Karen Lucero, of Lucero Organic Farms in Lodi, started bringing her Seascape strawberries back to Berkeley Farmer’s Markets in April. (They’re also available at San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Market, and Sundays at Temescal.) As Karen’s sometime market helper, I hold out samples by their stems to offer passers-by. Not many refuse a bite of bright ripe berry, but the cognoscenti sometimes will demur: “Oh, save the sample; I know they’re good!”

My opinion’s not unbiased, but Karen’s berries are a well-established market favorite, the preferred shortcake-toppers of Berkeley shoppers and the pastry chefs at Chez Panisse (strawberry soup? ok!). Lucero is a family-run, all-organic farm, which, since strawberries are among the “dirty dozen,” is worth keeping in mind. Most conventional strawberries are high-yield hybrids that owe their bright color and hefty size to heavy doses of fertilizer, water, and pesticide – this often makes them tasteless, too. Lucero’s Seascapes may not produce as much, but Karen and her husband, Ben, prize them for their flavor. The Luceros also minimize watering, which, ecological benefits aside, stresses the plants just enough, Karen says, to concentrate their nutrients and flavor. As a bonus, their distinctive long stems make for easy dipping in chocolate sauce (or a lucky mouth).

So take a break from your seminar papers, walk to the market, and stock up on some strawberries (and look out for cherries, which should show up soon). Not that the fruits of intellectual labor aren’t satisfying, but sometimes they’re not; and a basket of berries will always hit the spot.

“Graduate student” can be a totalizing identity. It can also be a fraught one, depending on your discipline (those of us in Comp Lit, for example, may be said to be “always already in crisis”). But we graduate students do sometimes manage to emerge from the devastating weight of questions like “Can contradiction be redeemed as determinate negation?” and “What am I doing here?!?!” to do other things, and identify in other ways. Lynn Xu, a first-year in the Comparative Literature department, is also a poet, which she sometimes finds at odds with academe. (Her poems have appeared in 1913, Best American Poetry 2008, Tinfish, Octopus, The Walrus, and elsewhere.) But if Lynn is always or ever in crisis, she’s also the kind of person who will, with glee, wish you weeks full of “happiness, humor, and disgust.” I’ve had worse weeks. (And if you’d like any of these things in your week, heavy on the happiness/humor side, you can come hear Lynn read with recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Rae Armantrout.)

During the academic year, Lynn may take notes for future poems, but most of her time and mental space is devoted to coursework. That doesn’t mean, though, that her lyrical spirit lies dormant. “Academic (critical) work asks so much from the imagination, but refuses to acknowledge it (the imagination) as an expression of the thought, as a form of expression inherent in the thinking,” she says. I suspect she’s not the only potential PhD who sympathizes with the grumbling so familiar in extramural discourse: a lot of academic writing is deadeningly dry, suppressing the imaginative impulse instead of fleshing it out. Though Lynn believes poetry itself can be a form of critique – and is writing a manifesto on the topic for a methodology course – she finds this mentality meets institutional resistance. “Criticism does not have take the form of the essay. But in school it does.  And a very restricted sense of the essay at that.”

When she’s not walking the rope between academic writing and creative writing, Lynn likes to walk the streets and trails of Berkeley. She also helps run a small press, Canarium Books. Though conscious of complaints about the institutionalization and over-production of poetry (the poets churned out by MFA programs, for example, and the poems they then churn out themselves), Lynn, who received her MFA from Brown, doesn’t think contemporary poetry is consigned to mediocrity. “The solution cannot be: stop writing poetry, or: stop publishing poetry,” she says. “Rather, it must be: to increase the quality of the conversation.  And hopefully our press does this.  All our authors I believe are luminaries in the craft.”

Lynn’s own luminous writing is, I find, peripatetic, peppered with paraprosdokian. Her lines have been described as “equal parts elegance and flippancy while staying all song.” In “Language exists because,” she writes: “Language exists because nothing exists between those / who express themselves. All language is therefore / a language of prayer.” Indeed, trying to write my seminar paper, I can’t help but feel that my language is a performance of prayer – a prayer that the thing will end itself. I don’t think that’s what she means; but I’m glad Lynn and her poems exist.

