Lews Mumford

Ok urban studies, history, or general academic and research folks. Just who is Lewis Mumford and what made him an expert on cities? I've read his Wikipedia page and it feels like he was a kind of amateur architectural historian who made good and wrote a door-stop of a tome about the history of cities (which many academics and other folks now cite), starting with pre-historic cultures that I suspect he didn't actually know a whole lot about.

I'm willing to be disabused of my potentially unfair and ill-informed conception of Lewis Mumford. Can anybody do the disabusing?

In the meantime, I'm getting a little guilty pleasure out of choosing a passage from his "The City in History" as a problematic piece of writing to offer a revision of for a weekly writing assignment.

Working Dog

I turned the heat on in my apartment and I can't tell whether it's working. I smell dust in the air as though a long-disused heat-generating apparatus is warming up. I feel the occasional warm draft on my feet. But when I feel the baseboard-mounted electric heaters, they don't seem warm at all. I've never used the system before so I'm not sure what to expect.

In any case, this is a warm pajamas and fuzzy socks evening. Or morning. Or whatever. I'm glad I picked up a two-liter of diet cherry Pepsi on my walk home; caffeine is pretty effective when you never drink any! Plus diet wild cherry Pepsi makes me think of my mother, 'cause I'm sentimental like that.

I got my stuff done for Monday's class. Now I'm working on the stuff for Wednesday's class that other people I'm sharing this week's facilitating duties need to see. Then I'll try and get work for my Tuesday class done, though that's a night class so I have all day Tuesday too.

Work really does expand to fill the available time, so I think the proper procedure is to just leave it all until the night before, right?

Prisons and Healthcare

As I noted earlier to Danae, it also doesn't help one get through one's readings more efficiently when said readings actively inspire anger at your government. Jill Nicholson-Crotty and Sean Nicholson-Crotty make a good case that US states with more negative social perception of inmates have lower funding for inmate health programs and have statistically significantly higher rates of diseases like HIV and tuberculosis in prisons. It seems that certain units of government, influenced by public perception that inmates are not worthy of care, fail to adequately fund healthcare for a population that is already significantly marginalized, often outside of prison as well as in it.

This is not surprising, sadly, but it is indefensible. And it suggests that our (that is, the United States' public's in general, not ours like yours and mine specifically) belief that prisoners are undeserving of basic levels of care may lead to prisoners failing to receive basic levels of care. So yay democracy, huh? I'm sure private, for-profit prisons will address this issue somehow (he says, rolling his eyes).

(no subject)

Woof. I did the things. The necessary things, anyway. Earlier, I was feeling ambitious and thought I'd go out for a bike ride at dawn. Now, I think I'm going to nap for three or four hours and see how it goes. I have my weekly 500-word paper to write for my Tuesday class, but I got my Monday stuff done, and I got my notes to my group on Wednesday to review like a good group member.

I talked a lot about my issues with school here with Danae over the weekend. I'll probably write more about that later. But I think talking to a counselor about anxiety, stress, work-avoidant behavior, worry over social difficulties, etc. could potentially be useful. I want to make an appointment this week, though I'm still avoiding making a solid commitment to do so, as you can see by my choice of language here.