These came late, but I have some goals here:
1. Long term goal: Become a member of the Newbery Medal committee and Caldecott committee so I can officially read and judge children's books. How does that even work? How fantastic would that be?--to meet the people at these conferences, to have direct insight into the world of children's lit? I wonder if I could get Steven Brown into this idea.
2. Exercise more. 5x/week. So far so good.
3. Become a Resident Tutor so I can better participate as a friend and mentor in this fantastic community of young geniuses noodling about in Cambridge. Re-orient all your random art projects to include the skills and interests of your students. Collaborate.
4. Figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my stocks. Keep my eye on that.
5. Travel someplace interesting this summer. I think I need to walk a great distance. "Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike."
6. Finish your dissertation prospectus. This is actually goal number 1.
7. Re-write your old papers and publish them in non-academic places. This is a silly goal but I want to do something with them. No one really wants to read academic journals and only two of these papers are worth the effort. Publish your stuff all over the place where people actually like to read and you can have more fun of it without all the academic futzing. Orient your research so you can justify traveling to neat collections in the process.
8. Try and win that darn Bowdoin Prize. Quit telling people about it because Steven Brown will kick your butt at this thing.
9. Drink more water. Lots more.
10. Get higher than a 4.5 on your Q scores.
11. Gracefully turn 27.
12. Structure your movie-watching more productively. Something old, something popular, something artsy. Brattle Theater should help you here.
13. MUCH more effort to eat my meals with people. Spend more time tasting your food and paying attention to all the interesting people you're surrounded by.
14. Sunday should be a day for learning to cook something new, and making it in amounts that it covers your lunch for a couple days.
15. More lists, thanks to Umberto Eco.
16. Once you get your camera, start hunting Messier objects.
hmm I suppose I should think about long term goals...
=Learn Italian and Spanish conversationally.
=Work on your Melville & Renaissance research with an i Tatti fellowship.
=Work with Rachel Sussman on her chrono-art.
=Find a way to make it to the AZ telescope, Mauna Kea, and Chile.
=Study under a Hilla Rebay fellowship.
Summer Reading Lists:
Read through the Newbery books.
Read through the Hugo Award books.
Read through your compiled Education books, and begin working on that philosophy.
Lists: Umberto Eco has given words to something you've always loved. The organizing aggregative force of lists...
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
In memoriam Walter Liedtke
My favorite memory of Walter Liedtke was when he was giving our intern group a tour of the Dutch and Flemish Galleries of the Met, and, gesticulating vigorously, he unintentionally, unmistakably, loudly, rapped the surface of one of the Met's Vermeers with his knuckle.
The whole gallery went absolutely silent.
And he just went on... "When you're a curator, you can do that sort of thing!"
What a tremendous loss.
What a tremendous loss.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Norman Mailer's Lego Utopia
Today I learned that Norman Mailer built a 7-foot tall Lego utopia which he keeps in his apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
"Thirty-three years later, however, the city still stands in Mailer’s living room in Brooklyn Heights, and its creator remains enthusiastic about his project. “It was very much opposed to Le Corbusier. I kept thinking of Mont-Saint-Michel,” he explains. “Each Lego brick represents an apartment. There’d be something like twelve thousand apartments. The philosophers would live at the top. The call girls would live in the white bricks, and the corporate executives would live in the black.” The cloud-level towers, apparently, would be linked by looping wires. “Once it was cabled up, those who were adventurous could slide down. It would be great fun to start the day off. Put Starbucks out of business.”
I wonder where it is now that he has passed away?
"Thirty-three years later, however, the city still stands in Mailer’s living room in Brooklyn Heights, and its creator remains enthusiastic about his project. “It was very much opposed to Le Corbusier. I kept thinking of Mont-Saint-Michel,” he explains. “Each Lego brick represents an apartment. There’d be something like twelve thousand apartments. The philosophers would live at the top. The call girls would live in the white bricks, and the corporate executives would live in the black.” The cloud-level towers, apparently, would be linked by looping wires. “Once it was cabled up, those who were adventurous could slide down. It would be great fun to start the day off. Put Starbucks out of business.”
I wonder where it is now that he has passed away?
