Finally Flagstaff

More than a week since my return and I haven't posted a dozen words on Flagstaff. Of course, I haven't posted all that much about anything. I have been stewing over my experience, not to mention the paperwork I have and am waiting for so that I can complete my registration. That is, I have a few things on my plate that I can't seem to get off of it just yet. Instead, I write suspenseful chapters in a horror-detective story and scoop ice cream.

Flagstaff, for those unaware, is a rather delightful town. It is on historic Route 66, with an older, more established north side of town as well as a south side that mostly consists of the University, the Sunny Side neighborhood, and the businesses and other homes that have grown up surrounding as a result. I stayed in the Du Beau Hostel, about a quarter mile from campus and one block from the train track and Route 66--they run parallel--in the other direction. I was happy to find abundant small businesses, my favorites of which were Macy's vegetarian cafe and Diablo Burger with its local, grass-fed meat (though I got their amazing grilled cheese) and familiar no credit card policy. I also enjoyed the jaunt up to Lowell Observatory where its namesake "discovered" Martian ravines as a sign of an advanced civilization and later astronomers first identified the "expanding universe;" it is closed on Thursdays, but I appreciated it all the same.

I met a handful of students (Tamara, Liz, and Nelson) who had plenty of good things to say about the Sustainable Communities Program--which for some reason is abbreviated SUS. It has a very liberal arts feel to it, with its primary classes every semester and plenty of electives to lean on your thesis. Though it is a two-year program, it does not seem to have enormous impetus to complete the program in two years. Rather, the encouragement is in finding internships and community-based involvement for students to implement their work in their community and, I hope, to quickly find work preceding or following graduation. One example is the ARTS lab, which is a sort of service-learning project that students perform throughout to improve one aspect of their community.

The Slugg (or, maybe, SLUGG) Garden is one such project, which was adapted from another student's senior project. I spent my Friday morning--after breakfast, reading, and renting a bike--planting vegetables in the Slugg Garden and chatting it up with Tamara and Liz. (Nelson and I had met the day before and he showed me much of the paperwork and networking on which NAU relies and with which I ought to quickly familiarize myself.) The air stays cool at six thousand feet and it was remarked that a week or two previous, they had had a frost; so gardening is a peculiar feat with only a one hundred day growing season. All the same, the excitement and interest for food systems, urban gardening, locavorism, and seasonality was obvious, and I took great pleasure in being around it.

Flagstaff, it rapidly became clear, is not the norm for Arizona. A friend of mine once stated that Austin, Texas was something like a middle finger to the rest of Texas for its well-advertised "weirdness," which takes the form of music, the arts, curb-side recycling, and general appreciation of hippie-dippy-ness. I quickly came to think of Flagstaff similarly. The region has actual seasons, so discourages the sort of retirement aged immigrants from elsewhere in the country that Phoenix and Tuscon attract; meanwhile, the University and plentiful small businesses support an artsy, quirky, and progressive sociopolitical mindset. That said, I generally stuck with the newer areas, whereas the north side's older families and fancier homes may have a slightly different political leaning. It also has a high Native American presence as it is just about next door neighbors with the Navajo reservation, so knowledge and dialogue with social problems and injustice felt--for lack of a better word--in the air in a way that a sprawling suburban empire like Phoenix simply doesn't support. Finally, the hiking and biking trails, along with its comfortable size and lively downtown encourage a thriving cyclist community, which is indubitably mindful of transportation politics and wilderness stewardship which motorists can often outright ignore.

Maybe the middle finger is the wrong image. It doesn't have an aggressive agenda or set politics. A recent conflict was that the skiing resorts on the nearby mountains (their are about six, but only three that are ski-worthy) wanted to manufacture snow for skiers, only that water is scarce, so that they were told to use reclaimed water; the reclaimed water, though, often has been exposed to dead creatures swept in by stormwater. Now, the problem is that these mountains are sacred for the Navajo--and I believe other Indians, too--who do not touch the dead for spiritual reasons; if you're going to spread "contaminated" water on sacred mountains, that represents a powerful blasphemy to the Navajo and their spirituality. The resorts have been given the okay by the city, much to the chagrin of the Navajo.

