I was, honestly, totally committed to this blog for most of the year. Somehow it has slipped away from me and so this is my attempt to contribute some thoughts to some of the last questions that are going to be posed for the theory portion of the class. Last weeks class the question proposed was to think about a piece of literature-
"Do you have a favourite author who writes about city life? A particular wonderful description of time and place? A poem that really seems to capture an urban moment or movement? Please put an excerpt on the blog and tell us why it appeals to you."
The first piece of literature I thought of was a book called 'High Tide in Tucson' a book of essays written by Barbara Kingsolver. She is one of my favorite authors because she is a trained ecologist and biologist and writes beautiful, beautiful books of fiction and non-fiction. Her most famous book is the Poisonwood Bible about a Christian missionary family in the Congolese jungle. The essays book has a short writing on her garden that she was trying to grow at her hosue in Arizona. It is a funny tale about the feral pigs that would sneak in at night and destroy most of her vegetable patch and flowers. There is a really great line in it, and if I could find the book I would post the exact phrase, but to paraphrase she talks about how we have to finally at some point just give in and think about how we can co-exist with what some gardeners would call pests. The pigs and her end up striking a deal and she is able to grow to accept their presence in the garden and to realize we have to stop fighting so hard against nature.
This really makes me think of the urban setting though. So much of the urban environment is synthetic, man made and can be completely unnatural in part effort to keep out the pests and the natural enviroment. Air conditioning, windows that don't open, pavement, etc. I just think of how nice of an approach to urban development would be to just accept that maybe we can co-exist. I know this sound very granola but its still a nice way to think.
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