As many American cities as possible

Would cities be a places along the way topic or a one for flâneuse? Flip a coin. Un coup de dés jamais n'obolira le hasard. Next city post goes to the other. Maybe. Depends on what it is. Now, to post and get back to reading these gems. I need a cityspace break in the worst way today. 

Mariana Valverde (Toronto): Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance. Dean Stansel (FGCU): Why Some Cities Are Growing and Others Shrinking. Michelle Wilde Anderson (UC-Berkeley): Dissolving Cities. From The American Conservative, a symposium on Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 

From n+1, the City by City project gathers reports from as many American cities as possible, to see how things are going and what can be done, including Baltimore, Milwaukee, Northern Kentucky, Greensboro, theDistrict of Columbia, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Chicago. Why city rankings always get it wrong: Happiest cities, most livable cities, loneliest cities — the Web's filled with lists. Why do cities get so little respect from state and national governments? 

An interview with Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. Joel Kotkin on the demise of the luxury city. Variety show: A new way to measure a city’s diversity. Ryan Avent on one path to better jobs: More density in cities. Nate Berg on defining cities in a metropolitan world. 

Are freeways doomed? Several cities are tearing down highways, creating bold new public spaces — and building a future without cars. Suburban hip is where it’s at: UBS might like Manhattan — but for all the talk of an urban renaissance, most growth is happening beyond the city. Could you actually be hurting the environment by going green and moving to the suburbs?

"As many American cities as possible" at Omivore, the Book Forum blog

The Secret Lives of the Brain

A multiple source ~ YouTube, The Guardian, WSJ, Wikipedia and Eagleman's own website ~ mashup on an intriguing topic, being incognito even from ourselves, How very flânerie-apropos... to stroll not just the streets exploring levels above and below but to explore the mind as well, la vraie chambre double

ForaTv just uploaded a video:

The Secret Lives of the Brain

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2011/11/02/David_Eagleman_Will_We_Ever_Understand_the_Brain; audio clip from book, 

David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (something less than a rave review from The Guardian), discusses the relatively minor role that the conscious mind plays in comparison to the rest of the brain. "The conscious part is like a stowaway on a transatlantic steamship that's taking credit for the whole journey without acknowledging the engineering underfoot," he says.

As neuroscientists are learning more and more about our body's hidden frontier, we have gained fleeting insights into our own intuition, habits and seemingly unexplainable preferences. Can we solve those mysteries by creating a complete computer model of our brain? Or, is the brain an unsolvable puzzle? Two leading neuroscientists discuss these question and more as we look into the neurology of the brain. 

David Eagleman's previous book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, was a delightful collection of short fables, each offering a wish-fulfillment image of life after death in which the wish turns out to contain its own perverse consequences. The fable principle was grounded in a nicely ironic psychology, subtly underpinned by Eagleman's own profession, neuroscience. Using fiction, Eagleman found a neat way of revealing how the mind cannot escape the contradictions of its underlying construction.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and a fiction ... More

Taking a (Nature & Poetry) Walk to Remember

#Mountainair is not urban. Of course not. How obvious can a statement get? Yet the organizing idea here and indeed a multitude of ideas from related areas: urban walking; freestyle walking; urban walking tours, art and poetry walks. Community planning and design, especially of public spaces, can encourage walking. This walk described here surely calls to the Manzano Mountain Art Council and iCreate, inviting the addition of public art. Miriam Sagan's Santa Fe Community College poetry posts come to mind too.

It's time to update Mountainair's Comprehensive Plan:

Sameer Reddy in the Wall Street Journal writes:

Nature and poetry share a long and loving history, as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Ralph Waldo Emerson's seminal essay "Nature," can attest. So when the New York Botanical Garden was planning the dedication program for its Thain Family Forest, a lush swath of newly restored old-growth forest in the garden's northwest corner, it found a natural partner in the Poetry Society of America.

