blog.shimer

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. 

Summer Colors

    Hello! As a Shimer student who has been blogging for three years now, I like to imagine that I have some sort of following out in the real world (hi, mom!). It is this idea that allows me to believe that some of you are just dying to hear whether or not I have continued painting after the class ended.
    Fear not! I am a painter for life now. Amanda Cadogan, painting instructor extraordinaire, has converted me. Now, I have not gained too much skill or patience since you last saw my still life, but I am still going at the canvas with vigor.
    I have two projects going on simultaneously right now. Both are replications of famous paintings. One of them is tip-top secret as it is a present for a dear friend of mine, but the other I am very excited to share with you. A lot still needs to be done on it, but I have made good progress.
    The original painting is by Judith Leyster. She was a well-known, oft-commissioned Dutch painter in the early to mid-1600s. I wrote a research paper on her, and other famous classical female painters, towards the end of our Oil Painting class and fell in love with her painting The Proposition.
    My copy of it is really a detail, I have chosen to zoom in on the subjects and cut out the surrounding area, but my painting is actually several inches larger than hers.

    From the wikipedia article about Leyster, "She signed her works Judita Leystar, often as a monogram with her initials JL with a star attached. This was a play on words; "Lei-star" meant "Lead star" in Dutch, which was the common name for the North star used at the time by Dutch mariners. Leyster was particularly innovative in her domestic genre scenes. In them, she creates quiet scenes of women at home, which were not a popular theme in Holland until the 1650s."
    In my replication, I still need to finish both faces, give both of them fingers, and paint the gold coins in his right hand.
    The reason I found this painting so interesting was the subject matter. Leyster was pointing out that many men in her time were propositioning women who were not prostitutes for sex. Leyster depicts this woman as sitting in the light of the candle, holding a thread (possibly embroidering), and ignoring the man while he attempts to pay her. He is standing in shadow and laying a hand on her arm possessively as he leans in over her.  (Hopefully my painting is decent enough that these things are apparent.)
     The part I am most proud of is the woman's shirt. It is also the portion that I spent, by far, the longest on. It was also painted under Amanda's watchful eye. One day I really believe that I will be able to paint something beautiful without needing her to hold my brush.
    That's not for a while yet though. So, I will continue working on this, and my super secret painting, and all of you will be able to say "I knew her before she was famous." (Ha!)
    Until next time!

Summer Courses

     I miss Shimer during the summer.  I read things and wish that I had a class to discuss it in.  I miss being on the Shimer floor and seeing Shimer people and walking across the IIT campus. But this summer will be different!
     Not only will I be working at Shimer during the week, I am also going to take a summer class with Stuart Patterson.  I am super excited!  Stuart is going to teach at Oxford next year, so this will be one of the few chances I get to take a class with him before I graduate. The last course I took with him was Natural Sciences II and it was wonderful.
     This course is called "Metaphor" and the description reads:

This course will explore the uses of figurative language - chiefly metaphor, but also simile, metonymy, synecdoche, and analogy - in all three areas of the Shimer curriculum.  We will begin by studying theories of metaphor and figurative language from literary, philosophical and cognitive psychological perspectives. We will then use these theories to examine core texts in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences; we will revisit some texts from the Shimer core (e.g. Aristotle, Darwin, Smith, Marx, lyric poems, Homer) for the uses they make of figurative language as a means of creative expression,  rhetoric, exposition and argument. Students’ reading will be self-directed to some extent depending on their primary area of interest.

     I have heard that summer courses are different in many ways from fall and spring, and I sure am excited to see that for myself!

Also, if you have some free time, read a poem by Cindarella Gregory, one of the co-founders of Shimer College.

It Begins...

"I wasn't always a feminist. In fact, I used to think feminists were sexually undesirable and perpetually angry. (Boy, was I wrong. Feminists are perpetually desirable, and I am sexually angry.)" Anastasia Higginbotham, "Chicks Goin' At It"

