by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 01/27/24-02/03/24

weeknotes family music museum teaching writing

This Week:

  • We had a birthday party for my daughter at our house. Ten kids, nine adults, games, crafts, and food. Whew! it was a great old time.
  • I splurged on a couple of albums at bandcamp. I picked up “You’re Dead” by Flying Lotus and “Desire, I want to Turn Into you” by Caroline Polachek. The former is an electro-jazz-rap freak out that is daunting, strange, and fun. The latter is a full of spare, catchy pop that I can’t stop listening to, particularly “Bunny is a Rider” and “Sunset”.
  • I did some work getting the Museum ready for Hartwick’s Spring semester, setting up the work study schedule, and getting my syllabus together for the Collections Management practicum that I will be teaching.
  • I started working with a student intern from SUNY Oneonta, who is going to help set up some new display cases this semester.
  • I also did some work on NAGPRA and repatriation, both getting the galleries in compliance with the new “duty of care” regulations, and moving an object in our collection slightly closer to repatriation.
  • I wrote a rec letter for a student for a summer fellowship. I hope she gets it.
  • I finished reading Dwight Swain’s “Techniques of the Selling writer”, and am writing up some notes about it.Swain was a pulp writer who ended up teaching creative writing at the University of Oklahoma, and his mechanistic and didactic approach to fiction structure is helping focus my often flighty and loose writing tendencies. At the same time, the book is definitely a product of its time, with some casual racism and sexism that makes it a frustrating read when you’re trying to get at his techniques and methods.