The Poetry Society, in turn, commissioned Jon Cotner, the author, with Andy Fitch, of "Ten Walks/Two Talks" and the creator of various urban walking initiatives, to design an experience for Garden visitors. He devised "Poem Forest," the goal being to re-introduce them to one of the area's few remaining pockets of 17th-century woodland.

Beginning last weekend and concluding this Saturday and Sunday, the public has the chance to walk the Sweetgum Trail, stopping at 15 spots along the path where they can enunciate a selection of poetic fragments that resonate with the landscape and focus the senses. The lines have been sourced from a diverse group of poets who share an attunement to the wonders of the natural world.

Taking a Walk to Remember. More here.

Temporary Insanity: 10 Lessons Learned from NanoWriMo — Happenchance

A familiar story. I stumbled over it 7 years ago, not completing the first year but coming back every year thereafter (a few reluctantly) and completely all of them. Some people take exotic vacations, others might schedule annual assignation. I NaNo just to do it, for a lark, and with no ambitions to contribute a novel I probably would not want to read to the many already out there in that category.

The points raised here are good ones: just doing it improves your focus and any other writing you do. Multiple blogging and social media, content as well as commenting, promote scattered writing: here a post there a comment here a tweet there a share. Blogs and other writing might suffer this month but will benefit in the long run.

"I stumbled across something called Nanowrimo: National Novel Writing Month. The task is this: write a 50,000 word novel in one month. This averages out to 1,667 words a day.

After your month is up, you copy and paste your text into a little word counter. If you reach the goal, nothing really happens except that you’ve written 50,000 words in a month. Nanowrimo is free and offers plenty of forums for people to talk about their WIP (work in progress).

Most people who start don’t finish. In 2008, there were 119,301 participants and 21,683 winners."

Temporary Insanity: 10 Lessons Learned from NanoWriMo — Happenchance

'via Blog this'

Gratuitous Graffiti: Robot Makes Random Wall Tags

Makes more sense than any number of projects, concepts, delusions, attitudes, notions and so... some even encountered this very day by a bemused and bothered flâneuse. This is how best to deal with them.

Graffiti takes time whether you’re an amateur or a seasoned expert. This crazy robot lets you sit back with a cold beer while it goes at the work of tagging an entire wall with your choice of spray paint. The drawback, of course, is that it’s a completely random process involving a wildly waving spray paint arm and a bunch of shapeless scribbles. But hey, at least you’ll avoid that miserable sore finger that comes from holding down the paint can button for too long

The Senseless Drawing Bot was invented by So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi for the singular purpose of scribbling random lines and swirls of paint on your chosen surface. The bot wheels itself back and forth in a straight line, swinging its metal arm and creating one-of-a-kind works of robot art.

We hear you out there asking “What’s the point?” But like so many other creative works out there, there’s no real answer to that. The Senseless Drawing Bot seems to exist solely to be weird, funny and different than most of the other graffiti projects out there.

Gratuitous Graffiti: Robot Makes Random Wall Tags and more good stuff from the Web Urbanist, a site the flâneuse adores, especially on those days when just being contrary is not enough

Best of TED, Nov 2, 2011

Stretch your mind, will you please.... not wasting minds begins at home... November 2, 2011

This week, meet the molecule that could make us act morally ... explore two art projects about storytelling ...  check in on the open-source future of science ...  What drives our desire to behave morally? Neuroeconomist Paul Zak makes the case for a hormone called oxytocin (he calls it "the moral molecule"). Watch now >> After he ended up on an FBI watch list, artist Hasan Elahi was advised by local agents to let them know when he was traveling. He did that ... and more. Watch now >> With scissors and paper, Béatrice Coron creates intricate worlds. Striding onstage in a glorious cape cut from Tyvek, she details her creative process. Watch now >> How does cancer know it's cancer? At Jay Bradner's lab, they found (and shared) a molecule that might be the answer. An inspiring look at the open-source future of medical research. Watch now >>

World Lit Mags

The Review Review's lit mag news goes global this issue ~ but without interfering with usual interviews, book reviews, writing and publishing tips ~ featuring Flash Fiction and what it's about.