To read Lynn’s poems, go here.

To hear Lynn read, go here:

Rae Armantrout and Lynn Xu (music from Wee Giant)
Friday, May 7th, 7pm
Studio One
365 45th Street (@ Broadway), Oakland (near the MacArthur Bart)

• Most elementary educational programs commit less than 1hr/week to science.
• 40% of science teachers say they feel unprepared to teach science.
• Most science teachers receive little or no professional development.

The list went on, but some of the main problems were obvious: science education was taking a back seat to subjects required for testing, there were few resources available to science teachers, and there were few opportunities for students to explore science after school.

Fortunately, there are simple steps that senior scientists and graduate students can take in their spare time to help address many of these problems. By volunteering in after school programs like the ones at LHS, we can excite students about science. We can co-teach lessons, like in the Science and Health Education Partnership program at UCSF, or simply provide support to science teachers who are uncertain about a subject area. We can mentor high school students as summer researchers, such as in the Summer High-School Apprenticeship Research Program. For more ideas, check out the Science, Technology & Engineering Policy Group‘s website. In short, there are many great ways to get involved with educational outreach as a graduate student or even as a full-time scientist or engineer. And if the fun of mentoring and the skills gained by teaching kids aren’t enough to convince you, then consider that the NSF is beginning to reward investigators and scientist for their outreach efforts and even requiring outreach efforts on some grants.

Photos by Colleen Morgan

It’s late and the bus is still filled to the gills with chattering Berkeley students, fogging up the windows and ignoring the exhortations of the bus driver, “STEP BACK! EVERYONE STEP BACK!” Students are leaving campus after late nights studying and working in labs, some headed to Safeway to stock up on supplies.  The student traffic tapers off south of Alcatraz, with older commuters staying on, heading to downtown Oakland and beyond.  The bus quietly undergoes an almost complete demographic change, one that has not gone unnoticed by the AC Transit authorities.

You may have missed the announcement last month from AC Transit: major changes were coming for some of the local bus lines, the most shocking of which is breaking the 51 in half at the Rockridge BART into 51A and 51B, lines that would service the north and the south segments of the 51′s route.  This would require paying for a transfer for non-UC Students, and for students with a Class Pass (a mandatory charge of $69.50 to your student fees, I hope you make good use of it!) presumably AC Transit would be able to charge UC for two rides instead of one. I also do not particularly look forward to getting off at Rockridge and waiting for another bus, especially late at night after a long day of grading.

It’s not a major disruption and will not change the experience of most students who live inside the Berkeley bubble, yet it seems a bit cynical on the part of AC Transit to break the bus line in half at the Berkeley/Oakland border. Students tend to stay in a tight circle around campus, and while this may benefit their university education, it seems a bit sad to live in the Bay Area for several years without venturing into Oakland and San Francisco.  In this respect, breaking up the 51 is just another division between Berkeley and Oakland, punishing those who would venture outside of the bubble.

If you’re a Berkeley graduate student invested in the future of your institution, you know all this already. But in all the debate swirling around the lamentable fee increases – most prominently, how best to protest them – another issue is at stake. It’s heresy around here to suggest that anyone who wants and works for it shouldn’t have access to a college education. But does everyone really want a college education?

As San Jose State professor (and Berkeley Ph.D.) Mike Rustigan argued in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed, many young Americans are more interested in working with their hands than sitting behind a desk, and to insist that everyone aspire to a four-year degree discounts the value – not to mention national economic necessity – of learning a trade. Caitlin Flanagan’s polemical (and pretty much universally derided) critique of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley serves as the reductio ad absurdum of our unblinking devotion to a liberal arts education at the expense of any practical knowledge. Arguing that school garden programs rob students of valuable time with civics textbooks, Flanagan accuses Alice Waters and her “ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting” acolytes of preventing migrant workers’ kids from getting into college, which is the only way they could possibly escape their fate of diabetes and underemployment. (Waters’ suggestion that working in a garden can prove pedagogically useful is unlikely to breed a permanent underclass of sharecroppers, but if it asks students to write recipes as well as coherent paragraphs about The Crucible – if it produces people who can effectively communicate information rather than haughtily parade their cultural capital in The Atlantic – is that really such a bad thing?)

