telluric

Feb 16, 2010 22:30

telluric, a.2 - Of or belonging to the earth, terrestrial; pertaining to the earth as a planet; also, of or arising from the earth or soil. (oed.com)

Today's quote

"Using our aesthetics, our cognitive and perceptual vocabulary, to establish and embellish, to the fullest extent possible, a contact zone with the nonhuman animals who share our world with us, but accepting also that there exist considerable venues on either side of this contact zone that are, on the one hand, only human, and on the other hand, only nonhuman.
-- Randy Malamud, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, pg. 45

"To those of us operating within the paradigms of U.S. culture, or attempting to operate through other paradigms but indoctrinated into that culture in family life, school, and elite and mass cultural productions, too often confuse particularities with universals because that is the way we have been educated, that is the way mass American culture functions. too often we confuse historically and culturally specific forms, attitudes, approaches, and concepts with global ones. The practice of universalization and generalization foregrounds some information and suppresses other information, as I have just done in my claims about 'those of us.'"
-- Patrick Murphy, Further Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature, pg. 60

"While the founders of Enlightenment science had no difficulty in writing about witches and supernatural manifestations in the material world, many people today rely on the Enlightenment's legacy of a secular, mechanical materialisms for a definition of realism and a conception of reality." -- ibid., pg. 63

"While the city may be more accommodating of marginalized populations, then, it also significantly curtails these populations' claims to belonging."
-- Sarah Phillips Casteel, Second Arrivals, pg. 5 (hence, a push for more parks?)

"The Mexican Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz in an essay about modern poetry once argued quite simply: '[T]he immense, stupid, and suicidal waste of natural resources must come to an immediate end if the human species wishes to survive on this earth' (Other 156). Paz's point is instructive because it demonstrates that we have come to identify the end of human time as synonymous with the destruction of our natural environment. That is, natural history and its long march through deep time, its expansion and complexification over the course of millions, even billions, of years is subsumed entirely under the rubric of humanity's tiny moment in time. The result is the false assumption that human history is nature's story and that was happens to us happens to the earth in undifferentiated parallel lines. ... Hence, in our day natural degradation so easily lends itself as evidence of the inevitable death of nature and the end of human history, especially within an imaginary influenced by Christian apocalypticism. The problem is how to avoid the unfruitful dichotomy that apocalyptic thinking produces, that is, the notion that nature must be either outside history and therefore eternal or within history and therefore doomed."
-- George B. Handley, New World Poetics, pg. 8

and, of course, the entirety of Rinda West's Out of the Shadow.

After seminar I went to a reception for a faculty candidate. He was cute, but my ride and I couldn't persuade him to go for a drink as we drove him to his hotel. So after dropping him off we went to a Mexican fast-food joint and I bought my friend a late dinner. While he used the restroom the cashier brought the order over. In a corner, CNN was providing a newscast on a Hamas assassin apprehended in Dubai.
"Are they the bad guys?" the waitress asked of Hamas. I declined to say, instead trying to give a basic sound byte definition of the organization.
"I never thought I'd see this in my life," the waitress said, shaking her head. "And you're so much younger than me, I can only imagine..."
Riding high on the wine that I'd imbibed at the reception, I shared my concern that my generation is going to see radical social change, if not collapse. We both hoped for the best and nodded over the tenuous Anne Frank adage that people are really good deep down.
I learned tonight about the Reno scale (one to five stars, with the understanding that nothing is Renoey enough to warrant a full five stars, aside perhaps Hunter S. Thompson's physical resurrection and subsequent parade down S. Virginia with a bevy of strippers, hot air balloonists, Burners, and casino rats). I'd say the Taco John's exchange runs about a 1.5 stars on this scale.

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