It's the framing

Just an AI update. Claude Sonnet 5 - the free version! - is unnerving.

This was an idle query of mine about the work of a late-19th century German folklorist, most of whose books have not, to my knowledge, even been translated into English. Working this out on my own would have taken me a trip to the library at least; it took the AI two minutes. 

 

And then I noticed that I'd just been using the default, Effort: Medium, which is only the second of five levels of thorough-ness - though the default also avails itself of Thinking. And there are, I learned, other models, most requiring an upgrade ($), named Fable, Opus and Haiku. This one is just "most efficient for everyday tasks."

Rain check

This hasn't happened to me before - a flight cancelled, two days before scheduled departure! 

No reason was given, but it might be an abundance of caution in regard to the aggressive flash-floody storms which are schedule to traipse through our hood tomorrow. Our flight wasn't until Wednesday afternoon, but perhaps the incoming plane was at risk? 

Luckily, if a little inconveniently, the airline was able to reschedule for the following morning, bright and very early. (It took two agitated hours of waiting for a call-back, though.) No compensation for the stress and disrupted plans, though. 

Fingers crossed that that one flies!

In the black

Went to my first event as the new Faculty Advisor for Sophomore and Transfer Students, where I received this, New School's newest merch. Seductively soft and squishy, I was told it's made out of recycled bicycle and truck tires. The whole event had the red and black color scheme.

Maybe we could

 

As I add more flesh to the bones of my "religion of trees" book I'm refining my voice. The book isn't and doesn't aspire to be academic, but rather accessible to tree-curious people more broadly. Yet still get my claim on readers' trust, or aspire to, through experiences including academic experience. I'm trying to write like I've learned to teach.

The writers of many of the other tree books of recent years, where they are not professional arborists or tree scientists, claim our attention through exotic travel, tree climbing, interviews with famous and less famous tree protectors and cultivators, or deep dives into relationships with trees, either of long standing or intensively. These tree book people read each other and, to some extent, write for each other too. Yes, I'd love to be one of them! But I haven't done what they have.

What I bring is somewhat different. I've read their books, but I also read lots of other kinds of books - including religious studies books. As importantly, I'm finding, I have developed a way of teaching this material that is playful and interactive. The "Religion of Trees" class, you'll recall, is watered by a shared practice of drawing. I used this in an AAR presentation two years ago, too, to enthusiastic response. In the book I'm including about twenty drawing prompts, at suitable moments in the unfolding of the argument. Readers are invited to draw not in a separate notebook but in the book itself. This is the first one:

As you picture the Buddha beneath a tree, what kind of tree do you see? Try drawing it.  

A friend who's been reading the draft with me has been delighted to do each one, and I enjoy seeing his doodles and sketches in my binder of drafts. I love the thought that my book, if ever it gets published, will become a personally meaningful object to readers in this way. (In this I realize I'm drawing on something from very long ago, the way Rick Warren insisted that readers of The Purpose Driven Life write in the book to open a more personal and dynamic relationship with it.) 

Why we're drawing isn't explained. If pushed I'd say I've learned it's meaningful through doing it in class. I'd explain that it can be a way of helping grasp and absorb ideas, a way of slowing down, a way of switching gears, a way of activating a more visual or lateral thinking, a way of surfacing and connecting to the gifts and questions each of us brings. It's effective if done once and exponentially more when it becomes a practice. It's also fun! My hope is that the reader will enjoy the feeling of having fun together with me, not the archetypal professor experience.

I hope that these invitations resonate with a way of moving through material that is playful, exploratory, occasionally digressive, rewarded by unexpected discoveries more than knock-down-drag-out demonstrations, open-ended. What I seem to be good at is finding connections between things others haven't thought related, and making them in suggestive rather than didactic ways. I love finding value in multiple viewpoints. (At one point I've written: "It’s not my intention to correct and replace but to contextualize and complement.") 

All of this comes pretty easy, I'm finding, if I give myself permission. A little harder, or maybe just later in this process, is something else: speaking from my own experience, or constructively. Not just: people have had all these fascinating thoughts and experiences but I've had xyz experience or I think about things in this different way. It's not that I don't have experiences or opinions, but my Princeton religious studies training makes me leery of the claims to authority of first-personal experience. Also: who am I, what should it matter what I've found? My experiences with trees are pretty tame compared to those of some, including many of my students!

