blog.shimer

Moves & Mobiles

Dinah, first year Shimer student, joins us to show what she did with her writing week - a week which at Shimer is similar to exam week at other institutions.  During this week, students either take comprehensive exams or do semester projects, which require 40 hours of work on some approved topic.  Semester projects are always at least partially essays, but many have a creative component--as Dinah's does.  On page 21 of our catalog, you can read more about comprehensive exams and semester projects.  We hope you enjoy Dinah's reflections on how she got to Shimer and how it's changing her, and how she used writing week to reflect on it all.

      This is the written portion of my writing week final, along with pictures of my final project.  I wanted to show how  education re-ignited and connected my passions.

 

                     I left Indiana as a beginning graffiti artist and activist. I moved to New Jersey for a day, then realized I did not want to live in New Jersey. I got rid of 2/3 of my possessions. I came to Chicago with 3 bags of laundry, 4 milkcrates of books, a mattress, a job, a couple boxes of odds and ends, and a rented room. My craft supplies and spraypaint were lost to my mother's attic, and my creativity was lost to my confusion. The first four months or so moved like a blur; wake up, bike to work, bike home, sit in room alone and read, go to bed, repeat. I read over 20 books that fall. I read more about labor movement and organization. I read a lot of Hesse. I still had no idea what I was doing, or wanted to do; I just knew that this was not it. I had spent the previous year working with community organization, activism, and radical politics. There wasn't a shortage of information to stop me from doing anything, just an inability to use it properly.
                              I have always had trouble formulating ideas and thoughts into coherent sentences or art forms. This was not helped by a year of instability and confusion. The creativity block I experienced was possibly the most painful experience I've encountered. I realized I did not have the ability to express myself, because I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to say. Ideas were constantly swirling around my head: statistics and figures, radical theories, beautiful and horrifying historical documents. They all hung over me. I could not decipher this. The year I had spent trying to learn, and the following year spent trying to effectively apply it, were fruitless. These were ideas I did not fully grasp. I couldn't bend them to fit, I couldn't shape them and view them from every angle, I lacked the true understanding to really make anything out of my own thoughts. Philosophers and historians dangled over my head, intangible. I became more uninspired; I hid my paints under my bed, and the dogs eventually chewed up all of my art pencils. I drank more tea and picked up a third job.
                       The decision to go back to school had more intense consequences than quitting a job or two and racking up more student loans; I was engulfed with creative energy. As this year pushed on, it has only become stronger. I have introverted greatly. I have found that I am in my head 80% of the time. As I bike to work I try to wrap my mind around the previous day's Sociology reading. I laugh at the similarity of drivers throwing temper tantrums to the tantrums of chimpanzees. My people-watching skills are now verging on creepy. I do math problems in my head for fun; this is the most surprising, really. I am astounding myself daily.

                              This mobile took me an obscene amount of time to make. I started working on it early, and sacrificed a lot of sleep. I gathered all of my focus statements, written papers, handouts, homework, notes, and more than a few journal entries. I attempted to cut them all into perfect squares. I drew a scaled design of a mobile, calculated how many paper birds I would need to really make this happen, and tried to figure out the paper crane size in relation to how big I wanted the mobile to be. . I hand-cut then hand-painted each piece of paper with water colors, ironed, and folded each bird. The folding and stringing process are what took the longest; the most intricate steps are rarely seen. I skimmed each paper as I painted and folded it, and it was mind-blowing to see just how much I came across this semester, even in the course I dropped after four weeks.

                          This mobile represents a lot to me. On the most superficial level, it is a reminder to all the first year students as to just how much we have accumulated thus far. This project, for me, is the manifestation of my last year. I have taken the things that I wanted so badly to know and have conceived my own ideas from them. I can take ideas apart, I can reshape them, I can combine and reduce them to my liking. They are no longer foreign, unreachable ideas floating above me. I have found a new creative medium through understanding. In Natural Science we discussed the opposition to science due to the idea that knowledge takes away from the “magic” of nature and the beauty in the unknown. This concept has never made sense to me, especially now. The only thing ignorance does is keep one in the passive position. I've found more than empowerment in knowledge though, I have found comfort, and I have found immense beauty.

