Dominic and I keep working our way through Louis Sachar’s “Wayside School” series. It’s a very strange and clever series, and occasionally laugh out loud funny. I’ve come to think of it as “Young Adult Weird Fiction”, sort of like if Jeff Vandermeer wrote books for elementary school kids. This week, we finished “Wayside School is Falling Down”, and we’re on to the next.
Friday, we installed some new artwork at the President’s residence.
In MUST204, more cataloging work on Hartwick Seminary.
I worked with a student intern on her display, which is coming together nicely.
More work finalizing the NAGPRA grant. Deadline in two weeks!
I finished watching “A Field in England”, another triumphantly strange Ben Wheatley film. This is a faux historical piece about greed, violence, and magic, set during the English Civil War. It was delightfully weird, ambiguous, funny in places, and gorgeously shot. I’m still thinking about many aspects of it, especially the divining scene, which, though not violent or grotesque in any way, manages to be one of the most disturbing and shocking scenes I’ve seen in a film in a long time.
I had one kiddo all day Monday and the other for a half day Thursday. We took the opportunity to climb up table rock and have a picnic
In MUST204, we continued with our final group project, which is cataloging the collection from Hartwick Seminary. We’re working out the kinks as we go, but we’re on track to get a big chunk of it done before the semester ends.
I finished reading Daniel Mills novel “Revenants”, which I’ve been describing as a kind of Puritan Gothic. It’s a lushly written, occasionally hallucinatory novel about a fictional 17th century Puritan New England village called “Cold Marsh”. Underneath its dream-like mystery of several missing young girls is a contemplation of patriarchy, colonial violence, and the degree to which the past remains viscerally alive in the present.
I had a sick kiddo this week, so spent a lot of time at home. In the meantime, I did some work on campus beautification, NAGPRA grants, and some exhibit planning.
I played some music with some local friends, finally taking my new guitar out for a public spin. It was fun!
In MUST204, we started on our final group collections project, developing and implementing the cataloging procedure for the archaeological materials excavated from Hartwick Seminary.
We hosted Hawhenadies Neal Powless, an internationally ranked lacrosse player and renowned coach, as well as a member of an important traditional family of leadership among the Onondaga Indigenous Nation. Neal’s talk was inspiring, insightful and funny, and I’m glad we moved it from the Museum to a larger venue–we had over 100 people in attendance!
I finished reading Robert Jackson Bennett’s novel “Foundryside”. The Minister of Intrigue gave it to me a while ago, but I didn’t tackle it because I had read his earlier “City of Stairs” and hadn’t really enjoyed it. I was worried that this book would give me the same feeling, and I am delighted to be wrong. It was well written, exciting, and compelling, in its exploration of class inequality, urban life, and the way the past haunts the present.
We got as good of a view of the eclipse as one was likely to get in New York, by hiking it up to Oswego. The clouds were out, but we were in the path of totality, and got to have the ethereal and strange experience of seeing darkness surrounded by light.
In Collections Management, I taught the students about care and conservation for paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs, and also talked about the complicated history of “ethnographic objects”.
I gave a tour of the Museum to Art History students and talked about the history of our Renaissance painting collection.
The Museum held a collections committee meeting, in which we talked about de-accessioning an object for repatriation, and potentially accessioning a collection of materials from a local illustrator and artist.
I did some more work moving our repatriation grant towards the finish line.
It was Oneonta schools Spring Break, so I spent a bunch of the week with a kid in tow at the Museum. He’s still happy to tag along and I’m happy to have him.
We had a quiet but fun Easter, with egg hunts, decorating, and a very tasty roast courtesy of Alanna.
In Collections Management, we washed and waxed the outdoor statue by Konaver, and talked about caring for metal objects and textiles. We also held our week 7/mid-term assessment meetings.
We had our opening reception for our newest exhibit “No Childs Play: The Impressionist paintings of Anna Richards Brewster”. It was a great event for a delightful art exhibit.
I did some work on a repatriation grant, as well as on some future potential grants.
I made some progress on prepping for our upcoming talk by Neal Powless.
I finished reading “The Magician’s Nephew” by CS Lewis with Dominic. This was a fitting prequel for the Narnia series, funny and strange and with all kinds of references and call-backs. I liked it considerably better than “The Last Battle” which I thought was kind of dour and abrupt. We’ve now gone through the whole Narnia series, and while I didn’t have as much as with Earthsea, it was fun to read with Dominic.
I also finished reading “The Centauri Device” by M John Harrison. It has been described as one of the opening salvos of “the New Space Opera”, but I didn’t have the background in the sub-genre before reading this, and so I’m kind of blind to all that baggage. It’s a murky and inventive book, where the main character is a drug-running (and addicted) ex-soldier and self-described loser, who gets caught up in a horrifically violent interstellar conflict. His ultimate heroism derives from his refusing to take sides in this pointless endeavor, and instead to choose to side with the refugees, the poor, and the victimized of the universe. It has all of Harrison’s hallmarks of gorgeous and pointed prose, an obsession with landscapes, and discomfort with the trappings of genre. At the same time, it doesn’t move outside of genre or critique it the way that his later works would so successfully do.
It was Hartwick’s Spring break, so things were a bit quiet around here.
I spent the time putting up some Anna Richards Brewster paintings for an upcoming exhibit.
