On regionalism

I recently mentioned how I came back from Portland with roughly 20 pounds of books.

These are just some of the themed books that seemed most interesting to the cultural explorer in me. The first one that I decided to pick up once I put all my other goodies away was Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas by Hunter Shobe and David Banis.

Here Professor Hunter Shobe discusses his and Professor David Banis‘s book in a talk at Portland State University. I saw this a few weeks prior to leaving for the northwest and almost couldn’t wait to find my way to Powell’s City of Books for my own copy.

I can’t exactly buy books on Portland from Amazon.de now, can I – NO! Doesn’t this book seem super interesting though?

A little personal history, while I was working on my master degree at Portland State University, I was required to fulfill 8 credits (two courses) of Geography. Well, the first course was something utterly titillating like, ‘Geography 101’. Seriously, it was so dry and boring it made me want to run fast and far away from the topic, in fact I barely received a C- in the class, which as an adult student paying my own way through college, with a strong sense of purpose, is something I made sure to rarely do. It was a struggle to even earn that grade though,  if I had received a worse grade, I would have had to fail out of my degree program – it was THAT strict! However, the second course I took to fulfill my prerequisite was a course on human geography taught by Professor Hunter Shobe.

As I hope you can tell by the PDX TALKS video, the man knows how to command a room and tell a story. This was one of my favorite classes OF ALL TIME at the university. If I had only known this before taking the other course – I would have never taken the other course!! He is such an engaging teacher, the learning seemed to sort of happen. I really enjoy being around inspiring people like that!

So, in the near future I hope to finish the book and reflect on the Portland I remember,the one presented in this book, and the one I encountered on my last visit home. I look forward to sharing and I hope you look forward to reading it!