blog.shimer

Winter Break is Almost Over

Hello everyone, T2SEY5W9EXFQ

I hope your winter solstice and whatever holiday celebrations you participated in were wonderful and refreshing. I participated in my church's Advent celebrations. This was exciting because this was my first Christmas at this church and as a member. I could probably write an entire blog entry about what it means to be a member of a church, but what's important about it is that by becoming a member of this church I'm beginning to sink my proverbial roots into Chicago. I knew since my second semester here that I wanted to make my residency in this city a permanent one. My church meets in one of the largest historical Polish parishes that was sold in 1993 to Covenant Presbyterian Church of Chicago. That means that during Advent the altar looks a little something like this:

This picture doesn't do it justice, especially since I took with my phone camera. You can't tell from this image, but the church is actually lit almost entirely by natural light with a few small bulbs to illuminate the side aisles above the pews. 

I was so busy with the last two weeks ( known as Hell Week and Writing Week) that I hadn't been to church in a few weeks. When I resumed my regular attendance I got so many comments from pastors and acquaintances who I met in my membership class about my hair that I suddenly realized how many people didn't know what had happened. 

My First Semester Project

I decided to begin this post not with a standard personal introduction, but with an introduction of a different kind. I decided to begin by confessing my love for comics. 

An explanation of this love is not only important for the reader’s understanding of this post, but it can also function as a simple summation of my character. I am a rather shy, timid sort of person by nature, and I don’t like violence. Comics, as I’m sure you are aware, are often seen as havens for mindless depravity and wickedness. I, like many other comics lovers, feel that this perception is unfair. After all, comics are rarely mindless. 

Nevertheless, several comics that I have encountered depict depraved acts of violence and buckets full of wickedness. That is why my relationship with them has been one of occasional tumult (much like the relationship between Superman and Batman). There are often works of great historical and artistic importance, even works of philosophical brilliance, that, because of their violent nature, I simply cannot read.

But there is still something magical about comics. When an author is able to take a plain, ordinary sentence and elevate it to a level of remarkable emotional resonance by simply (though laboriously) adding a drawing—there are few things I enjoy more. 

Another comics stereotype that has inexplicably survived decades without sustenance of any kind is that they are only about super heroes. This is an untruth of the highest order. Comics are of an astounding and incredible variety. I would even say that the majority of comics published today (if we consider “comics” to include graphic novels, newspaper comics, webcomics, mini comics and comic books) are not about super heroes at all. From Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant, a witty, historical webcomic, to Andy Runton’s Owly, a children’s comic of delightful imagination; from Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo, the exquisitely drawn tale of a wandering rabbit samurai, to Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, a beautiful, somber, autobiographical love-letter to the author’s hometown (and mine too, so I’m partial), comics are capable of exploring anything, in any way, with the same emotional and literary quality as a novel or work of non-fiction. 

But despite all the wonderful things that comics are capable of, I still think that they have an untapped potential for good that needs to be developed. As an educational tool, comics are unmatched. They have the extraordinary ability to present subject matter that may be considered boring or dull, and make it exciting and entertaining. Plus, comics get kids reading. In today’s world of screens and machines, reading is taking a backseat to many other activities. But comics are there, welcoming new or reluctant readers into the fabulous world of words and pictures. 

So, yes. I love comics. You may be wondering what that has to do with anything else. Actually, it has quite a bit to do with “anything else.” My love for reading comics, as well as writing them, and my belief in their educational potential, directly influenced my decision to create a comic book for my Semester Project. My goal was to take a subject that few would read about “just for fun”, and present it in an enjoyable, easily accessible way. Choosing that subject was easier than expected.

Our first reading in Natural Sciences 1 was The Presocratics, edited by Philip Wheelwright. In it, Wheelwright explores the lives and ideas of the philosophers who lived and thought before Socrates. It was a fabulous read, one that made me even more excited about my Shimer future than I had already been. Each reading was challenging and thought-provoking, and each class discussion was stimulating and invigorating.

I so enjoyed reading The Presocratics that one day I suddenly thought, “This would make a great comic book!” It had long been my ambition to create an historical comic book, especially one geared toward younger audiences, and I did so love those wonderful ancient thinkers. Therefore, I was quite excited by this new idea.

