Grad School Acronyms

ITL - In the Library

OOL - Out of Library

LOL - Lots of Library

(SOL and FML still retain their same meanings)

I'm just kidding about the last two.  Graduate school is nuts.  It's constant waves and waves of something, and there's not enough time to articulate what that something is.  I think the first and most important skill I'll be learning this semester is how to read efficiently and effectively. Another will be time management -- in particular, knowing when to stop.  All and all I'm loving all of it. I'm still moving into Shepard University, but it is gorgeous as is and we've already thrown two dinner parties (Thursday is sacred).  Today I swam all the way across Walden Pond and saw Thoreau's hut.  When I get the chance, I'll put a photo up.

For now, here's David McCord's poem "What Cheer"

The decent docent doesn't doze;
He teaches standing on his toes.
His student dassn't doze and does.
And that's what teaching is and was.

History of American Civilization

This blog has been many things over the past few years, but wherever I've been and however I've treated it, it's always been a place for me to record things that I think are worth keeping in mind.

This past year has been nuts.  I worked at as a curatorial intern (with stipend!) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, directly under an amazing curator, Elizabeth Kornhauser, who would literally take hours of her time, sometimes daily, just to talk with me about art.  My experience with her was mentorship unparalleled, unbounded with such a wealth of resources that is the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I had the opportunity to give tours to the public, which was a rewarding educational performance.  Every tour I gave, people would stay after and talk with me longer -- I had the freedom to take longer if I chose.  The tour I constructed myself, "Moments of Indecision and Catastrophe" took museum goers to David's Death of Socrates, to Lucas Cranach's Judgment of Paris, to Rubens Venus and Adonis, to Cole's Oxbow, finally to Carpeaux Ugolino.  On my other tour, "Landscapes," I was immensely proud to have people who never before gave more than a passing glance to landscapes whole new perspective on the genre, starting with Breugel's The Harvesters, then El Greco's View of Toledo, Cole's Oxbow, Hannock's Oxbow (to this day I am ashamed I never did an Asian wall scroll of any sort.  I just never felt comfortable enough with my handle of Asian art).

Simultaneously, while I was working at the marble columned pedestal of culture, I was living in Bedford-Stuyvesant with my two best pals, Mario Sosa and Misha Epstein.  Bed-Stuy, do or die, was a place where I did not, and got out of before I did.  I still cannot even really write about the experience because it is something I am still processing over a year after the fact.  Needless to say, between the regular shootings, the repeated burglaries, the sinister threats, I was really glad to move out.

Then I had this really weird two weeks where I essentially worked in the shipping depot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Queens, which was possibly the most monotonous job I've ever done ever, and drove me crazy. This one I can write about, and will soon.

Following that, I worked as a private tutor to the children of one of the wealthiest families in New York City, taking helicopters around New York, flying on private jets to vacations in the Caribbean, Europe, and Mexico, and learning how the other half lives.  At this point, I've seen both halves, and hope to situate myself somewhere comfortably in the middle.

Now I'm living in Cambridge, MA, in what can only be described as the most beautiful apartment I've ever lived in.  My roommates are great, my landlord is great, and I'm studying in my first year for my PhD in American Studies at Harvard.  I'll likely be here for the next six years, so during that time, this blog will become more of a place to post random thoughts and excerpts from what I've read that I find particularly poignant and worth reflection.  I have no idea what exactly I am going to get out of all this, but I have no doubt it will be a tremendous experience.  Hopefully it will also periodically become a travel blog as well!

And may I say, as I said some 4 years ago when I was working at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a place which I love so much, which offered me mentorship, and friends who loved learning for the sake of learning, and such a sincere wealth of knowledge and opportunity (for free!) that I wondered if there was really any need to go anywhere else (and perhaps still wonder periodically), that what I said back then still stands now: Go Obama!

Chapter 87 - The Grand Armada

This passage struck me. Ishmael and the harpooning crews have unexpectedly been pulled into the middle of an enormous pod of sperm whales, the "Grand Armada," where, utterly surrounded and one flick of a fluke from death, Ishmael marvels at the playful newborn calves nudging his boat, and revelates:  

...thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

What a moment. Ishmael and his crew, the hunters, are suddenly a part of an enormous, deistic, revolving clockwork of whales -- their fates, their powers, their deadly potential is instantaneously nullified in this moment of concentric calm. It is a moment of pause in which one's miniscule position in the universe is made smoothly, silently, terrifyingly clear. It is a moment of universal judgment, when one realizes his fate is entirely out of his own hands. And here, the serene pause of judgment:

...we glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.

Yet Ishmael has no real fear of death. In an sense, he has already died -- a suicide -- at page one, when he commits himself to the sea. This, I suppose, explains his extraordinary, revelatory calm in the face of overwhelming danger. Like a samurai, Ishmael has already accepted death, and is therefore able to truly enjoy life, not by clinging to it, but by knowing it is already gone. And so he considers the metaphysical implications of his situation, the idea of a universal calm before the storm, the smooth, serene, calmness that is often the greatest virtue of a magnanimous hero in the face of emergency, and simultaneously the most disturbing and unnerving quality of the sociopath, who, with the same degree of clarity, enacts some gruesome evil. Thankfully, our narrator is Ishmael. He's the magnanimous type (we can look to Ahab for the other sort), whose ruminations recall my favorite lines from Candide:

"What is that--optimism?"
"Why, it is the mania of maintaining that all is well,
even when you are feeling bad."

Anemic Cinema

I mashed together Marcel Duchamp's whirling Anemic Cinema (1926) with The Album Leaf's "Over the Pond."  Duchamp, the notorious upstart, printed these two dimensional "Rotoreliefs" and then spun them on a turntable -- as the images spin, they achieve the illusion of three-dimensionality that is strangely mesmerizing. Paired together with The Album Leaf's measured, oneiric piano, the backdrop of warm bass, and strange, nostalgic vocals (Sigur Ros), the whole invites the viewer to project himself into circles.

For a translation of Duchamps' punful, playful, spiral phrases, see Katrina Martin's article.

The Blood of a Poet

I mashed Jean Cocteau's 1930 silent film Le Sang d'un Poète together with Gui Boratto's remixed "Paradise Circus." The original film is cut very differently -- the way I've cut it presents the story as more of a retelling of the "Galatea and Pygmalion" myth, but it preserves much of Cocteau' ingenious representations of the artistic psyche.  Enjoy!

Measuring Intelligence

The best measure of intelligence that I can think of (barring of course SATs, ACTs, Mensa testing, IQ tests, phrenology, physiognomy, and magic) is the extent to which one can make what is in his or her mind occur in reality.  There are many, many types of intelligence -- Leonardo da Vinci was a genius of drawing, Paganini of the violin, J.P. Morgan of business and money, Melville of writing -- all measured by the extent to which a given person can make what they imagine come to life.

This is not to be confused with a measure of goodness. Goodness has much more to do with what you imagine in the first place.

Are you smart enough to trick yourself?

Vasstalgia

"You never liked me at college," says the character Norine in The Group. "None of your crowd did." How many of us have said the same thing, to ourselves if to no one else? How many of us have felt betrayed by that mythic essence? How many of us have lain awake at night in fear that our professors were on to our fraudulence, that our friends secretly hated us, that the admissions office let us in by mistake? How many of us regularly revisit Vassar in our dreams, wherein we retrace our steps through the quad as if searching for a lost item, wherein we have the nagging feeling that we've forgotten to do something, though we don't know what it is?

All of us, I suspect. Mythic qualities tend to have that effect. Vassar captures the imagination even as it breaks the heart. And isn't that what keeps us coming back for more?