Category: Uncategorized

While I would like this blog post to be able to clarify some of my ramblings from yesterday’s class, I can tell you right now that it is not going to. However, instead of using this space to fall into linguistic/philosophical problems which I do not have the tools to eloquently handle, I’m going to focus on one small—and violent—word; “need.” Continue reading “You “Need” To Read This”

Original post here.

The article shared by Pam really got me thinking about the blame and lack of control felt when one is involuntarily pushed into homelessness. In Pagliarini’s attempt to explain how “learned helplessness” is an eventual learned symptom of being poor in America, he undermines the real issues at hand and continues the endless cycle of blaming the poor for being poor. In effect, he’s labeling the victims of systematic violence as the actual origin of this violence because they haven’t taken a hold of their own “control” yet.

The thing is, people who have fallen victim to foreclosure and homelessness really don’t have a lot of room to exercise their own control and agency. The mindset that these people have merely “given up” as a result of endless financial strains is problematic.

Despite Pagliarini’s attempt to set his article outside of the “Get Rich Quick” mentality, it ends up being exactly that. His article is riddled with a white privilege perspective with some classist ideals sprinkled in here and there. If we were to shove this article into Lelah Turner’s hands and say “Alright, here’s the answer to your problems. Get going!” she would laugh our face. It almost reminds me of the pee scene in The Turner House when Cha-Cha realizes the kind of life he is “destined” to live. From Cha-Cha’s perspective, as a black boy growing up in Detroit it’s as if his agency had been inherently taken away from him from day one.  Ideas like “Get Perspective!” and “Achieve Success” are unrealistic and problematic to advise to people like Cha-Cha or Lelah (Cha-Cha being a black man and Lelah being homeless, both under their own kind of systematic pressure) because they haven’t had the same set of opportunities laid out for them.

I was just reading this interview with Matthew Desmond, whose book Evicted just won a Pulitzer. I haven’t read the book yet and am hoping it’s not in the tradition of Alice Goffman’s On the Run.

But given Dominion‘s deep and complicated human characters, this line really jumped out at me:

“There are two ways to dehumanize: the first is to strip people of all virtue, the second is to clear them of all sin.”

The other day during our class discussion, we were discussing mythology and religion. This reminded me of my Bible as Literature with Dr. Drake in the Spring 2016 semester. Continue reading “Mythology and Religion”

I was trying to find  Mother Jones article from about 10 years ago because it made a claim that when a house (or apartment, or any dwelling) approaches about 2800 square feet (I think), it becomes impossible to clean that place on one’s own. Someone else must be hired to do the cleaning.

But I can’t find the article, but in the meantime, Google yielded this article from a 1908 Ladies’ Home Journal. It’s titled ‘“I Want to Build a House’: An Architect’s Frank Talk with the Man or Woman Who is About to Build.”

Maybe it’s worth a read!

Noa Wesley is a senior at Cornell and an artist who works in multiple platforms, with an especially keen eye for photography.  found from craigslist is a Tumblr blog that Noa created a year ago where she re-posts various craigslist ads; these are absurd (and often hilarious) objects and photos that create a telling portrait of our relationship with our consumer-goods. When viewed altogether on the blog, her gallery is a reflection of our contemporary identity and how it evolves with the internet and social media. Additionally, it has challenged some of my own ideas on what we constitute as “art”.

Noa is an old friend of mine, and a chance encounter with her this weekend led to a discussion about her blog and how it covers themes such as “performance”, “waste”, “origins”, and many others that are prevalent in our classes’ texts and discussions.

One of the things that you notice when looking at Noa’s blog is that the humor derived from the ads comes from the amateur nature of their photographs; while sometimes it is obvious that the seller is trying to be humorous, it is normally ambiguous whether or not the comedy is intentional. This ambiguity is what drew me to her blog; Noa’s selection does not feel mean-spirited because she is not making fun of the sellers or their advertisements. Instead, she is inviting the audience to interpret and relate to the sellers. She told me “These are artifacts that are brought from the private sphere and into the public. I think it’s interesting that the person behind the camera has a relationship with these objects that they don’t want them… at one point they had a use for these objects.”