     So, the school year is wrapping up.  This week is final conferences and then registration.  The graduating seniors have their senior dinner Wednesday night and Commencement is on Saturday.  Soon it will be only summer, summer, summer.  Which of course means something different for everyone.
     For those of us who are already "real" adults, the same jobs that we have worked for years will continue on.  Some of us who don't have jobs now, maybe we'll pick one up for a few months.  Some of us may even continue working Federal Work Study at Shimer for the next few months.  Some of us will be leaving this place forever, scattering in the wind to the four corners of the world.  Some of us will work internships whether they are paid, unpaid, or paid through Shimer.  Some of us will go home to families that we haven't seen in months.
     As for me, I will be remaining in Chicago all summer.  I have: begun my internship at the Chicago Dramatists, started my FWS job, registered for a summer class, commenced the sad process of looking for new roommates, and started the reading for my thesis (which is where I found the introductory quote).
     Some people have told me that I am crazy for starting my thesis so soon, but people have started sooner than I!  I have a little under a year to complete my project, which is already looking daunting.  Currently, I am halfway through the first book on my reading list, Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation. It is pretty wonderful so far, I would recommend (at least the first half of) it to anyone interested in knowing a little more about feminism.

Against ideas: On Crime and Punishment

I just finished teaching Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in my Humanities 2 class, surely an endurance marathon for student and teacher alike. Perhaps this is what made the epilogue, which depicts Raskolnikov's first step toward redemption (as mediated by the love of a good woman), such a let-down -- after spending so much time in Raskolnikov's twisted head, surely we deserved something more.

Yet the argument could also be made that the epilogue is totally superfluous, that everything has been decided by the time Raskolnikov finds himself compelled (in part by the "peer pressure" of Sonya) to confess his crime. We can already see Sonya's dedication to him and her role in his redemption. We have verified Porfiry's claim that the confession would take the police by surprise, leading us to trust his claim that the sentence will be merciful. And we also know that Raskolnikov is going to continue to be a total jerk about the whole thing for as long as humanly possible. What does the epilogue add, other than the sentimental satisfaction of learning that Dunya and Razumikhin get married?

Even more important, to me, is what the epilogue takes away, insofar as it attempts to narrate what is not narratable. Though something like Christian "doctrine" as such barely makes an appearance, Dostoevsky's narrative here is certainly Christian, and nowhere moreso than in its attempt to capture the mysterious movement of free will: the failure of will that leads to sin as well as the turning of the will back toward God. In both cases, Raskolnikov is pulled along in a way that renders his conscious intentions strangely irrelevant. (Indeed, in the case of the confession, I'd say 90% of the conscious thoughts we get to see are anti-confession.) Various explanations for his crime, such as madness and/or physical illness, are trotted out and ultimately rejected -- the ultimate explanation seems to be that he became proud (though he didn't have to, as shown by the example of the similarly-situated Razumikhin) and he sinned.

The twist is the way that Raskolnikov's pride is so intimately tied up with ideas -- not simply the ideas of "nihilism," but ideas as such. Certainly we are meant to take Raskolnikov's vaguely Nietzschean ideas to be absurd or at least unappealling, but every other alternative is systematically undermined. Every ideology mentioned is either sharply criticized by a sympathetic character, or espoused by an unappealling one. It's not that Raskolnikov got a particularly destructive set of ideas into his head, it's that he got any set of ideas.

And that's why explicit Christian theology is so thin on the ground: Christianity is presented as something other than a body of ideas. The exemplary Christian, Sonya, hasn't even thought to ask the most basic question in theology -- why would a good God allow suffering? -- even though she's in a situation that screams out for such questioning. The closest we come to a theological reflection is the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, which receives no overt explication and seems to have been selected simply to emphasize the miraculous (i.e., ultimately unknowable and mysterious) nature of Raskolnikov's conversion.

The result is that the most important events of the narrative -- Raskolnikov's crime and conversion -- are simply unaccountable (in the sense of Aristotle's alogon). This famously "psychological" novel points ultimately toward the impotence of our psychology for directing or explaining our actions, as Raskolnikov endlessly spins his mental wheels. And so one could say that this response to the threat of nihilism is itself even more radically nihilistic than the nihilists themselves, recommending that we renounce all our ideas, accept suffering, and wait patiently. Surely there has to be some other alternative to the fantasy of being the next Napoleon!

A Cold War Kafka: Orson Welles’ The Trial

In Shimer's Humanities 4 class, we read Kafka's The Trial and watched Orson Welles' 1962 film adaptation. As it's a public domain work, you can watch the film as well, for instance on YouTube:

  

Generally speaking, the students were disappointed in the changes Welles made to the story -- the way he ended it was a particular source of outrage, but other changes seemed to "flatten" the book and the character of K. somehow. I agree with them, but I actually take that as evidence that Welles has done a very capable adaptation of the novel into a film.