Faux-populism aside, most school garden advocates would agree with Flanagan that, whether early education is cultivated in vegetable plots or those of Shakespeare, college is the ultimate goal, and the argument that the university isn’t for everyone runs a real risk of elitism. It’s easy for a tenured faculty member, or a first-year graduate student enjoying the first fruits of fellowship, to wax poetic about the art of mechanical production. But, as Rustigan argues, recognizing the abilities of those who show promise in shop class isn’t just empty praise; it might help steer would-be dropouts in a positive direction. Our educational system tends to give short shrift to those with neither the desire nor the skill set to don white collars. If the push for equal education put more emphasis on vocational programs, like the Regional Occupational Training offered in cooperation with the Santa Cruz public school system, we might give otherwise unmotivated teens a reason to stay in school by showing them there are multiple paths to success. Manufacturing may be cheaper in China, but home improvement and electricians’ visits will continue to be made in America, and such expertise comes with a certain job security. As Rustigan quotes a retired plumber, “No one is going to outsource your local repair guy.”

And let’s face it: not all of us in academia have the luxury of condescending to the service sector. Plenty of plumbers make more money than assistant professors, and grad students flush with funding now might not find such a plum situation on the job market – to say nothing of undergraduate humanities majors who try and fail, as I did last year, to score jobs in marketing or magazines and end up waitressing (and earning more than some office-bound peers) instead.

This isn’t meant to suggest that anyone is deciding between a mechanical engineering PhD and a career as a shop mechanic, or to deny the fact that college education can indeed be a powerful force for social change and personal gain. As the current controversy at Berkeley High attests, the misguided assumption that non-white students can’t excel in college-prep courses comes perilously close to proving Flanagan’s point. But it’s about time we realize that learning skills for manual labor, like learning critical thinking, is good for everyone, whether it’s part of a formal curriculum or not, whether as the basis for a vocation or as a supplement to one. The best education would teach how to use all the basic tools: reading, writing, arithmetic, and a hammer.

Located about 3.5 miles northwest of the Berkeley Campus (take the Buchanan exit off 80 and head west), The Albany Bulb was an active construction landfill until 1987 and is now part of the Eastshore State Park.  It’s not marked on Google Maps, but you’ll recognize it if you follow the coastline up from Gilman until you see, well, a bulb extending into the bay.  Take a nice, meandering walk (or ride) from the parking lot and you’ll be treated to breathtaking views of San Francisco and the bay as well as giant sculptures by local artists and graffiti-covered construction debris.  Head leftish on the path to Mad Mark’s castle, then wander north along the shore to find large murals and amusing uses of the large chunks of concrete scattered throughout the island.  On the north shore you’ll encounter huge sculptures by artists Osha Neumann and Jason De Antonis–I like to get to this part of the bulb by the late afternoon, so I can watch the sunset light up the city and the sculptures.

On any given day you will run into dog walkers, mountain bicyclists, anarchists, graffiti artists, photographers, and people who might rather not be disturbed.  The east side of the bulb is where there are more permanent encampments and the dogs who guard this area are not particularly friendly.  Stick to the well-trod paths and you’ll have a blast.  I bet you didn’t think that the apocalypse could be this fun!

A recent news feature in Nature Biotechnology asked some of the most prominent synthetic biologists how they define their field. The diversity and vagueness of the responses highlighted the difficulties the community has had centering itself on a set of focused objectives. Because Synthetic Biology is such a new field with no central discovery to mark its launch point, and because the application of systematic engineering to biology is so fraught with problems, the Synthetic Biology community has had trouble defining itself in concrete terms. This comes despite such efforts as the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), an NSF-funded consortium of faculty across various universities that is intended to facilitate joint research efforts within Synthetic Biology. Some responses in the article suggested that Synthetic Biology had become more of a buzzword meant to garner federal research dollars than a productive field. For those of us in the field at the moment, this hit painfully close to home.