What I mean to get at is that I want to say Flagstaff is one thing or another, but it isn't. I look forward to its hiking and biking trails, its coffeeshops and breweries, its live music and art shows. I am also interested in its political discussions and how it engages with other parts of the state with their more stubborn perspectives on immigration and race. In addition, Flagstaff has a delightful novelty, perhaps even a mystique because it is not the Midwest. I have just about always lived in the Midwest, save for less than two infantile years in West Virginia, and though I love it, I need to move out in case I ever come back. I could call it domestic exoticism, my undoubtable interest in this new place, its strong light and altitude, its pine trees and politics. I look forward to it, more than I would have expected, to be honest.

Mechanics, Usage, and Grammar

Does anyone else remember MUGs testing in middle school? We were given small, often inane sentences or paragraphs and told to identify something like five "mechanics, usage, and grammar" mistakes. I hated those. It always suggested one ideal form of writing that to which you ought to aspire to. Yeah, that sort of thing. Personally, I do enjoy the pomp of avoiding sentences ending with prepositions (of, to, with, etc.), but that is not how people speak and trying to incorporate it naturally is hardly ever going to sound appropriate. Unless, of course, your characters and narration are intentionally formal or outmoded or exceptional English language learners.

Anyway, this is an open invitation for commentators on the first few chapters--and likely successive chapters--of my detective story involving "strange cases." The protagonist is Lorenzo Vincenzi, PI, and one of his early, peculiar cases. It is built into traditional Lovecraftian fiction, but is in part inspired by other detective stories I have been enjoying lately. You can send me an email at Caleb[dot]A[dot]Phillips[at]Gmail[dot]com or just comment here.

