Summer Reading: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I've been posting a lot on my research blog about the novels I've been reading this summer, but I realized that I actually should be doing those posts over here since they aren't really full of research thoughts. I just want to keep track of the books I've been reading. And I should be reserving that blog for my ruminations on abjection and subjectivity. (It's not published, well, publicly, but let me know if you want to read it and I can open it up to you).

I just finished a lovely novel called The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery who is a French philosophy professor. I loved how she took abstract philosophical ideas into real world lives and experiences in this novel. It's a much better way to talk about these issues, and I wish I could do something like that. I'm thinking I might try something similar in my paper on autobiography, but I doubt my skill could carry the concepts into a narrative like Barbery does.

I loved how the characters grapple with death, class struggles, and the meaning of art. And the take away point of the novel is to recognize that death is imminent, but to not be crippled by this knowledge or act in bad faith, but to be as authentic as possible. "The important thing, Paloma said one day, is not the fact of dying, it is what you are doing in the moment of your death." And being sincerely engaged in building, rather than destroying, something is the measure of a good life.

My favorite moment in the book is when Madame Michel, the autodidact consierge of a high-class apartment building, is thinking about the validity of education, especially higher graduate research.

Should you study Plato, Epicurus, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel or even Husserl? Esthetics, politics, morality, epistemology, metaphysics? Should you devote your time to teaching, to producing a body of work, to research, to Culture? It makes no difference. The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite--for this turns the university into a sect. 

I've been struggling the last couple months to write a paper, mostly because, I realized, I want it to be new and different and brilliant to say something extremely complicated in an elegant way. And that's too much for me. It puts a tremendous roadblock up. But I'm realizing that I'm losing sight of what I've been doing and wanting to do all these years. I'm not that eloquent and my thoughts don't run as deeply and as abstractly as I'd like them to, but I desperately don't want to get caught up in the fan-boy masturbatory academic world whose only function is the "self-reproduction of a sterile elite." I want to engage in works that I love, that fascinate me, and try my hardest to elevate thought and contribute something.

The book is also about enjoying the small pleasures in life, which I have not done lately at all. "I have finally concluded," the 12 year old Paloma says, "maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had some to us, an always within never"

I used to have those moments more often, I would go out into the world and look for them. It was easy to find them in Russell Square or the British Museum in London, or in Central Park in New York, or in the immense silence of the Uintas while fishing with my mom. I even remember the delight I felt when I was in Provo and I could hear someone practice their bagpipes down the street. These moments of wonder don't happen in Louisville, but maybe I'm not looking for them. Maybe it's because there's a train yard outside my window and I live above a frat house. Or the dreadful and humid heat, the low-flying planes, the trains screaming and blocking my path out of the train yard where I live. I haven't had many little pleasures since I moved here last year, but maybe when I move into my own little apartment on a shady street I can relax a bit and be wondered by art and nature again. We'll see. For now at least I have the novels I've been devouring this summer.

And French films about awkward anxious people who fall in love. And the cute songs at the end of such movies.
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living with a painting, day one

I was thinking the other day about how much I hate museums. I think I hate going to museums the same way I hate reading books: I get overwhelmed by the content and the time it takes for me to get through it all.  I hate that you have to "get through it all" at a museum, like there's a time limit.  You have to see everything in a couple of hours.  I personally can't be in a museum for longer than a couple of hours. I go mad and get angry and want to run away.  There's just too much stuff.  I hate how I can only give each painting a quick glance or, at most, five or seven minutes contemplating its lines and colors and textures and context and subject so superficially that I might as well not even look at it.  I forget it the moment I leave, unless I find a postcard of it in the gift shop, but the postcard is merely a reminder of its existence, a reminder that will probably find its way to the bottom of a pile of postcards, or tacked to a wall with fifty other reminders.

A museum is no way to view art.  Art should be lived with. How can I possibly understand a piece of art if I only glance at it, if it's not there with me to return to when I'm not thinking of anything in particular? It's funny how I thought of this and then when I started reading a book by Stephen Fry called The Ode Less Traveled about writing poetry, he says: Poems, "as with a good painting are not there to be greedily taken in at once, they are to be lived and endlessly revisited. The eye can go back and back and back, investigating new corners, new incidents and the new shapes that seem to emerge."  Clearly I need to live with a painting.

