Well-Swept Yard

" for birds sake ," an online exhibition by Cemre Yesil and Maria Sturm, begins with a statement offering a fascinating bit of history and contemporary politics: Since the time of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul has been a very important city for aviculture. The city’s geographical location for bird migration has led to the establishment of a huge culture devoted to birds and their care. The photographers’ statement goes on to describe the purpose of the photographs: This work is about the birdmen of Istanbul and focuses on the shrouded relationship between the bird and the birdman, one full of contradictions of love, possession and pleasure. The birds compete to determine which has the most beautiful song of the day. The authors of the show put it this way:  an illegal tradition  an addiction a meditation Something they need in order to feel good. The first photograph shows two hands pulling apart curtains that hang over a birdcage. We can see past the do

Among recent works exhibited by Ege Kanar is a remarkable series of portraits on glass called Mortals . Kanar is a photographer steeped in theory and philosophy. His work explores being, existence and the unfathomable relationship that photography has to being. He writes How can photography, a tool that is presumably incapable of depicting what is beyond the visible, that which lies not on the surface but beneath it, possibly be used to contribute to the formation of a new transcendent representative state, a hypothetical real, which exists beyond dualities such as visible or invisible? Mortals immediately reminds one of nineteenth century portraiture, that time when Europe and America celebrated the surface and rarely questioned what the surface really meant. I find that Kanar's Mortals journey back, taking with them the questions that should have been asked but were not. Because the surface ideas of photography's beginnings remain with us, Kanar's work is releva

A couple of months ago I signed up for a MOOC ( Massive Open Online Course) offered by the Harvard Divinity School and taught by Laura S. Nasrallah , Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity. I was enthralled, pulled in, captivated. From the syllabus The letters of Paul are the earliest texts in the Christian scriptures, written by a Jew at a time when the word “Christian” hadn’t yet been coined. What is the religious and political context into which they emerged? How were they first interpreted? How and why do they make such an enormous impact in Christian communities and in politics today? Nasrallah's scholarly passion comes through again and again especially in the numerous videos in the class. The introductory video is a good example. I will not describe the full course. You may still visit the archived portions of the course. I want to stress the value of the MOOC as a learning platform and from my point of view a learning platform perfectly suited for

"What is art?" is a question impossible to answer. Eduardo Galeano avoided the question and wrote instead about the function of art. My favorite Galeano function is the first one in his Book of Embraces .  The Function of Art/1. Diego had never seen the sea. His father, Santiago Kovadloff, took him to discover it. They went south. The ocean lay beyond high sand dunes, waiting. When the child and his father finally reached the dunes after much walking, the ocean exploded before their eyes. And so immense was the sea and its sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it. And when he finally managed to speak, trembling, stuttering, he asked his father: “Help me to see!” Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces , page 17.

What is wrong with this picture At our (university) faculty meeting today we were given permission to skip teaching our classes tomorrow so that we can catch up with paperwork.

I just want to wake up dead That is what my father always said about dying. A gentle, uneventful passing.  This is what happened. He awoke on the fateful day, got up, ate his usual cholesterol-rich breakfast, and then returned to bed for a nap.  He was in his mid-nineties.  At some point somebody noticed that he did not look quite right. A check at the bedside revealed that he had died during his nap. As I see it, things turned out better than he had hoped for. He woke up, had a good breakfast, fell asleep and died.  I'm glad he had the breakfast.  

The Special Needs Of Old Cats Caring For Your Elderly Feline  I am guilty of not remembering the name of a special cat of my childhood. The older I become the more I love cats and forget things such as names. Well, Cat lived outdoors and would sneak in the house from time to time. My mother did not want animals in the house (well, other than we three sons). The attitude was rooted in an incident from my mother's childhood on the farm, on a day when a goat got in the house at a time when my grandmother was any-day-due with a child. Not pleasant. Not for the people and not for the goat. The goat returned to the outdoors and my grandmother soon gave birth to a healthy little girl. But I digress. Cat visited the back door of our house every day signally meal time. This was in the 50s and we fed the cat from a can of what I suspect was the cheapest cat food at the grocery store. Can and large spoon in hand, I walked to the back of the yard where a long unused chicken coop sat. The

Cultural Institutions & Wikipedia: A Mutually Beneficial Relationship Webcast (Library of Congress)  This is good news. Acceptance of the Wikipedia as a serious and useful should be bolstered. And by the way, I found an objectionable phrase in the Wikipedia this morning and before a note reached the editors the phrase had been removed. Here is what the Library of Congress says about the video cast (or transcript download) TITLE: Cultural Institutions & Wikipedia: A Mutually Beneficial Relationship SPEAKER: Dominic McDevitt-Parks, Kristin Anderson EVENT DATE: 08/13/2012 FORMAT: Video + Captions RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window) DESCRIPTION: Over the past few years, cultural institutions have formed partnerships with Wikipedia in order to increase their visibility on the web and connect with a vibrant community of online volunteers. As a purpose-driven, non-profit educational project, Wikipedi

