by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 3/24/24-3/30/24

weeknotes teaching museum books indigenous

This Week:

  • In Collections Management, we washed and waxed the outdoor statue by Konaver, and talked about caring for metal objects and textiles. We also held our week 7/mid-term assessment meetings.
  • We had our opening reception for our newest exhibit “No Childs Play: The Impressionist paintings of Anna Richards Brewster”. It was a great event for a delightful art exhibit.
  • I did some work on a repatriation grant, as well as on some future potential grants.
  • I made some progress on prepping for our upcoming talk by Neal Powless.
  • I finished reading “The Magician’s Nephew” by CS Lewis with Dominic. This was a fitting prequel for the Narnia series, funny and strange and with all kinds of references and call-backs. I liked it considerably better than “The Last Battle” which I thought was kind of dour and abrupt. We’ve now gone through the whole Narnia series, and while I didn’t have as much as with Earthsea, it was fun to read with Dominic.
  • I also finished reading “The Centauri Device” by M John Harrison. It has been described as one of the opening salvos of “the New Space Opera”, but I didn’t have the background in the sub-genre before reading this, and so I’m kind of blind to all that baggage. It’s a murky and inventive book, where the main character is a drug-running (and addicted) ex-soldier and self-described loser, who gets caught up in a horrifically violent interstellar conflict. His ultimate heroism derives from his refusing to take sides in this pointless endeavor, and instead to choose to side with the refugees, the poor, and the victimized of the universe. It has all of Harrison’s hallmarks of gorgeous and pointed prose, an obsession with landscapes, and discomfort with the trappings of genre. At the same time, it doesn’t move outside of genre or critique it the way that his later works would so successfully do.