USC - on campus and back home

I made two brief visits to the protest on campus day - brief, because of graduate exam, and aching (and bandaged) head.  What I saw was peaceful, good tempered, and conducted in the spirit of wanting peace - with Muslims, Jews, and people who most likely identify as neither, but know murderous wrong-doing when they see it.  They had a program for the day, pinned to a tree - including yoga and meditation, poetry reading, reporting on Palestine, an Israelism discussion, a Kaddish reading and a sunset vigil.  What did the University end up doing?  There was an escalating number of Trojan Alerts; and of closures on campus; a half-hearted and mealy-mouthed letter from the Provost (probably written by McKinsey & Co) which made a limp attempt to say oh yes, we do support free speech - and then, by the time I was home, the LAPD were there in force, rubber bullets and riot batons at the ready.  Although I don't think I knew any of the protestors who remained in the center of Alumni Park calmly waiting to be arrested (after being told to vacate for trespassing.  Trespassing? Really? In the center of campus?) I was proud how they calmly and, yes, peacefully, one by one, gave themselves up to be arrested.

Moth's expression shows how horrified she was by the turn of events.

We're told that we can teach on-line tomorrow, if we like.  NO WAY am I missing teaching my last undergrad class of the semester in person!  I have just taken a fine batch of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven.

 

classroom cover-up

It seemed the only possible way to teach without looking like a Hallowe'en zombie: I was delighted when a student told me that I Rocked That Hat.  In turn, I told the class that my work with them would be done if they all made sure that their parents and grandparents and of course themselves had their skin checked regularly ... then we slid back into normal gear and discussed the function/destruction/preservation of monuments (and I showed them the first ten minutes of the Met's video about the making of the Seneca Village Afro-Futurist installation, too).

Yes - it still hurts, especially where they had to press into the side of my head to stop veins from bleeding - that feels as though I've been thumped with a small mallet.  But better today than yesterday ... and thank you, everyone, for your concern!

 

the abstraction of waiting rooms

 

Not that I myself was lost in abstract thought - plenty of teaching prep for the week - the last week of teaching! - to get me through ... Reader: wear sunscreen.  Admittedly, the damage done to my skin - which needed two small skin cancers removed from it today - was probably done on French and Greek beaches in the 1970s, but all the same.  And think yourself lucky I'm not posting images of my huge stitched flaps (there's not a lot of skin round one's hairline) not of my bandaged, Bride of Dracula self (the bandages will shrink a bit in a day or two).  Of course I took documentary selfies of such things as I was being patched up. I may try and conceal myself on campus under a floppy hat.  Also, it hurts (that's to be expected, apparently). Also I will probably have a black eye tomorrow or the next day.  Better off/out than on, but youch.

it's spring! let me out!

I don't believe that I've ever fully noticed before that among the galloping horses on the Bryant Park carousel that there's a galloping orange cat - still shrouded in winter protected plastic.  Presumably he'll be liberated soon.

I'm now back in LA, and it's the last week of the teaching semester coming up ...

 

spring in NYC (and some painting details)

When spring arrives in New York, it can be absolutely stunning - and I was lucky today ... Largely I was in the Met, visiting the Harlem Renaissance show, which is every bit as good as everyone says (go, if you haven't already, and you can ...).  This is from one of my very favorite pictures there, Palmer Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints, from c. 1937 - indeed, Hayden was something of a revelation to me.

Five rooms, maybe, later, a woman turned to another behind me - but ever so much so that I could hear - "This lady's only taking fotos of cats."  (this is from William Johnson's Mom and Dad).  Well .... er ... not quite guilty as charged: 

... there was a wonderful flash photographer in Jacob Lawrence's The Photographer (1942) - how have I missed that before? unlike so many of the paintings here, it's actually owned by the Met.

So very many good things - I'll just add Horace Pippin's The Artist's Wife (1936).

Then downstairs, this collaboratively constructed and curated Afro-Futurist room, Before Yesterday We Could Fly, building on the history, excavations, and imagined futurity of Seneca Village [that largely Black (with some Irish) community that was "cleared" when Central Park was constructed...this opened just after my last visit to the Met, and I can't wait to share this with my students next week, since we discussed Seneca Village earlier in the semester in the context of Central Park.

And of course, having been talking about Jerome Thompson's painting, I went to say hello to it (and photographed a few details so that I have some even clear images than I currently do of details), 

and - this is real research! 😀 - found a dandelion that was new to me, in Bierstadt's Lander's Peak - since that's an invented mountain, it's almost certainly an imagined plant, too ...

 

other people's departments

Having this framed Frank Stella poster for the Attica Defense Fund in one's corridor rather raises the bar: we have posters for LACMA, back in Taper Hall.  (The Attica Rebellion, as you'll recollect, was a protest in 1971 that took place in the Attica Prison in upstate New York, against racial disparity there, inhumane living conditions, and demanding that prisoners be granted political rights: it led to the deaths of 33 inmates and 10 officers/employees of the correctional facility). It's a pretty sobering reminder, as one comes up the stairs towards Princeton's Art and Architecture reminder, that even if the rebellion led to some relatively short-term improvements, things slid back again: a far cry from being served danish pastries and fruit and coffee before I led a seminar with a terrific group of 14 or so students.  And one subsequently sent me some slug art I didn't previously know!  It's really invigorating - I know I said this yesterday - to spend a couple of days outside one's customary intellectual habitat.

propitious?

So ... I might have been talking about Bark today (tree bark, not canine voices), but the paper that I'm workshopping/discussing tomorrow morning (plus some other readings) with what seem like a super-smart load of graduate students here at Princeton is on ... yes, Dandelions.  So it should go well, no?  It's been really great being back here: just half an hour in Labyrinth Books, opposite the campus, had me feeling that this was a world in which history/the humanities actually mattered - as did the response to my talk, and dinner afterwards.  Sometimes (and perhaps this is especially true towards the end of a semester) a day or so of academic life away from home base is exactly what one needs to get one's brain and spirits working again.