Also, a note on mechanics. One does not require a Google account (which owns Blogger/Blogspot) to make comments on these weblogs. You have the option of logging on to your Google account, or commenting via a different network (I believe), or neither. Often, commenting does require rewriting one of those blurry text images to avoid bots, but having an account is not necessary.

~~~

Future Posts:
Collected comments and thoughts on Flagstaff, AZ and Northern Arizona University trip;
Further views from my bikeseat;
and Man vs. Food: the Caleb Edition, in which I describe some behavioral peculiarities I have with food and how they make themselves known with my mom around.

NAU/Flagstaff first impressions

(If you can't tell, I've felt rather inspired to post despite being limited to typing via my phone.)

Walking about campus, it feels... recognizable. I am reminded of the worn out words of tour guides during the undergrad search, "It just felt right when I came here." That is not the case for me here, but it sure as he'll does not feel wrong. I am reminded of other locales, fond memories of places that have taken up specific nostalgic identities. The Ponderosa scattered about remind me of Duke, especially a certain precariously tottering one by the art museum there. The hills harken ever so slightly of West Virginia, the open spaces of Minnesota--especially of the expeditions further North than the Twin Cities. How strange to feel these small anchors in a place I have never been. It gives me satisfying handholds; that is to say, the strength is my own, but I am potentially allowed a certain firmness.

Later I will post photos to my tumblr.

Flight of the Phoenix

Flying into Phoenix is a peculiar experience. I will not herein write extensively, but I felt motivated all the same. Not since I was a small child have I been to the Southwest, and those trips were most certainly by the luxurious Astrovan of yesteryear. The view from the plane includes rich vistas of desert, scrub, and craggy hills and mountains. They appear alarming, striking, historic; they are imbued with that rich austerity of distinctly old things. Many long stretches are even and planar, then, the upshoot of a hill or mesa highlights this by the parallel demarcations of geologic ages, mostly revealed by wind but in certain hydrologically blessed locales, by flowing water. Seeing it the first time, even from so high or especially from so high, I cannot help but feel it, sense that unmistakable intensity, that mystique.

Following a long stretch of planar, scrub landscape, sits Phoenix. It's lack of character is plain from any angle, I imagine. The houses are uniform, even the neighborhoods have their spatial characteristics, as if no one wanted to try something different. And I suppose no one did. Swimming pools dot many of the backyards with pristine cerulean eyes staring out of the wetted lawns of foreign Kentucky Blue. The pools remnd me of a passage about flying into LAX, seeing the innumerable private pools, and finding none disturbed by swimmers. Waterways pierce or wind with the roads, many of which have been straitened or are entirely artificial. The long courses of unnervingly aligned streams recall the agricultural fields of Minnesota with their creeks forced into peculiar, geometric arrangements.

It gives me the shivers, despite the outside temperature rising above ninety. Of course, inside this gray wind tunnel airport, it is cozily in the sixties or low seventies. I look forward to Flagstaff. The images of mountains and Ponderosa dancing just as suredly as sugar plums.

"Blue Mountains constantly walking..." What about blue mountains dancing?

On the move

I am out and about again, this time on my way to Flagstaff. It turns out that Northern Arizona University's Sustainable Communities Progra
is interested in me and has offered an assistantship. I am off to visit, although I have already informally agreed to the position, and so away from my computer and unable to post properly. I have a few subjects on which I hope to write soon, I will likely post the first chapter of my horror detective story I have been workin on--though the first burst of creative excitement has wained--and have to assemble a few photo albums of recent adventures and exploits; all of which I plan on linking to from here. If you're interested, I'll be posting photos and tidbits to bakingphilosophy.tumble.com, which will automatically go to the Facebook for posting on my wall as well.

And, an aside: After the trip to the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle with Anna, I have been inspired to read some more SF. First on the list willbe Ursula K le Guin's "The Lathe of Heaven" (though I am more excited for "The Word for World is Forest") and James Tiptree Jr., the title of which I cannot presently recall. I have some other noteworthies laying around, but we will see where it goes from there. I picked up the Bean Trees by Kingsolver as well--a writer I have avoided for her popularity--to read in Arizona, but have a humorous, nerdy little tagalong I can't yet put down.

Finally, I want to say that I love finding birds in airports. They break health code for the restaurants, probably cause minor messes, and potentially annoy staff. They sound little revolutionary songs, chittering about atoms when airports and other large spaces are built inclusively, have intentional nesting rows and miniature, artifiial ecosystems for them to coopt. They make the long gray capsules, the streamlined mania feel that much more human.

Comments on Budgets, Education, and Private/Public Resources

Some Reading Material/Sources:
B-Cycle Bike Share Program in Denver Begins at Fast Company
TOMS Shoes and Buy-One-Give-One Business Model from Fast Copmany
BioTorrent: Torrent File Sharing Goes Academic from the Great Beyond
Stewart Brand on Deviant Globalization from Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond at Wired.com
Cities as Software in the Netherlands via Beyond the Beyond (original can be found here)
Jon Stewart Surrenders to Big Banks

And a series of news links from Democracy Now [dot] org:
National Day of Action for Public Education (5 March)
Mass School Closings in Detroit (2 April)
Protests on Wall Street (30 April)
Austerity and Protest in Greece (4 May)
Arizona Legislation Banning Ethnic Studies (14 May)
Students Strike in Puerto Rico (17 May)

Also,
Makers by Cory Doctorow
The Uprising by David Sirota
GoodGuide

What I have to say does not have much in refined structure at the moment. In many ways, it feels heavy with naysaying and rants. In another way, I am pretty sure it is more than that.