However, as the semester continued, I began to doubt my decision. I was worried that my project wouldn’t be academic enough. I was worried that I wouldn’t meet the deadline. I was worried that I would again encounter those prejudices against comics that I had encountered before. To my delight, my idea was met with enthusiasm and encouragement by both my Shimer friends and my facilitators. By the time Writing Week came along, I was feeling motivated and inspired. 

I began my project by deciding which philosophers I wanted to cover. There are many included in Wheelwright’s book, and narrowing that list down to six was quite difficult. In the end, I made my selections based on personal preference. 

After making that decision, I researched representations of the chosen philosophers (statues, paintings, etc.), and based my character sketches on those representations. Upon finalizing the design of the characters, I began to fully research the comic by returning to Wheelwright’s book. I used other sources as well, including Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, and some reputable philosophy websites.

Once research was completed, I began to write the comic. Writing, in this case, was basically storyboarding. The information, dialogue and characters were hastily sketched in a notebook. All the panels were planned out, and ready to be drawn. 

(An example of a written page).

After the comic was approximately 80% written, I began to get discouraged. I looked at all those hastily sketched pages of stick figures, all of those illegible notes, and I couldn’t see the comic beneath the scribbles. Fortunately, Writing Week is only a week long. I knew that I had to finish. So I took up my pencil somewhat hesitantly, and started to draw. 

Drawing was the most time consuming of all the aspects of this project, but it was also the most rewarding. It was in the drawing phase that I experienced the “comics magic” that I mentioned earlier. I soon saw all the text and dialogue that I’d written spring to life when the drawings were added. I tried to make each panel as aesthetically pleasing as possible, and with every additional detail my project began to look more polished and complete.

(The finished version of the page above).

This momentum carried me through the rest of the week, and on Wednesday, December 5th, my first Writing Week ended. I was done, I was relieved, and I was quite happy with my project.

In a blog post from last year, a fellow Shimer student described Writing Week as a chance for students to personalize their semester. I think that’s an excellent description. I, for instance, had the opportunity to combine my love for a medium that is often overlooked, with an historical, academic text that I thoroughly enjoyed. What else would grant me this opportunity but Writing Week? Where else could it occur but at Shimer?

Roots & Branches

In the Shimer library the other day, I came across a little gem of a book from our old Mount Carroll campus (circa 1940) entitled “Too Much College,” which contains the chapter “Teaching the Unteachable.”   

“In my opinion,” Stephen Leacock wrote, “the great majority of the colleges of the United States and Canada contain in their curriculums of liberal arts an accumulation of courses which are little more than an attempt to teach the unteachable...in a world where it was always afternoon young men and women might sit among the lotus leaves, or in the shade of the catalpas and talk of “social trends” and “personnel psychology” till they nodded off asleep. In the world as it is there is no room for such a slumber, for such a sleep, for such a folding of the hands to sleep.”

Learning for the sake of learning is the cornerstone of academia--but it has always struck me as leaning too far towards selfishness over selflessness, passivity rather than activity. But now, through Shimer, I have come to see learning as an end in itself.

It's the process. Before the "end product" of an object of knowledge, there is the activity of putting down your preconceptions and listening. It is beautiful and redeeming and allows you to appreciate your (collective or individual) past with unbearable compassion and no shame. To learn is to love, I have come to see. Engaging in a dialogue--whether it be with a book, a classmate, a stranger, or a piece of art--requires you to act forth with your true self in a simultaneously outward and reflexive relationship. It's astonishingly profound. You are constantly becoming more 'yourself,' breathing and laughing and feeling--extending like a thousand branches--through the world around you. You are of it and with it. In the Bhagavad Gita, "there is a banyan tree which has its roots upward and its branches down." In its context, it refers to the Vedas and transcendence, but it strikes me as a beautiful description of all relationships and the self.

Your roots might be your experiences; your branches, your action. But in the end, they are equal and of the same tree; they are meaningless distinctions, as all are.

And in between the ground and heavens? Understanding, or the verb tense of. At the trunk, you use the nourishment you've taken from the rich soil and process it into something helpful and true to yourself. You are producing. Then you take this truth and send it back out into the world as something others can appreciate and utilize in turn. It requires every single cell of the tree and every breeze of the surrounding environment; but the most beautiful thing of all is that it will come back to you, again through the fertile ground. It will all return, only to go back out again. And only in this way can a tree grow.

