All posts by LIam Cody

Smelly Art

This semester we’ve talked a lot about scent and the powerful role it can play on people. There have been some really great posts that I remember by John Panus and, most specifically, Laura Major about senses, in particular smell. Laura talked about it as one of the things that ‘brings people together’ and John talked about how intuitive and ‘trusting’ we may have to be when it comes to sense. I was reminded of these posts recently when I read an article in the New York Times titled “Art for the Knowing Nose.” Continue reading Smelly Art

The Automobile and Power in “Clay’s Ark”

I thought Clarissa made a great point in her post from February 26th about how in Mind of My Mind and in the videos we watched in class about the Mission district in San Francisco the powers possessed by Doro and by the tech workers seem to end up getting used against them. Though the dynamics are slightly different, I got thinking about how technologies get used against their owners in Clay’s Ark too. The specific example I am thinking of has to do with Blake and the automobile.

Continue reading The Automobile and Power in “Clay’s Ark”

A First Visit to “The Feminist Wire”

As I often do when I initially explore a website, when I visited The Feminist Wire for the first time I began by examining the site’s mission statement and, because it has a caveat I had never seen on a website before, its commenting policy. My rationale for examining these two features is that before I began reading submissions I wanted to gain a sense of what exactly this site’s goals are—the kind of writing it looks for, the kind of community and discussion it attempts to generate, both the kind of conversations it is participating in and the ones I am joining by reading the site. I believe a close examination of this site’s mission and commenting policy might help us, in this class on Octavia Butler’s work, to think not only about the policies of discussion in our own classroom space, but about the ways in which those policies (or a lack thereof) shape discourse outside our classroom.

Continue reading A First Visit to “The Feminist Wire”