Firstly, it's not easy to fund a literary magazine when your finances are being bankrolled by the CIA. But Transition, a journal founded in Kampala, Uganda, has faced this very challenge and many others, ultimately gaining attention from Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Ghani, I am slightly older, but still slightly foolish. That's why I'm still on it."

Read the rest at World Lit Mags

'via Blog this'

"Rose by Any Other Name"

Umberto Eco on translation as negotiation, language and meaning. Read it. Yet more Eco on Porta Ludovica. Quotes and more: Eco is so quotable.... and of course, all PL is yet another irresistible item for the ravenous feed reader

Eco as reader of Colin Wilson

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches moves us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

-- "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage" (1984) from Travels in Hyperreality

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

-- Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1984)

Eco - Writings: "Rose by Any Other Name"

'via Blog this'

Belated Bookish Links

Beckett, Dublin 1948, Beckett Foundation

“One of the great productions of literary scholarship of our time,” the Beckett letters (via @seanjcostello). * Who is César Aira? * An encounter with the keepers of the Flannery O’Connor legacy. * Inside William Faulkner’s drinks cabinet. * F. Scott Fitzgerald’s guide to the good life. * The recipe for Anthony Burgess‘ infamous cocktail Hangman’s Blood. * From Baggot Street Bridge, a Patrick Kavanagh app. * When T.S. Eliot met Ezra Pound. * “I have been boiled in a hell-broth.” T.S. Eliot writes to Virginia Woolf.

* “This kind of long gestation period is pretty typical for America’s corps of young, elite celebrity novelists. Jonathan Franzen took nine years…Donna Tartt vanished for a decade…Michael Chabon has gone seven years between major novels.” * DBC Pierre & Nicholson Baker’s fictional excesses. * On “great American cynic” Ambrose Bierce (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn).

* Los Angeles, London, New York: when fiction makes real-world cities “better* ... Stephen Crowe tells Her Royal Majesty why he’s illustrating Finnegans Wake.

More on Stephen’s blog: http://wakeinprogress.blogspot.com

Welcome to the Occupations

From the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, don’t be afraid to say “revolution”, #OWS. The "Last Place Aversion" Paradox: Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton on the surprising psychology of the Occupy Wall Street protests .... 

As the OWS protest blossoms across America, they are no doubt being watched over by the country’s patron saint of civil disobedience — Herman Melville’s Bartleby. 

.... Immanuel Wallerstein on the fantastic success of Occupy Wall Street.... Nouriel Roubini on why almost every continent on Earth is experiencing social and political turmoil. In three months, an idea and a hashtag became a worldwide movement — here’s how they did it....Scott McLemee interviews four professors who are tracking the movement. What will become of Occupy Wall Street? A protest historian’s guide. Harvard Business Review on what businesses need to know about #OWS. ...

Read all of Welcome to the occupations at Omnivore

Introducing transliteracy

This is one of the readings for Week 4 of CMC11, Creativity and Multicultural Communication. Transliteracies sure sounds like Multiliteracies. Is there any significant difference other than the discipline of origin?  More emphasis on sociocultural aspects? I vaguely remember related (internet mediated cross cultural or transnational communication) terms from the late 90's that seem to have all but disappeared from use. Are there other related terms? 

Quotes:

Introducing transliteracy

• Transliteracy is recent terminology gaining currency in the library world. It is a broad term encompassing and transcending many existing concepts.
• Transliteracy is such a new concept that its working definition is still evolving and many of its tenets can easily be misinterpreted.
• Transliteracy originated with the cross-disciplinary Transliteracies Project group, headed by Alan Liu from the Department of English at the University of California-Santa Barbara. The main focus of that group is the study of online reading.
• The term has its basis in the word transliterate, which means “to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language.”
• transliteracy is concerned with mapping meaning across different media and not with developing particular literacies about various media.
• interaction among all these literacies
• “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and films, to digital social networks.”
• working definition of transliteracy
• Basically, transliteracy is concerned with what it means to be literate in the 21st century.
• social networking, but is fluid enough to not be tied to any particular technology. It focuses more on the social uses of technology
• Transliteracy is very concerned with the social meaning of literacy.

