I've reached that point when I've stopped fiddling around with readings - I think! - and am now committing myself to what each of three ten-minute videos for each class will be - one setting the context for the readings, and posing some questions; one close analysis of an image or, occasionally, pair of images; one slightly off-beat excursion into a linked issue (my way of trying to expand the material in an over-compressed course). This is making me feel wonderfully organized and in control, which is probably an illusion. Moth was extraordinarily useful as a paper-weight and as a sounding board for ideas: eventually I managed to fit in Frederic Church's The Heart of the Andes alongside Italianate ruins by Robert Duncanson and, of course crumbled-Empire ones at the hands of Cole (and Charleston post Civil War, and the burnt out corpse of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco as purpose-built ruin) - asking the question of where we find ruination and decay as part of a Humboldtian/Darwinian natural process? Ummm, yes: perhaps I'm being over-ambitious, but I'm having fun.
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