Economies far and wide in the economic North are stretched pretty thin. Whether it is the strain of budget cuts and reduced income for educational systems in the United States, the continued pilfering of Americans' pockets by banks (usually with the government as a foolish intermediary), or the strain of the European Union due to overextended loans and slowly growing economies, the results are startling and dramatic. Generally, the results are tightened strings and bound coffers, which are felt most intensely on those most in need of social services and least able to defend themselves. That is, by cutting back on financial aid packages for students or raising tuition, the institution engages in a self-defeating endeavor. Efforts to raise funds from the already hard hit only disenfranchises and alienates and likely fails to greatly improve revenues. Similarly, austerity measures in Greece leave those least responsible and least able to repay national debts handling the greatest burden.

"Socialism" and "socialist" are branded around American politics to the point of meaninglessness. Therefore, I have little concern with positing this alternative: By identifying taxing those parties who are doing the best under hard times (i.e. the too-big-to-fail banks) and lightening the budgets of those pursuits that require the greatest funds (that is, military engagements), we can free up the resources for real problem solving. When you are running low on luck and resources, the worse thing that can happen is to have those around you call in favors and debts, essentially debilitating you far beyond your means. Instead, when you are out of luck and capital, you ought to be able to fall back on social capital, resources, and utility to return to a position from which debts and favors can be returned. Right now, with over ten percent unemployment in the United States, it is obvious that luck is a shy in these parts.

If we take social resources, services, and capital seriously, as foundational for a healthy, recuperative economy and community, then a new model arises. Rather than cutting back on those services that assist the most people, we see what few resources that are available allocated most broadly. That isn't to say that high taxes (or the equivalent) takes everything away only to give it back, only that enough of a net is provided to actually support social, emotional, and economic recovery.

I think this notion makes the most obvious sense with education. Education is a noncompetitive resource; that is, just because I have a Bachelor's degree does not mean that there are any fewer degrees for you to get. In fact, the more people involved in education, the superior the product. With the wave of fiscal constraints--felt strongly in California and more recently in Puerto Rico, but everyone involved in education presently senses--and the subsequent protests, the importance of education and its shear power in sculpting society runs deep in our subconscious. When those constraints are deepened--as with the ban on ethnic studies in Arizona--the pressure becomes breaking-point severe.

This growing wave of dissatisfaction with shortchanged social services and a poverty of government initiative on resolving tension, a sort of upsurge of grassroots problem solving is solidifying. (Here, I focus on urban population centers because they concentrate the intellectual and motivational resources for this sort of to-the-point problem-solving more clearly.) Urban informatics, also known as city-as-software, models take the knowledge and opinions of city dwellers and turns the usual bureaucracy and turns it on its head. With urban informatics, there are three and only three steps: 1) Make concerns of citizens easily accessible to problem solvers, 2) Provide means for problem solvers to function, and 3) Put problem solvers to work. The article above focuses on potholes: You see a pothole, text the appropriate government network with the info and maybe a photo, and those who can fix it know exactly what the issue is. There are no pink forms, no TPS reports, just citizen concern and action. The real magic, though, is that this can be a two-step, citizen-run process: Report problem, appropriate problem solvers act. (By giving the responsibility to a student intern, the Eindhoven city government seem to identify the brevity of such an intermediary when it could be easily handled by a computer program or through direct connections with problem solvers.)

Now, let's expand more on urban informatics. My friend and I go into a new restaurant and try the food; if the food is questionable we can send a text to the county health inspector suggesting a surprise inspection, whereas if the cleanliness and quality are superb, a similar commendation (hosted by the health inspector, social network, or other organization) might be in order. (GoodGuide is a mobile phone application that acts somewhat like this for food, cleaning, and cosmetic products.) Or, if we return to the classroom, if my [hypothetical] daughter is having trouble with understanding trigonometry in class, if she and other students report a problem then a teacher assistant or temporary tutor could take a few days to improve or guide the situation. If, on the other hand, my daughter's teacher is fantastic at explaining geometry proofs, then the teacher may be asked to host a class or two for those students who are having difficulty elsewhere in the school or the district.

This demands a more adaptive and mobile expectation for our social systems. It also requires much more citizen participation in order to succeed. But isn't that exactly what we want right now? I am under the impression that most people--whether they are peacenik environmentalists or tea partiers--feel that no one in the government is really listening to the issues of the day. Albeit, many of those issues are larger than a text message about a pothole or restaurant, but those examples succeed at direct communication and quick response time. It does not help my daughter if I have to wait for a new superintendent that will hopefully be stronger on facilitating mathematics in the classroom. In a way, these new models function as perpetual town hall meetings. In such meetings, communities are small enough to get everyone together and openly discuss concerns which may be as minor as potholes or as severe as water shortages. The new model takes any of the scheduling, time, and personal effort out of it. You can do it and forget about it.