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Multi(ple): literacies, tasking, connecting, networking #MOOC/s

Would that be multimoocquing (or however spelled)? I favor qu for the hard c. Getting ahead of myself (we can do that here), I came across "Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy" in CMC1l readings for week. The article struck me as Multiliteracies  relevant even if it uses the word "collaboration" too often. Call it coollaporation and let it be, let it be ...

Not the only thing I am doing out of order. In the interest of practicing an economy of scale, efficient multi-tasking and navigating chaos and especially to retain a modicum of sanity in this busy season, I've been thinking about how to connect, mentally relate, different but intersecting MOOCs. Currently in progress or about to start, these are the Program for Online Teaching, Multiliteracies, Creativity & Multicultural Communication and Change 2011. A more complete list includes previous ones. Participants remain connected on Google Reader, in personal networks and through sporadic posts on respective Facebook (& other) groups. Obviously, I'm going to need a mind map but not today.

Fractal Art Wallpaper, Chaos Theory

Network the distributed networks: MOOC+ or the landscape of a quondam, moocque futurus. This very distributed network or series of distributed networks connects differently for each of us depending on individual purposes. They also connect with our outside (personal, professional, creative, community and other) lives even more idiosyncratically ... but that's another post. 

Posted via email from Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments

The Human Cost of Social Connectivity, Brian Solis

I'm not entirely sure where this article fits into Multiliteracies, but it does and maybe the sooner the better ~ part of the firehouse / filter / shallows / narrows discussion because they all contribute to "Social Media Fatigue" and "Follow Fatigue" ~ symptoms of "Chaos Navigation Failure Syndrome" (CNFS, a syndrome not a disordet and I just made it up)

Over the years, we’ve learned the importance of social media in our professional and personal lives. It is after all a revolution in of itself. From improving governments to socializing businesses to improving collaboration and learning to investing in personal development, social media is influencing and reshaping all it touches. But there are very real costs associated with social media and they extend well beyond technology, popular networks, trends or monumental events.

You are here because you live and breathe new media and with each day that passes, you place unprecedented value on social and mobile networks and the role they play in your livelihood. Your experiences are incredibly personal, but are also influenced by your connections. The value you glean from each network is directly correlated to the relationships you forge within each network. The content that you curate, create, and consume dictates the focus and significance of your interest graphs.  The gravity that attracts people and information to your egosystem is essentially yours and only yours to define. And, that’s the point of this post. We must study the human cost of social media to improve how it is we adopt and employ it in life, study, and work.

via briansolis.com

About the human cost tied to social networking: "The reality is that the cost of social networking is great and without checks and balances, engagement can cost us more capital than we have to spend"

Is the new "tree of knowledge" is network?

Posted via email from Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments

Extraordinary Discourse

What can I say? The link is on my feed reader now. Podcast themes (or would they be topics, with mashups one is never quite sure) work and the workplace (The World Owes You A Living 1 & 2) and knowledge (The Twisted Hairs Rhizome, Fractal Documentary, Delectables for Autodidacts) both relate to interests I blog and curate content about. There are more. I could blog selections on The New Faculty Majority (work, learning), Work and Life (more work) and Computers Language Writing (knowledge, learning). I may eventually. For now, c'est pour la flâneuse...

Jack Saturday explains in the header, "Extraordinary Discourse has been long in preparing. I offer a multi-voiced thought adventure, around an hour a week. Its many themes converge in the theme of Play" and quotes Whitman, "Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you."

Kairos lays out the plan in succinct detail and less playfully....

"Extraordinary Discourse" is the latest project of Canadian audio and new media artist Jack Saturday, previously best known for an enormous sound-collage called "The World Owes You a Living" which was self-published on 6 CDs back in about 2005.