Still, it's coming to seem like a natural part of the voice which invites readers' participation and shared exploration of the experiences and traditions of others is sharing some of my own intimations and hopes. Never "so do this!" but some "maybe we could"? Or even, since I love providing new meanings and implications for received ideas, "maybe we are already..."

Their ashes to ashes, for our sins

气候变暖的彩色

When it isn't one thing, it's another. Today it was both and then some. Real-feel temperatures in New York neared 100˚ (it felt the same in the shade as in the sun!), brought down only a little by a sudden torrent an hour ago. All the while, the air was unhealthy because of smoke from wildfires half a continent away. Still, we're not getting the worst of any of this. We haven't, like many western states (and European countries, Asian cities and Kenya), had our highest recorded temperatures, aren't encountering fires exploding around us like in Canada, the American West or Spain, or, like many of the places we visited in China last month, wading through streets flooded by slow-moving typhoon Bavi. But we do have a Congress with nothing better to do than try to make daylight savings time permanent, "saving daylight." Deckchairs!

From the Great Tree of Light

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've been spending some more time with Skywoman. Robin Wall Kimmerer's exquisite telling of the story in Braiding Sweetgrass has introduced millions around the world to this wonderful cosmogonic story from the Haudenosaunee, including me: I'm pairing her account with the first three chapters of Genesis in my second chapter.

I'm including the way she updated it a few years later, but have been finding more surprises: a different updating a few months before, and quite different tellings in various sources, including Joanne Shenandoah and Doug George's Skywoman: Legends of the Iroquois, the one to which she directs her readers (from whence the image by John Kabionhes Fadden above). This fits what I'm saying - that living stories are told and retold in different ways, the difference a testimony to their vitality. But I hadn't realized how artfully outlierish the Braiding Sweetgrass telling is, abstracting from who Skywoman was or how she came to be falling, while still telling us she was holding some sprigs from the "Tree of Life." In Shenandoah and George's telling, for instance, Skywoman has a full backstory and a name. The tree is called the Great Tree of Light, and she doesn't take seeds from it down to what will become Turtle Island.

How do I honor the particularity of her tellings without implicitly calling them into question?

River scenes

Visited the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers today - our first time. It's full of delightful discoveries, like Wade & Croome's 180-year-old Panorama of the Hudson River from New York to Waterford which shows steamboats going up and down the river and depicts what you might see if you were on them, though it also tries to capture the river's twists and turns. (This bit near West Point put me in mind a little

fancifully of the scroll paintings of the nine turns at Wuyishan.) To see what's on the other side of the river you turn the book upside down! At top above is the stretch from where we are (between Manhattanville and Bloomingdale at far right) to Yonkers, if you were taking the steamer up. Here's the view you might see to your right you went back down - though it really looks like the view from out our window today!

Work in progress

I've been back at school three times this week, for air conditioning and quiet as I wrestle with my squirrely "religion of trees" manuscript. 

But the place feels haunted. Who's still connected to this place? The details of our "total reorgani-zation" remain opaque, the energy of the community dispersed.

Summer doldrums

Sail 4th

A travesty, a waste and a shame. Now that we've made it past the prez's people's pathetic pass at honoring the nation's birthday - How small they are, as our mayor put it, how weak, how unoriginal - one starts to feel both anger at what was stolen from us and sadness at the thought of what might have been. I gather the dud of a national "state fair" displaced what would have been an astonishing gathering of folk musicians from across the country, for instance. 

Long before the dystopian midnight carnival on the National Mall (is this how you turn the Washington Monument into an unholy pillar to Baal?), I was reminded of the grandeur and dignity possible as tall ships from around the world passed up and down the Hudson... You could see them out our window (above) or at river level (below)! 

And all day I was buoyed by the words of our magical mayor the night before: What a privilege each of us has, to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses, to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds, to bring America ever-closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores — the greatness that, for 250 years, has been America.