blog.shimer

Does hell exist?

It’s a beautiful day in Chicago. The trees are blooming, the sun is shining, and Shimer students are mentally and emotionally preparing themselves for the upcoming final week of classes.

As Adrian, a 2011 graduate and current admissions counselor, pointed out, the term “hell week” is a recently adopted one. Over the course of the last few years, it has gone from being relatively obscure to being published in the weekly student newsletter. It refers to the last week of classes, when all the final papers you inevitably procrastinated throughout the semester are due.

At most schools, the last week of classes is when one prepares for final exams, but since we have none here, I think it’s safe to call hell week an entirely fabricated phenomenon. It’s completely avoidable if you don’t procrastinate. I’m speaking from experience, having survived a hell week last semester. It’s not uncommon to find Shimer students up all night at the IIT library (which is open 24 hours), frantically typing papers until the wee hours of the morning. It is arguably more difficult to write papers than to prepare for tests, but at least you don’t have to worry about your inadequate performance on a test, given your lack of sleep.

One of the fundamental paradoxes of hell week is that since you know that you’re the one who placed yourself in Hell, you can’t really justify complaining about it. I wonder if officially coining the term will lead to future students concluding that hell week, since it is a chosen fate, is a survivable and even ideal circumstance to find themselves in. It will be an interesting and very Shimer-esque experiment to observe the ‘social construction of reality’ through language.

Still Life Painting (Part III)

     Hello, Shimer Blog readers! As promised I have a picture of my painting with some orange on it:

      That is not all though! I have also worked on my pitcher a bit more, which has resulted in something actually resembling a round object and not just a shaded-in white space. Amanda is an amazing teacher and I am consistently surprised at how much my painting looks like art. So, here is my painting at its current stage:

     The next steps coming up include a glazing process to give more color to my fruit and vegetable. I also must decide whether or not to include the pattern on the pitcher, which is more of an internal struggle than you may imagine.
     In case you enjoyed the article I posted last time about women in art, here is another for your further reading: Examining the Exclusion of Women from Art Historical Documentation
      Next time I might post some of the work I have been doing on my replication of Leyster's The Proposition. Until then!

A Break from Paintings

My recent blog posts would have you believe I do nothing but paint. However, that is not at all true. I also go to three other classes, have some hobbies, and participate in extracurricular activities. Sometimes I even: read for fun (currently Leonard Woolf's autobiographies), try to discover new music (I wrote a blog post on here a few years ago about how terrible my music taste is - it has only gotten marginally better), play video games (almost done with Mass Effect 3, so awesome), learn American Sign Language with one of my roommates (so much fun), and go on road trips (like to D.C. for the national feminist conference).

Other than my oil painting tutorial, I am taking two cores (Natural Sciences IV and Humanities IV) and one other elective (Film Elective: Narration Through Music). My class on musicals is a ton of fun. We all get together Tuesday evenings, watch this films together in Cinderella Lounge and then gather again Thursday morning to discuss them. Between the screening and the discussion we read a related essay (or a collection of essays), and sometimes the libretto, and one of us writes a protocol (a short paper read aloud at the beginning of class to focus discussion).

The class includes students from all grade levels and a few students from IIT. This is the first time this elective has been offered, but every semester Marc Hoffman facilitates some sort of film class. Recent ones have included an Introduction class to film and French New Wave.

To give you an idea of what we have been watching in our Musicals class, I will list a few (photos from imdb.com):

 

 

The version of Into the Woods we watched was a taped version of the Broadway show with Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason. I was not a Sondheim fan before this class, but after our discussion on the complex dialogue, interwoven themes and harsh juxtaposition of fantasy to fact, I joined the fan club.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Judy Garland is best known for her role as Dorothy Gale in the Wizard of Oz (another musical, though not featured in this class), but she really won me over in Meet Me in St. Louis. The film is a technicolor explosion about a family that amy have to uproot their lives and move to the big city.

We discussed  gender roles, economic class distinctions, family ties, and the role of music in tying together a storyline.

 

 

 

 

One of the best-known musicals of all time, Singing in the Rain offered a whimsical, light-hearted story about an actor who falls in love with a movie and out-of-favor with his co-star. It offers a lot to discuss about gender roles and relations, the silenced female voice, comodification of racial identity and capitalism's role in art.

