Quentin's Weeknotes 2/6/22-2/11/22
This Week:
- I re-read M. John Harrison’s masterful novel “Light”, a book about quantum mechanics, exploration, and the tensions of running from or embracing immediate experience. I first read it almost 10 years ago, and enjoyed it, though I had not yet spent as much time with Harrison’s understated, exacting prose as I have since then. As such, I think I was a little bewildered by this novel, which follows three interlinked narratives across hundreds (actually billions) of years and hundreds of millions of miles, and contains so much weird but plausible future-speculation alongside its rich explorations of human fraility, self-involvement and self-deception. This time around, I was astonished and delighted by how well Harrison sticks the landing of its ending (which he ironically but emphatically calls “The Beginning”), despite all of this abstraction and complexity.
- I started teaching MUST204: collections management again. I’m trying to shift it towards more of an “ungraded” model, following on the work of educational scholars who are critical of our late-Victorian grading system. We jumped right in with basic object handling!
- I purchased the beautiful and haunting self-titled album by Doran. They’ve constructed their own folk-music language which I find enticing and foreboding in equal measure. This song is a good example, with its combination of gentle chanting, affection for nature, and lurking magic:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8XpnyEmCzw&w=560&h=315]
- My wife and I worked our way through Staged, a wonderfully funny BBC series in which David Tennant and Michael Sheen star as outsized versions of themselves during COVID lockdown, trying to rehearse a play that was postponed by the pandemic. It was filmed largely on Zoom and has featured some wonderful cameos by Samuel Jackson, Adrian Lester, and Judi Dench. Well worth your time.
- I did some design work, and some planning on our just-about-to-open exhibit “Juxtapositions: Warhol and the Baroque”