There is also a sense of primitive and amateur mercantilism on display that I find very interesting “Some of the photos are just so unappealing,” Noa says. “If someone posts a picture of a used makeup brush and it’s in a pile of dirt, who is going to buy it?”

In the texts in class, we explore the ideas and feelings behind homes and property, as well as the often careless swindling that goes into the trade. While I find Noa’s blog intriguing as an extension of both personal and financial performance, I’d love to hear your own thoughts!

On Friday April 7, 2017 I was fortunate enough to be able to attend one of the panels during the Democracy and Citizenship in Our Time teach-in that took place on campus. Topics that were discussed during Panel II included LGBTQIA+, education, economic inequality, immigration, and disabilities. I was particularly intrigued with what Dr. Kathleen Mapes had to say surrounding economic inequality in America and how this problem has been brewing for decades.  After our recent viewing of the 1948 film, “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House”, I felt this topic to be especially relevant to the themes that we have been discussing thus far in this class this semester and I wanted to explore how economic inequality is presented in the film and the effects that it has on the audience’s interpretations of what it means to build your dream home.

Continue reading “Democracy and Citizenship in Our Time (and in Mr. Blandings’ Time)”

I had never before seen Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, but after watching it in class I was struck by how much it related to my own upbringing, specifically in the context of space.  In the movie, it is comically shown that the 4 person family does not have enough space in their Manhattan apartment.  Scenes such as Mr. Blandings and his wife fighting over who gets to use the bathroom mirror demonstrate that personal space is definitely an issue for this family, and is ultimately what leads to their moving out of New York City.  Growing up in New York City myself, I can relate to these issues of personal space, and although they are certainly comical in the film does not mean that they are at all an exaggeration.  Sharing a one bedroom apartment with my sister and two parents, personal space always was, and still is a point of contention in our household. Continue reading “Space in Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House”

I don’t have any ideas on how Dominion might relate to the housing crisis yet, but I’m finding this book to be interesting in other ways. It is certainly a slow read; long and heavy. However, I do enjoy the language. It’s wonderful overall, but every so often there’s a moment when I pause and reread a piece of the language I especially like. It’s like finding little treasures scattered throughout the book.

Continue reading “Just a Bit of Appreciation”

Property ownership has been an overarching theme of the semester thus far. From The Old Man and the Storm, which follows an eighty-two year old man as he rebuilds his home after Hurricane Katrina, to Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, which depicts the build-up of the United States housing bubble in the early 2000’s, to Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, which tells an account of an African American family living in Detroit struggling to keep their childhood home, the concept of housing is an important element to consider. Furthermore, it is also crucial to keep in mind that in all three of these cases this notion of home is accompanied with sentiments of melancholy.

The idea of a “dream house” juxtaposes the disheartening idea of home seen in the varying art forms aforementioned. This notion of a “dream house” is largely highlighted in mediums such as magazine advertisements and television shows and connects notably to the “American Dream” throughout time. Rather than focusing on compartmentalizing, many times a key component of a “dream house” is expansion, as depicted in Mr. Blandings Dream House. In the film (seen thus far), Jim Blandings and his family are cramped in a New York apartment. After seeing an ad in the paper about new homes in Connecticut, he and his wife decide to purchase what they continuously call their “dream house,” regardless of the apprehensions of their lawyer.

However, Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s lecture “Small is Beautiful” highlights the importance of modesty and ecological efficiency. He calls attention to the contemporary “Tiny House Movement” gaining popularity, as magazines and television shows are beginning to bring this shift into popular culture. An excerpt from the the television show Portlandia, shown during the lecture, exemplifies, in a greatly exaggerated manner, the efficiency and capability of a “tiny house.” Dr. Kenneth Cooper went on to reexamine the notions of the “American Dream,” calling attention to other countries, such as the Netherlands, that use bicycles, drive smaller vehicles, have tinier food portion sizes, and overall have less grandiose ideals within the culture. This sense of more, and bigger and greater has me thinking, when did the “American Dream” begin to constitute gluttony? Or has it always had?