Attacking the canvas

Lynn Boggess is a great painter and a pretty good carpenter too. Blogging about our visit to his opening at Tyndall Galleries on Saturday night, Paul talks about his use of the trowel as his instrument of choice, as well as his amazing homemade easel (one of several). Folded up, it looks like a shallow wooden crate. With a few turns of a power screw in reverse, it transforms into a three-legged construction capable of accommodating a canvas in rugged terrains.

The paint on Boggess' works is so thick it takes about ten years to dry out fully, he speculates.

You don't have to know all that to appreciate his art, but it really does make you appreciate the work that goes into it.

When is organic worth the premium?

With prices of organic foods high and higher, it's hard to know when they are worth the money. Pesticides are toxic, but does that mean that all foods treated with pesticides are equally bad?

Here's a chart that sorts it out. Doesn't it seem that strawberries with all their squishy little pores would be the worst? They're not.

Roman holiday

By Lisa Scheer, who has been on a roll lately. (That would have been a pun, pre-digital.)

Life against the overgrown

Public Art 360, the regional/national symposium that Janet Kagan & co. successfully pulled off this weekend in Chapel Hill, looks to have been a great success! Wish I could have attended more than just the one session on landscape architecture--but that one was pretty amazing.

Walter Hood, who grew up in Charlotte, is an artist, an architect, and a landscape architect; he's been called "one of the nation's rising stars of landscape architecture." His work is worthy of all those titles, and his mission is to show that the lines of separation are artificial. Given the character of some of his "interventions," I'd say he's a bit of a social worker and an activist as well. According to Metropolis magazine (July 2005),

At 46, Hood is now one of landscape architecture's leading public intellectuals: former chair of the department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at Berkeley, Pentagon memorial competition juror, and constant lecturer. As an African American in a profession with seemingly none and an urbanist in a discipline just barely breaking free of the pastoral, he's something of a phenomenon. His faculty position has given Hood the ability to pick and choose projects, a luxury he has exercised carefully and often polemically, working nearly exclusively in the public realm, and often in the inner city.

I was particularly taken by his work in the Phillips community near Charleston, South Carolina, where he helped the residents defeat a proposal to widen a road. The project would have cut the community in two. This achievement was won through the concept of "the overgrown." Imagine a well-manicured suburban back yard at the edge of an undeveloped tract: you are peering across civilization into the overgrown. The overgrown can be used as shield or sword. You can clear your landscape to enjoy using it and perhaps to enjoy the proximity to your neighbor; or, say, you aren't that friendly with your neighbor: you might "let the overgrown take care of it."



Through an aggressive use of the concept of the overgrown--including actual use of plant material to expand the vegetation in key corridors--Hood helped the community persuade the relevant officials that the widening of the road would be an assault upon the community.

(In some back yards, the line between civilization and the overgrown is under constant negotiation.)

The very long civil rights movement

Ken Zogry already had a fine career established in public history by 1998: he had completed two books, both of which would end up winning awards, The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1850 (The Bennington Museum: 1995), and The University’s Living Room: A History of the Carolina Inn (UNC: 1999). Then, something happened that changed his life. He was asked to take a look at an endangered house in downtown Raleigh, a house built in 1901 by Dr. Manassa Thomas Pope. Dr. Pope, a graduate of the medical school at Shaw University, was the first licensed African American doctor in North Carolina. His daughters lived in the house until into the 1990s.

In 1998, Zogry prepared a National Register nomination for the house, which by then was surrounded by parking lots. He ended up involved in a 10-year struggle to save the house and to turn it into the first house museum of an African American family in North Carolina. It's not yet open to the public, but there are great plans, and Zogry is the executive director of the Pope House Museum Foundation.

About 1,800 of the documents Zogry found in the house at the outset are now in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. What especially piqued his interest was a 1906 voter registration card issued to Dr. Pope. "Everything I had learned said this should not exist," he said as he began his talk on Saturday morning at a conference on New Perspectives in African American History and Culture. The discovery launched him on an investigation into a fascinating and little-known story about black male political resistance to white supremacy in the first two decades of the twentieth century--in Raleigh. The result is his UNC dissertation, which he has just recently defended.