What would that look like? Well, those social institutions that are presently so strained would need reinvigoration, firm support both from citizenry and from the government writing checks. In Sirota's The Uprising, he points out that the Senate is an inherently cumbersome, undemocratic institution for our government. What we need more than ever is citizen action, voice, and motivation. For each of these, we need more democratic, more transparent paradigms to solve our problems whether they are local, domestic, or abroad. We can take the new technologies, the new methods and infuse them into and through the old while constructing a the network outside it to make it all faster, clearer, more involved.

It is a community I am more interested in seeing everyday.

Massive Tumblr Article Posting

I haven't managed an easy way to link articles from my .rss reader to my tumblr account on the road. I can read articles from my phone, and have the tumblr application, but links are still something of a pain to copy and paste between programs. So, instead, I star them and am going back to post them now. That means a lot of suggested reading will be posted in just minutes. I apologize if it is a big headache to anyone.

The View From My Bikeseat

Getting out for walks, runs, bikerides, and whatnot are a really pleasant sign of the season. What was only months before a near barren stretch of cement, dashed with worn out yellow marks, has become a shared space for the alternative commuter, the family moment, the pleasantly solitary stroll. When I would bike to school not so many years ago, I would generally wear headphones on the ride. Most of the time, I left before 6:30 in the morning, so listening to a few familiar tunes wasn't an altogether foolish life choice. Now, though, I hardly use headphones at all and especially not on a bike.

I have heard mention of laws against wearing headphones in the car, which makes sense. Headphones--especially earbuds--insulate you from outside. In cars, this acts as a sort of double insulation, but on a bike, it can be all the more serious. If you screw up on a bike, you don't have too much time to react; it is kind of like this: biking to accident to cement. I have hit the grass plenty of times and just the other day I managed to sort of walk over my handlebars as my wheel caught in the sidewalk to avoid falling on my face. These events, though, are more like "missing the ground" than quick thinking on my part. They pale in comparison to when I bashed into a low red brick fence or went bodily over my handlebars when I hit a ball on the ground or hit the front step and tore the skin from the back of my right pinky finger. The former are accidents within accidents by comparison.

Over the years of bicycling to school or work or just around, I have learned that most Lincolnite motorists--saying little of motorists in general--have no idea you are there when you are biking. This is in part the result of parents stressing safety to kids, I think, and thus putting most of us on the sidewalk once we can steer well enough. Cyclists aren't seen as fixtures of the road. Sometimes I see stretchy-pants clad cyclists going all out on the main thoroughfares on my side of town, and I quietly applaud. But the cars go over forty miles and hour and I don't feel like tempting fate that much. Downtown and in the neighborhoods, I am on the street with lights and reflectors at the ready.

All the same, cyclists have to stay on their toes so to speak, because more than once I have stopped just as some bonehead pulls into the crosswalk where I might have been had I not seen the lights reflected in a window or blinking between tree trunks. It is odd, really, to worry most about two extraordinarily disparate groups of motorists: young men and old women. Really, though, the first is going to fast most of the time and the latter has a harder time taking in all the information on the road. Either way though, if I get hit by a car, I will assume it is one of these two. (My closest calls have been old women in large, heavy, likely ill-maintained behemoths of steel; they turn without looking at the crosswalk and have missed me by inches when I barely pass or stop just short.)

With more and more hours logged on the bike trails, though, I have come to fear a greater insularity with the world by most people. Maybe it is always like this and I just notice it more, or maybe my bike and I are quieter than I suppose, but I earnestly try to avoid spooking people when I pass or cross. Groups of young people are the worst in this regard; I can shout ahead that I am coming and more often than not, they are entirely unmoved. My bike is a street bike and I often fear hitting a patch of gravel or sand or mud if I have to hop off the trail to get around them. If I do, nothing frightens people more and I expect someone to jump or gesture right into me. This hasn't happened yet, but I fear it sooner or later will.

These groups as well as runners often wear headphones and--the most irksome--earbuds. The slow, rhythmic strides suggest some calm, some unexpecting disposition that my intrusion will shatter. Runners are the least worrisome, to be honest, and often I think none at all about passing them by. I call out to them, warning them if they have any ear to the trail at all, and whiz passed. In pairs or groups though, between the meditation of a good run and the ambiance of your own soundtrack, the anxiety grows. Their minds can be thousands of miles away and without all but the most intense heckling, I am without a clue.

The other concern are pairs or troops of adults, often with strollers or dogs or children on bikes and trikes. These worry me less, but etiquette is one of those things I think one ought to start with early but is often forgotten altogether. Again, hopping off the trail is that safest, surest route to avoid an incident, because whenever I stick to the trail, I expect someone to veer out in front of me and I can see me pull a one-hundred-eighty degree vertical flip in the air before crashing to the ground, behind me, some crumpled child whimpering numbly.

I dramatize somewhat, but the view from my bikeseat is not exactly pretty. I plan and assume and strategize for oddball circumstances, for curve balls, and stray children. In some ways my favorite ride is the late night bounding up steep hills, able to see anything that might lay ahead. Of course, it is in those nights that I make up my own worries. Creatures from horror stories slink in the shadows or chase me from tree branches. (I often recall cut scenes from video game Dark Corners of the Earth, in which an unseen, heavily breathing creature, surveys the town from rooftops while you inspect the streets below.) In the end, such anxieties make the ride itself more successful, they make the ride a triumph rather than a commute. So, I take those well, excited to get home for rest, water, and a shower.