Weeknotes: 08/27/23-09/2/23

This Week:

• On Sunday, I travelled to Northampton, Massachusetts to memorialize my mentor and friend, Bob Paynter, who died earlier this year. It was a sad and beautiful evening, full of laughter and tears and reconnection with old friends and colleagues, and plenty of great Bob stories. I was very honored to be asked to speak as one of Bob’s students, and I tried to capture what made him such an amazing educator and person.
• The semester started at both SUNY Oneonta, and at Hartwick, and so my wife and I are both back slaving in the teaching mines. I’m teaching a small Introduction to North American Material Culture course, which tries in a halting and abridged way to capture the complexity and richness of Indigenous life before the arrival of Europeans. So far, we’ve talked a lot about terminology, particularly the concept of material culture as a way of understanding human behavior and social life through objects that circulate within it.
• I also started again as work study coordinator, faculty advisor for the Alternative Realities gaming club, and the various other responsibilities of being Museum curator that crash into me at the start of a new semester.
• Not sure if it was this week or last, but I bought a copy of the Sadies new album “Colder Streams”, which is haunting and beautiful, full of jangly guitars, bright harmonies and dark stories of magic, nature, and ghosts.
• I did a fun thing that I saw on X/twitter, which is to make a list of 20 songs that spark joy. These are supposed to be songs, that in the words of Nick Worral (who posted the original idea) “bring instant joy the second you hear the first note, the ones that give other people the best insight into what stirs your soul”. Here’s my list:
  

This was hard to do! And after I had written it and posted it, I already thought two songs that should’ve been there all along.