After weeks of watching it in 15 minute chunks, I finally finished Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, a strange and ambiguous film about faith, desire, and the sad decay of the world. It was great though jebus it’s long.
The Museum opened back up again for the summer, and we have a summer assistant. Welcome aboard, Josephine!
I did a LOT of inventory at the Museum. We have about 20,000 objects, and our policy is to check the status of each of them once every five years. You would be surprised at how not-at-all straightforward of a job this is.
I finished reading “Mycroft Holmes” aka Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s Sherlock Holmes novel. It’s not bad. What I liked about it was that it located the Holmes stories in the broader history of British colonialism, slavery and conquest, set as it is on Trinidad during the British occupation, not long after the end of the US Civil War. I can’t say it was the most well-written book I’ve ever read, but Jabbar and co-author Anna Waterhouse clearly love the Sherlock Holmes stories and know the history of African-descended peoples, and both come through enthusiastically in a rich and entertaining novel.
On Saturday, I took my son and a friend of his to Robot City Games in Binghamton, NY, as a belated birthday treat.
I was back at work after a week of kid quarantine and another week of self-quarantine.
Collections Management had our final, which consisted of finishing up some inventory work, and having a debriefing session about the class as a whole. Despite the ups and downs of health and power-outages and everything else, it was a really great class this year, with a fun and engaged crop of students.
I finished reading “The Wild Road” by Gabriel King. It’s a wonderful piece of fantastic fiction, with cat protagonists, beautifully written and richly imagined.
A musical rabbit hole sent me to the work of legendary british folk musician Nic Jones, and I’ve been obsessively playing his obscure and beautiful songs all week. This version, of the 18th century gender-bending sailing song “Canadee I-O” is majestically and artfully played and sung, much better (imho) than the Dylan version on “Good as I Been to you” which clearly cribs from this: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlFKwY_YgZ4&w=560&h=315]
Last Saturday, my son turned 9. He’s a smart, funny, interesting guy, and I’m so lucky to be able to watch him grow and come into his own. Love you, kiddo.
I tested positive for COVID-19. It sucks. Get vaccinated and boosted, and wear a mask.
I watched Bladerunner 2049.
I did a little remote work helping with Hartwick’s commencement.
Hazel was home with me, as she tested positive the same time I did. We played in the garden, read books, sang songs, and kept ourselves happy in each other’s company.
The Hartwick College Board of Trustees met at the Museum for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. It’s always a great joy to host them here.
In Collections Management, we continued working on our project cataloging the material from Hartwick Seminary.
….Was weird. I had one kid home monday from a previously scheduled snow day and the other home for being sick, then an actual snow day on Tuesday, with massive power outages rendering workplaces and schools alike without power.
We had a great Easter, with a visit from the Easter Bunny, babka, decorated eggs, and a gorgeous roasted lamb for dinner.
I finished reading “Tomorrow’s Cthulhu” a good Lovecraft-inspired collection that puts the Cthulhu Mythos into various imaginary futures.
I devoured, basically in one sitting, the entire 900 page collection of Mark Waid’s masterful comic series “Irredeemable”. It’s a morally and emotionally complicated deconstruction of superheroes, that takes as its fundamental question–what if Superman (in this case, a superman-like character called The Plutonian) had a nervous breakdown and began destroying the world? Powerful, electric stuff. I couldn’t put it down.
I finished reading Kameron Hurley’s novella collection “Apocalypse Nyx”, set in her “Bel Dame Apocrypha” world. The books are brutal and dark and sort of funny, about a group of mercenaries trying to survive and live in a world of perpetual violence.
I finished reading volume 2 of “Once and Future”, an action-packed collection about the undead monsters of English mythology. Museum workers will save the world!
After years of it sitting on my shelf, I finished reading John Hartigan Jr.’s “Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People”. I almost wrote a booknotes about it, but I feel like I’m still pondering it; it’s a dense, theoretically rich book that deftly engages with anthropology’s long wrestling (for better or worse) with race. But I’m troubled by its conclusions. On one hand, I am drawn to its calls to complicate race and its intersections with class, gender, geography, and other social fields and forces. I am also inspired by the book’s foregrounding of White people as subjects of analysis, something I’ve done to a lesser extent in my own scholarship. The book also has rich chapters on the historical relationship between whiteness, poverty and Eugenics, as well as deft cultural analyses of films and music that draw on hillbilly and “white trash” metaphors. On the other hand, the book necessarily detaches racial categories from power, with a regular refrain to study race without racism, and examine poor White people through vectors of class, gender, and geography. But this raises questions for me about what is actually being studied. Hartigan says “cultural analysis” is a better framework than Whiteness (drawn from that new right-wing bugaboo “critical race theory”), but I worry that such an analysis can be easily divorced from power, making White people just another subject category to be analyzed (or protected by the law!) and leaving in place the fundamental violence and terror of racial hierarchy, not to mention the complicated mess of sadism and desire lurkingat the heart of white supremacy.
In MUST204, we talked about Colonialism and collections, and the students began a short, in-class group project where I give them a fictional collections management problem to solve.
My wife and I finished watching “Sorry to Bother You”, a dark and strange and radical and funny film about racism, capitalism, and human-horse hybrids. It’s a hard and heavy movie that is lightened by its humor and genuine weirdness.
I had a great meeting and tour of the Yager with Jason Blue Lake Medicine Eagle Martinez, an amazing artist who we are hoping to do a show and program in the museum. I also worked on an application to fund such a program.
I watched the strange and wonderful film “They Remain”, which is based on an equally wonderful story by the great Laird Barron, from his book Occultation. Very creepy and ambiguous folk-horror.
In MUST204, we talked about prints, drawings, and paintings.
I took part in a safe zone training through Hartwick’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
It was spring break at Hartwick, but no slowing down at the Museum. We de-installed “From Viking to Insight” and installed a new exhibit by Roberta Griffith.
I submitted a grant to hire an Indigenous consulting group to help us improve our archaeological exhibit.
I cleaned up the formatting around here a little bit–new template, a few new javascript plugins. Keep your feet off the couch, at least for the first few months!
After years of it sitting on my shelf, I finished reading John Hartigan Jr.’s “Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People”. I almost wrote a booknotes about it, but I feel like I’m still pondering it; it’s a dense, theoretically rich book that deftly engages with anthropology’s long wrestling (for better or worse) with race. But I’m troubled by its conclusions. On one hand, I am drawn to its calls to complicate race and its intersections with class, gender, geography, and other social fields and forces. I am also inspired by the book’s foregrounding of White people as subjects of analysis, something I’ve done to a lesser extent in my own scholarship. The book also has rich chapters on the historical relationship between whiteness, poverty and Eugenics, as well as deft cultural analyses of films and music that draw on hillbilly and “white trash” metaphors. On the other hand, the book necessarily detaches racial categories from power, with a regular refrain to study race without racism, and examine poor White people through vectors of class, gender, and geography. But this raises questions for me about what is actually being studied. Hartigan says “cultural analysis” is a better framework than Whiteness (drawn from that new right-wing bugaboo “critical race theory”), but I worry that such an analysis can be easily divorced from power, making White people just another subject category to be analyzed (or protected by the law!) and leaving in place the fundamental violence and terror of racial hierarchy, not to mention the complicated mess of sadism and desire lurking at the heart of white supremacy.
I had a great meeting and tour of the Yager with Jason Blue Lake Medicine Eagle Martinez, an amazing artist who we are hoping to do a show and program in the museum. I also worked on an application to fund such a program.