Quentin's Weeknotes 5/11/19-5/17/19

This Week:

• I finished watching Under the Skin, also known as the Scarlet Johansen alien movie. It was weird and sort of poetic, but also with not much beyond what's on the surface (ironic, given the title). 

  via GIPHY

• I finished teaching my Collections Management class. This semester, my students did projects where they created a concordance between old and new numbering systems, researched the provenance of some mysterious prints, and prepared a selection of objects to go on exhibit, respectively. Along the way we learned about basic artifact handling, dipped our toes into Museum database management, washed and waxed a piece of outdoor sculpture, and watched a clip from an important piece of Museum film scholarship.
  
• I celebrated my son's sixth birthday. Six was a good year for me, filled with new friends, new things to learn, and new experiences, and I hope it will be for him too.

Quentin's Weeknotes 5/4/19-5/10/19

This Week:

• My boy and I attended an ancient festival, celebrated across the land. Thanks to the
  Secret Comix Cave in West Oneonta for putting on such a great shindig.
  
• I read Alex Pareene's piece in The Baffler entitled "Teenage Pricks," in which he thinks through the ways in which Trump's behavior has impacted children, especially teenage boys. It's an interesting and well-written essay, but I was especially struck by this paragraph, discussing why the modern conservative movement has such a youth problem:

"Trumpism’s pitch to young white men is thus a stirringly amoral sort of syllogism: we can’t give you anything material, because we stole it all and are hoarding it, but we can create a world in which you can regularly act on your worst impulses and get away with it. Some city kids are coming to town; here’s a way to racially mock them that won’t get us in trouble."

This is essentially a bite-sized and modern version of David Roediger's argument in "The Wages of Whiteness", itself drawn from W.E.B. Du Bois's assertion of a "psychological wage" given to white workers after the Civil War, to offset their lack of material gains (and to keep them from forming a multi-racial labor party). History repeats itself. 

Quentin's Weeknotes 4/27/19-5/3/19

This Week:

• Well, actualy it was last week, but not posted in the chaos...The Yager Museum hosted Amberdawn Lafrance, the Cultural Restoration Manager for the St. Regis Mohawk Nation in Akwesasne, NY. St.Regis/Akwesasne straddles the New York-Canadian Border along the St. Lawrence River. It's seen an astonishing amount of pollution, development, and environmental degredation over the last 200 years, and the St. Regis Mohawk have recently won some important legal battles to get it cleaned up. Lafrance talked about the results of one of those battles, which is the Cultural Restoration program she heads. The program brings together Mohawk youth and elders, where the former learn important environmental, subsistence, and cultural practices from the latter--a form of cultural revitalization that doubles as environmental restoration. Plus, the course is taught entirely in the Mohawk language. It was an inspiring and insightful look into what sustainability looks like from an Indigenous perspective, and was a great capstone to our year-long Indigenous Speakers series.
• The Reigning Sound's cover of Sam and Dave's "You Got me Hummin'" is the Nitroglycerin in my engine this week:
• The Yager Museum had a reception for its newest exhibit "Silent Lakes and Flashing Rivers: 20th Century Fishing Cultures in Temagami." This exhibit was conceived, curated, and installed by students in Hartwick's Museum Studies course and focuses on the impact of fishing tourism on the Temagami region of Ontario, particularly on Indigenous communities there. The exhibit looks amazing and I'm really proud of the work the students did.

Quentin's Weeknotes 4/20/19-4/26/19

This week:

• I visited Toronto with my family for the Easter weekend.
• While there, I visited the Great Escape bookshop on Kingston Road. It's very close to my mother-in-law's house, but I find that I don't go there as much as I would like. Despite that, I'm glad I did, as I bought quite a few long-waitlisted treats including this one.
• And, as if on cue, M. John Harrison reminds me of the anxiety that attends being a book collector:

Quentin's Weeknotes 4/13/19-4/19/19

This week:

• I finished Rebecca Solnit's book "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities." The book is a love letter to activism, even in the darkest times. My favorite line, in its implications and in its poetry is

"The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave."

• The Yager Museum hosted its "Family afternoon at the Museum." This is our annual event for families and children, and the Museum was filled with games, crafts, food, and activities. I want to thank Buran from Bearded Dragon Games for bringing tabletop fun, and all of the students who worked and volunteered to make the event a success.
• I helped de-install our exhibit "Along the Rails: Willard Yager, Native American Art and 20th Century Tourism." This exhibit was curated by students in our Museum Studies program at Hartwick and was my first experience seeing an exhibit go from conception to installation. I'm proud of it, and am looking forward to the next student curated exhibit that will replace it.