Reading Response/ week 2

For this weeks reading response I have decided to comment on my favorite articles and those that really made an impression on me beginning with "Where the south begins" written by a man who I would affectionately like to refer to as "Panduriform" Zelinsky. It seemed too easy for me to forget that a culture area could be identified by such things as manner of recreation, worship, diet and gestures, to name a few of Zelinsky's examples. Yet, when I read this article it all came back, "of course", I said to myself, "while walking around the different regions in Chile I looked at these things all the time, but to define a culture by them? Definitely, it's those differences that help us to differentiate between, say Chileans and Peruvians, or southern Chileans and the Lake region inhabitant etc". After I got this little clarification off my mind I was able to more fully appreciate what ol' Panduriform was doing with his research. I love to imagine the adventures he must have had while he was "conducting research". One of my favorite southern traits is the roof pattern, I will forever keep an eye out for the structure in movies and when I travel south. The virtual avoidance of paint on barns and sheds was interesting because as I was traveling in the New England area I noticed that all the structures associated with farms and ranches were painted, not just that they were often bright red. It would be interesting to see where the red painting originated and where the line for red barns begins and where it ends.
I will wrap up on this article as I see it is getting a little long and I still have more to say about the others.

My favorite article I read for this week was "Wilbur as Icon" By Peirce F. Lewis. Lewis obviously had special feelings for Zelinsky, not special in the way of two lonely sheep herders in the wild, special in that Lewis admits himself that Zelinsky is in fact an icon of his, but I believe that his feelings blossomed well beyond icon status. Lewis wrote so compassionately that I fell in love with the man.
I appreciated how Lewis was able to look at Zelinsky's work from a professional point of view, "he used his eyes" Lewis says, and after reading "Where the south begins" I am able to appreciate Zelinsky's inquisitive eye myself. I found Zelinsky's article to be fascinating, but it was after reading Lewis's article that I more fully understood where this man was coming from.
Lewis's way of writing was smooth connected, personal and a breeze to read. I would read a thousand pages written by Lewis on Zelinsky, his work and their adventures...

Through reading these two articles alone I have more of an idea on what i want to study as my term paper topic. Not only that, but I am more excited about it now after having my eyes re-opened to all the different ways in which to define a region. I mean come on, roof patterns!
I have taken a lot of notes on this article but feel I should stop soon, I will end with coping one last thing from my notes and that is that "these men tickled my fancy".

"Deforesting the Earth" -Williams
Very interesting~ "places ending in -ing, -ington, or -ham connote settlement in open land whilst -leah, -feld,- and -wood connote wooded places cleared for settlement". The book that this review is, well, reviewing sounds like it has a lot of important content on what I believe to be one of the most important environmental issues facing us today. With that in mind looking at ancient environmental trends it can help us to better understand where we are today environmentally and where we are going. How this relates geographically, the importance of place names to understanding a region.
~on a side note to you Starrs, I am surprised that with only 800 or so pages this book did not make our reading list ; )

"In defense of food" -Lowenthall
What really stuck out for me, as I actually have a lot to say about this article, but I am going to keep it to a minimum, was the need to reword the "eat less meat..." and how those words were turned down, this is not surprising for a country that uses 2 to 3 times more grain than any other country in the world, to feed livestock. Eat less meat as nutritional advice, absolutely preposterous!