 

Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully filmed, skillfully written and acted with conviction. It sparked discussion about the role of audience in a film, what it means for a movie to be filmed for television as opposed to the theater, and the grey area between good and evil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basically, I am taking an awesome film elective and learning a lot more about the world through musical narration.

Until next time! 

Still Life Painting (Part II)

Hey there!

So, I left you last time with just the underpainting of my still-life. This post is a little more exciting! I have painted the artichoke! 

I learned something magical in class. Namely that this very vegetable green is not made with yellow and blue oil paint, but with yellow and black! Mind-boggling I know!

Also pretty fantastic is an article I recently read for my research paper: Old Masters: Overlooked Women Artists by Joan Altabe. You should give it a read if you are interested in art.

Next time I will show you some orange on that canvas! 

Peripatetic Like Whoa.

It is a perfect day in Chicago today.  It’s one of those days that rests halfway between spring and summer where the sun is shining bright and warm, but the air is cool and it’s hard to decide if the sweatshirt you’re wearing is actually necessary.  It’s one of those days where you want to go outside and stay there and, contrary to what preconceived notions you might have about school, it is also a perfect day to be a Shimer student.

Near the beginning of this semester I fell in love with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.  We read about a third of it in my Social Sciences class and then moved on, which was disappointing for me.  I asked our facilitator, Aron, if he would be willing to lead an informal tutorial for interested students so we could finish the book before the semester ended.  He agreed, and since then we have met almost every Tuesday at 10:30 to discuss yet another book of the Nicomachean Ethics.

It has been phenomenal. 

There are usually somewhere between three to six of us who take the time to read an extra 20 or so pages of Aristotle and meet for an approximately hour long discussion.  Sometimes we bring snacks.  Sometimes we sit outside.

Today we went for a walk, ‘cause we’re peripatetic like that.

The conversation started more casually than it usually does.  I think Alexis brought up my squirrel phobia, which led to Aron’s story of being attacked by a gang of squirrels when eating lunch one day.  Eventually, though we wove our way to the book of the Ethics that we had read and spent the next hour or so shouting over traffic and meandering through neighborhoods and parks while discussing Aristotle’s perspective on friendship.

I can say with the utmost sincerity that there is no other way that I would rather have started my day.  The conversation flowed beautifully and, despite being outside and walking, we managed to cite the text and carry on an extremely focused, rigorous and interesting conversation about a beautiful piece of philosophy.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that very few other schools have peripatetic philosophy days.

Ra-ra Shimer.

I’m going to go write an essay outside now.

Still Life Painting

Hello again! I have read much of Gombrich's Story of Art at this point. I have some knowledge to back the application of oil painting I am learning. I also am working on a research paper for our oil painting tutorial about female Old Master painters, focusing on Judith Leyster (whose painting "The Proposition" I am working on copying) and Artemisia Gentileschi. Gentileschi is the famous painter who did "Judith Slaying Holofernes".

Very exciting stuff.

So, one of the things we've done recently in class is focus on still-lifes.  We each drew some in our sketch books after looking at many in the art institute. My sketch book is a weird place filled with half drawn paintings. Which was actually intentional because I am focusing on different things in each one, like composition or the way light falls or color acts or tones relate. I draw in charcoal, but my classmates usually use graphite.

Then, in class, Amanda (our facilitator) brought in dishes and fruit and cardboard and lighting and a camera so that we got to practice creating our own still-lifes. We each did quite a few. Ultimately we decided to go with Allison's still-life of a pitcher, semi-peeled blood orange, and an artichoke. 

Here is my underpainting, or brown-school grisaille, of the picture:

Next step to come soon!

Ta-Da!

My last post was about the draped pillowcase we've been painting in my oil painting tutorial. Well, several steps have happened since then and it looks a bit different.

Voila:

 

 

     Until next time.

Three Students, Three Hours, Three Paintbrushes

One of the most amazing things about Shimer is the tutorial. This species of class is made up of one to three students and a facilitator. It can be on almost any topic imaginable, as long as there are works to read from and the facilitator is willing to have conversations about such things.

I lucked out this semester and got to take a truly unique tutorial with two of my classmates. Amanda Cadogan is teaching us oil painting for three hours every Friday.

We read theory and history from:

And:

We learn techniques like "grisaille" (under-painting) and sketch throughout the week to work on our artistic abilities. Today I will show you a portion of an underpainting that I've done. I'll update you over the next few weeks as to how everything is working out:

There it is, my pillowcase drapery. Perhaps not the most invigorating of subjects, but it does help me to understand tone relationships. Obviously only part of the underpainting has been done, but I hope you can get a feel for what this will eventually look like. 