I enrolled in the UCSF/UC-Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering largely because it boasted the largest and most promising Synthetic Biology faculty in the world. Before that, I worked for a year with a prominent member of the field at MIT where I started to get a sense of the field. As a biochemist, I was taken aback at the engineering jargon and oversimplification I felt was being applied to systems I knew were very complex and incompletely studied. But the positive efforts I witnessed far outweighed the negatives. One tremendously successful Synthetic Biology effort has been the International Genetic Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, which challenges teams of undergraduates, graduates, and even high school students to undertake a genetic engineering project over a summer. Arguably the only “biology competition” in the world, the masterfully executed iGEM competition and jamboree thrills both students and participating faculty with the potential of Synthetic Biology. The iGEM competition relies heavily on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a large, open library of genetic engineered parts, largely submitted by iGEM students. The idea behind the Registry is that students and scientists can use the submitted parts in the Registry to build upon other groups’ work and thereby avoid replicating efforts. It was impressive efforts such as iGEM and the Registry, together with excellent work by highly reputable scientists and engineers that convinced me to stay and contribute to synthetic biology.

Though Synthetic Biology is facing increasing criticism, I readily defend it as the most promising approach to engineering biology. Though there are many difficulties with engineering biology, Synthetic Biology has made the most prominent and daring attempt at solving some of these challenges. Having worked in the field for several years now, I am consistently impressed by the dedication with which Synthetic Biology’s proponents approach its challenges on a daily basis. Most are serious scientist and engineers, tackling and slowly solving real problems. Synthetic Biology should tone down its promises and refocus itself on solving key issues with engineering systems, but it should not be dismissed. Harnessing the powers of biology will take more work than even Synthetic Biology’s critics realize, but Synthetic Biology has made the first few steps, and the payoff should be well worth the struggle. We should be patient and let it struggle onward.

Photo by brianwallace

L.A. has a reputation for being a cultural and intellectual wasteland, but at the 8^th Annual West Coast Law and Literature Conference, held January 13 by USC’s Center for Law, History and Culture and Department of Comparative Literature, I found a welcome oasis. I came across it by accident; I happened to be in town, I knew one of the professors participating, and parking was provided (probably the deciding factor). Since the papers were accessible online, I already knew that the panelists – Bernadette Meyler of Cornell Law School, Julia Lupton of UC Irvine, and UC Berkeley’s Victoria Kahn – would be presenting work on topics ranging from England’s 1660 Act of Oblivion to joint-stools, Hannah Arendt, and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. I was anxious to find out just how all this (most pressingly, the joint-stools) could be connected under the proclaimed theme of “Early Modern/Post-Modern: Inventing the Political Subject.”

For some, the field of Law and Literature is symptomatic of the American university’s fetishization of interdisciplinarity, geared more towards marketing appeal than genuine intellectual inquiry. Depending on your perspective, it’s a way to make literature more relevant by relating it to the outside world, or a way to pretend to be engaging with the outside world while still remaining comfortably ensconced in academia. Debates over intellectual jurisdiction often ensue.

To my relief, the presenters at the one-day, single-panel conference didn’t waste time making the case for Law & Lit, opting instead to close-read and cross-examine each other’s arguments. All three panelists questioned the emphasis placed on “historicism” – briefly, the idea that texts should be understood in their historical contexts – and what the over-determined and often undermined term even meant. At one point, Kahn wondered whether “thinking with Shakespeare,” the project proposed in Lupton’s book of the same name, could really be called “historicist,” or if it could better be called simply “thinking.”

