by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 09/05/2026-09/11/2026

weeknotes fmaily teaching museum goodthings books

This Week:

  • In FLP 102, we talked about material culture, the Cornell method of note-taking, and Gabe Moshenska’s fascinating article about shrapnel collecting in WWII.
  • I got some contracts signed for some amazing future programming, including the inaugural Phil Young Residency for Indigenous Art and a cultural presentation by Mohawk educator DJ White.
  • The kiddos came back from Iowa and immediately started school. It was thus a long day of driving followed by some slow days as we all get mentally and emotionally ready for school.
  • Good Things:
    • Alanna and I finished watching season 1 of the Tunnel, a UK-French crime show about the investigation of a murder which takes place halfway between Folkestone UK and Callais France in the Chunnel. This strange and often bewildering show twists this straightforward mystery into a commentary on immigration, gender, inequality and neoliberalism, mental health, and more….too much more, if I’m being honest. After 10 episodes there were so many characters, and so many plotlines that just kind of ended that both Alanna and I felt a bit let down. Having said that, the show is held together by the intense, often funny, committed performance by Clemence Poesy, as Elise Wasserman, a brilliant detective for whom clues to a murder are easier to understand than the basics of human interaction.
    • I finished reading JG Ballard’s “The Drowned World.” It’s a legendary piece of climate fiction and gives the ecological forces of the world the seriousness and power they deserve. It plays the amazing trick of de-centering humans from our often arrogant location as masters of the environment, and instead suggests something much more ambiguous, strange, and wondrous about how the world acts upon us.
    • I also breezed my way through Gord Hill’s “500 years of Indigenous Resistance”. It’s a polemical manifesto, not a piece of historical analysis, but it is full of rich detail and fiery language. Most of all, it re-cast the history of the Americas as one of resistance, rebellion, and genocide, and out of the often neutral or hagiographic forms that history frequently takes.