bark, trees, talk

A rather undistinguished plane tree trunk outside THH - but its undistinguishedness is, one might say, its crucial characteristic.  It's more or less something that one takes for granted.  That, anyway, was the presumption on which the talk I gave today was built: that tree bark is something (in real life, in a painting) that one takes pretty much for granite [as one of my Rutgers undergrads once wrote in an essay] - but we shouldn't.  And indeed, if we were are bark-eating beetle, or a bark-invading fungus, we wouldn't ... (the talk was actually on "Bark and Beetles").  My thanks to everyone at Case Western's Art History department who not only attended, but who asked great questions - since this was the first full-length airing of what's up to now been an unwritten book chapter, these questions were especially useful in helping me think what else might or might not be there.  Alas - this was all via Zoom - I would so much rather have been in Cleveland in person, and heading off to dinner afterwards, and talking more ... But there was an unexpected other pleasure - because we were on Zoom, there were many, many more cats in the audience than I usually have coming to my talks.