What Zogry has discovered is that Dr. Pope's action in registering to vote was part of a concerted voter registration effort that went on around 1906; then it stopped, to pick up again in 1916. Many questions remain unanswered, including why the 10-year hiatus, but it is clear that there was a strong movement among African Americans to participate in politics even as Jim Crow laws were tightening and the conservative Democrats were shoring up their power after retaking the government in 1898.

In 1919, Dr. Pope actually ran for mayor of Raleigh. He was joined on the ballot by African American candidates for commissioner of safety and commissioner of public works. With no hope of a chance, these men were making a statement: "the strongest possible public action that black leaders could take against disenfranchisement," according to Zogry.

The election was lost, but all was not lost. A student named Ella Baker was attending Shaw in 1918. According to Zogry, the election of 1919 was "a formative experience" for her. After graduation she moved to Harlem and began her life's work--which included becoming "a guiding force" behind both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In fact, said Zogry, it was no accident that SNCC was formed at Shaw: Baker could have taken it to any major black school, but Shaw provided "a strong connection to history."

Commenting on Zogry's paper, Fitz Brundgage called Dr. Pope's mayoral election campaign significant because of its threat to the "appearance of hegemony." It was significant "because it underscores the persistence of a commitment to black political action that extends far back," back before the 1950s, back before the 1930s (which is sometimes what we think of as the outer edge of the civil rights movement), back to within the very height of the Jim Crow period. And Brundage would even take it farther back. Rather than read Dr. Pope's story as a predecessor to what was to come later in the twentieth century, he "would read it backward and talk about a continuous black struggle for equality, with varying tactics, but a continuity of struggle," one that has never let up: These various episodes of civil rights activities should not be seen as separate events that just happened, but rather as a long steady march, by actors conscious of their own history from one generation to the next.

Denis Cosgrove

My friend David Lowenthal has written a beautiful obituary in The Independent of London about a friend of his, Denis Cosgrove, who died too young, at 57. It surely would have been a pleasure to have known Professor Cosgrove.

Prizing geography's traditional mélange of nature and culture, Cosgrove had little affinity with either the abstract positivism of spatial science or the radical activism of post-colonial social critique. Happy in 16th-century Italy, he recalled that at home and at his Jesuit school, Rome had always been more important than London. Like Renaissance humanists, he saw the fulfilled life as a balance between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa; for himself he chose contemplation, self-reflection, thoughtful critical converse. His vocation was less about changing the world than changing oneself. Whereas policy-driven social science was blind to the liberating and consoling power of beauty, dismissing it as veneer and distraction, Cosgrove's aesthetic concern reflected his conviction that beauty was inseparable from goodness and truth. In common with Stoics and Jesuits, he told an interviewer, he valued education as "something that feeds the soul and the mind and the body together, posing questions like 'Who are we in relation to the world? How should we live our lives in a way that is fulfilling and morally proper?' "

In that quest, he was eminently successful. His warmth, humour, kindness, delight in children, theirs in him, and intellectual challenge, charmed and dazzled all who knew him.

Bill Ferris-fest, and much more this weekend

There's too much going on in Chapel Hill this week for one person to possibly take in. Last night, Bill Ferris presented some of his rare and wonderful documentary films of Mississippi blues artists that he started making in the late 1960s. Today, this Renaissance southern scholar was on The State of Things on another subject: the 100th anniversary of the birth of Richard Wright, which is being celebrated at UNC this weekend in a big way. That conference begins on Saturday night with a staged reading of Paul Green's dramatic adaptation of Native Son. It culminates Sunday night in an event in Memorial Hall featuring Wright's daughter Julia Wright.

Meanwhile on Friday and Saturday, you could go to the conference on New Perspectives in African American History and Culture, sponsored by UNC's African American History Working Group.