I've had this idea before but have never taken the time to see it through.  So I decided now was the perfect opportunity.  I would go to a local museum, find a painting and visit it every day for at least a week. I would spend at least an hour in its presence, not necessarily staring at it for an hour--I would write, listen to music, read, and the moments when I pause or get distracted I would look at the painting, and allow my eye to slip across it, lingering on a particularly lovely line or shading, sweeping through its figures and focusing on a bit of color I hadn't seen before.  This is how I want to experience art, not rushing through a museum so that I can say I've seen it all.

So today I went to the Tate Britain to meet my painting.  My criteria for choosing a painting were pretty arbitrary: 1) it had to be something I'd consider putting on my wall at home, a painting I wouldn't object living with, and 2) there had to be a soft seat near by.  That's all.  There were some early 20th century paintings I quite liked but not a soft chair in the room, so I moved on to another room  Finally I chose this painting:

It's called Theseus and the Minotaure (Interior at Minos) by Keith Vaughan finished in 1950.  I don't particularly love the painting, but that's one of the reasons I chose it.  It's like when you meet someone at school or church, and you get along fine but they're not your favorite person, and then you get to know them and sometimes you become pretty good friends, or at least you understand them better and can appreciate who they are.  That's kind of what I'm hoping will come of this experience.  

One interesting thing I noticed about the painting is that I counted 78 crescents in it.  That's a lot of crescents. That's pretty much what I got from it today, but I have a whole week to acquaint myself with it and think more about it.  Today was just the initial meeting.  I think this is going to be a fun experience. 

bunch of little randoms

The week since I last posted about the David Byrne concert has been slightly insane. I quit my job last Tuesday so that I could focus more time on the class I'm teaching and on my thesis. Then I started teaching, and that has been quite the experience so far. I've been putting a lot into that, and I'm hoping it's showing. I have the tendency to ramble or say things without thinking (thus insulting people and spouting off inappropriate things) but I think I'm improving. Maybe I just needed some practice.

I feel slightly hypocritical because I am requiring my students to post 3 blog entries every week and I didn't even post anything last week, but I suppose I have my excuses. For one thing, this class takes a lot out of me, and when I sit down to blog it's usually complaints about all the things I have to do which is not interesting. In fact, I have the suspician that this post is very uninteresting as well. But that's ok, it's just a bunch of randoms. I spend hours preparing for the two and a half hour class, the equivelant of 3 fifty minute class periods. When my mom asked me what I did yesterday and I told her "prep for class and teach" she didn't believe it was all I did, but it was. It's a good thing I love it so much.

I hope that what I try to get accross to my students is working. I hope that they learn how important it is not to just feel and experience art but be able to read and talk about it as well. Maybe I'll keep working on making that point throughout the semester. I can't even begin to say how enriched my life has become because I can read and talk about art. I can examine it and understand it and reach new levels of experience that I wouldn't have by simply taking it at face value. I think we need to start analyzing right away.

I went to Moab last weekend with my good friend Brittany. We had a good time camping, and there were some interesting people to be around. I finally got to go to Arches National Park and enjoy the beautiful arches. I don't like hiking as much and that's because I'm lazy, but it was a wonderful experience.
Here's me at Delicate Arch

Where I am standing under this arch is actually quite precarious. I kept imagining myself sliding down the side and smashing my head open on the rock below. I don't know how so many people can visit and not all die. It just takes one slip.

I have to say that I love the desert. I didn't used to. Not until a couple of years ago actually when I read an article in a class about how our love for green is really just a social construct and that we should try to find beauty in the delicate blends of browns, reds, grays, and of course the bright blue of the sky, found in the desert. It's such a peaceful place as well. This is one of my favorite photos I took on our hike to Landscape Arch:

What a wonderful place to be. I'm glad that I discovered how gorgeous the desert can be.