I graduated from Hopkins with a Ph.D. in Byzantine art and architecture and then turned my research efforts to the history of photography. On the face of it, that is a radical career jump. But Byzantium, in particular the Byzantine icon and the justifications for the icon intrigued me. The proper (working) icon had to bear a resemblance to the saint represented and had to be made "in the right way." Then there was a special kind of icon that was not made by human hands (acheiropoieta), images that miraculously appeared (the earliest example may have been the Veil of Veronica, an imprint of the face of Jesus left when Veronica used her veil to blot away the sweat on the face during the march to Golgatha). The icon, a representation rather than an idol, seemed to enjoy a special identity with the person represented.  I wondered if any post-Byzantine European civilization shared a belief in this very powerful kind of image and one day it hit me that the ge

Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation   But leadership will have to come from somewhere else, as well. Just as in society as a whole, the academic upper middle class needs to rethink its alliances. Its dignity will not survive forever if it doesn’t fight for that of everyone below it in the academic hierarchy. (“First they came for the graduate students, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a graduate student…”) For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: depar

 As a young father rearing a boy in the age of superheros, I hit upon the idea of creating a superhero just for bedtime stories. He was Skaterman, a fellow with fabulous skates that allowed all kinds of feats in the mold of superheros. I am fuzzy on the particulars of stories, but the tales were sufficiently exciting that the stories had the opposite effect of what parents hope a bedtime story will do. They got the young fellow wide awake and insistent on the story going on and on. More than once I dozed off only to be awakened with the child command to continue. I was reminded of the stories when I saw this @BritishPathe short on a dad and daughter enjoying an outing on motorized skates. Too bad the invention was not nuclear-powered. Dad drives daughter to work on motorised skates - YouTube

My father rarely threw anything away, attitude from the farm upbringing and the Great Depression.  Nails were an interesting illustration. A nail, no matter how bent and rusty, is useful. Dad had cans and cans of bent nails that he used building things around the house, indeed for building various out-buildings from lean-roof chicken houses to dog houses. Fifty years later they still stand.  When he needed a nail he took one from the can and either straightened it in a vise or hammered into shape for reuse. I cannot be certain, but I do not think that my father ever bought a new nail.  I have other examples of one man's trash is another man's treasure. Maybe I will talk about some of those at another time. 

This was handed down from my grandmother. The teacakes are a half recipe because my grandmother was cooking for a family of ten people.  

Origin: 1740–5 0; inter-  + act interact. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged . Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/interact (accessed: June 13, 2012). I like the division because it emphasizes the "act" part. The first time a taught an online class with Blackboard I learned a couple of things about interactivity. First, I had a student that had taken a class from me before. He sat at the back of the room and never said a word. I noticed that he was quite active on the discussion board. When I saw him at an art opening I remarked that he was more active on the discussion board than he had ever been in the classroom. I asked him why. His response was short. "I don't like speaking in public." The second thing I learned was by accident. I had to be out of town for a conference and I posted an announcement telling the class that I would have limited access to the Internet but that they should continue the week's

SparkNotes No Fear Literature: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter 4  WELL, three or four months run along, and it was well into the winter now. I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway. That's pretty much the way I feel about mathematics.

I've dealt with a sore back all winter. Not fun. Chalked it up to aging. Maybe it is. Anyway... Yesterday I spent the whole day working in the yard and garden. I kept thinking that I will pay for this when I can't get out of bed next morning.  I arose and my back never felt better. I remembered my grandmother saying that if you don't feel good you need to grab a hoe and go outside and work. You know, I think she was right! Good ole granny medicine. 

Eldest cat, fourteen, has an electric heating pad and she likes it. I don't blame her. Wish I had one, only me-sized. 

Gmail is pretty clever at placing ads next to messages--ads that pertain somehow to what is in the message. I've noticed recently that when message from or about my university show up that an add for the University of Phoenix appears. I wonder if this means that Gmail thinks that I might want to work at another place or that it likens my university with UPhoenix. Hmm . Well, yes.

Ten years ago. I vividly recall the moment when I heard that my bombs were raining on Afghanistan. I was working in the garden. A neighbor was playing his radio or TV loud enough that I heard the "news flash." I stood frozen for a moment and then dropped the tool and screamed. I saw old friends and their children and grandchildren exploding, dying, suffering. I ran inside. Tears ran down my cheeks.  I told my wife. We held each other. What else to do?

October is the month for rose bush propagation. And helping rose bushes multiply is easy. Look for a cane of goodly diameter, large enough that you will be able to push it or hammer it into the soil without the stem breaking, and yank the stem from the bush with enough violence that you pull a strip of bark from the mother branch.  Flat cut the branch 4-5 inches above the tear (being certain to leave 2-3 stem segments between top and bottom). Poke the branch, rip end down, into the earth. If need be, gently hammer the flat top of the stem to help the sinking. (If the earth is hard, place a gallon plastic jug of water over the spot where you want to sink the stem. Make a small hole in the bottom of the jug and allow the water to seep into the earth and soften it). Push the stem into the earth so that the earth remains compact around the stem (that is, do not dig a whole or poke a hole with a tool).  Walk away. Forget about the bush-to-be until spring.  While you have forgo