Quentin's Weeknotes 2/21/21-2/27/21
This Week:
- On the first of Hartwick’s Spring Semester “Break Days”, we opened the Museum for students and screened “Rumble”, an amazing documentary about the impact and place of Native American people on 20th century popular music.
- I taught categories and nomenclature in Collections Management
- I finished reading Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, a book that’s been with me my entire adult life–I first read it when I was 18, and have re-read it several times since. What brought me back to it this time was QAnon, and its impact on my neighbors and my country, not to mention its sources in our collective historical moment. Eco’s book tells the story of the of a fake conspiracy theory about the Knights Templar, invented as a game by some aging intellectuals and former student radicals, and the consequences when it breaks out of their control. It’s such a rich book, both for Eco’s astonishing grasp of European history, and for his insights about what it means to believe in something that can never be verified, and indeed must never be, lest it would collapse. As I write this, there is a widespread belief that Trump will be inaugurated on March 4th, 2021, based on a convoluted reconstruction of US history that links the real and the fictional, in ways that parallel “the Plan” invented by Casubon, Belbo and Diotallevi in FP. But like FP, violence is a likely outcome of taking apart the the world and remaking it through insinuation and analogy.