I did some logistical work for our upcoming talk by Neal Powless. We’ve gotten a good buzz and we’ve moved to a larger venue to accommodate!
I also did some more work on repatriation, both in meeting with tribal reps, and working on a grant to get objects and ancestors back home where they belong.
I finished reading “Trouble Boys: The Real Story of the Replacements”, which is an incredibly detailed rock biography about one of the great unsung bands of the 1980s. It makes clear that the Replacements were a working class rock and roll band, all of whom came from essentially tragic circumstances, and whom the record industry of the 1980s treated with either ignorance or outright predatory maliciousness. There’s something both heroic and tragic in frontman Paul Westerberg’s quote that opens the book, stating that the band was the only future available to them, outside of “jail, death or janitor”. Mostly, the book made me revisit the music, which is sloppy, fun rock and roll that and in some cases reaches sublimity.
Sunday, we took a quick jaunt up to Utica to do a little shopping. We ate great Greek food at Symeon’s which has become a regular stop for us when we’re up in Utica.
I’ve now a Light Phone 2 for a month. Its advertising tag is that it’s “designed to be used as little as possible”, and it’s essentially an up-market “dumbphone” with little to no internet or apps attached. The concessions it makes to 21st century devices are a podcast aggregator, a music player, and a maps/navigation feature. I’ve gone back and forth from smartphones to feature phones in the past, and I’m fairly happy with this new minimalist phone and hope it will stick in the future.
Things I like about it:
It’s small and very light, especially compared to the android brick I used to carry around.
Call quality is good, maybe even better than my last android phone.
Interface is intuitive with everything is basically right where you want it.
The e-ink screen is very easy to see and read
Things I don’t like:
It can be a little quirky. It’s sometimes slow to respond, and you have to write texts on a small, thumb keyboard very slowly to get anything legible. The maps app is better for plan-ahead navigation that actual turn-by-turn navigation.
I read Tochi Onyebuchi’s harrowing sci-fi novella “Riot Baby”, a powerful book about race, violence, psychic power, and freedom, and which calls to mind the best radical and socially-conscious science fiction.
In MUST204, we talked about taking artifact photos for cataloging purposes, and I lectured on the history of collections.
I’ve been assisting in the installation of our newest exhibit of paintings by the great Anna Richards Brewster.
I did some more work moving on NAGPRA and repatriation.
I cemented some plans for our upcoming hosting of a talk by the great Neal Powless. I’m really excited to hear him talk about Lacrosse, Indigenous recognition, and more on April 10th.
My wife and I are working our way through “The League”, a hilarious and positively filthy show about fantasy football, with a stellar cast that manages to make the frankly terrible people they portray human and even occasionally empathetic.
In MUST204, we talked compared the collections policies of a bunch of other Museums from the US and UK, learned how to use Pastperfect to find objects in the Museum, and learned how to label objects.
I showed my daughter how to play Minecraft, and we built an ocean-side house with lots of cool underground tunnels together.
My wife and I watched a bit of Cardinal, a gritty noir set in the cold wastes of northern Ontario.
I finished reading A Cosmology of Monsters by Shaun Hamill. It’s the kind of character-rich horror that I usually like, but I’m famous for disliking horror and weird-fiction that tip their hand too deeply and I had the same response to this book. It gave me just enough exposition to and explanation to take the shine off what was otherwise a pretty haunting study of family tragedy, wrapped in a love-letter to horror culture.
My son and I finished reading C.S. Lewis’s “The Last Battle” which was kind of a stinker of a book, if I’m honest, and a real let-down for a series that I quite liked, and quite liked reading aloud with my kid.
I spent a lot of this week working on a NAGPRA Repatriation grant. I’m within striking distance of finishing, and hope to get it out in the next week or two.
In Collections Management, I took the students through the processes of accessioning an object into the Museum’s collection, and through the NAGPRA process. The latter is something I had never taught systematically before, and though I think it turned out alright, I am going to tweak it a bit when I teach it next time around.
I finished reading Terry Bisson’s wonderful “Fire on the Mountain”, an alternate history where John Brown’s raid successfully kicked off a rebellion, and the Southern US becomes a multi-racial socialist democracy. The book is well written and hopeful, and I really enjoyed it.
It was Oneonta Schools February Break, plus President’s day, so I had one or both kiddos with me every day. It was a complicated dance, but we made it work.
At the Museum, we held an afternoon program for kids called “World of Water” with games, crafts, activities, and snacks. We had a great turnout and a lot of fun. We were lucky to be joined by educators from Hanford Mills Museum, and we’re happy and appreciative that they could come out and share in the fun.
I finished reading China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station”. What surprised me most what that, despite being a fixed point in the micro-genre of “Weird Fiction”, and filled with bizarre and bewildering imagery, the story is a fairly conventional urban noir, with a small ragtag band of city dwellers caught up between powerful and unknowable forces. What didn’t surprise was that the ending sucked. I couldn’t get over the grand reveal of the brutality of one of the main characters, with whom readers are set up to build a powerful emotional attachment over 800+ pages. It felt disingenuous,like bad character development, and a sour note on which to end an otherwise decent and interesting book.
In Collections Management, I taught the students about environmental conditions, and collections management policies.
In the few spare moments I had, I worked on some forward planning for an upcoming program.