Also on Friday and Saturday, you could experience Public Art 360: Symposium from Seven Perspectives. Kudos to Janet Kagan for working so hard to bring this conference together--it will gather public art professionals and interested folks from across the Southeast.

On Saturday and Sunday, you could delight yourself on the Chapel Hill Spring Garden Tour, visiting gardens in the Oaks and Meadowmont, including the gardens of the historic DuBose home.

On Sunday and Monday, you could go Beyond the Sunbelt: Southern Economic Development in a Global Context.

Don't know how many of these riches I can absorb. I'll start tomorrow with a summit on affordable housing in Chatham County, where I'm a panelist. Good to see they are thinking in this direction.

Good question: Why don't we celebrate April 9?

On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered. The nightmare of the civil war was officially ended; the Union would be one again. Why, then, asks Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory, is this day not celebrated?

Kevin is being cagey here. As he knows better than most, whole books have been written to explain that after the war, what happened was a massive "reconciliation." The Confederacy was not treated like a defeated nation: President Andrew Johnson would not honor the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves. Eventually even ex-Confederate soldiers and their widows received pensions from the United States government. Our men died, your men died, it was awful: let's get over it and get on with things--so went the rhetoric of reconciliation as cities and towns on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line ushered in Jim Crow. It's kind of as if the war didn't happen, or at least that it was all a big mistake. President Wilson spoke at the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg--where Union and Confederate veterans gallantly shook hands--without once mentioning emancipation. So it's little wonder that this day of the great achievement of the Union victory goes unnoticed.

At a Civil War symposium on the UNC campus a couple of weeks ago, Gary Gallagher gave an interesting interpretation of the various ways in which the war was conceived and remembered. Talking from his new book, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (UNC Press), he outlined four dominant narrative traditions that have shaped our understanding of the war.

Gallagher argues that popular understandings of the war have been shaped by four traditions that arose in the nineteenth century and continue to the present: the Lost Cause, in which Confederates are seen as having waged an admirable struggle against hopeless odds; the Union Cause, which frames the war as an effort to maintain a viable republic in the face of secessionist actions; the Emancipation Cause, in which the war is viewed as a struggle to liberate 4 million slaves and eliminate a cancerous influence on American society; and the Reconciliation Cause, which represents attempts by northern and southern whites to extol "American" virtues and mute the role of African Americans.

A celebration of Grant's victory over Lee on April 9, 1865 would fit within the "Union Cause" narrative. And yet, as Gallagher persuasively argues at least as to the way the Civil War has been presented in movies since the movie "Glory" in 1989, the "Union Cause" narrative in our own time is supremely unpopular. In movie after movie--fourteen or so that he discussed--Union soldiers are depicted as ugly, violent, dishonest characters. There is no celebration of the United States as a great nation worthy of victory and respect. Yet as Gallagher further detailed, the goal of preserving the Union for the sake of its own preservation was a dominant narrative just before and during the Civil War itself. How would it look to European countries if this fragile experiment in democracy could not survive even 100 years?

What happened to the positive narrative of saving the Union for its own sake--the cause that Lincoln, among so many others, so fervently believed in? Even slaveholding southerners, at least those of a certain class, were reluctant to let the idea of one nation go for the sake of the rebel cause. Said North Carolina Judge Thomas Ruffin at a peace conference held in Washington in 1861, "I was born before the Constitution was adopted. May God grant that I not outlive it."

The more powerful narrative of reconciliation overcame it, in part; the narrative of the Lost Cause held on for a long time and survives in some quarters; the narrative of emancipation has reemerged since the civil rights movement, coming to fruition in movies like "Glory." But even when emancipation is celebrated, the Union soldiers come off as complete jerks. Why is that?

Gallagher's theory is that Hollywood is speaking to our time, as it always does speak to its own time, always in the interest of box office returns. And that in our time, whether you are on the left or the right, the federal government is not the good guy.

MLK anniversary resources

Legal History Blog has a nice roundup of remembrances on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination, including a link to the remarkable speech by Robert Kennedy Jr.

