Curlycueing Toward a Curriculum

OK, so, I see this class being mostly about getting deep into food and shelter as fundamentally human concerns, so secondarily a critique of the commodification of this stuff, and a big, wide, underused doorway to talking about the Good Life and about capitalism. Uh.

So, anyway, it's of course a philosophy class: I aim to bring some good, rigorous thinking to the good life.

In the broadest outline, it goes about like this:

1. Human nature makes us deeply concerned with food and shelter security and quality.
2. Money is the tool we've invented that allows us to delegate food and shelter responsibilities to others while we specialize.
3. Our food and shelter choices change as our consciousness increases, but specialization for money tends to suppress consciousness and the sense of integrated wholeness and meaning in general.
4. Each of us makes food/shelter choices along a continuum [suburban/fast food <---> intentional shelter/food]

In practice, I see the class being quite hands-on and experimental/conversational. I'd love to have an actual garden to work in. Good buildings to visit. Guest people, like a chef, an architect, a farmer, etc who can show a kind of tacit knowledge that exists right below what we commonly notice. OI want the kids to step into a new way of looking at stuff so that they can see interlocking patterns, overlapping systems, integrity and wholeness where we usually see dualistically, etc.

Very very roughly, classes might progress like this, sessions 1-40:

1. What is a person? What makes us human? As humans, what do we care about? What makes us happy? What scares us? Why? What is it about the human condition that makes our food and shelter concerns different from those of a cow, for example?

2. Where do we live? In what? Why? How? What mechanism and systems have we set up in our culture for getting shelter? Who thrives in this system? Who flails? Why? Who profits? What does the typical American do over the course of his life to maintain access to shelter?

3. How do you spend your time? What do you do for work? Why? What do you get? What does your employer get? Talk about specialization, cash, credit. How is your time valued? What skills does the culture reward, and which does it disdain? What does your pay mean? Who decides what your time is worth?

4. What do you eat? How do you get it? Where does it come from? How did it get to your plate? Who grows it? How much does it cost? Who gets that money?

5. What grows here? What is grown here? Why is this grown here, but not that? Why is some land used for growing food, and other land is not? Where does food growing go when a city gets bigger?

6. Exotic food- what? Where? Why? Who's involved? What are the costs?What are the benefits?

7. Gardens/subsistence farms/commercial farms/monocultures... what are the market forces on food production, and how do they conflict with the OTHER forces on food production, such as flavor, freshness, health, worker safety, etc. How does profit and convenience bow to ethical and aesthetic concerns that are hard to measure? What might our food economy look like if we had different priorities? Talk about phenomenon of the farmer's market, home gardening, etc. Why?

8. Efficiency and embodied energy and subsidies. How is the market manipulated? Why? Who benefits? What are the consequences? How are scarcity and abundance manipulated? Commodities markets, centralized planning, false economies. Let's bring some suspicion, anxiety, curiosity to our food choices. How to research, etc.

9. Region vs. profits, one-size-fits-all practices, centralized planning, biotech solutions to the problems of region, the traditional banes of farmers and how to eradicate them, cartesian thinking, management and engineering . GMO vs seed-saving.

10. Food and buidlings. Is it just association, or is there a deep harmony between McDonald's and the American model of suburban development?

11. Land use: what do we do where? What land is sacred, and what is profane? Who lives on which? What is blight? Who suffers it? Mobility and its consequences for the rich and poor. Some effects of spatial segregation. The control of land. Land as reward and punishment. Freedom from the land. Freedom to the land. The shadow economies and the people who choose them. "Marginal".

etc. Meanwhile, we are hopefully growing some food, tasting it next to supermarket food, going on field trips to look at food available in different parts of the city, talking a big donor into flying Van Jones out from Oakland ,
cooking some great meals, talking at great length about quality of life, complicating the idea of buying and earning, etc. Occupy!!!

Whatcha think?

The Walking Dead

From where I sat I could hear only the sibilants and fricatives, the blown leaves of their conversation. A bit of voice like a glimpse of leg. Mostly those rustling esses, rattling tees. The limb got pretty hard. I worried they'd see my feet dangling there over the patio, but it was dark. They stayed on the porch, drinking beer and leaning into each other with the unmistakeable movements of new love. Each movement profoundly gendered: her graceful arms, elbows in tight, wrists exposed, hands birdlike; his arms possessive, his chest forward and massive.
That's all. They went inside after a while, and watched TV. And I slipped down out of the tree and walked back to my little basement apartment knowing that the purpose of my time had expired.

The Unmet Needs and the People of Them

In our house we burn the toast, then scrape the charcoal onto the counter, then real butter, but the toast by then too cool to melt it, so every breakfast is bitter and fatty. And the counter stays that way till someone, exasperated and put-upon, wipes it mostly clean. The ice-cream is our hidden riches, a three-gallon restaurant barrel of it, but it is, somehow, in the 70s, carob, not chocolate, so its enticements lead to disappointment. Like retail, I much later learn.

Our dandelions and ant-swarmed cherry stones and purslane and crabgrass bracketed by two perfect neighboring chemlawns. I see contempt. I feel it.

The ancient Peugeot sitting crooked on a faint driveway-aura of red rust. Through its never-washed windshield I can see our neighbor's orange racing car. This can be too much after a swimming lesson or a fight.

My mother, vague then sharp. Her abstraction like a gypsy skirt. Her hair a shambles. Her glasses fingerprinted. Her hands always so strangely limp, like a Tyrannosaurus Rex's.

My father always turning a corner and barely glimpsed. Thin and dreamy. Looking up. Listing the Latin names of trees. Explaining. Ending my sentences that were not going to end that way.

My sister, shy and pale, smelling of sucked thumb.

My brother, silent till six, all in plaid, every stitch, always. His lack of other preferences. His contentment. He eats everything: burned toast, carob ice cream, home-made yogurt, snails, ants, parts of the lawnmower that sits by the front walk a summer and a winter and another summer till it's one day gone.