The Week in Review

Notable O.E.P. Stories for the Week Ending in August 31st, 2012

Ms. Katie O. forwarded an email to me this past week, wherein a solitary link to a recent post from the idea-centric blog Brain Pickings floated, unclicked, waiting to be read. Upon her suggestion I’m including a few image-quotations (see above) from the original post, entitled “How to Be an Explorer of the World.” The book of the same name, written by “guerilla artist and illustrator” Keri Smith, is subtitled Portable Art Life Museum; it’s an avant-garde picture-art book that superimposes handwritten suggestions, of the author and of (un)recognizable and important thinkers, over images of found places, objects, things. In Smith’s own words, as quoted from B.P.:

“I am interested in the idea of taking art…out of the realm of ‘institution’ and into the hands of the individual…A museum is what YOU make it. You decide what goes in it, what is interesting, why it is interesting…It gives the reader permission to create their [sic] own portable (or not portable) show.”

It’s an attractive idea, this self-creation, this disciplining of the individual’s sensing of h/er environment and the acceptance of a notion of life as lived through experience and encounter and, in the remembering (for Smith, in the cataloguing and collaging), as lived through transcription and reference and a soft plagiarism of multiple, previous ontologies. I’ve featured coopted from Zen master/activist Thich Nhat Hanh and early-modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein but Smith pulls from multiple and varied sources (she’s adamant about the necessity of footnoting, too). She’s picked a lot of brains for this project, including a welcome poking-and-prodding of her own.

This seems a fine place to begin as we, once again, look back to this week’s O.E.P. successes – not just because our organization works toward intellectual efficacy and legitimacy but also because we too are compiling things. We too are creating our very own “Life Museum.” We collect, we curate, we reflect, we share. This seems a worthwhile tradition to enact. So, on to our recent additions:

	April Alliston‘s recent op-ed for Al-Ja- zeera English excises some important ideological/behavioral/experiential through-lines when considering just to what extent trolling, cyber-bullying, real-life bullying, and general slander coalesce. She also asks questions with seemingly illusive, or simply hard-to- define, answers: what qualifies as hate-speech? As verbal abuse?
	In light of the scandalous remarks of, and still surrounding, Todd Akin, Estelle B. Freedman adopts a much-welcomed calm, critical approach in order to ground the discussion of “legitimate rape” in an historical and socio-political context. More seriously she embodies a discursive posturing toward those whose lives – and bodies – are compro- mised in the current political climate.
	To quote myself (loosely) in a previous post: “When considering the modern socio-political climate, paradox (or, more appropriately termed, hypocrisy) is the rule; Maya Paley justifiably ex- poses Israel’s handling of African refu- gees as in direct contradiction with its similarly dire past.”
	“An anecdote is oxygen that breathes life into a great story of exposition, facts, and data.” We love Michele and truly appreciate her work, both with us and independently of her OpEd pursuits. She has a great illustrated TEDEd video to compliment her ideas about journalism as an opportunity not just for reporting, but for fostering communicative relationships.
	Speaking as a woman and an adherent of Islam, Qanta A. Ahmed provides a particularly honed perspective as to the ramifications of religious fundamental- ism. This “heinous distortion of Islam” seeks to eliminate women’s access to education and, by extension, equal societal (and human) rights – which, Qanta clarifies, contradicts the original teachings of “The Prophet.”

- J. J. Morr

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