Funnily enough, our mascot is a tree (well, one of them--the other is a 'flaming smelt,' but that one doesn't often make it onto the t-shirts). If we place it in the context of our motto, "to serve rather than be served," the tree becomes a metaphor for truth in action.

In the same vein, the growth of a culture or world can be seen as a similar gyre: our delving into the past to gain wisdom, our synthesis of these ideas, and our future output. All of it's "turning and turning in the widening gyre," in that unlike a tree, it not only progresses through time, but spirals back through space. In a sense, we are continually returning to the same ideas, the same truths, but in different contexts and in different lights.

Returning to our original metaphor of lotus leaves and catalpas, we ask ourselves: what sets our particular tree apart from those of other liberal arts colleges?

Our motto is “not to be served, but to serve.” It's our method. Judith Butler writes, "Being acted upon is not fully continuous with acting, and in this way the forces that act upon us are not finally responsible for what we do."  It's an intentional understanding that active reception is necessary before active engagement in the world, and in between the two is you, your intelligence and will. Navigating through integrated course after course, one comes to see both that things are ends in themselves, and that none of them are isolated disciplines--including yourself.

If one could ever distill the particular quality that makes Shimer special, I think it's that every level of our organization is consistent with itself, these truths. On an interpersonal level, we try to understand each voice in class, including the facilitator’s. On a self-governing level, we work together democratically to make decisions. On an academic level, we try to understand the author of each text we read, and ultimately try to understand all the texts together--which themselves even build upon the inherent subjectivity of everything we think we know.

This may seem paradoxical when examining, for example, our social sciences curriculum, which sort of moves from through philosophy progressing towards post-structuralism. But I think here we try to treat all texts as equally important. We read the feminist critiques of Plato, but we don't necessarily lose respect for Plato. We confront the racist, sexist, and colonialist texts in the western canon, as well as difficult-t0-grasp mystical texts, but throughout all of it we learn that in order to actually understand the author, respect is a pre-requisite.

I experienced a rather silly but nonetheless striking example of this last year during a Humanities 2 study party. We were all reading poetry aloud in the dorms when someone reacted to an annoyingly distracting individual with sarcasm--which I pointed out to him wasn't fixing anything. I didn't realize until I saw the trapped look on his face that I wasn't solving anything either. It seems to me to be an perennial question: how do you relate to a person or idea without just reacting to it? Where's the balance between you and the other? It was a real-life, emotional realization of the pitfalls of endless ideological intolerance. Academic and political movements tend to react seemingly endlessly. I found myself looking for balance, and finding it here, in discussions of existentialism (authenticity), zen (the middle way), and pure dialectic itself (Hegel).

"Ultimately, therefore, it is not a question of (n)either…(n)or, but both…neither," as Constantin von Maltzahn put it.

What makes the “Great Conversation” so great is the degree to which we actively listen to the Other, understand what was said, consider it critically, and then consciously relate our perspective back to the person, who in turn does the same. It goes from one person’s mouth to the other’s ears, and back out through the other’s mouth (...and back in through the other’s ears, ad infinitum). It's the understanding understanding, as Aristotle might say. Martin Buber (whom we read in Social Sciences 4, and is generally a favorite among Shimer students) calls it the unifying "I-Thou" relationship achieved through the objectifying "I-It" relationship. The common idea here is that humans are social beings, so we’re going to live with each other whether we do it compassionately or not. We are, in a sense, obligated to learn to do it well.

I don't think it's a coincidence that our studies are so generalized. In teaching us “how to think,” I think we are really learning “how to love.” The Sufi mystics sought to love all things. Shimer itself has made me a spiritual person, in helping me to understand my place in the universe, and what it means to be an active participant in it--arguably the most "unteachable" thing of all. I am learning what it means to be open: both confident and humble. A Shimer student recently sent out an email reminding us of the necessity of vulnerability. It feels like magic when both sides of a conversation really show up to help each other learn. I recently realized that the word compassion, literally, means to "co-suffer" (the "Passion" of the Christ); it is a mutual surrender necessary for making the world a better place.

Evidently we knew it in Mount Carroll, and we continue to remember now. To put it simply: we insist upon living what we've learned: we love.

The Opportunities of a Liberal Arts Degree...

