Hillside in Lawrence, Kansas

Lawrence Ferlinghetti--born March 24, 1919--still alive
From ending of "The Astonished Heart":

"There is a great crowded bluff
 in Lawrence Kansas
 that looks a long way
 into the astonished heart
of America."

Published in "Open Eye, Open Heart" (1973) and "These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems 1955-1993" (1993)

The picture is during a graduation ceremony at the University of Kansas looking south from the football stadium to the side of Mount Oread. When I lived in the J. R. Pearson dorm, I often liked to walk across this area from the Union and nearby classroom buildings. Later on, I sometimes would buy a submarine sandwich from the Yellow Sub and sit on this hillside to look north at the valley where the Kansas River runs. This was especially great when someone was playing the carillon in the campanile. But I don't think I ever took a picture of that view. Most of the time I rarely I saw anyone else there.

There aren't many places in Lawrence that could be called a bluff. I think he meant somewhere on this large hill on which the heart of the campus sits or by the riverbanks. But I don't think the latter are high enough to be bluffs. I now wish I'd contacted him when he was younger to see if a specific site influenced him, maybe to place a small monument to poetry with this line or the entire poem inscribed on it.

White Horse Temple--Luoyang, Henan Province, China

In the 1990s I visited the White Horse Temple with my students at the Zhengzhou Textile Institute during Luoyang's Peony Festival. Founded in 68 AD, the temple is regarded as the first Buddhist temple in China. We also saw the Longmen Grottoes.

On the large incense burner, running vertically it says White Horse Temple (traditional Chinese characters--白馬寺; simplified-- 白马寺)

I decided to go to China to take a break from my graduate school program in political science at the University of Michigan since living in China would help me learn about the country, which was one of my specialties. I picked Henan Province because I'd shared an apartment in Kansas with Chinese from Henan and few foreigners  lived there. I was so caught up being with my students and Chinese colleagues that I didn't see another native speaker of English until about 1/2 year had gone by. When a teacher from Britain who was at another college knocked on my door, I was stunned. I wish I'd taken more pictures without identifiable people so that I could share them without violating someone's privacy.

I loved spending time in the department office helping my Chinese colleagues or in the classroom talking with my students when they were studying. (College students in China tend to have a home classroom where they study, although some like to go to the library or their dorms.)

Climate Change and Child Sexual Abuse

In recent years I've been focusing more on the environment and child sexual abuse. This week while reading Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church, a book by the Boston Globe about its Spotlight investigation on child sexual abuse, I've been reminded more strongly that central to both problems are outrageous failures to act on obvious evidence that simple steps must be taken. Not acting as soon as possible made matters much worse. This past December I felt similar shock and even anger about this while reading a good summary of climate change published by Oxford University Press--Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Joseph Romm. It was the 2014 first edition, so his discussion about how climate change increases the likelihood of wildfires in California exasperated me.

Climate change and my own health have combined to motivate me since I was an undergrad to walk to reach places. I've nearly always lived within less than a twenty-minute walk of at least one grocery store. In this century, in places like Gettysburg, Madison, and Baltimore, it's usually been at least two grocery stores, which is great for taking advantage of sales.

My concern about child sexual abuse has increased while thinking about what to cover in criminology and intro sociology classes I teach, after learning about Adverse Childhood Experiences research, and when people have confided to me about this happening to them. Many of my students have told me that they'd learned nothing or very little about this before. I wish that I'd known years earlier about the extent and harms of child sexual abuse. Another thing I have been doing is contacting legislators and the news media to get more done. A couple of examples are to enact Erin's Law to teach about sex abuse prevention K though 12 and for public radio talk programs to do shows on the topic. I'd thought that sending letters glued into greeting cards would more likely get attention and action, but I'm very disappointed that I got almost no response. Because of the renewed attention to child sexual abuse in recent months, I'm trying again. I suppose people who were abused would feel a lot worse if they got no response.

Mildred Thompson and Abstract Art

A few years ago, I became interested in abstract expressionist art by women after I learned of an exhibit organized by the Denver Art Museum: Women of Abstract Expressionism, held there June 12, 2016 - September  25, 2016. A lot of the paintings appeal to me more than ones done by the more famous men. In March 2017 I was lucky to see a small exhibit of paintings by Mary Abbott at McCormick Gallery, her official gallery in Chicago. I very much like the variety of colors she chooses. Because she's still alive at 97, I'm thinking of writing her to let her know how much I appreciate her paintings.

While Mildred Thompson was alive, she didn't get as much appreciation as she deserved. According to a tour guide yesterday at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, someone once suggested to her to recruit a white woman to stand in her place so as to increase the chances of selling her art.

Her official website: 

http://mildredthompson.org/

Her art contributed the name of an exhibit held at the museum from October 13, 2017 through January 21, 2018--Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960 to Today. I wish I'd seen it.  

She also worked with wood: