Blog Geographies

I have enjoyed this blog experience. I do not like, Sam I am, the confining linear structure that archives all my posts the second five more appear, but I appreciate the radial/rhizomic linkage.

Blogs have a ton of potential for expanding classroom discussion. We didn't utilize the blog to its fullest possible imaginable (!) potential, but I think all we did added exponentially to the value of this class for me. I've always enjoyed classes where we can have this freer space to write-think. I don't know if the average student below junior level could make good use of this, but for the rest of us, yes.

I'm thinking about architecture and geographies and spaces ever since RSA plus hearing Kathleen Turner's Arnold Fox-winning paper this semester on "fourthspace" (a concept by NIU's own James Giles). The blockiness, the linearity, of this blog is so limiting and unorganic. I'd prefer a setup like the Huffington Post's homepage or something where blog posts had larger or greater sizes according to how much they were read/used. Something more open, more expandable, less cephalopodan (sorry: I now have all these fun metaphors I now use every chance I get).

Spatial relations. Thinking about space in modern psychological torture (Guantanamo, etc.). Thinking about that Austrian who imprisoned his daughter in his cellar for 24 years. Industrial cement. Bare-bones squares. Square trapdoors. Dark boxes. Pressure devices. Desensitizing acoustics.

What does space look like on this blog? Featureless squares. Windows and doors. Anonymous fonts. What does our space say about us? What content matches all this blankness?

The "blogosphere" - spherical, radial, more organic - is that where the radical comes in? In our connections despite the liminality, the limitations, of our form? Why do I hear this fear, this hesitation, to break out of this safebox, this box, this safe, this square, this imprisoning form, -- and comment on someone else's blog? Come on, take a baby step, I challenge you, everyone in the class (who hasn't already), comment on one other blog and post a link to your comments! Cherry-dipped foam-on-top double-dare ya!

Here is one of mine on Sivacracy.net. (Sivacracy rocks! We should all be posting a million posts there.)

---
“The Wild Iris” by Louise Gluck

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.