Hello Darlings! Its been quite a while since I’ve written in the Shimer blog. However, it is only because I have been engaged in several different activities! First and foremost, I’ve been immersed in my new job as the Program Leader at Sit Stay Read. Sit Stay Read is a nonprofit organization that implements literacy programs at inner-city grade schools. All of our materials are dog-themed, such as our books, brainstorming worksheets, and writing sheets. And the coolest part? We bring in actual dogs and their owners for the kids to visit in order to overcome anxiety about reading aloud as well as building their confidence for learning.

(Basic diagram of a Sit Stay Read program)

As a Program Leader, my job is to get the kids pumped up about reading and writing, manage the group of volunteers in each program, and oversee the program in general. Each program is about eight weeks long. By the end of the program, the kid’s work is put into their very own book (which I have to put together).

(Mid-way through the process of putting together their books)

Besides Sit Stay Read, I’ve been heavily involved with another nonprofit organization known as Assist Her, Inc. Assist Her, Inc. is an adolescent female empowerment organization that specializes in literacy, prevention, and mentoring programs and workshops within Chicago schools - I am their Social Media Relations Specialist. I run their all of their social media accounts as well as work closely with the Community Relations and Marketing departments.

 

(Two of my co-workers, sporting their AH t-shirts!)

I can’t really say what I’ve been working on as it will be released in the early spring, but I can say that Assist Her, Inc. has provided me with some amazing opportunities such as meeting authors, CPS officials, politicians, access to VIP events, and most importantly…to be a part of evolving a truly revolutionary group! You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn.

(The Executive Director of AH, Samantha Coleman, and I with author Crystal Winston)

And finally, the other group that has been keeping my attention is the Unity youth group that I volunteer for. I am one of two sponsors who lead the middle school class (they’re called Uniteens). This year has been a little different as my co-sponsor and I have decided to write our own curriculum about world religion. So on top of writing my thesis and burying my nose in my academic readings, I’ve also had to take on learning about a few other religions, which I find to be really awesome!

(All of my Uniteens and their welcome board)

Besides co-teaching and co-writing the curriculum for the middle school class, I was also preparing for our 2012 Fall Unitreat! The Fall Unitreat is a three-day retreat that we our group gets to go on to meet up with other Uniteen groups in the Great Lakes Region (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky). We focus on the Unity principles, trust activities, spiritual education and guidance, and just having a lot of fun!

(Picture from the Spring Unitreat 2012, I couldn’t find a group one of the Fall Unitreat D: )

These are only some of the activities that I have been involved in recently. I’ve also been attending the GLAM group at IIT, attending comedy shows, traveling to Indiana and Michigan, attending social study groups, and much more! But Shimer College actually has a lot to do with all of the activities I am involved with… specifically by what I’ve gained through their Great Books curriculum, what my Liberal Arts degree will be, and their work field preparation. By using a Great Books curriculum, students at Shimer are taught how to critically read and analyze texts, how to communicate and hold a discussion, and how to facilitate their own learning. And since all of the students here at Shimer are studying “Liberal Arts”, our area of expertise is in a little bit of everything! This gives us all an advantage in anything and everything we do, especially since having a degree in Liberal Arts means that we have both communication and interpersonal skills. What’s more is that these skills are actually sought after by professional organizations and companies. And of course, as a college that uses federal aid, Shimer has a Federal Work Study (FWS) program that can allow qualified students to gain real life work experience that is paid and able to be added to our resumes - both on and off campus!

To me, this is the most important and often most looked-over part of what Shimer College has to offer. A lot of people think, “I can’t do anything with a Liberal Arts degree!” I know I had a couple breakdowns about it my first year here. But I have learned that this is NOT the truth. It is actually BECAUSE of my Great Books education, my soon-to-be BA in Liberal Arts, and my experience with working in both Student Life and the Business Office of Shimer College that I was even considered for my positions at Sit Stay Read or Assist Her, Inc. Not to mention that Shimer’s curriculum taught me how to lead, facilitate, and even write a curriculum for my youth group at Unity. Without Shimer College and what I’ve learned here, I would not be able to say that I am much more than a college student about to graduate… I am in fact a college student who has the necessary skills and experience to lead a purposeful and prosperous life.

Until next time, -L.

Carefully Cultivated Confidence: An Introduction

    Hello, internet. 

