Metropolitan Fringe? Really?

Notes from Geoff Nunberg's "The Long History of the Word 'Suburb'":

Recently, urban planners have been calling the suburb "metropolitan fringe" and "edge cities"...is a new name really going to attract a new wave of suburbanites?

In Europe:
tanneries
gambling houses
slaughter houses

First middle-class setting: London around 1900...but aristocrats still saw it as vulgar and pretentious

Malvina Reynolds (singer of "Little Boxes")...calling suburbs unoriginal: unfair? Is everyone supposed to be a folk singer? Sorry.

Too similar to thesis? Taped in 1996. I can add to this, finding the differences today and using today's adaptations of the suburbs (and maybe reflections of suburbs in the last centuries) to find something out.

Example: Revolutionary Road written 1961, movie taped 2008. What are the differences? Are these effected by time and disassociation?

Hmmm...

Did a bit of damage in the ol' Oxford English today...

So, Chaucher pretty much coined the term "suburb" (or, well, "the suburbe of a toun") in Canterbury Tales! That's 1383! I can't find my copy tonight, but I'll look it up soon...

Also, I'm realizing that the original suburb (probably that to which Chaucer refers), while not the American suburb, could have been more of a class-separation tool than a population-accommodating necessity.

...so does the "sub-" reflect not only to the geography of it all but the "lesser", "lowly" people who lived there?

Maybe not. But I needed to write this.

New idea!!!

My chat with my sister left me with the idea that all hope was lost with the TZ idea...BUT, after chatting with Mr. Engholm, I'm now thinking of doing a creative thesis. Maybe a memoir of my trip (travel journal-esque), my sister's time there (but I don't know if that would be like, "oh, look how great my sister is"), or maybe just something about the whole volunteering, Peace Corps thing...which would include interviews with other volunteers.

...kudos to you if you could follow that sentence.

I could also see what her students (all girls, about my age) think of Americans and maybe focus more on the students. Hmmm.

Links:

US/Tanzania Relationship

In a rut...

So this evening I told my sister all my ideas about the TZ topic, keeping in mind that she knows a lot more than I do on the subject. And she told me it'd be very hard to relate some of the things I'm interested in to her remote village. So it's a bit frustrating, but it was better to find out now than to find myself in a rut later.

And yet I find myself in another rut...

She says that I'll have a lot of time to hang out with her students, and it would be easier to focus my paper on that.

It seems like such a good opportunity to write about TZ, but I'm just having a really hard time finding something both compelling and applicable to my situation...I know I should be waaaay further along in this process.

Journal Entry #2

Today I’m pretty much making mental pro/con lists regarding both of my possible topics. I’m realizing that one of the most difficult things with the TZ one is including the recent Bhutanese events in my analysis of a different third world country, Tanzania. Do I compare the two countries’ situations? Do I include the modernization of Bhutan (and its solution of GNH) at all? Also, how do I include experiences from my time over there without making it personal? I think I have the means to find a lot of support for my paper in Tanzania, with connections in a seriously small village and a sister to serve as my Swahili/English translator, if necessary. However, regardless of roadblocks, this topic holds more connection to my own life than the suburb idea.

But...the suburb idea is still in the running. We'll see...I like how either involves a good bit of interviewing.