Law and Humanities Blog takes the opportunity to compile a list of movies featuring minority characters and civil rights themes.

North Carolina Miscellany documents a peaceful march in Burlington, North Carolina on April 8, 1968.

Events in Raleigh were less than peaceful.

Combating sex trafficking: UNC conference

Today I've been in another world. I've been to central southern Nigeria, a region so poor, where the future is so bleak, that families send their daughters into sexual slavery. Many of them end up in Italy, where they are sold to madams, Nigerian women who too have done their time in enforced prostitution. In elaborate juju ceremonies they are sworn never to reveal the identities of their traffickers: "If they betray this, they and their family are going to suffer some kind of unidentified horrid thing," said Esohe Aghatise, a lawyer and activist working to support these women.

Through Dorchen Liedholdt I've gotten acquainted with Sigma Huda, a Bangladeshi lawyer and United Nations Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, whose work is so threatening that her government has put her in detention.

I've met Jeanette, a 13-year-old runaway at a bus station in Boston, and watched her become seduced by Billy, an "entrepreneur" who cons her into joining his "family" of working girls.

All of these stories and much more are being told at an international conference taking place at the Friday Center, sponsored by the Carolina Women's Center at UNC: "Combating Sex Trafficking: Prevention and Intervention in North Carolina and Worldwide." Tomorrow I'm on as moderator of a panel on legal advocacy.

Introducing Carson Dean

Tonight at the monthly meeting of the executive team for the Partnership to End Homelessness in Orange County, we welcomed Carson Dean into the staff position of coordinator for the plan. He comes to us from Raleigh, where he has been executive director of the South Wilmington Street shelter, Wake County's largest emergency and transitional shelter for homeless men. He has a wealth of experience relevant to the work of our ten-year plan. He helped to create an draft Wake County's ten-year plan. He was planning committee co-chair of Wake County's 2007 Project Homeless Connect.

During his time at South Wilmington Street he implemented a housing first program. Additionally, he secured a grant from Triangle United Way to start a program to find employment for chronically homeless men.

Earlier, Dean was a program director at Haven House Services, a nonprofit in Wake County that serves young people: runaways, homeless and trouble youth. There he implemented an innovative street outreach program.

We are very fortunate to have him in the position of coordinating our efforts! I look forward to working with him.

Poverty Awareness Week at UNC

Lots of good programming going on this week on campus during Poverty Awareness Week sponsored by the Campus Y. Sorry I'll have to miss tonight's screening of "Change Comes Knocking: The Story of the NC Fund," a progressive anti-poverty initiative that Gov. Terry Sanford started in 1963.

The Fund sought to align federal, state and local government, foundations and the state's civic and business leadership to break the entangled bonds of racism and poverty in North Carolina.
This trailblazing program used integrated teams of college students to assist and strengthen poor communities throughout the state. The NC Fund, which grew to embrace the radical notion that poor people should be empowered to act on their own behalf, was both controversial and transformative, leaving a legacy that continues today.

Produced by Durham documentary filmmaker Steve Channing.

Other events to be aware of.

Eyes on public-sector blogging

Municipalist is a blog that focuses on blogging by public officials--legislators, school board members, town council members and such. This week it profiled GreeneSpace. My thanks to Craig Colgan for the kind attention.

Oh, there's lots of other interesting stuff on Municipalist too. Check it out.

The Speech

Barack Obama's speech yesterday was a remarkable performance. Some politicians would have "denounced" the inflamatory words of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright and got on with other things as quickly as possible. That would have been hard for Obama, given his longstanding ties to this man. But he managed to reject the explicit remarks Rev. Wright made, while putting them in the context of the rhetoric of black liberation theology--not denying the legitimacy of the minister's argument, but marking his own distance from what he called the "static" view of race in America that the minister's remarks reflected:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Obama distinguishes his own generation from the generation in which Rev. Wright grew up, and in the process works to weave together the complicated stories of being black and white in America:

They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician's own failings.
And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It's a racial stalemate we've been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy - particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.
But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

As the New York Times editorial this morning states, Obama "put Mr. Wright, his beliefs and the reaction to them into the larger context of race relations with an honestly seldom heard in public life."