    I suppose introductions are in order: my name is Ryan Taylor-Davis, and I’m a first-year transfer student at Shimer from Sebastopol, California. Blogging is something fairly new to me; I haven’t really done it very often. Nevertheless, I saw an opportunity to learn how to do something new and grow as a person and I took it. In many ways, that’s what it’s is about: self-growth. Every time I hear stories of people rediscovering themselves at Shimer, completely changing their ideologies and life goals, I smile. Like these people, I’ve experienced my own sort of transformation, of total reconstruction and metamorphosis at this amazing place. And I’ve been here a month and a half.

    Perhaps the beginning would be the best place to start. I was always a bookworm; many long hours were spent wandering the hills and fields of Sonoma County, my home, a book in hand and the sun on my face. It was nothing short of magical. School, however, was always a different matter. I enjoyed reading, but hate the textbooks and tedium infinitum of worksheets; it killed learning for me. Of all the subjects I hated, there was no greater villain than math and science. How horrible they were, no books and all practice problems. I struggled with them all throughout middle school, and high school got even worse: with failing confidence in my academic ability because of my slipping grades in math and science, I felt less and less confident in the liberal arts, and I watched those grades begin to slip as well. I began to show up late, or even not go at all, just because I was discouraged.

    Come graduation, I went to Santa Rosa Junior College. It was infinitely better than high school, because I could choose what I wanted to take. I solved the problem of hating math and science by simply not taking them. This, however, did not solve my disgust with the subjects. Upon finding Shimer, I was determined to apply and wrote my admissions essays that night; I was confident that this had to be the place for me. I’d go to Shimer and study hard, participate in the B.A. to J.D. program, and the graduate and practice law. There, just like that, in a neat little box.

    But life, in its infinite wisdom, is never that simple. It doesn’t appreciate being put into boxes like that. When I arrived at Shimer, the most peculiar thing happened. I started to appreciate the natural sciences. Reading The Presocratics, a collection of writings by natural philosophers before Socrates, and then reading Lucretius, the great Roman poet, write about atoms in the 1st Century B.C. really piqued my interest. I started asking questions, questions I had never considered before. We knew about atoms that long ago? How do atoms bond with one another? 

    The readings continued to get more and more interesting, and every time I read a new author, a thousand new questions filled my mind. Sometimes, I would understand. I’d gloss over diagrams, with their overtly complex labeling system, or struggle with Aristotelian diction. But that’s the beauty of Shimer: every time I stepped into the classroom, no matter how bewildered I was when I started, I always left with a better understanding of the material. This understanding was usually sufficient to discuss, write about, or even explain the concepts to other students; the few times it wasn’t, others were always there to help me after class over food in the cafeteria. 

    All of my classes are brilliant, but I guess Natural Sciences 1 with Jim Donovan really stands out because it evoked such a drastic change in me. I went from a kid who was routinely made fun of in science classes, who had to take biology twice because he did so poorly, to looking forward to my Laws and Models in Chemistry class every morning. Considering that the class starts at 8:30am, that’s a feat. It’s just so different from anything I’ve previously experienced; it makes me want to be there. Unlike the discouraged slump I fell into in high school, I’ve never missed a class.

    I’m also enrolled in Humanities 1: Art and Poetry with Aron Dunlap, which is phenomenal - we’re reading Metamorphoses, a captivating book by Ovid. It’s quite remarkable how much art over the years has been based on the stories found in this book. And then, in the afternoons, I have Social Sciences 1: Society, Personality, and Culture with Ann Dolinko. We’ve had some really interesting discussions in that class, especially after reading William James’ Psychology: The Briefer Course.

    Each semester at Shimer, students either take a composition exam (“comp”) testing their competency in a group of core classes or do a semester project that links up with their academics; considering students generally comp at the end of their first year, or midway through their second, I’m going to be doing a semester project this year. I haven’t decided exactly what yet, but I know I’m going to be doing something related to the diffusion speed of gases through a solid barrier. I’ve been pretty inspired to test the diffusion speeds ever since reading Pascal, who did the same, but with mercury. The most amazing part of all this, though, is that I could have chosen nearly anything (as long as it’s approved by the facilitators) to do my semester project on, but I’m choosing a science experiment. Now that’s certainly a transformation!

    So I guess I really didn’t know what I was going to major in. Law seemed the obvious choice because, well, I thought that was the only thing I could do well. I didn’t really like rhetoric, but it’s what I could do unfailingly decent at. It seemed like a knee-jerk reaction to NOT doing well in so many other areas: just find one thing you’re decent at, and cling to it. But Shimer’s turned all that on it’s head: I’ve discovered I’m good at more than just talking pretty. I did well on my first sociological paper, and chemistry continues to fascinate and inspire me. 

