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"If These Trees Could Talk",,"A cold morning in February and a sun still shy to rise, it's time to harvest olives! As all the baggage is ready from the day before, there are only mud drooling roads to worry about (once the sun makes up his mind). Soon water runs down my back too, so, when the shadows are the shortest, I decide to take a piece of clothing off.
One more tree despoiled, we stage nets under the next and hit the branches with our long sticks until the last olive has fallen. Next tree. Be careful to not spill any olives from the nets! Next line. Will we finish the whole field today? Before the day comes to a close, we fill up the last sacks and hurry to deliver the harvest.
Unsurprisingly, the prize barely covers the cost for the whole endeavor. As usual, fewer and older people come to deliver their harvest too. I cannot help but to ask: am I the last generation to take on such a task? Gasoline has replaced the mule, my nets are made of durable nylon thread, the fabrics that cover my skin are as natural as the wheels of our car. And I know that the result of this harvest does not change my daily modern life.
Soon, only a handful of agricultural engineers will be needed to harvest the whole shire. Efficient, like no one in the countryside before, they ride the new engines that collect each tree with appalling speed. Yet, something does not feel right. Maybe I am romanticizing the past, inventing a countryside without flies. Trading my modern amenities for the hardships of a farmer in the past does not sound that bad, at least, when I think of it from my air conditioned office. My suspicion of the machine, perhaps, is a disguise for a yearning for a simpler time. Yet, it has been around a decade since I last harvested olives. But still now, I cannot stop to wonder: does the olive tree prefer a mechanical hug, or a human beating?",,,,2010,"Fernan Gomez-Monedero, 33, Ph.D. student",,,,,,if-trees-could-talk,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC Graduate Student Summer Residency","Agriculture,Modernity,Nostalgia,Self-Realization",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/465/olivo-3728377_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Sounds of a Thing in Indiana",,"The following text is a transcript of the above recording.
My name is Daun Fields, I’m a punk singer and a Ph.D. student at the University of Florida. I’m 42 and this is my Humanities Moment.
So, my humanities object is the Fisher Price tape recorder. It’s a brown, chunky, hard plastic kid’s tape recorder from the 80’s. It was manufactured by Fisher Price from 1981-1987. The space in which it existed in my life was in the very back room of a (four room) single-wide trailer in southern Indiana, Franklin, Indiana, in a bustling trailer park. The back room of the trailer was my younger sister Jessie and my bedroom. We had a bunk bed, the walls were stacked with board games and dressers and toys, and in the corner of that room was a taxidermied barn owl. Which was illegal to have in the state at that time and I think still is. At that time that’s what that space looked like. This tape recorder, I suppose I chose it because it was the first time that I ever heard my own voice projected back to me and I was probably 7, or maybe 7 or 8 years old around that time.
The reason I chose this object is because, looking back, in that moment when I first heard my voice back to me, I realized that there was a lot of the world and sounds in the world and words that people said and sounds that came out of humans that I could save. That I could stop, and rewind, and listen back to them. So instead of always kind of replaying things in my mind, which I did as a child, being musically inclined from a really young age, hearing songs and being able to sing the words right back and sing the melodies right back and always kind of having songs in my head and singing out loud and humming and being really focused on sound and melody and the way that people talked; the volume at which they talked or the pitch at which they talked or the music playing in the grocery store and things like that...this tape recorder was such a big thing. It was just such a big thing in my life.
One of the things my sister and I would do is we would record ourselves playing cards. So we would play Slapjack or we would play GoFish and all these card games that were really exciting that would just get us laughin’. We would record ourselves playing those games and then record ourselves laughing. One of the interesting--I think maybe a better word--important or more profound reasons this tape recorder was so, just, I guess so powerful for me, is because I would record things and it wouldn’t necessarily be like I would record now as an adult. How I would record vocals or background sounds that you would want to edit out or you would want to filter and compress and get everything sounding really perfect, or the pitch, or the autotune. It really was just, you would hit record, and any sounds going on around the area would also pick up. So it was more just a full soundscape. Looking back, it really reminds me of how much is always happening. That it may not just be this one singer singing this song or this one person speaking. But there’s all of this other life that’s happening all around.
I would record my sister and I laughing or playing cards. Sometimes when my mom and dad would be fighting a couple of rooms up in the front of the trailer My sister and I would get really quiet and get behind the door and we would record them. And I would have these fights that I would have on tape and I would listen back to them. I’d listen back to them and I would hear my mom, who was very quiet normally, her voice would be very deep and she would be really loud. And sometimes the fights would go on for a long time and eventually I didn’t want to listen to those again so I would stop, rewind, and then I would go maybe into a different space. I would go outside, or I would go to my grandma’s house where it was really quiet, in a big brick farmhouse that was about two miles from the trailer park--really close--surrounded by nature, surrounded by cornfields, and I would record the cats in the barn. I would record the dog or I would record myself kind of singing along with the creek or my sister and I singing a song we learned in church, at the Baptist church down the street.
When I would listen back to these recordings, I was just listening. I wasn’t listening to find mistakes, I wasn’t listening with notes or ideas on how to improve the next time. And that object itself, that chunky, hard plastic, brown, corduroy brown, corduroy 1980’s brown, two-toned tape recorder, it really shifted me. It helped me to hear myself. It helped me to, I suppose, understand that I was a thing, just like the bird that I recorded or the cat that I recorded, or the humans that I recorded--that I was also a thing. That I had sound to contribute. And I had things to sing.
",,"Fisher-Price Tape Recorder",,1986,"Daun Fields, 42, Punk Singer, Ph.D. Student in English, University of Florida",,,,,,sound-of-a-thing-indiana,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"NHC Summer Residency Program","Creativity,Families,Nostalgia,Self-Realization,Sound Engineering",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/468/cassette3.jpeg,"Moving Image","Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"It Really is Gonna be Alright... ",,"In the Fall of 2016, I started putting together application materials to begin my Masters program. I had so much anxiety going into the process and a lot of life changing questions– do I want to continue with the theatre? Am I ready to leave my family and study in another country? The longest I had gone without seeing my family was maybe two months in college.
One day, while working on my materials and going through the motions, ""Every Little Thing Is Gonna Be Alright"" by Bob Marley just came to mind and I started to hum the song. I stopped working and played the whole song on my phone before I went back to work. This was a song my mom who died of cancer would sing all the time– and in that moment, I felt her and I felt peace. It felt like she was trying to say something, to comfort me. I could hear her telling me I could do it or that I was ready for the next chapter of my life.
I finished my Masters and even went on to enroll in a Ph.D. program. To this day, whenever I feel my anxiety creeping up or whenever I feel myself falling into a dark place, I just sing that song and cry a little. After that, I feel great– a sense of calm and peace just takes over. It is not a magic wand that makes the challenge disappear– however, it provides me with little moments of calm and clarity to solve the problem. (And knowing that it is like my special time with my mother makes it even better.)","Bob Marley","""Every Little Thing is Gonna Be Alright""",,"Fall 2016","Irene Gasarah, Ph.D. Student ",,,,,,really-gonna-be-alright,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Comfort,Connection,Family,Marley, Bob,Music,Nostalgia,Song Lyrics,Songs",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/495/nature-3219116_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0