Wednesday, May 21, 2014

last class of semester

Oh how interestingly the semester ends, so for my seminar in energetic aesthetics, great title, what? as we have discussed all manner of texts and art stuff, we will end with me bringing wine, a participant bringing chocolates and everyone talking (in turn, natch) about what everyone wrote (is writing, I know I know) as a final paper. This is the way I always end my seminars, and the point is that if you are going for an interview for some job, you have to be able to have a drink in one hand and talk about what you are good at or impassioned by, the other hand on the heart or the brain.  Wonderfully, many of our students get positions -- I don't think this is why, but you never know.

For my irregular but I hope delightful column in the Oxford Gazette (Magazine) which I've written for years and years, about the New York cultural scene, this time I got to add -- because the great editor, Tim Horder, tells me when I have another week before the deadline -- Mahler's Third, which we heard Saturday night and were (well, I was) astounded by. Really, the zarathustra coming in, and the soaring melody and the everything loud and less loud-- i loved the repetitions and want to think about that form, but, you know, when do you get to anything? I had the joy of writing my introduction to our translation (Nancy Kline and myself) of Lorand Gaspar's Sol Absolu (Earth Absolute) in the middle of the night, having lunch with the great John Richardson yesterday, writing and rewriting part of the catalogue for Picasso and the Camera for the Gagosian Gallery here in New York, hearing my friend Dean King talk about his book on the Feud between the Hatfields and McCoys (and Matthew has just finished a tour with Juliana Hatfield, so it seemed appropriate to go), and no, I haven't gotten back to the chapter on Painting and Sculpture for the Cambridge History of Modernism, but, um, I will before we leave for France on July 1. Or I think I will.


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