It's been an exhausting semester, by turns a slog and a whirlwind (literally, at times). On a recent visit to my kids' doctor's office to get their second shot, I looked out the seventh-story window toward downtown and saw a patchwork of blue tarps covering roofs: storm damage leftover from Hurricane Ida. Somehow this image encapsulated the spirit of the times, here.
But there have been a few highlights.
Lately I've found myself writing about space exploration, future space travel dreams, and space tourism. I don't always know why I'm driven to write about these topics, although in a way they are not a huge departure from my earlier research and writing on airports and air travel. It's about how our temporary species migrates around the planet—and how we might wish to migrate further.
While teaching my Ecological Thought seminar, I've been thinking about the odd place where nature writing and space travel intersect—a curious coincidence that was made vivid in Douglas Chadwick's book Four Fifths a Grizzly, and which I wrote about at Los Angeles Review of Books.
Three of my Ecological Thought students and I presented on Jenny O'Dell's book How to Do Nothing, at a conference at Rice University called In the Path of Disaster(s).
In that same class we read and discussed Julietta Singh's new book The Breaks, which I also reviewed for Los Angeles Review of Books, thinking about how it relates to recent trends in (and the importance of) public scholarship. This is a central aim of Object Lessons, so I am always eager to see what other pithy books are doing across this scattered field.
In my workshop on writing the short essay, my students and I wrote a piece about how the classroom has felt during the pandemic. It was a cathartic piece to write, and we were gratified to see so many different readers respond positively to it. While writing it we weren't sure if we were just complaining or maybe whining too much, but it turned out that the utterly draining sensation of the moment has been widely shared.