The relevance of this particular disciplinary intersection – between early modern law and literature and post-modern law and literature – was perhaps most aptly articulated by Kahn, who, in discussing her paper on “Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza and Arendt,” posited that because early modern texts created the conditions for modernity, looking back on these texts can help us diagnose contemporary problems and give rise to alternative modes of thinking about the present. We might not be so flummoxed by current crises of political theology, from Islamic jihadism to Christian fundamentalism, if we paid better attention to how influential writings on the topic have been read and misread in the past.

The event’s format deviated from the norm of scholars reading their papers and fielding audience questions. Each of the three papers, copies of which were available at the conference, was introduced by another panelist’s commentary, to which the author could then respond; additional comments from other legal and literary scholars followed before the forum was opened up for questions. While feedback was delivered mostly as prepared remarks, the proceedings were enlivened by a spirit of collaborative openness. Kahn’s discussion of Lupton’s paper noted the early modern simultaneity of common law – in which the wife was considered her husband’s property – and canon law, under which a suitor must earn a woman’s consent through courtship. Using this legal lens, Kahn proposed, could lead to an alternative conception of Kate’s personhood in The Taming of the Shrew. Lupton said she found this idea useful, but pointed out that canon law didn’t necessarily endow women with any real agency: a “woman’s consent” to marriage often had little to do with the woman herself, but was instead used as a rhetorical strategy by men (like when Capulet waxed moralistic about his daughter’s consent in Romeo and Juliet).

I didn’t quite follow all this, and I’ve probably grossly misrendered whatever problematic was being (re-)problematized. But I did get the impression that the attendees were really, for the most part, engaging with each other. As someone new to the conference circuit and still at sea in my own field, I found the conversational, mutual-presentation format extremely conducive to, well, not zoning out during talks. No matter how eminently readable, the most riveting arguments can be difficult to follow when recited in monotone; by the time a paper is deemed worthy of sharing, I’ve sensed, the author is already weary of it. Having someone else explain, or question, what the papers were about kept things fresh for both the authors and the audience. For those who hadn’t read the material beforehand, the co-panelists’ commentary – which included both summary and critique – helped both focus the articles’ salient aspects and make them accessible to a diverse audience. I study French and English literature, and I attended the conference with my mother, a recent American History PhD and recovering lawyer, and we both came away invigorated by fresh ideas – this despite her wariness of Comp Lit jargon and my usual response of catatonia when confronted with legalese.

I hope to attend more conferences that work like this: interactive and well-organized, interdisciplinary but intellectually focused on the timely and the timeless, putting literature in conversation with politics without putting it on trial. Though I admit, I never quite figured out how the joint-stools fit in.

Food Rules elaborates and expands Pollan’s pithy food protocol – “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants” – into 64 “rules.” Pollan’s goal is less to chastise than to serve up advice in bite-sized pieces (“Pay more, eat less”) and offer mnemonic devices (“The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead” – yikes!). Pollan recognizes that the standard American diet, invested by corporate money and government policy with an aura of natural inevitability, is a hard habit to break, and complicated criticisms of the food industry’s fourberie can be difficult to digest. Exposing our diet’s absurdities – and offering appetizing alternatives – makes the case better than just telling us over and over that we really shouldn’t be eating those Cheetos.

Pollan is most convincing when he plays the bricoleur, taking useful tools for thinking about food from both nutritional science and traditional wisdom (which, as he demonstrates, is often eventually backed up by science). He counsels us to “eat our colors” because, as mothers have known for centuries, brightly-colored vegetables are good for you (or because, as scientists have recently found out, they contain polyphenols, flavonoids, and carotenoids). His appeal to simplicity helps counter the notion that only well-educated elites have the time and means to enjoy good, healthful food. Not everyone can afford organic, and busy working moms might scoff at “slow food,” but we can all agree to spend less money on soda and stop obsessing over antioxidants. Pollan wants to suggest that, if we just consult our common sense, we can have our occasional local, grass-fed, organic beef and eat it too.

