Weekly Wins: Not! Mum on Mumford

At least three victories and triumphs of the previous week or so.

Paramount or minuscule, a win’s a win!

• In a seesaw reversal, the second week of the social sciences intro course was slightly rockier than the last, while urban history went more smoothly. There is infinite energy, and manifold energies, emerging in both groups. All in all, and only so far, the semester looks sharp. To be continued.
• Thanks at least in part to my planning and setup for the class discussion of Lewis Mumford’s seminal “What Is A City?”, students articulated the author’s points, referred to the text, connected to their own experiences, asked questions, and in general, made my task easy. No tooth-pulling needed. If their eyes and body language were to be trusted, even the few who remained silent were nevertheless involved.*
• Last weekend, what I’m calling my white girl group met for the first ever! time in person, over what else but brunch. We’re using ShaRhonda Knott Dawson’s Racial Crossfit Curriculum as a guide, perhaps as a point of departure for attempting to tackle the mysteries and ugly sides of whiteness in ourselves and our personal-cum-political lives. We went to a randomly selected black-owned restaurant on Flatbush Avenue. Afterward, we took a sunlit stroll to the nearby Brooklyn Museum to see We Wanted A Revolution, all the while unraveling our thoughts about (self-)segregation, power, and more. Time well spent, especially the exhibit, which I had wished to revisit after seeing it too briefly.
  

  Barbara Chase-Riboud. Confessions for Myself, 1972. Black patinated bronze, wool.

  

  “I am better than these motherfuckers and they know it.”

  

  Ming Smith, Untitled (Grace Jones in Ballet Costume), c. 1975

  

  Jae Jarrell

  

  Jae Jarrell, Urban Wall Suit.

  

  Ming Smith, Untitled (Self-Portrait with Camera), c. 1975
• I shared a call to action on one of the social media monsters, the one I scour multiple times daily for information ~ personal, political, professional ~ the one I allow to spellbind me and steal my time. Perhaps it’s the one that led you to read this post.** I don’t have much of a following; news, updates, and pleas for input go largely ignored. I’ve retreated from my more public and active persona of years past and now post rarely about anything besides this blog. These are statements of fact, not self-pity or deprecation. So, when a person at least two degrees of separation from me ~ someone I met once, years ago, and haven’t corresponded with since ~ replied in precisely the way requested, helping a person even further removed from us both. Algorithms? Luck? Timing? Whatever! It’s a win.

Asterisks & Asides

* At least several in the class had definitely seen this text before ~ I assigned it the previous time they took my class. If they read it then and attended at least the first two class sessions before dropping the course, they might vaguely recall a similar discussion a year later. Far more likely, one of my colleagues assigned and covered the article within the last week, which would explain why some printouts were different from the PDFs I provided. And, perhaps, the seemingly intuitive understanding and insight of Mumford described above.

** If so, I thank you profusely and add the caveat “present reader excluded.”

18/52