doing that hurts us.

No one is good at everything. We're all human. Just think of the recent news on our athletic heroes. What's harmful is being afraid to accept what we're not so good at, and accept help from those who are better at whatever it is. Taking guns into a locker room in professional athletics is not real smart. Knowing that we sometimes do not-so-smart things might suggest that we should court friends with better judgment who don't let us do those things, like carry around firearms, and drive under the influence, and explore sexual avenues trhat might destroy relationships we care about. I'd suggest that believing in friends and acknowledging the hope that they can make us stronger is a very positive attitude, and one that doesn't deny our not-so-strong points, without making us so arrogant that we figure we always know best.

Hopefully, our effort to get our friends to deal with their optimism wisely won't mean their giving up their good feelings and their positivism. "Il faut toujours de la modération." As a famous French poet once said.

In the last December issue, we started to talk about fear as a climate for defining our perspective. Yes, it might make us pay greater attention to our surroundings, if we're fearful. But it might also scare us into submission and acceptance of a situation we could make lots better if we weren't scared to try. As in most things, we need to find a balance between loving ourselves and feeling that no one can match us or take our place. Someone will. Some day.

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Visual Memories

• David's Shield, the six-pointed star.

  Hand-made memory sculpture designed to bring to mind conversations and research on the Middle East. Particularly Israel and Arab resistance to Israel.

• Rose Necklace

  Crocheted for a friend to remind her there's good stuff going on, too. See Topic of the Week.

• Nature Governed?

  Scanned image of a tomato plant. It reminded me of a halloween ghost when I scanned it. What might it represent in relation to issues of age? of poverty? of land? of optimism?

  Consider:

  • age - delicacy of what look like limbs, the darkness of what might be a head? skull? that then gives way to an eye we can see right through, like a skull?
  • poverty - unnatural thinness, adequacy of diet? but onw might see apparent joy and celebration in the pose?
  • land - the importance of land to produce food, and the dependence wrought by not having land on another who may control food and necessaries
  • optimism - a scary, dancing death's head? or a clebration of life with those who went before us - consider the mexican Day of the Dead

  Are there issues of balance in these possible interpretations? Can you find a natural object that lends itself to ideas and issues that we all face today?

  I could imagine that my tomato plant creature is on wheels. I wonder what that would tell me. By the way, I wouldn't try to save the plant itself, but would photograph or scan or draw it. jeanne

Topics for the Week

Scarce Resources: Land

To what extent is the East-West struggle in the Middle East an issue over land as a scarce resource?

Consider the game of musical chairs. If you were the last one to be left with no chair before the world's nations began to consider sovereignty inviolable, how does that affect the land that belongs to you? What did some of our philosophers have to say about the owning of land? What do U.S. indigenous peoples have to say about the ownership of land? What does the third world have to say about land? And what about sovereignty. What is it? Should it be inviolable? How does it fit into the concept of justice as fairness? What about law and justice? Law and fairness?

No. We can't have all these conversations. Most of us are overcommitted to start with. But we can have some of them. Our memory sculptures are meant to

Anyone picked up a souvenir that relates to Avatar? How does this recent blockbuster relate to issue of land and justice? Any memory sculptures you could share on this?

Fear as a Means of Persuasion

Will upload some links to recent studies. jeanne

Fear as a Means of Governance

Age and Reliance on Contracts Across Generations

Consider that the young must rely upon their elders to educate and create opportunities for them to advance. And the older groups must rely upon the society as they know it and expect it to continue to care for them as they bring their life cycle to a close. This whole cycle is fraught with a need for trust and yet no over riding force that can assure that such trust will be honored. What a mess in terms of human relationships. For all of us. Even poor Mrs. Astor.

Range of Online News Resources for Issues on the Site

• Newspapers: Labeling here is based on an article by Ashley K. Vroman on the impossiibility of labeling newspapers by ideology. I personally go along with the conclusion of the conservative Media Research Center's L. Brent Bozell III: if the paper never met a conservative cause it didn't like, it's conservative, and if it never met a liberal cause it didn't like, it's liberal. But then, what about the Wall Street Journal whose news staff is considered liberal and its editorial staff considered conservative? jeanne

  Liberal Newspapers:

  New York Times - Los Angeles Times - The Washington Post
  The Boston Globe - The Chicago Tribune

  Conservative Newspapers:

  The Wall Street Journal - The Washington Times - The New York Post
  Manchester (N.H.) UnionLeader - The Oklahoman

   

   

   

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