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Introduction Distillate

So how do I distill me and my journey to and in Shimer to a single blog post? I don’t know but what follows is my passing attempt at doing so.

 

Myself and 2 other Shimer students at White Cemetary near Halloween. I'm the one with the beard.

My name is David and this is my second year at Shimer. This means I’ve completed all my ones and twos (Social Sciences 1 & 2 for example). It also means I passed my Basic Comp (a harrowing experience where we doing readings in Natural science, Humanities, and Social Science with written pieces for each along with a graded classroom discussion on one or more pieces we read).

I grew up in the Chicagoland area my whole life. Just before coming to Shimer I was working in school bussing doing all kinds of business and safety/training sort of things. I started looking at schools when I realized corporate life just wasn’t what I wanted long term. My father went to a Great Books school for a year so the concept wasn’t new to me. I honestly didn’t apply anywhere else and I don’t regret that one bit.

I’ve always been a reader and I love discussions so a Great Books program seemed to make sense. Shimer does a great job of expanding the core of a Great Books program to include voices not typically there (women, people of color, really any sort of minority voice is ignored in most Great Books curriculums) and that is a HUGE draw for me. Add in that I was a terrible student in high school, had never taken SAT or ACT, and hadn’t been in school in 7 years. Needless to say the reality that Shimer uses things like the essay part of the application and interviews to heavily inform their decision for admittance was a big deal to me.

I felt awkward my first few weeks; I’m 26 and some first-year students are as young as 16. Also, spending 7 years in corporate America meant my style of dress doesn’t fit in at any college anywhere. However, Shimer doesn’t judge as a community based on anything except how you are in the classroom and the community. Honestly, I forget that some of my classmates are 10 years younger than me until I want to invite them out for drinks. That was beautiful and by the end of my first year I can say Shimer felt more like home than anywhere ever had.

Jim Ulrich and Nat Sci 1 (our chemistry class) reminded me how much I love science, something traditional schooling sapped me of. Ann Dolinko’s Soc 2 reengaged me in political life and is probably the reason I got the political work I’ve recently been doing. Stuart Patterson’s reaching out to me after hearing I was taking a semester off highlighted just how AWESOME our facilitators and environment at Shimer are. Honestly, I’ve not met a facilitator yet that isn’t fantastically brilliant and incredibly engaged with their students.

Shimer is a wonderful place and I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me. From time to time I’ll try to remember to post something here to let you all have a slice of that journey as well. Right now I’m pretty focused on how what I do can raise up not just me but others as well… How fortunate I got to a school with a motto of Non Ministrari Sed Ministare (“Not to be served but to serve”).

Continuing Madness: Where have you been, Manda???

Hey, all! I know that I haven’t written on this here blog in a while, but oy vey has my life been HECTIC! First of all, I’ve been playing bass pretty frequently at Inter-Varsity, which is basically the Christian Fellowship group on IIT’s campus. I play in the worship band and I sing as well. We also have an all girls Bible study group which I attend, which has been very interesting (For those of you who are confused right about now with the whole “wait...I thought she was Jewish” thing, I’m a Messianic Jew).

    I also decided to get baptised...in October of all months. The morning of my baptism, it was 40 degrees outside, and in my religious tradition, you have to get baptised in Mayim Chayim (living water), which meant I got submerged completely into Lake Michigan! It was a little crazy.
Afterwards, I went to go get Walker Bros (THE BEST pancake house in Chicagoland) with my synagogue friends.


    I also took my niece trick or treating for Halloween. Beka and I dressed up as matching Pretty Purple Princesses. It was her first year out, and so I had to teach her the ettiquite of Trick or Treating. She was really good and got ALL THE CANDY. I also may have gotten way too much candy as well.


    On top of all of this, I’ve been working my hardest to learn about some pretty difficult topics in my classes. Currently, I’m struggling to grasp the ideas behind two economic standpoints. We read Smith and Marx in my Social Sciences class, and while I still don’t quite understand Marx, I sympathise much more with his ideas of estranged labour. Smith’s idea that the beggar is just as secure as the king kind of alienated me from his main point. Natural Sciences has been difficult as we try to approach the idea of how heat is equivalent to energy (vis viva), and how compounds have electrochemical properties that we can use to describe their base parts (Berzelius).
   
    Hopefully, when I get pass this week (two papers due tomorrow and a show to prepare for this weekend. OH BOY!) I can just relax. My boyfriend has promised me a rib dinner, which sounds like a perfect end to this hectic week. I will also be going to Jacksonville, FL for Thanksgiving to visit my sister on base. It will be the first time I will be flying alone, so I’m excited but also very nervous. I’m also planning my summer trip to Israel to study and work on a possible ministry opportunity, so stay tuned for my next blog post, which will probably be on that subject.

Break for a Semester

David Gasper is a current student who has been working with political campaigns during his time at Shimer. He'll introduce himself in another post, but would like to bring you what he's been working with around this election time of year!

