Weeknotes: 12/30/23-1/6/24

weeknotes museum music comics movies indigenous

This Week:

Back at home and back at work after Christmas holiday in Iowa. Unfortunately, some of us seem to have come back with some kind of respiratory bug, which has made getting back into the rhythm of things difficult.
A lot of my week was just spent getting back to up speed, answering emails, scheduling meetings, getting things in order for the future.
Our work study roster is quite light during Hartwick’s J-term, so I had to spend some time hiring a few new people in order to keep the desk full.
I did some work on the Museum’s NAGPRA compliance, including trying to wrap my head around the upcoming regulatory changes in the law.
I’ve been re-reading Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples “Saga”, in preparation for starting the new volume I got for Christmas. I remain awed and delighted at how heartfelt, radical, and deeply thoughtful this series was and is.
I also received Richard Shindell’s “Blue Divide” for Christmas, and finally started listening to it this week.
I watched Enys Men, an ambiguous and symbolically dense folk-horror film. I can’t pretend that I understand it (or that it is even interpretable in any straightforward fashion), but the film is clearly probing questions of environmental degradation, labor history, ruination, and memory. It’s also beautifully (if primitively) shot, and the landscape of the Cornish coast and Cornish islands is the real protagonist in the story.