    Will I abandon my previous plans and major in natural sciences? I don’t know. And I’m okay with that. That’s a pretty big life decision to have made in a month and half. But I do know that I don’t feel like I have to choose law because it’s the only thing I’m good at. I have other interests, other areas of proficiency. This confidence in myself, this idea planted in my head and carefully cultivated over my short time here, will continue to grow and flower and bloom over the rest of my education. That is the true transformation Shimer has caused. 

 

    All the best,

        And see you at Shimer,

            Ryan

 

Figuratively Speaking

    Hello, again! One of the great things about Shimer is the option to take a summer course, which I did! How'd it go, you ask? Well, it went just swimmingly. (What your mind has just done to make that sentence make sense is positively fascinating. I'll explain below.)
    The first book we read for class was The Way We Think by Fauconnier and Turner. Their major concept is "blending," something our minds do automatically to make language make sense.
    I found the discussions to be very interesting. The class dynamic itself was a little strange at first, but worked out great in the long run. I was the only fourth year in the class. Everyone else was soon to be a second-year or, in the case of one student, it was their first Shimer class. This in itself turned out to be a bit exciting. There was a fresh attitude and approach to discussion. Many people were still finding their discussion type.
     So, like I promised at the beginning of this post, I will explain why your mind has done something amazing.
    The sentence "it is going along swimmingly" is not a literal statement. The class did not all get into a pool together and start to swim to some finish line. And yet, you understood what I meant. Your mind created a mental space, my class, and another, a swimming arena, connected the dots between those two ideas (considering what matched up from both sides), and blended them together to understand that my class was going well.
     This proved to be one of the simpler concepts to understand, and one that we came back to many times over the course of the class. In addition to Fauconnier and Turner, we read works by Lakoff and Johnson, Aristotle, Black, Davidson, Searle, Schroder, and many more.
    Stuart, the facilitator of the course, also sent out articles about modern metaphor issues. I will share this one with you on the topic of the use of metaphor in law:  http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/272-39/12092-focus-the-power-to-make-metaphor-into-law 
    Part of what is so amazing about metaphors is how often we utilize them in our speech. It is almost impossible to communicate without them. And in class they are often essential to conveying the thoughts in your head into the thoughts in others heads. Since the end of the summer and the beginning of my fall classes I have thought a great deal about the metaphors present in all Great Books and how much the greatness of their ideas has to do with the greatness of their metaphors. 

Final Thoughts?

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Brad Krautwurst, who is interning with the Richmond Public Library in Virginia.

Like some of the other folks in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) program, I am reaching the end of my summer internship, with a combination of satisfaction and a certain amount of a sadness and a lingering desire to do more to help.

I am very satisfied with my internship, and the time I've spent here.  I feel I've made a difference in more than a few patron's lives, and learned a lot about library sciences, both in abstract knowledge and practical skills.  I've toured three different libraries--including Richmond's--with a fourth to come tomorrow.  I've created a display that seems to be attracting much more interest than my colleague and I ever thought it would when we first started putting it together.  I've been offered an ongoing distance volunteer position, too.  There isn't much else I could have asked for!

My time here has really helped me put the critical thinking skills I've been learning at Shimer to good use, whether that's in helping a patron find a job or in a more abstract way of thinking about librarianship, and in that context, the relation of the past to the future.  Many have made the argument that libraries are obsolete, in the days of digital e-books and Google.  Libraries are a thing of the past, antiquated, or even a waste of money.

There is some measure of truth to the first two, and my response to the third is that I believe there are better, more noble values in life than truth.  That said, libraries are at risk of being left behind, because of the first two points.  There is no questioning that, I believe, but the response should be to adapt, and to use these technologies we have to exhibit the past.  There is great potential in digital librarianship, in providing community space for folks to use computers and Internet, because not everyone has Internet at their homes, especially in underprivileged areas.

Even with the things I've learned and the philosophies I've developed in my time here, there is a certain amount of sadness and lingering desire.  The sadness comes, partly in that I simply really enjoyed working at the library.  It is a laid-back environment, with great staff members that I will sorely miss.  The other, more pressing part of my reaction, is that desire to help.  There are many patrons here searching through frustrating applications for jobs, or earning their GEDs, or learning computer skills, and I've learned to accept that I can't solve those problems.  I can help, and I definitely want to.  But I can't solve them by myself.