I've thought a lot on my semester off about what Shimer means to me. I could wax poetic for volumes on the quality both of our education and of our community. I could weep a new Great Lake for how much I miss the discussions in and out of the classroom. While all of that is true, what stands out most is what has changed about me as a result of just a year and a half at Shimer.

I've been doing work in the Waukegan area during my semester off. For those unfamiliar with Shimer's history, there was a time when a few buildings in the Waukegan area served as Shimer's physical home. This means that people in the area are at least passingly familiar with Shimer. Let me pause here to tell you a bit about what I've been doing. I came from school busing, and so I have returned part time to that field. The other thing I've started doing is getting involved in politics. I've been working both for a county wide political party and for a state senate race. My instinct is to tell you all about both of those, but what's really amazing is what Shimer has meant in this journey.

In school busing, I have a reputation for being able to do work quickly and under pressure, a skill Shimer has only honed to a razor edge. Things like hell week (the last week of classes before writing week starts) and the Basic Comp (the week-long examination you take after your second or third semester) kept that working under pressure skill sharp and readily available.  While other people found thinking under the harsh reality of 16-hour days, five to six days a week, to be near impossible, I found it to be a blessing I was only solving how to get a student from point A to point B and not attempting to unravel the mysteries Kierkegaard almost teased me with my last semester. I also noticed a huge change, and so did my previous boss, in that I ask A LOT more questions. Sometimes this is a wonderful thing. Upset parents and school administrators have commented to me on how they feel like I really understand their complaints and am working with them to fix their issues. I wasn't bad at this before but Shimer and learning to ask questions in a different way has helped tremendously. Sometimes it's a hindrance that I like to understand a project before I undertake it and sometimes business relationships are about doing work quick not with the deepest understanding of that work.

In the world of politics my Shimer education has been nothing short of magical for me. I'm sure all of you have heard, "Shimer is a place you learn how to think, not what to think." Nothing has made this reality more clear for me than entering into a world I knew very little about. I've learned new skills (whole new areas really) at a pace that is startling for me. I started the season with things like 'script', 'turf', and 'universe' being totally foreign words. I'm now quite comfortable not just with the terminology but the concepts behind them. I've been able to convince people to not just teach me what to do but why they do it that way. I've learned things like when to walk base (friendly voters same party as candidate) and when to walk persuasion (not-so-friendly voters from either party), why we call some universes (consumer-data and voting-data-targeted groups of voters) and walk others. It means that though I started the cycle off knowing nothing about the mechanics of running a campaign or working for a political party, I'm now confident that I'm an asset to the campaigns I work with.

Some things are the intellectual fascination of creating universes harkening back to Durkheim’s love for statistical analysis; others are much simpler. I worked an event where we put up pictures of candidates on a backdrop. For years they've had trouble with getting any adhesive working to keep them up and they spend large amounts of time trying to so. My solution was one that was simple, one that hearkens back to my Nat Sci experience magnets. The front of the backdrop was held to the frame with magnetic strips, so magnets seemed to me to be the simplest solution. It seemed like an incredible solution to them and a simple solution to me. It worked; magnets front and back meant signs held no problem. And that's what I see when we talk about "how to think, not what to think."

What's been most surprising to me is that people DO know the Shimer name. We have a really solid reputation with people who know us. Our exposure isn't as large as I'd like but a good number of lawyers and politicians (even a state senator) have heard of us. An even greater number have heard of a Great Books education. Both Shimer and the Great Books tradition have been greeted with a positive response. Comments about Shimer specifically have been about the small size of our classrooms and the community activism of the community. I didn't have the pleasure of being in Waukegan, but some of you must have caused some ruckus while there because people in politics feel the Shimer name is associated with being active in the community we lived in. I'm proud of that tradition. I'm sure some of the neighbors wouldn't find that tradition so wonderful but the idea of "to serve, not to be served" I believe starts first in our own community and then extends into the communities we live and exist in.

I never expected to be one for calls to action; I certainly didn't sit down to write this to give you one. However, that's the rub... we only affect our world by acting in it. So that's what I'd like to see all of us do more of: talk about Shimer and the Great Books program whenever you can, to whoever you can. But also, do things that make a difference in your community. By doing those things and wearing something from Shimer or by simply having a group of us making positive change in a neighborhood: people will ask, people will talk!

Constitution Day

Poster designed by KC Stresak

    Every institution of learning has its strengths and its weaknesses. One of Shimer's not-so-strengths is modern politics. In Social Sciences 2 we learn all about the formation of the founding documents and the various definitions and aspects of liberty, but Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau can only take you so far in understanding current political debates. 
    There are, of course, electives, lectures, and activities that supplement the core curriculum and offer education about topics not addressed in the required classes. One of these activities is Constitution Day. Shimer has observed this tradition since 2005 when the United States Department of Education announced the requirement that any school receiving federal funding observe this federal holiday with a debate.

