by Quentin Lewis

Weeknotes: 4/16/23-4/22/23

weeknotes teaching family books museum

This week:

  • I removed a 19th century letter from its frame and matting in preparation for it going on display at the Greater Oneonta Historical Society

  • In MUST204, my students and I worked on the Museum’s emergency preparedness procedures and supplies, as part of their final project.

  • My wife went to a conference, so I’m solo parenting this week.

  • I finished reading Colin Wilson’s “The Philosopher’s Stone”. It’s one of his attempts at Lovecraftian horror, but it mingles together those styles and ideas with his broader interest in philosophy and neuroscience. It’s also really long, and to my mind, kind of back-ended with the good stuff.

  • I did some more work on repatriation, moving some cases along the procedural processes in the law.

  • I worked on our upcoming new Indigenous and archaeology exhibit.

  • I mourned the passing of Dr. Paul Mullins, who died at the beginning of the week. It’s hard to even know what to say. He was my mentor, my colleague, and my friend, and such an amazing person that he could make you feel like he was all three at once. When I first met him in 2001 at his long-running Ransom Place field school in Indianapolis (after using a new website called google to find a field school with the keywords “archaeology” and “music”) he had a Batman earring in his ear, a Joy Division poster in his lab, a wicked and often crude sense of humor, and a forthright leftist politics that appealed to my burgeoning radicalism. He was also brilliant and prescient, setting trends in archaeology that the rest of us are still trying to catching up to. I had never met anyone like him, and I still haven’t.

    I don’t have any pictures of the two of us, to my everlasting regret. But this one captures so much of what I loved about him–his impish sense of humor, his love of pop culture, and his feeling that even the most mundane, popular or commonplace images and objects (mickey mouse, geek conventions, barbie dolls (with his equally brilliant wife Marlys Pearson), ruins, underwear, donuts or pets) were worth our time and curiosity. With his own enthusiasm and intelligence, he made the whole world seem more interesting.

    Paul Mullins

    I’m going to miss him a lot.