His technique is to harvest thousands of short sound-bites from the infosphere - from pundits and commentators, from interviews with ordinary people, and sometimes from films or TV shows - then stitch them together into king-size sound-quilts. As the title "The World Owes You a Living" suggests, there is a polemical slant to his work: he's a millenialist who believes that there is plenty of wealth to go round and that we could all be leading fulfilling and meaningful lives, but that society has been rigged to keep both wealth and self-fulfillment in the hands of a priveleged few.

The resulting work is full of both visionary hope and libertarian outrage, but it's also full of artistic inventiveness, kaleidoscopic variety, humour and fun. "Extraordinary Discourse" takes the form of a series of podcasts - twenty-nine to date - built on an even larger scale than "The World Owes You a Living" and incorporating all the material from that earlier project. Check them out. His is a voice well worth hearing, particularly right now.

Extraordinary Discourse" by Jack Saturday, Kairos

Broadsided: Responses: Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 2011

RESPONSES

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 2011

At Broadsided, we believe that art and literature belong in our daily lives. We believe they are not just decoration, but essential communication. They inspire and they demonstrate the vitality and depth of our connection with the world.

Moved by the plight of post-tsunami Japan, Broadsided artist Yuko Adachi sent us the image "Love Heals Japan" (see right) and asked if we would help her find writing to accompany it. We were inspired by her idea, and decided to ask other Broadsided artists if they had been similarly moved and, if so, if they'd be willing to share their work.

We posted that art, and asked writers to respond. Below are the collaborations that resulted, as well as a short note from the writers and artists about this process. We hope that you will download, print, and share these with your community.

Yuko has created a high-quality giclee print of her collaboration with Hugh Martin. You can purchase it on Etsy. All proceeds will go to the relief effort in Japan.

Click each image below for the pdf; scroll down for more information about each collaboration.