With its piecemeal approach, Food Rules is more concerned with making eating better easy on an everyday basis than with tackling the deeper issues that make eating well so hard. But Pollan does plant the seeds for how our food choices can help restore ethical and economic balance, on a personal and a societal level. Yes, farmers’ market produce can cost more; but cutting back on meat, restaurant meals, and mindless snacking is good for your body, your bank account, and the planet, and that’s no coincidence. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan outlines how traditional agriculture’s perfect economy – cows eat grass; cow manure fertilizes grass; cows eat grass – has been ruptured on both ends: cows eat processed corn; toxic cow manure requires fiscally and environmentally costly storage. It’s easier to see how absurd, unappetizing, and inefficient our diet is by looking not only at multiple pictures, but also at a single bigger picture, by situating our alimentary attitudes in a larger social, political, and economic context.

Some readers of Food Rules may find it not quite substantial enough to satisfy their hunger for nutritional information. The book’s breezy tone, and its reluctance to address its premises, are understandable: publishers, like snack-food manufacturers, push products that require minimal processing on the consumer’s part; we want things that melt in our mouths, not stick in our teeth or wedge stubbornly in our brains. After all, if you suggest too strongly that the way we eat has everything to do with the way we work, sleep, play, medicate, produce, and consume – in short, with the very fabric of our society –  you’ve far exceeded the bounds of a snack-sized airplane read. But for those whose tastebuds are tantalized by Food Rules, Pollan offers up heartier fare in books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, with analysis that, for all its density, is surprisingly easy to swallow (if you’re willing to chew a little first).

Pollan’s philosophy can only become a staple in our cultural cupboard if we abandon the notion that our bodies can be hermetically sealed off from the body politic. Just as we should aim to eat whole foods, not polysyllabic nutrients or numbers of calories, and adopt whole diets (like that of the French) instead of just their most appealing aspects (more red wine, anyone?), we need to live whole lives, choosing diets that make sense in our own social, political, and economic contexts. The fact that “food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies” requires further consideration than the passing acknowledgment Food Rules affords it. Italian cuisine, driven in large part by fresh seasonal produce, may translate better than the Inuit reliance on seal blubber, but even European eating strategies are incompatible with many Americans’ workaday lives. After all, you can only “After lunch, sleep awhile. After dinner, walk a mile,” as rule #54 prescribes, if your schedule allows for siestas.  If Professor Pollan’s students take his advice, he might end up with some sleepy afternoon seminars.

I have to admit that I didn’t feel much of a connection to the Bay Area until relatively recently.  I missed my home, where I was familiar with the local history, geology, and native plants and animals.  Did you know that nearly half of trees species you see around Berkeley and San Francisco are originally from Australia and New Zealand?  I didn’t, until I had a look inside Mike Sullivan’s The Trees of San Francisco, available for check out from the Bioscience and Natural Resources Library.  The blue gum eucalyptus grove, native to Australia, contains the tallest trees on campus, indeed the tallest stand of hardwood trees in North America.

If you don’t have a lot of interest in the not-so-local plants, take a look at Oakland Geology, a blog dedicated to local geology.  Andrew Alden highlights the rocks around town.  According to Alden, “every neighborhood in Oakland with a “mont” in its name has bedrock exposed.”  You’ll know you’ve got it when you can tell the difference between serpentine and blueshist.

An old Sanborn fire insurance map showing the lay of the land along Shattuck Avenue in 1894

Finally, how old is the building you live in?  Was your aging south-side Victorian always chopped up into 12 tiny apartments with hallways for bedrooms?  You can do a little detective work by looking up the old Sanborn fire insurance maps, available digitally through the UC Berkeley library.  It helps to click on the index first to locate the pages containing the street nearest to you.  I found out that my old apartment was built right next to Strawberry Creek before the city moved the stream underground.  Also, most street margins on the major thoroughfares around town have trolley tracks underneath them—the Key Route system served most of the East Bay until it was dismantled as part of the General Motors streetcar conspiracy.  If you happen to live in Oakland, Michael Migurski has done a lot of the heavy cartographic lifting for you at Old Oakland, where you can select and overlay different historical layers.

Welcome to your new home!