<![CDATA[Grist - Comment Feed for Cutting-edge nature writer discusses ... nature]]> Grist Comment Feed en Comment #1 by Ron Steenblik http://www.grist.org/article/the-nature-of-a-plastic-pink-flamingo-a-qa-with-jenny-price/ Fri, 22 Dec 2006 23:59:36 -0800 http://www.grist.org/article/the-nature-of-a-plastic-pink-flamingo-a-qa-with-jenny-price/1 RE: Q&A with Jenny Price

Several years ago I read Jenny Price's book, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, on a whim. It was not what I expected. Besides providing a fascinating history of the passenger pigeon, and the role of endangered birds in the women's suffrage movement, Price challenges us to ponder deeply about how we think about and respond to nature. Like the specter in "A Christmas Carol", she leads us through the transition from a time when Americans -- both native and colonial settlers -- looked forward to the annual migration of the passenger pigeon (the likes of which has no modern parallel) to a society that seeks out nature in the form of CD recordings of waterfalls, and that icon of the great outdoors, the SUV. Extrapolating from that trend, it becomes easier to envisage our descendents becoming so separated from nature that they will not miss it, because they will never have known they were in it.

Keep up the good work, Jenny. And thank you, Kit, for a great interview.

]]> RE: Q&A with Jenny Price

Several years ago I read Jenny Price's book, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America, on a whim. It was not what I expected. Besides providing a fascinating history of the passenger pigeon, and the role of endangered birds in the women's suffrage movement, Price challenges us to ponder deeply about how we think about and respond to nature. Like the specter in "A Christmas Carol", she leads us through the transition from a time when Americans -- both native and colonial settlers -- looked forward to the annual migration of the passenger pigeon (the likes of which has no modern parallel) to a society that seeks out nature in the form of CD recordings of waterfalls, and that icon of the great outdoors, the SUV. Extrapolating from that trend, it becomes easier to envisage our descendents becoming so separated from nature that they will not miss it, because they will never have known they were in it.

Keep up the good work, Jenny. And thank you, Kit, for a great interview.

]]> Comment #2 by caniscandida http://www.grist.org/article/the-nature-of-a-plastic-pink-flamingo-a-qa-with-jenny-price/ Sat, 23 Dec 2006 05:08:37 -0800 http://www.grist.org/article/the-nature-of-a-plastic-pink-flamingo-a-qa-with-jenny-price/2 nature, and irony

Having gone to school in New England, and possessing the sort of visionary creativity that can offer that amazing brief reading of globalized nature in the port of Long Beach, CA, Jenny Price surely appreciates that the birthplace of the pink flamingo, fifty years ago, was Leominster, MA.  And of course John Waters' classic drama (or whatever) takes place in Baltimore.

(And, to use Clintonian terminology, Divine did not actually "have sex" with her son.  In one shot which, every time I have seen the movie, has always elicited from the otherwise cackling audience a riveted silence, she begins to fellate the young man -- and dear John brings the camera in very close.  But then, she is distracted, and breaks off contact, leaving the lad majorly unrelieved.  Is that supposed to be funny?  Every sensitive recipient of fellatio knows that that is a serious breach of etiquette; heaven forfend, that any of us should ever need to cry out, "No!  Don't stop!  Keep doing what you're doing!"

As for his having sex with a dead chicken, no.  The young man has sex with a blonde chick (ha ha) in a chicken coop, and oddly reaches out and grabs a very alive chicken, and thrusts that poor little dinosaur somewhere between the two sets of mammalian genitals.  The chick looks at least as shocked as the chicken.)

I agree with Kit's suggestion that Jenny Price's disagreement with Bill McKibben over the term "nature" is not a substantial one.  The way she uses it is untraditional, and requires some explanation, a bit more at least than what she provides here.  Not that I doubt her: no, she clearly is on to something.  It would be a fascinating challenge, in fact, and highly desirable, to organize "nature tours" of urban areas, in the manner of how she analyses LA.

On "irony": That word means so many different things, that I rather distrust people who just throw it out as though it had an obvious conventional usage.  In this context, I assume it means something like the refusal of any two persons to agree that anything implicitly deserves our reverence, or even our respect.  And that makes sense, in an age in which one of our greatest, most creative and brilliant works of art is "The Simpsons."  But I could be wrong.

Anyway, I do not clearly perceive this in my own students.  They seem tentative and adaptive, hence given to skepticism; but at least in our conversations, they are serious, and not given to irreverence or ridicule.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

]]> nature, and irony

Having gone to school in New England, and possessing the sort of visionary creativity that can offer that amazing brief reading of globalized nature in the port of Long Beach, CA, Jenny Price surely appreciates that the birthplace of the pink flamingo, fifty years ago, was Leominster, MA.  And of course John Waters' classic drama (or whatever) takes place in Baltimore.

(And, to use Clintonian terminology, Divine did not actually "have sex" with her son.  In one shot which, every time I have seen the movie, has always elicited from the otherwise cackling audience a riveted silence, she begins to fellate the young man -- and dear John brings the camera in very close.  But then, she is distracted, and breaks off contact, leaving the lad majorly unrelieved.  Is that supposed to be funny?  Every sensitive recipient of fellatio knows that that is a serious breach of etiquette; heaven forfend, that any of us should ever need to cry out, "No!  Don't stop!  Keep doing what you're doing!"

As for his having sex with a dead chicken, no.  The young man has sex with a blonde chick (ha ha) in a chicken coop, and oddly reaches out and grabs a very alive chicken, and thrusts that poor little dinosaur somewhere between the two sets of mammalian genitals.  The chick looks at least as shocked as the chicken.)

I agree with Kit's suggestion that Jenny Price's disagreement with Bill McKibben over the term "nature" is not a substantial one.  The way she uses it is untraditional, and requires some explanation, a bit more at least than what she provides here.  Not that I doubt her: no, she clearly is on to something.  It would be a fascinating challenge, in fact, and highly desirable, to organize "nature tours" of urban areas, in the manner of how she analyses LA.

On "irony": That word means so many different things, that I rather distrust people who just throw it out as though it had an obvious conventional usage.  In this context, I assume it means something like the refusal of any two persons to agree that anything implicitly deserves our reverence, or even our respect.  And that makes sense, in an age in which one of our greatest, most creative and brilliant works of art is "The Simpsons."  But I could be wrong.

Anyway, I do not clearly perceive this in my own students.  They seem tentative and adaptive, hence given to skepticism; but at least in our conversations, they are serious, and not given to irreverence or ridicule.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

]]> Comment #3 by Delay And Deny http://www.grist.org/article/the-nature-of-a-plastic-pink-flamingo-a-qa-with-jenny-price/ Tue, 26 Dec 2006 04:45:35 -0800 http://www.grist.org/article/the-nature-of-a-plastic-pink-flamingo-a-qa-with-jenny-price/3 Go Further

Jenny Price is on the edge of seeing it.   She needs to go further.

I'd like to see us define nature not as something people destroy, but as something we inhabit poorly or well.

1st part: great.  2nd part: well, if we define nature, which is our destiny, there is no poorly or well.  

She has the right insight...but ultimately Man, his creative spirit, is defined by what we do in our Man-Nature artwork.

The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services.


]]> Go Further

Jenny Price is on the edge of seeing it.   She needs to go further.

I'd like to see us define nature not as something people destroy, but as something we inhabit poorly or well.

1st part: great.  2nd part: well, if we define nature, which is our destiny, there is no poorly or well.  

She has the right insight...but ultimately Man, his creative spirit, is defined by what we do in our Man-Nature artwork.

The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services.


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