I'll show you the (pretty much) finished product next week! 

The Galvin

Well hello again.

Isaac here. In my last blog post here, I mentioned the Galvin Library (more formally known as the Paul V Galvin Library), and I would like to go a little further into detail on it.

The Galvin is a resource that all enrolled IIT, VanderCook (a music education school), and Shimer students have access to. It contains books on many, many subjects (including pleasure reading, if that tickles your fancy), housed on two levels. The first, primary, floor is home to not only what I understand to be the vast majority of IIT's book collection, but also a portion of Shimer's library, which can be found in the Northwest corner of the building. On the west side of the building, there are isolated rooms with tables for private group study, with a capacity of around four people. These rooms are exceptionally useful, whether you are in a group or not, for privacy. Especially if you're working on a large project that you need room for, but don't want to pack up and take with you every time you take a short break, these rooms are invaluable.

Now we come to the use of the lower floor of the Galvin. On weekdays during the school year, it is open all night long. This means that you have access to all the referencing materials, power outlets, and vending machines you might need to feed your paper, your laptop, and yourself during a long night of paper-writing and rewriting. I would really love to say that it never comes to that point at Shimer; that we finish all of our papers weeks early, are always satisfied with them, and never have to stay up at night over them, but that is not the case. As with all humans, Shimerians have flaws and make mistakes. That sometimes means that we have too much work during the week to finalize our papers, and there is nothing to be done about that, but to buckle down for a late-night session of paper revisions. When it comes to that, though I always try to avoid it, the Gavin is my place to go, as I am sure it is for many other fellow paper-writers, Shimerians or otherwise.

Well, it seems that once more I am out of time before I need to head off to Natural Sciences 2 and discuss Jane Goodall, and her charming depictions of the chimps and apes she worked with (seriously, her writing is really endearing). Next week is spring break, so not much will be going on at Shimer, but the week after that, we go back into full swing with the founding documents of the US (Soc 2), Kafka, O'Conner, and Dostoevsky (Hum 2), finish Goodall (Nat Sci 2), and continue to look at Renga (Japanese Poetry). I really can't wait!

Sine cera
Isaac.

Making the Difficult Decisions

Perhaps another introduction of myself is due. It has been quite a while since I've contributed to the blog and I am a bit of a different person than the eager first-year I was when I first wrote on these internet pages.

So! My name is Alex Rosenberg. I am a third-year (sixth-semester) student at Shimer College. I am a traditionally aged college student currently taking Humanities 4, Natural Sciences 4, Film: Narrative Through Music and an Oil Painting Tutorial at Shimer as well as American Sign Language at Gage Park. I have served on several different committees at Shimer and am the Vice President of the IIT Hillel. My interests range from religious theory to feminism to video games (with much overlap) and, since a few of my most time consuming responsibilities have recently ended, I hope to write about many of these things on this blog in the upcoming months.

I currently live with two roommates, whom we will name J and H for the purpose of anonymity, in the Bridgeport area. I have been roommates with J for three years now, with H for two. Many years from now I will describe these days as those of gold and wonder and beauty (or so I believe at this point anyway). However, something monumental is about to occur in my time-line and I am preparing for everything to change.

J is graduating in just a few months and H is leaving for Oxford in the fall. Seemingly endless decisions must be made in light of these two facts. Will I find new roommates or live alone? Will I renew my lease or apartment hunt? Not to mention how my (rare) social time will be restructured.

This, however, is not the point of today's post. Today I am writing about Oxford.

Once upon a time, Oxford was a dream of mine. I thought about the joys of studying on the other side of the ocean and the prestige of the whole thing. Over the past few years I kept the idea of it in the back of my mind as I joined more groups and took on more responsibility.

Then something happened. I changed. I have always loved Shimer, but my feelings for it matured. There are no longer the butterflies in my stomach that come with first love, but an enduring sense of place that I'm not ready to give up.

I decided not to apply after all. My excitement for all of my friends who are planning to study there has grown and I feel even more delighted to be one of the few of my class still planning to be on the Chicago campus  next year. I will miss them all (especially my roommate) but I'm also anxious to exchange stories with them a little over a year from now when our paths re-converge.

This is also exciting news for you, dear reader, as it will (hopefully) make a faithful blogger out of me.

Until next time.