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Louis Adamic on BMC
All quotes from Harper's Monthly Magazine, "Education on a Mountain"
"They [the students] swim in intellgience and the desire to improve themselves. Then uncertainty steals upon them, and they sink again into depression. Not that the process ends here. They are continuous waves" (524)
"Men suffer most from unacknowledged self-contempt... He tries to act in such a way that he will be respected by others, and he becomes confused into thinking finally that this assumed self-respect he has pawned off on others is a reality. But underneath he knows or feels that it is all a lie. Behind the front he offers to the world he is a disorderly person. He never knows when he walks into a room but that the enemy is waiting for him, ready to show him up for the liar he is. And yet, unconsciously, he longs for this very thing to happen to him. But at the first onslaught of the real enemy he will fight as if he were a real enemy instead of a friend. He has constructed and elaborately decorated the superficial self that he is to present to society. It is as if he wore a carefully designed [pasteboard] mask, to the making of which he ha s given the most tender care, and behind this lives the real man, growing increasingly chaotic, miserable, and unhappy, longing for his deliverer but ready to receive him as an enemy. The task of the college is to be his enemy-friend [frenemy]: the bitter enemy of the superficial self, the friend of the real self. But the real one is starved, emaciated. It must be fed back to life, while the superficial one must be attacked without mercy." [524]
"[John Andrew Rice says] A good teacher is always more a learner than teacher, making the demand of everyone to be taught something....A man who never asks himself any questions had better not try asking others....A teacher must have something of humor, a deeply laid irony, and not be a cynic. In the center of his being should be a calm, quiet, tough. ["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."] He must have in him the principle of growth; like the student, a sense of justice and a great capacity for dejection.
Teachers in a place like this, where education is taken seriously, should always bear in mind that they are the central problem; that we would provide the students with a liberal education if we merely gave them the privilege of looking on while we educated ourselves. Also, that it's wrong for us to want others to be like ourselves; that we must want to attend to being the sort of people that others ought to be like." (526)
"They [the students] swim in intellgience and the desire to improve themselves. Then uncertainty steals upon them, and they sink again into depression. Not that the process ends here. They are continuous waves" (524)
"Men suffer most from unacknowledged self-contempt... He tries to act in such a way that he will be respected by others, and he becomes confused into thinking finally that this assumed self-respect he has pawned off on others is a reality. But underneath he knows or feels that it is all a lie. Behind the front he offers to the world he is a disorderly person. He never knows when he walks into a room but that the enemy is waiting for him, ready to show him up for the liar he is. And yet, unconsciously, he longs for this very thing to happen to him. But at the first onslaught of the real enemy he will fight as if he were a real enemy instead of a friend. He has constructed and elaborately decorated the superficial self that he is to present to society. It is as if he wore a carefully designed [pasteboard] mask, to the making of which he ha s given the most tender care, and behind this lives the real man, growing increasingly chaotic, miserable, and unhappy, longing for his deliverer but ready to receive him as an enemy. The task of the college is to be his enemy-friend [frenemy]: the bitter enemy of the superficial self, the friend of the real self. But the real one is starved, emaciated. It must be fed back to life, while the superficial one must be attacked without mercy." [524]
"[John Andrew Rice says] A good teacher is always more a learner than teacher, making the demand of everyone to be taught something....A man who never asks himself any questions had better not try asking others....A teacher must have something of humor, a deeply laid irony, and not be a cynic. In the center of his being should be a calm, quiet, tough. ["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."] He must have in him the principle of growth; like the student, a sense of justice and a great capacity for dejection.
Teachers in a place like this, where education is taken seriously, should always bear in mind that they are the central problem; that we would provide the students with a liberal education if we merely gave them the privilege of looking on while we educated ourselves. Also, that it's wrong for us to want others to be like ourselves; that we must want to attend to being the sort of people that others ought to be like." (526)
Poems as Constellations
Approach to the poem must be from afar off, even generations off. A reader should close in on it on converging lines from many directions like the divisions of an army upon a battlefield. A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very little out of A) .We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do.
Robert Frost, "The Prerequisites," Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966) , p. 97.
[W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. ...The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.
T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 23.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Whow‽
I invented a new word today when I had a pen stutter while annotating:
"Whow"
"Whow" expresses both the exclamation of surprise (wow!) and the question implied ("but how was it done?") -- best coupled with the new hybrid punctuation "?!", the so called "interrobang":‽
Another neologism tonight: "connecticanadian" (noun or adjective), must be said aloud for full effect "con-ECT-uh-kuh-NAY-dee-an" -- refers to a Canadian transplant to CT; very friendly, garrulous type, says "sohwry" a lot, usually Caucasian.
"Whow"
"Whow" expresses both the exclamation of surprise (wow!) and the question implied ("but how was it done?") -- best coupled with the new hybrid punctuation "?!", the so called "interrobang":‽
Another neologism tonight: "connecticanadian" (noun or adjective), must be said aloud for full effect "con-ECT-uh-kuh-NAY-dee-an" -- refers to a Canadian transplant to CT; very friendly, garrulous type, says "sohwry" a lot, usually Caucasian.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Brave New World
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.
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