In a culture of sound bites there's a real danger that this speech will not undo the damage that has been done to Obama's campaign, that the inflammatory words of the minister will be all it takes to drive some voters away. But that would be a shame. In this speech, Obama faced perhaps the toughest challenge yet to his campaign. As the Times said, "It is hard to imagine how he could have handled it better."

Delivered in the shadow of Independence Hall, it was a speech for the ages. Read (or watch) the whole thing.

UPDATE: Jonathan Tilove's insightful coverage of the speech:

Barack Obama's speech on race was entitled "A More Perfect Union.'' But it might have been called "Waking From the Dream.''

With it, Obama dashed the fancy that 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., America, in an act of timely wish-fulfillment, might elect a black man president while skipping lightly over questions of race.

But more than that, Obama was both true to himself — ending a self-imposed silence on matters central to who he is — and true to the deeper meaning of King.

Come the April 4 anniversary of King's death, it will now be far harder to be satisfied with platitudes. Very much in the spirit of King's 1963 "I Have a Dream'' speech — and unlike the 2004 Democratic National Convention speech that made the Illinois senator's reputation — Obama's words this week were less an idealized paean to America's aspirations and more a gritty accounting of its real history, its present quagmire, and the long slog ahead.

. . . more.

A real great story

From Meg McGurk of the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership. At yesterday's meeting of the work group for the Orange County Partnership to End Homelessness, she had a great story to tell about the "Real Change from Spare Change" program. A man went into The Bookshop on West Franklin Street and asked if they were participating in the program. Yes, they are: he was shown the collection can on the counter. He plopped down a large container of change. He said he'd been picking up loose change on Franklin Street for years, knowing that there ought to be some good use for it, and now he was grateful to have the chance to give it back. It came to $27 (and change).

We remember Eve

Mayor Kevin Foy's statement tonight at the beginning of our Town Council meeting:

We begin this evening's meeting by acknowledging the grief and pain that we are suffering at the loss of our colleague and friend, Eve Carson.

Eve was the president of Carolina's student body, which is how many of us came to know her. But the more we got to know her, the more we understood what an extraordinary person she was, and how broadly and deeply she touched the lives of people in Chapel Hill and beyond.

Eve's death represents for us a terrible, incomprehensible loss. She was a person who embodied what is beautiful in this world, and it was a joy to know her. Her having been taken from us rips from us our greatest hopes and our greatest dreams and our greatest aspirations for what the world might become someday.

We are diminished by the loss of Eve, and we know it.

We mourn this day, but we will carry on. We will soldier on. We have Eve's memory and spirit to help us carry on. But we will always remember Eve; we will always cherish Eve; and Eve will always be with us in Chapel Hill, to challenge us with her beauty and grace, her intelligence and charm, her compassion and idealism.

Eve's spirit will challenge us to be a place where youth can flourish and hope can endure and evil will be forever banished. And although we cannot replace Eve, we do know that she was a person who mattered in this world by the work she did, and she was destined to do great things. Rather than have those things remain undone, each of us can look to pick up a piece of the work that Eve did, and to do the work she would have done, the way she would have done it.

My colleagues on the council and I have been a part of the sorrow of our community, and we have reached out to Eve's family and to our colleagues on campus and beyond. We have extended to Chancellor Moeser our deepest sympathy to the campus community, and we have sought to comfort everyone in our town. Each of us has suffered, individually and collectively, a harm that is deep and piercing.

Yesterday, my wife Nancy and I attended Eve's memorial service at her hometown in Athens, Georgia. We had the opportunity to meet Eve's mother, Teresa, her father, Bob, and her brother, Andrew. We told them how much Chapel Hill valued Eve and how heartsick all of us are.