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"How Love Heals" Yuko Adachi & Deborah Fried-Rubin Download the pdf (352kb) Artist Yuko Adachi is a Tokyo-born artist who was raised in Japan, Paris, London, and the United States of America. She has been painting since she was a little girl and has been showing her works through solo and selected group shows internationally. Her painting was featured for the cover of Artscope, New England's Cultural Magazine (May/June 2007) and Takara Magazine, the Japanese Culture and Information Magazine in New England (2007 issues). In 2007, her work was awarded best in painting for "Healing Power of Art" by Manhattan Art International. Today, she lives and works in Boston. In 2010, she opened an artist studio store, "Planet MOMEKO," in Rpckport, MA. www.yukoadachi.com. Writer Deborah Fried-Rubin is a second year graduate student in the Queens College MFA program, pursuing an interest in poetry after many years of practicing law. A recipient of Queen's College's Silverstein-Peiser Award for Poetry, her work has appeared in Why I Am Not A Painter, an anthology of MFA poetry from the NYC area, published by Argos Books. She lives on Long Island with her husband and three children. QUESTIONING OUR RESPONSES Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Japan's earthquake and tsunami? Deborah Fried-Rubin: Yuko Adachi's beautiful work automatically conveyed to me an image of one world, both fractured and unified. The lines reaching to circles illustrated trajectories of trauma engaging people across the globe, making the pain of one the pain of many. But the lines can also be seen as shooting from a place of brightness to reach circles of suffering. This back-and-forth reading reinforced the connectivity for me. The work also reminded me instantly of the kabbalistic concept of "shattered vessels" which humanity heals by acts of kindness, as well as teachings by the Ben Ish Chai, regarding the world as an orb spinning in space, constantly returning light to dark places. Yuko's saturated colors, both innocent and textured, felt like a hope for deeper understanding. Why did this visual response come to mind when thinking about Japan's earthquake and tsunami? Yuko Adachi: I wanted to create an image that is positive, gentle and healing for Japanese people and to those who purchse this print. The reddish bubbles are love energy that is being sent to Japan and the circle represents the Japanese flag as well as the earth energy and the ray of light shining upon it, to indicate that the sun will rise again! The suffering that Japan is experiencing aches my heart to the point of numbness but I want to thank you for your support and love that you are sending to Japan. We feel it! What do you think is the role of art in regards to real-world, real-time events? In other words, what makes a "successful" occasional or political piece of writing or art? Deborah Fried-Rubin: I hope art helps us make sense of the emotional content of "world" events, and shows us how to relate in our private capacities to make a cumulative impact. Because everything is ultimately reducible to millions upon millions of individuals, the best "political" poem is a personal one, with heart in it. Yuko Adachi: An agile creative response with a purpose to the event that opens up our mind and willingness to make an effort to spread what we created and talk about it. "The Horse of Higashi-Matsushima" Yuko Adachi & Hugh Martin Download the pdf (312kb) Artist Yuko Adachi is a Tokyo-born artist who was raised in Japan, Paris, London, and the United States of America. She has been painting since she was a little girl and has been showing her works through solo and selected group shows internationally. Her painting was featured for the cover of Artscope, New England's Cultural Magazine (May/June 2007) and Takara Magazine, the Japanese Culture and Information Magazine in New England (2007 issues). In 2007, her work was awarded best in painting for "Healing Power of Art" by Manhattan Art International. Today, she lives and works in Boston. In 2010, she opened an artist studio store, "Planet MOMEKO," in Rpckport, MA. www.yukoadachi.com. Writer Hugh Martin is a veteran of the Iraq war and a graduate of Muskingum University. He now attends the MFA program at Arizona State University and his chapbook, So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was a winner of the 2009 Wick Chapbook Competition. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, Nashville Review, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, River Styx, American Poetry Review, and War, Literature & the Arts. QUESTIONING OUR RESPONSES Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Japan's earthquake and tsunami? Hugh Martin: The piece of artwork is a small, yet beautiful and important reminder that we need to keep Japan in our thoughts. I'd already drafted a poem about the picture of the horse, but the piece of art, focusing more on the disaster to the country as a whole, was a powerful juxtaposition to the specific, more concrete death of the horse, which ultimately leads us to the human deaths and the temporary graves. Why did this visual response come to mind when thinking about Japan's earthquake and tsunami? Yuko Adachi: I wanted to create an image that is positive, gentle and healing for Japanese people and to those who purchse this print. The reddish bubbles are love energy that is being sent to Japan and the circle represents the Japanese flag as well as the earth energy and the ray of light shining upon it, to indicate that the sun will rise again! The suffering that Japan is experiencing aches my heart to the point of numbness but I want to thank you for your support and love that you are sending to Japan. We feel it! What do you think is the role of art in regards to real-world, real-time events? In other words, what makes a "successful" occasional or political piece of writing or art? Hugh Martin: I think all art should help us acknowledge and be more aware of disaster, both in the sense of the collective and the personal. Art can help heal those who were victims; it can help those who were distant better understand. Yuko Adachi: An agile creative response with a purpose to the event that opens up our mind and willingness to make an effort to spread what we created and talk about it.

