Quentin's Weeknotes 12/28/19-01/3/20
This week:
- [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSgHGFuPNus&w=560&h=315]
- I started the week on vacation in Toronto and ended it back at work, in a new year and new decade. I’m mostly trying to get back into the rhythm of the Museum, which will be fairly busy this coming Spring. We’ll have a new exhibit in early February, multiple programs (including our first-in-a-long-time concert next week, featuring John O’Connor), and a big push for some intensive collections work. Also, I’m teaching Collections Management again, which will probably be slightly different this year than in previous iterations, as we have some big external projects that we are going to help with.
- I grabbed a copy of the new Hallelujah the Hills album “I’m you”. It’s a tuneful, strange, exuberantly hopeful album. I’m thinking a lot about this lyric, from the title track:
Don’t quit, it only makes your enemies glad
They’d celebrate your decision, then feast on what you had
The rolling hills of lifer-arcs reflect the light from distant stars
Don’t quit, it only makes your enemies glad
- I finished reading Ann Leckie’s Ancilliary Justice. This is the kind of sci-fi I love, filled with deep, thoughtful meditations about complicated historical issues (in this case, colonialism, slavery, class-conflict, and gender identity) wrapped in unusual and weird narratives. The story centers around the human host of an Artificial Intelligence that once ran an entire spaceship, and how he/she seeks revenge for the ship’s destruction. It’s not surprising to me that she studied with Octavia Butler–both of them share a fascination with working through humanistic ethics, in the face of non-human (or inhuman) conditions.
