We've had blazing heat for the past few weeks, followed by torrential rains, some of them the residue of Hurricane Ida; friends of ours to the South, esp in Louisiana, and to the North, esp in PA/NJ/NY, have had it worse. But the past few days have been lovely: not too hot, beautiful clear skies, all the vegetation much more vivid from gorging itself on the rain.
Today I and I suspect other colleagues here at UVA are so to speak "processing" our first couple weeks of teaching (or at least, I am). I find that it takes me a few weeks to learn the rhythm of my teaching week--what days are heavy with teaching, what days are heavy with preparation, which days are suitable for scheduling meetings and which are not. It always surprises me, because I pretty often teach new classes. This fall I am teaching one entirely new class, and the other main class I'm teaching is so substantially revised that it feels like a new class, and it still requires me to reconsider everything, and revise my teaching material rather substantially. It's all good work, very good work--and I learn so, so much: I never learn more than through teaching it, it's one of those clichés that is, in my experience, completely true.
I hope this semester to try to use this blog as a kind of "diary," to capture some of my experiences as the semester goes along. For me, semesters are always like a ride in a rollercoaster in a straitjacket in the dark: you feel completely constrained and yet also hurled crazily around a very fast track, often without any warning of what twists and turns are coming up. So I don't know if I can keep it faithfully; but, at least on this somewhat calmer Saturday afternoon, I'm going to try.
Anyway, here's some good stuff I've read recently:
Mary Wroth, autofiction writer of the seventeenth century, wrote of her love affair with William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke; his statue is the one in front of the main entrance to the Bodleian Library, in Oxford. Her legacy is her amazing novel, Urania.
Bill Frisell interview! A master jazz guitarist—I love his versions of “Shenandoah” and “A Change is Gonna Come”, among others—and here he admits that Burt Bacharach is pretty great, and that he loves his music. Yes.
Good piece on the dangers of the public humanities, and the perils of becoming a “promotional intellectual.” Also, this seems right to me:
“I also think there are people on the faculty who adopt an all-too engagé rhetoric as well — that is, if you’re not performing work explicitly invested in some kind of social-justice mission, then you are advancing the cause of settler-colonialism. Here I have in mind my friends in American studies especially — anyone who is not doing work that is directly connected to present-day American minority studies is a settler-colonialist, and American studies people are quite willing to burn all that down in the heat of their zeal. They are, ironically, the biggest Puritan settlers on campus, and I sometimes fear they are unwittingly contributing to a narrowing of humanistic learning.“
A good appreciation of William Maxwell as a novelist. It argues he is “a fictional historian — as opposed to a writer of historical fiction“. This is good, but I’d eventually like to also read an appreciation of him as an editor.
Ironic: An article about a replication problem in an article about dishonesty that seems to be the responsibility of Dan Ariely, an important so called behavioral economist. This piece connected these problems up to larger patterns in the field, And in the marketing Of so called social scientific knowledge. Worth reading.
A sobering account of the past twenty years of US decline, by Bill Galston.
And again: We need more pieces like this by the WaPo's Carlos Lozada : Searing, no-punches-pulled accounts of the past twenty years of American foreign policy. You don't have to agree with what these pieces will say, but every American should read them.
Be well everyone. Read good things, watch good things, take walks, talk to people, friends and others, stay safe, stay sane.