"Children at Play" Cheryl Gross & Susan Cohen 11" x 12" Ball point, ink, handmade paper. Download the pdf (424kb) Artist Cheryl Gross has an MFA in New Forms from Pratt. She writes: "When asked about my work, I always equate it with creating an environment transforming my inner thoughts into reality. Much like an architect or urban planner, that reality and humor becomes the foundation of the work. Beginning with the physical process, I work in layers. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, my urban influence has indeed added an "edge" to my work. Coming from a totally vertical and intense environment, I now live in Jersey City, NJ." www.cmgross.com Writer Susan Cohen is author of the forthcoming book of poems, Throat Singing, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Poetry International, River Styx, Southern Poetry Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley and is two-time winner of the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award. QUESTIONING OUR RESPONSES Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Japan's earthquake and tsunami? Susan Cohen: I found "Children at Play" wildly imaginative, yet so strange and disturbing. When I made myself address it, that sense of being disturbed turned into a deep grief. I had a nephew who died a few years ago at sea and whose body later washed ashore, so I'm especially haunted by the idea of children in the waves. As I wrote, I realized I was hearing sounds of bicycles and surf and kids playing before supper, that the visual image had a strong aural effect on me. Was that triggered by the incongruous bird perched on the bicycle? I don't know, but I found myself wanting to intone or chant, which made this poem very different from those I usually write. Why did this visual response come to mind when thinking about Japan's earthquake and tsunami? Artist:--> What do you think is the role of art in regards to real-world, real-time events? In other words, what makes a "successful" occasional or political piece of writing or art? Susan Cohen: Real-world events disappear so quickly and completely from the news. Perhaps art contains the capacity to focus our attention at least a little longer. Artist:--> "sliding house/meditation for after an earthquake" Ira Joel Haber & Lisa L. Moore 10 1/8" x 7 7/8" Ink and crayon on notebook paper. Download the pdf (420kb) Artist Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer and teacher who sometimes writes poetry and movie reviews. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one-man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Hirshorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In 2004 he received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn. (View Ira's Work) Writer Lisa L. Moore grew up hiking, skiing, trail riding and working on her family's ranch in the eastern foothills of the Canadian Rockies. After working as an arts journalist, Lisa went into academia and since 1991 has been teaching English and Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author or editor of several books, including Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and the Austin Project (Texas) and most recently Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (MInnesota). She is the co-director, with Meta DuEwa Jones, of the Texas Institute of Literary and Textual Studies, which is offering a series of lectures, workshops, readings and symposia in 2011-12 on the topic of Poets&Scholars (more information here). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Sinister Wisdom, and she blogs at Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community. QUESTIONING OUR RESPONSES Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Japan's earthquake and tsunami? Lisa Moore: My poem started from a couple of awkwardly-translated sentences on a news report. A woman whose husband had just been found in the rubble was asked for a reaction and I was struck by the difference between watching her speak (in Japanese) and the rather bloodless subtitles: "I am relieved to see him, of course. But there are so many others still missing." Those words sounded so measured but the woman looked so distraught and desperate....not "relieved" at all. Those words and their inadequacy and what might be behind them rattled around in my brain for a few weeks and were called back to mind when I saw Ira Joel Haber's piece "Sliding House." The plainness and somber colors of the image combined with the terrifying movement of the house out of the frame seemed to capture that dissonance. Why did this visual response come to mind when thinking about Japan's earthquake and tsunami? Ira Joel Haber: I did this drawing in a notebook when I was living in San Diego teaching Art at UCSD. I lived in a very small apartment which was on a high hill. and had a patio overlooking the valley below. This drawing is of course about hanging, literally and figuratively. Some of my work, especially the work from 1969 to 1975 have a strong dose of catastrophe and destruction so this latest environmental disaster hit home. What do you think is the role of art in regards to real-world, real-time events? In other words, what makes a "successful" occasional or political piece of writing or art? Lisa L. Moore: I read a lot of eighteenth-century "occasional" verse composed for particular people or events, and the poems that last are the ones that speak with enough specificity to conjure the feeling of that moment in a way that grabs the reader even across centuries. Like Pope's "Epistle to Bolingbroke." Who cares about Bolingbroke? But the line "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" breaks my heart. Ira Joel Haber: I can recall one work that I did in direct result of real world events and that was the Viet Nam war. The role of art with regards to the above is the same as any person's reaction should be. "River Vessel" Kevin Morrow & Mason Schoen Download the pdf (300kb) Artist Kevin Morrow is a native of Wisconsin who received his BFA in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2003. Soon thereafter, he received his MFA degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand where he studied in the Contemporary Maori Department (Te Toi Hou). Upon completion, Morrow returned to the U.S. to live and work in Austin, Texas where he spent a year or so concentrating on earthworks. Morrow now lives and works in New York. Images of other work at Mason Schoen: I don't know, really. Of course art should capture experience, perspective. In my opinion, successful poetry or prose leaves a reader feeling stranded and tethered at the same time. That's what I shoot for, but often miss. Artist:-->

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