I trust, though, that the staff members here will make a significant amount of progress.  The library's motto is, after all:

Inform.  Enrich.  Empower.

 

Scattered Arabic Thoughts

Among my favourite reading lists this past academic year was for the (lamentably retired) David Lukens' survey course on Medieval philosophy, spanning from Athenagoras to Buridan.  The list boasted a number of interesting specimens, including Duns Scotus on individuation, Marsilius of Padua on the relation between Church and State, Maimonides on faith and reason, and Ockham on perception.  Particularly impressive to me, however, were our readings from such Islamic luminaries as Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and Averroës.

These men are relatively foreign to our contemporary academic world, and will go unread by most philosophy undergrads, which is a shame, since the best of them tend to be a.) brilliant, b.) influential in the development of Western thought (we owe much of our knowledge of Plato and Aristotle to Arabic translators and commentators, for example), and c.) utterly fascinating.  To take but one especially colourful example, Avicenna (A.D. 980-1037) would sneak candles under his blankets to read Aristotle as a child, purportedly re-read the Metaphysics over forty times, composed what became the definitive medical textbook until the sixteenth century, and died at the young age of fifty-six because he ignored his doctor's repeated admonitions against excessive... self-extertion at parties.  That, and his philosophy is among the most lucid, wide-ranging, and intellectually stimulating I have ever encountered.

I and a handful of classmates, therefore, were understandably thrilled to learn that Jon McGinnis, a respectected Islamic Medievalist, would be delivering a lecture on the development of science in the Muslim Middle Ages at IIT during the semester.  The lecture was, as anticipated, captivating (I won't attempt and fail to do it justice here), and after a question and answer session Dr. McGinnis kindly gave me some advice on studying Arabic philosophy.  I was particularly interested by the language question: how difficult it would be to actually learn Arabic, and what suggestions he could offer on studying it.  While he warned me that the language is unusually challenging for Indo-European speakers, he also assured me that it was possible to learn and gave me some helpful pointers.  Thus it is that, five months later, I find myself enrolled in an intensive Arabic course this summer at the University of Chicago.

Herewith a few Arabic tidbits I've learned over the course of this summer, and which readers might find interesting:

1. While it might seem odd that a course in modern Arabic would help much in reading eleventh-century philosophical texts, proper Arabic (or "fuṣḥā") has actually remained much the same since at least the eighth or ninth century.  (Compare that with the difference between modern English and the Old English in Beowulf.)  The reason lies in the Qur'an: as the holy text of Islam, it is the perennial reference for Arabic vocabulary and grammar, ensuring otherwise unlikely stability in the tongue.
2. Even independent of such religious influence, Arabic appears "older" than it really is: it boasted at the time of the Qur'an's composition (and thus still boasts today) grammatical features, such a declensions, that contemporary languages in the region had long since discarded.
3. Arabs have a remarkable apparatus for generating new vocabulary.  Instead of having a mass of distinct verbs and nouns to represent different concepts, Arabic has a range of "roots" with basic meanings, each root consisting of three ordered consonants; k t b, for example, is associated with writing.  There are then several "patterns" of consonants and vowels, with associated changes in meaning, into which the roots are inserted to generate new words.  The pattern ma--a-, for example, corresponds to "The place for ---", and thus maktab is "office", or the place where writing is done.  Elegant, no?

I'll conclude this rather ungainly train of Arabic thoughts with some Shimerian advice: read!  There are worlds of thought to be discovered, summer projects to be planned, and possible careers to be considered, if you take the time to research areas you wouldn't encounter otherwise.  Had you asked me about Medieval Islamic philosophy in high school, I would have shrugged my shoulders and guessed it was the province of a handful of boring experts; now I'm seriously considering trying to make a career in the field.  The poets, philosophers, and scientists of bygone ages are all available for our examination, and they offer avenues of study a life would not be long enough to tread.

(P.S. I realise now I haven't yet put up a proper photo of myself.  Here's one of myself at the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore, another good reason you should come to Chicago.)

88 Books that Shaped America at RPL

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Brad Krautwurst, who is interning with the Richmond Public Library in Virginia.

