Quentin's Weeknotes 11/29/20-12/5/20
This Week:
- Students in Collectors and Collecting shared their Collection Analysis presentations. We had analyses of baseball cards, comic books, dolls, nativity figurines, designer handbags, and more. It’s one of my favorite parts of the class and I’m always delightfully surprised at what the students find.
- I finished reading the third Dactyl Hill Squad book (“Freedom Run”) with my son. We’ve really enjoyed this early Young Adult series by Daniel Jose Older, and particularly the way in which it blends irreverance (dinosaurs in the Civil War?) with serious topics, such as race, slavery, colonialism, and collective action.
- I finally watched “The Rise of the Skywalker”. Meh. The lightsabre battle on the sunken Death Star was pretty cool.
- I worked on getting some spring programs together, and on some collections research. No spoilers, but some exciting stuff coming up at the Yager Museum.
- Weirdly, I had never got around to reading the prequel to Jeff Smith’s “Bone” Series, entitled “Rose”. I love Bone, and it’s been a great delight to read it with my son. He had grabbed “Rose” from the library, and read it, and recommended it to me, returning the gift. It was a lot of fun; exciting in its own right, and with great callbacks to and enrichment of the original series. Plus, Charles Vess’s art is astonishing and lively.
- I watched the documentary “Tickled”, an amazing story about a cultural journalist from New Zealand who decides to write a light-hearted piece about a series of internet videos purportedly showing young men competitively tickling each other. What follows is a dark and astonishing film that feels almost like a spy thriller, but ends up being a harsh commentary on class and privilege.