Shimer-in-Oxford via Video Blog

Adrian, our 4th Year Video Blogger, joins us to show us some of the places Shimer-in-Oxford students get to explore when not reading the entirety of the Republic and then some each week: 

 

 

End of Term

Here we are at the end of the term in Oxford, and I regret that I haven’t sent our news for more than a month! So let me offer a belated season’s greetings with some news from a more-than-ordinarily-chilly Oxford. We have finished up courses and embarked on our various holiday plans: travel, reading toward tutorials and theses in the Spring, and just relaxing after a very busy term. 

I realize I haven’t said much yet about the range of subjects folks are studying here. So I want to pay tribute to everyone’s hard work this term with just a list of some of the tutorials that they’ve undertaken over the last few months - the list isn’t exhaustive, though it might exhaust you just reading it: “Christian Mysticism,” “Druidism and Paganism,” “History and Practice of Observational Astronomy,” “Early Writing Systems,” “Chinese Literature,” “Feminism,” Proust,” “Philosophy of Mind,” “French Lyric Poetry,” “Psychology of Religion” and “Classical Guitar” to name, literally, a few. Next term promises just as rich a harvest of ideas, with “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” “Government and Politics of the U.S.,” and “History of Consciousness through Material Studies” a few of the courses we have planned. 

 

Meanwhile  a number of us have been making the most of their time in Oxford getting out of tutors’ rooms and the Library in extracurriculars (like Lance Dyke in the 2008-2009 program*). Bob Carpenter has been up at around 5 every morning through the term to train with the Hertford College crew. We look forward to cheering him and his boat on when they compete in the “Torpids” races on the Thames just south of town in February. And Ari Robbins’ been studying with the Cafe Reason Butoh Dance Theater in nearby Headington; he’s planning a tutorial on Butoh next term to dovetail with the topic of his thesis. And, of course, Adrian has been getting to know the geese in Port Meadow!

 

Finally, before I sign off, I will leave you with some visuals. The first two shots below were taken in the Chapel of New College. New College has been giving us rooms (as they did our last time through) so we occasionally have had classes in the “Rew Nooner Spoom.” (The room was named for William Spooner, Warden of New College from 1903 to 1924 and eponym of the “spoonerism,” the transposition of letters in phrases to sometimes hilarious effect: Spooner is reported to have bellowed "Three cheers for our queer old Dean!" to a Hall full of undergraduates on the occasion of one of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s birthdays. How’s that for some amusing Oxfordiana?) 

 

We went to the Chapel following the end of our last class last week. We had been reading Henry Adams’ Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and we thought it’d be a good idea to take a look at some of the very fine Gothic architecture Oxford has been graced with (though it post-dates the Cathedral at Chartres by a few centuries). 

 

 

 

Click on this last image below and you’ll get a clip of a little gathering we had in rooms lent us a former Shimerian-in-Oxford, Kim Gumino, who is in the process of setting herself up here. As you’ll see, we had tutors and students in for what in Oxford is known as "end of term drinks,” though I assure you all the fun was perfectly good and clean. I offer the video clip as evidence of this. It’s of Howard Ruan, who studied Classical Guitar this term. You’ll hardly believe me that he’s studied it seriously only since he’s been in Oxford; he is primarily a bassist. He and his tutor, Rikky Rooksby offered bravely to perform some duets for our end of term party. (Some of you may have had the chance to learn from Dr. Rooksby as well - he has a widely popular line of instruction books on guitar and composition.) So, I leave you with a bit of their gracious playing and wish you all a similarly beautiful holiday.

 

 

 

* (See http://shimerinoxford.blogspot.com/2009/02/fencing-part-deux.html on Lance's career as a fencer for Oxford University.)