Christmas and the Dark

My friends Stephanie and Nathan, in love and in life.

The Christmas holiday as we know it is a celebration of life - this we do through getting together with blood relatives, the people wherein our lives begin and grow. It’s meant to be the best day of the year, the time when the stuff we really live for is most present. It’s an assertion of life against the coldness of winter and the short dark day of solstice. In the Christian form, there’s even a birth in the mix, a miracle birth of a deity in human form, no less. Read the rest of this entry »

Beauty and Perception’s Limits

When we experience beauty, we react to the feeling that things are just right somehow - unexpectedly right, sometimes inexplicably right. We ask another person - “Did you see the way that happened?” -or- “Did you hear how beautiful that was?” When we take note of beauty, we notice things that aren’t merely “correct,” or even “true.” We notice things happening as they should always be, though they rarely are.

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Consuming Rhythms, Cultic Offerings

I’m a deep skeptic, maybe even a cynic, about environmentally-sustainable shopping. I recognize that the opportunity to purchase “green” versions of our usual items stands to benefit us in many ways. I could, for example, purchase coffee filters wherein less bleach was involved in the manufacturing process. This would likely put less bleach back into the ecologies of production and consumption. Yet I don’t do this. Read the rest of this entry »

Landscapes are not kinds of landscapes

Manhattan, shot from highest point in Illinois (artist's image)

We had a great visit from Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation today. We walked around with Matt to visit some infrastructural highlights of this mega-campus, our laboratory for the world. Matt’s presentation on CLUI revealed the organization to be even bigger than I thought.

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Inhabiting the University

Irit Rogoff gave a great talk tonight, about as clear an articulation I’ve heard of the theory and method behind the new modes of curating and making art that have occupied my brightest hopes for art as an institution in today’s world.

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The Most Beautiful Sermon I’ve Heard

In An Alternative World is at Hand, Walter Brueggemann sermonizes on a passage from a letter by the Apostle Paul, where Paul is quoting from the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah. For the beginning of the Christian season of Advent (which is something like our “Christmas”), the guest preacher paints a picture of a beautiful world. He’s talking at Duke Chapel, the cadence resonating through a space of tired academic workers and students at semester’s end. I should listen to this at the end of each day.

Listen here.

Remote Viewing

(Link from NASA post here. It’s a University website, not a government site, but I’ll save that for another post.)

People are psyched about this image, a photograph of a Mars lander probe, shot from a second orbiting probe.

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The Secular

Iris Marion Young:

“The ideal of urban life I conceptualize entails a political conception of differentiated citizenship. Political institutions and discourse ought to define the scope of the polity as extending across the city and region in which people share the effects of external economic and environmental forces, and interact in dense networks that create interdependencies and mutual effects. Read the rest of this entry »

Empyre follow-up

We use certain means to certain ends, and in so doing produce certain subjectivities.

(One works through zoning law to produce more equitable housing, or through interaction design or software to produce more humane interfaces. The navigation of zoning law implicates us in different ways and makes one another sort of “citizen.” The decision not to do so does the same.)

This doesn’t make the production of subjectivities the true end of the work. Read the rest of this entry »