by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 10/11/25-10/17/25

weeknotes goodthings teaching museum music books

This Week:

  • In MUST205, we talked about the materials used in making labels, and then I had the students mount their test labels in the Museum’s planning room.
  • I did some packing and planning for our annual trip to coastal New England.
  • I finished reading Colin Wilson’s “The Occult: A History”, a book I’ve had on my shelf for almost 30 years. I was bewildered by it, in terms of Wilson’s antiquated style, the subject matter (ghosts! ESP! aliens! magic! divination!), and how remarkably boring I found the overall thing.
  • I also finished reading Christian Wiman’s edited volume “Joy: 100 Poems”. I picked a few poems that I liked and wrote some brief notes.
  • Good Things:
    • Like a lot of people, I listened to the last episode of WTF with Marc Maron. I’ve been listening actively since 2011 (pretty sure that John Hamm was the first episode I heard?), and Maron’s voice, curiousity, anxiety, and humor have been a constant in my life for the last 15 years. I wish I could say I liked this episode, or that it felt like a fitting way to end his legacy, but Obama’s contradictions were on full display here; soaring rhetoric about democracy and American values and the role of activists in furthering those values with simultaneous scolding of the young, American left for being too judgemental, in their insistence that America live up to those ideals globally. Maron, for his part, has always straddled the line between curiousity and anxious worry, and his great ability was to turn that inward scrutiny on others, whether they were comedians, authors, musicians, actors, or presidents, even though Obama’s first appearance rocketed him to a higher level of notoriety. Having Obama on again seemed less a celebration of those worthy skills, hard-earned in Maron’s life and career, than a tawdry and petty re-vamping of a fickle moment of fame.
    • I listened to D’Angelo’s “Voodoo”, and especially the ethereal masterpiece “One Mo Gin” a lot this week, upon hearing that he died. What a strange, quiet, sexy, magical album. Rest in Power.