Last month, the Library of Congress released its Books that Shaped America, a list of the 88 most influential books written by and for Americans.  It includes everything from The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock (1946) to The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963) to Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987).  It coincides with an exhibition showing off the originals of these books at the Library of Congress -- which I saw over the weekend, but unfortunately have no pictures, due to the Library's rules prohibiting photography of the exhibit.

The last few weeks, during my time staffing the computer lab, I have been working on a display, in cooperation with a coworker of mine named Ellen, showing off these books, as well as pointing patrons toward a survey duplicating the survey the Library of Congress published.  We hope, at the end of the D.C. exhibition's run, to have RPL's results to compare them with the Library of Congress'.  I have been slowly but surely categorizing the books into something more compelling than "fiction" and "nonfiction" for the purposes of the display, formatting the Library of Congress' book descriptions, and preparing a version of the list that notes the few instances where our library system just doesn't carry the book.  I'm proud to say that we have most of the list, excepting things like A Survey of the Roads of the United States of America by Christopher Colles (1789) and A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (1788).  

I've divided the books into seven different categories: American mythos; American poetry and plays; movers and shakers; prominent American literature; science and science fiction; children's and young adult books; and the rest.  

American mythos contains famous figures in American history, such as Frederick Douglass and Thomas Paine, who have almost become mythological in their importance to American history.  American poetry and plays explains itself and contains selections from Tennessee Williams, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, among others.  Movers and shakers is a particularly interesting category for me, as it includes books that have been so influential on America so as to change the very course of public opinion: books such as Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On (1987) or How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (1890).  American literature contains a vast array of works, such as Margaret Mitchell's 1936 epic Gone with the Wind and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.  Science and science fiction houses both Carl Sagan's Cosmos and James B. Watson's The Double Helix.  Children's and young adult contains Margaret Wise Brown's classic 1947 picture book Goodnight Moon and Jack London's The Call of the Wild.  Finally, "the rest" includes books that simply didn't fit anywhere else, such as The Education of Henry Adams and Joy of Cooking.

If I have time over the last few weeks of my internship, I plan to put together a list of further reading, books that comprehensively look at ideas explored in these books.  For now, though, the display looks great, I'm proud of it, and I hope patrons participate in the survey!  If you'd like, you can take the survey the Library of Congress offered here.

 

Me in front of the display at Richmond Public Library. Photo credit to Ellen Wolf.

Microfilms and History

Kathryn Stresak, Dorian Gomberg, Ed Vlcek, Brad Krautwurst, and Naomi Neal are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Internship/Mentorship (SIM) Program. They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Brad Krautwurst, who is interning with the Richmond Public Library in Virginia.

After a great mini-vacation consisting of taking a few Megabuses to New York City for the weekend with my boyfriend, I am back in Richmond feeling refreshed and inspired.  Most of that inspriation comes from the New York Public Library, which was fantastic and beautiful.  If you are ever in New York, make sure to stop by.

Anyway, one of my duties at the library is to answer Cyberlibrarian questions.  These are questions from people all over the continent, if not the world (so far I've had one from Canada, one from Seattle, and one from California) about historical events, asking for digital images of microfilms.

Microfilms are microreproductions of documents, in this case about 1/25 of the original size put on a reel of film for storage and reading.  So far all I have worked with has been newspapers, but I know we have other documents.  The newspapers have been fascinating enough, though.  

One of the first things I was able to do with the microfilm, just to be trained on it and gain familarity with its usage, was to see what the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch, the local newspaper here, was on the day of my birth.  I admit that it is not very well captured and rather dark, but you can see how I've gotten better with the microfilms comparing these with the next ones I will show you.

A rather badly captured front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch from July 22, 1990.

Usually, as I've said, I've had to find obituaries, which always causes a weird mixture of intrigue and sadness for me, because on the one hand, I obviously have never met any of these people and it's intriguing from a distance, looking at the obituaries as a historical artifact.  On the other hand, though, they always list the survivors, and I can't help but realize that on the days these obituaries were printed, those survivors were no doubt deep in grief.  It's rather sobering.

On a brighter note, I've found a few articles that I thought might be of interest to people reading this blog and, with permission, have included them, though again, they are rather badly transmitted, so they will perhaps be of historical interest more than they will actually be read:

 

An article about books from 1988.

 Finally, here is an ad from, again, 1988, for several movies that I found telling, in terms of movie theater tickets' costs ballooning since then.

Look at the prices!