I finished reading Nan Shepherd’s “The Living Mountain”, which is ostensibly a kind of deep guide to the Cairngorn mountains in Scotland. But really, it’s a book about the interrelationships of bodies and places and the way in which the lines between ourselves and the world around us are astonishingly thin and interdigitated. In his introduction, Robert MacFarlane compares it with Merleau-Ponty’s “The Phenomenology of Perception”, in the ways that it posits the body and the senses as prefiguring our rationality and our modes of interpretation, and that as we move through a space like a mountain or it’s foothills, it changes not just what we see and feel, but how we think. It’s also a gorgeously, sensually written book, full of heart-stopping passages and sweet, thoughtful reminiscences. I had started this book as we were driving through the Cairngorns on our way to Loch Ness (we actually took a wrong turn!) and that brief exposure expanded as I navigated the rest of this book since we left.
I made some steps towards a much fuller, richer celebration of Indigenous People’s Day in Oneonta.
I’m late to the party on “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, but man….what a movie. Alanna and I watched it (in two sleepy pieces) and it was beautiful and funny and strange and inventive.
In polar opposition, I finished watching “The Northman”, a brutal and gorgeous film about evil men in an evil world.
We welcomed 4th graders from Greater Plains and Valleyview to the Museum. We love having them, showing them the Museum, and showing them the campus.
We are lucky to be hosting a graduate intern from Binghamton’s Masters of Public Archaeology Program. Nerissa is doing a great job and I’m looking forward to working with her over the next two months.
I mourned the death of Brian Wilson. The Beach Boys were the first band I loved as a band, after a cousin played me a whole tape of their music. “Help me Rhonda” is maybe a perfect pop song, full of beautiful melodies and very unusual harmonic changes that surprise and delight me every time I listen to it. I saw Wilson premier the completed version of Smile with the wondermints at Royal Albert Hall in 2004 and it was mindblowing, a delirious and joyful suite of songs about being American, being in love, and the wonder and confusion of both. Rest in Peace.
We left for Scotland on May 21st, and we returned to Oneonta on June 5th. It was an amazing, exhausting adventure, and feels as though it flew completely by. I’m still processing all the amazing things we saw, but I was really taken with the stone circles and cairn in Temple Wood, Kilmartin, where this picture (with my daughter making a delightfully weird face) was taken:
In between galavanting around the Highlands, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the Northeast of England, I:
Sunday we celebrated Alanna for being the amazing, thoughtful, and loving mother that she is. I’m so lucky to get to parent with her, and learn from her. We made breakfast, went for a walk with the dog in Robert Riddell park, and then took a visit to Carefree Gardens in Cooperstown to buy some more plants.
It was finals week. My students in MUST252 submitted their take-home finals and my students in MUSST204 had their last session of cataloging work.Saturday is graduation, and then it’s off to the races for summertime.
I spent some time planning 4th grade visits to the Yager Museum in June.
I celebrated my son’s 12th birthday, which is both delightful and shocking to me. I’m so proud of this smart, funny, eccentric kid!
We’re getting ready for our trip to Scotland. If all goes as planned, next Friday I will be in Glasgow, trying to fight off jetlag and getting to know a new city. No more weeknotes until we get back.
It’s the last week of classes. In MUST252, we were honored to have Darren Bonaparte from the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe as a guest speaker. We also talked about Hartwick College’s connections to native people and colonialism.
In MUST204, students did more work on Hartwick seminary cataloging. They’ve gotten a lot done and I’m very proud of their work.
I am almost done with the reporting for our NAGPRA grant.
We had a celebration for our graduating museum-affiliated seniors.
Dominic has a piano recital, and Hazel has her first soccer practice. I’m really proud of both of them for tackling new things this year.
It was Ballet recital week, and Hazel worked really hard to get ready for her recital on Friday and Saturday.
I was a guest lecturer in SUNY Oneonta’s Introduction to Archaeology class, where I spoke about the African Burial Ground in New York City. It’s a project that continues to inspire me and many other archaeologists decades later, and I tried to do it justice.
Hazel and I finished reading “Ramona Quimby, Age 8”. This isn’t my favorite of these books, but the whole series is so wonderful and thoughtful. It’s a great prompt for all kinds of wonderful conversations about emotions, expectations, growing up, and more.
In MUST252, I talked about the Haudenosaunee Longhouse as an artifact and as an idea. I also talked about European arrival in North America, the communities they encountered, and some of the artifacts that appear in the archaeological record based on that encounter.
In MUST204, my students continued working on a project to catalog the material from Hartwick Seminary.
On Tuesday, we hosted a group from the Adirondack Mountain Club and I gave them a tour of the reservoir exhibit.
This was a weird week kid-wise. There was no school Monday, and then half-days Wednesday-Friday. Lots of juggling and complicated pickups and drop-offs.
It was Oneonta Schools' Spring Break, so Alanna and I juggled the kids.
We finished putting up “Discovering our Place” and just in time, as the reception was held on Thursday evening. Students put this exhibit together last fall and it looks great! It is organized around the themes of working, learning, and playing in and around Oneonta, over the last two centuries.
In MUST252, I talked about Cahokia and urbanism on Turtle Island, as well as a very general overview of pottery and subsistence in the northeast.
In MUST204, students started working on their project of cataloging more material from Hartwick seminary.
Alanna and I watched “Ludwig” which is both entertaining and silly.
In MUST204, the students undertook a group evaluation which serves as a kind of coda to their hands-on learning in the first half of the course. Next week, they start the class project, which will be continuing (finishing?) the cataloging of the material from Hartwick Seminary.
I started teaching MUST252: North American Material Culture to 1700. I’ve made some changes to this class to accommodate some changes in the Museum world and to speak to the world we are all standing in. We’re going to focus on Indigenous presence, persistence and creativity in the past and the present, and I’m inviting in a number of guest speakers to speak to those issues.
I put together some more advertising material for our upcoming screening of “Lake of Betrayal”.
Alanna and I finished watching the 3rd and most recent season of Ted Lasso. It’s a delightful pleasant show and I have no idea how they are going to keep the story going without losing some of that.
I continued to make some progress installing “Discovering our Place”