Broadly speaking, it seems that a film adaptation of a novel needs to do two things: it needs to capture the spirit of the book in a significant way while simultaneously answering the question of "why now?" For a popular novel like Harry Potter or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the second question answers itself -- we're doing the movie now because the material is popular now. For a novel like The Trial, that takes more work.

My theory is that Welles answered that question by transforming the plot of The Trial from a grim anticipation of totalitarianism to a direct protest against actual-existing totalitarianism -- a particularly relevant topic in the early 1960s, when the USSR seemed poised to overtake the West. One can see this above all in the ending, when K. remains defiant and accusatory up to the very last and the two executioners opt to kill him with dynamite, which produces a mushroom cloud. Obviously there is no more salient Cold War trope than the threat of nuclear annihilation. The choice of sets is relevant here as well. Where the novel has K. travelling through poor tenaments to reach the court, Welles presents us with bleak modernist apartment blocks that feel very "Soviet" -- and he also has to walk through a crowd of half-naked old men holding signs with numbers, linking Soviet totalitarianism to the Nazi holocaust. Overall, K. emerges as the put-upon American whose resolve sometimes wavers but who ultimately refuses to go without a fight.

This significantly simplifies both the character of K. and the themes of the novel. The ambivalence of K., the sense that he's both unjustly persecuted and yet a total jerk, is absent here. The ambiguity of the novel also significantly dissipates -- for instance, the religious overtones are actively suppressed, above all in the cathedral scene where Welles takes over the delivery of the "Before the Law" sequence. Interestingly, K. interrupts his telling (a full version had brilliantly opened the film), dismissing it as a story "we all know" -- in contrast to the novel, where the story is an obscure preface to an inaccessible law, here it is part of the publicly known ideology. In addition, where Kafka is at pains to distinguish his mysterious court from the "normal" law -- for instance, by having the executioners run away from a policeman in the final chapter -- for Welles, this bizarre court is straightforwardly the law of the land. Accordingly, where the novel's K. was surprised to learn that the lawyer had a "normal" law practice as well, the film's K. discovers that the lawyer has a "regular commercial practice" in addition to the criminal practice K. is using.

In many ways, though, Welles brilliantly captures the spirit of the novel, above all in his choice of sets, which convey the kind of squalor and confusion that attends the court proceedings. His cinematography also gives us a visceral sense of the claustrophobia of the novel's atmosphere, above all in the flogging scene. Welles also handles the sexualization of the Law very capably, bringing out the homoeroetic element in the lawyer's relationship to Block much more clearly than Kafka does.

Yet all of this is always related back to Welles's overarching thesis. Unlike Kafka, for instance, he pairs the squalid interiors with imposing exteriors -- this contrast is clearest in the cathedral scene, where the interior of the cathedral appears to be a stripped-down warehouse. The sexualization in turn serves as a particularly vivid and immediate demonstration of the simultaneously intrusive and corrupt nature of the totalitarian court. It all looks very impressive, Welles is saying, but underneath it all, it's nothing but a systematic obscenity that one must resist at all costs.

In light of this systematic approach, I am much less inclined to criticize Welles's "betrayal" of his source material -- some degree of betrayal is inevitable in any translation between mediums, and Welles's betrayals are far from capricious, even where they're shocking (as in the ending). It's not a straightforward adaptation like Michael Haneke's film version of The Castle -- it's an extended argument for The Trial's relevance to urgent contemporary concerns in his historical moment. One might disagree with that argument, but one cannot deny that it is masterfully made.

What's ironic, then, is that Welles's systematic reshaping of The Trial into a Cold War parable winds up missing the ways that Kafka may actually help us to understand something like "Soviet totalitarianism" -- and that precisely in the moments when K. seems to consent to the legitimacy of this bizarre court. The question one is left with after watching Welles's film is why everyone isn't like K., why everyone doesn't just see right through the injustice and corruption, why everyone isn't a brave dissenter.

We might do well to attempt to understand such things in this era of the triumph of liberal democracy as the self-evident form of government -- and so I propose that a truly contemporary adaptation of The Trial could perhaps take the opposite approach of Welles. This adaptation would unambiguously take place under Stalinism, but all the ambivalence of K.'s character, all the rich overlapping themes, would be left in place. The law before which K. is called wouldn't be the "regular" law, any more than the Party was simply identical to the state -- and this law would still also overlap with religion, and with sexuality, and with family. Most importantly, the audience must not be allowed to settle unambiguously on K.'s innocence.

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.