Eve's family was very gracious, and even under the burden of such surpassing grief thanked us, and all of you for your thoughts and your support.

Athens and Chapel Hill are now forever bound. We are bound by the thread of the life of a lovely young woman who touched us as she graced this world.

Please join me in a moment of silence to remember Eve; but I hope that this moment will resonate around the world, and that our moment will awaken this world with our cry of grief at this senseless death.

I would also like to call attention this evening to the assistance that is available to everyone in our community who is coping with this tragedy and who needs assistance. Our town has a crisis unit, housed in our police department, that is ready to help, and I ask you please to call them to seek that help if you need it. Contact information is available on the town website or by calling Town Hall.

In addition, the university has counseling available and people ready to assist members of the campus community during this difficult time.

A lesson from Eve: Don't curb your enthusiasm

Long ago I trained myself out of using exclamation points--no place for them in polished writing, I learned and dutifully practiced: words themselves are powerful enough, if you know how to use them. Even today I find myself editing exclamation points out of my email messages.

Not Eve Carson. Here's a message I had from her on Feb. 11 (at around 3 a.m.), in response to my request to learn more about a survey the student government association had done (under Chris Belhorn's leadership) on student attitudes toward panhandling:

Dear Sally,

I am so sorry that I haven't gotten back to you before now! Somehow, I managed to miss this email and it remained unopened in my mailbox until right now! So, the date for the Feb 6 meeting with the Downtown Partnership has come and gone and again, I apologize for not seeing this before-- I so wish I had read this before... I can assure you though, that we would love to participate in these meetings in the future! I know a number of students who I think would serve as excellent representatives for this committee.

I hope you are doing well and I really thank you for reaching out to me. It was so kind of you to write in the first place! Would you mind if I passed this message along to Chris Belhorn? I think it is such a compliment to him (and he is totally deserving of all praise!) that you would be interested in having a student serve in this group!

Thank you Sally. I'll look forward to talking with you again soon!
Eve

For more of her infectious spirit, see this moving tribute by her friend Ben Lundin. As for me, in Eve's honor and memory I'm renewing my own pledge to serving others--with new and uncensored enthusiasm.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. I spent part of it speaking to the Orange County chapter of Delta Kappa Gamma, an honor society of women educators. Also on the agenda was the presentation of scholarships to one young woman from each of the senior classes of the four Orange County high schools who planned to major in education. (This year, there was no candidate from East Chapel Hill.) I appreciate Betty Eidenier for asking me and Kathy Harris for introducing me.

They wanted to hear my "stories" about being on the Town Council, but I started earlier than that. I told them how I'd written my dissertation on a national fellowship from the American Association of University Women. And about how eventually I met one of the women who was on the award committee. She told me that one of the things that impressed her the most about my application was the fact that I had a brand new baby. This was kind of disappointing: I had hoped she was going to say it was strength of my ideas about Virginia Woolf! But it was true that juggling a dissertation and a newborn child was quite a challenge, and the time off from teaching that the fellowship allowed made my life much easier.

Women helping women: may it ever be so.

Real dollars for real change

Many thanks to the Daily Tar Heel for its generous $10,000 contribution to the "Real Change from Spare Change" program.

Unfathomable

Two communities are shaken to the core by the senseless murder of Eve Carson. Here's what they're saying in her home town of Athens, Ga.

Eve Carson was brilliant, without arrogance.
She was beautiful, without vanity.
She was generous, without self-importance.
She was, as her Clarke Central High School teachers remembered her Thursday, the woman you hope your daughter will become.
"This was a girl who was going to cure cancer, who was going to make Academy Award-winning movies, who was ... going to do something big," said school counselor Sam Hicks.

My connections with Eve were few but meaningful. I was looking forward to seeing her at the next meeting of our Downtown Partnership outreach committee. My brief impressions of her were like everybody else's: this was someone who loved and embraced life, had enormous amounts of energy and talent to give, and was already at work to be the change she wanted to see in the world. There is no making sense of it.