Hello all,

Happy Reading Break!

Last week our ASTU class finished reading Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, and, unsurprisingly, it was the central focus of many students’ blog entries. Themes included separation and connection, us vs. them, security and vulnerability, and other dichotomies.

Mariana focuses on people’s sense of security, as well as vulnerability in Sphar’s This Connection of Everyone With Lungs. Mariana contends: “People are vulnerable no matter where they are. The illusion of security that exists in our beds is so faint and fragile that it can barely protect us”. Mariana throughout her blog post focuses on the sense of privacy and security on the individual level, compared to the sense of vulnerability on the global scale. I agree with Mariana’s claim that with growing globalization and media, it is getting more and more difficult to be secure in our beds, and remain private and unaffected by outside influences in our lives.

Jacqueline takes a different approach, linking Judith Butler’s position about the body to the work of Juliana Spahr. In her blog post, Jacqueline highlights this sense of separation and lack of connection between people due to the physical separation between their bodies. “When I applied Butler to [Spahr’s] work I realized that she actually accomplishes a way to explore grief in a constructive manner that doesn’t dichotomize the “us and the them”.” I thought this was a unique perspective, and a connection that I did not make immediately on my own. I did not think to associate Butler’s theories to Spahr in this way. I find that Jacqueline swayed me to support this view.

Tzur, in his blog, highlights Spahr’s geographic distance from the mainland U.S.; yet despite this, claims that Spahr “is still connected to everyone”. Tzur argues, “in spite of nationalities, borders, and everything else we are all humans–interconnected, interdependent, interlocked–on this planet”. Sam offers a different take. He contends that a certain “Geographical Imagination” is required when going through life. That is, “idea of understanding what you are connected with through your given geographical and political situation”. Sam is not saying that people are not connected; he is simply saying that it is important to understand how our geographic positioning and socialized upbringing play an important role in how we interact with and connect to other people.

Personally, I am not quite sure where I stand in regards to this matter. I tend to waffle back and forth between thinking that we are all connected as human beings, and then thinking that our upbringings, cultures, national ties, religions, and other factors result in our distinction from others. For now, I will tentatively choose to adopt Sam’s idea of “Geographical Imagination” and see where it goes.

Nico did a wonderful job of thoroughly analyzing Spahr’s work. He drew many connections ranging from our previous reading from last semester, Safe Area Goražde, to historic and real world examples (Jim Crow laws and the Black Lives Matter movement) to our other CAP classes, Geography 122 and Sociology 100. It was interesting to see how his mind works, drawing all sorts of connections and applying them to our readings.

Spahr was not exclusively the topic of everyone’s blog posts this week, however. Kaveel chose to analyze post-9/11 poetry in general, and discussed his fascination with how different audiences could apply different meaning or significance to the same poem. (He highlights W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” in the context of the September 11, 2001.) Diego, similarly, analyzed the poems “The Names” by Billy Collins and “Photograph from September 11” by Wislawa Szymborkska in his blog entry. Kihan wrote a very interesting blog post about “counter-monuments”, linking it to 9/11 memorialization. Rachel linked our readings about violence and trauma to a film called The Flowers of War, analyzing the film’s similarities and differences to what we’ve been discussing in class.

There are many other interesting blog posts, and I wish I could give them all the proper recognition they deserve, but just know that I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of the posts this week. Keep them coming, bloggers!

-Kendall Manifould