Adam holding the U.S. Constitution

    Now, it may seem like debates would be a common occurence at a school where the students take part in serious study and serious conversation about what we read. However, there is a very definite difference between a debate and a discussion. In the classroom students are expected to learn from one another, see opposing view points, and to attempt to reconcile differences in knowledge gained from the writing by using the text. A debate requires students to take and defend a viewpoint, while refusing to give in to the other side. Quite the opposite of Shimerian, in my mind. 
    I will be honest by saying that I was not looking forward to the event at first. If I were ever required to take part in a debate on whether or not we should have debates, my stance would be a firm 'no.' However, watching my fellow Shimer students changed my mind.

 

    The event was organized by facilitator Stuart Patterson and third-year student Matt Kawahara, who has a lot of experience in the debating arena. The question was: "Should Supreme Court justices retain their position for the remainder of their lives after being appointed (the status quo), or should they be subject to elections/re-appointment (reform)?"
    On the side of the reform was fourth-year student Adam Bechtol (farthest to the left in the photo above) and first-year Jonah Ragir. The Shimerians defending the status quo were third-years Leo Mollica and Dorian Gomberg. The debate was set up as follows (stolen from the email sent out by Matt Kawahara): 

Jonah goes first

1. The reform side of the debate will present arguments for their side of the debate. (6 minute time limit)

2. 5 minute period of cross-examination, in which the defenders of the status quo will be permitted to ask questions about the arguments given by the reform speakers.

3. 5 minute period of preparation time, where the defenders of the status quo will prepare and write responses to the arguments given by the reform speakers.

4. Defenders of the status quo "good behavior" clause of the constitution will present arguments in favor of the current system of appointing justices, and respond to the arguments given by the reform speakers. (8 minute time limit)

Leo's rebuttal

5.  5 minute period of cross-examination, in which the proponents of reform will ask questions of the defenders of the status quo. 

6. 5 minute period of preparation time, where the reform proponents will prepare and write responses to the arguments given by the reform speakers.

7. The defenders of reform will respond to the arguments presented by the status quo and defend their original arguments against the status quo's responses.

Dorian and Leo during their preparation time

8. Cross-fire period. This is like cross-examination, except that both sides of the debate will be able to ask questions of one another. This is more like an open conversation between both sides of the debate about the arguments that were presented.

After this, the judges will present their thoughts on the debate and make suggestions for how to improve argumentative quality and oral presentation of points.

Matt giving advice, with just a glimpse of Albert reading his notes.

    The judges, Matt Kawahara and facilitator Albert Fernandez gave some great advice on what could have been used against the other teams, and let all four of them know what they did well and what they should work on. Ultimately, they named the Reform side the winners of the debate.
    I did not take enough notes to give an accurate blow-by-blow, but there were two great lines used by both sides that stuck in my mind. (I hope they will forgive me for pulling their words out of context and if I misquote them at all.)

Dorian listening to the advice from the judges

     Leo said, "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data.'" (Which, to be honest, he said was not his own creation, but is still an awesome thing to say.)
    To which Jonah replied, "Pure statistical data does not give us history." 
    Although I came in dreading the idea of sitting through a debate, I actually find myself hoping Shimerians will start doing this sort of thing more than just once a year. Who knows, maybe I will even take part in one. 

All photos by Alexandra Rosenberg

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. 

Naomi's Internship, Week 9: Dino Feet, and Farewell

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

This post is from Naomi Neal, who is interning at Tryon Farm and the Tryon Farm Institute in Michigan City, Indiana.

Another busy, busy week at the Farm—and this time, there was even more to get done than usual, because it was the final week of my internship. This experience has definitely altered the course of my life. To be fair, having embraced the post-structuralist theories (particularly those of Berger & Luckmann) to which I was introduced by Social Sciences 4, I do tend to feel that every experience significantly shapes an individual. But my time at Tryon Farm altered my being more appreciably than most other periods of my life. Through my work in environmentally-mindful building projects, with plants, with people, and as a part of a non-profit organization, I had the amazing opportunity to test out several different professional approaches to the field of conservation, in which I hope to make my living. I learned things about myself, my abilities, and my preferences. I got some idea of what makes strategies for conservation (and for building public support for it) successful or unsuccessful. In short, day-to-day troubles and worries aside, it was something like a perfect, Platonic internship.

Of course, all this is retrospective. There simply wasn’t time in my jam-packed final week to reflect on the course of the experience, as a whole. I had an oven to finish, after all!

Building the cob oven was, perhaps, more stressful for me than it strictly needed to be. Even though it hadn’t been my idea to undertake a final project, and even though Ed Noonan told me on multiple occasions to seek help in the construction from the many knowledgeable folks on hand, when it came time to build, an unexpected sense of pride rose up in me and I insisted (albeit mostly silently, to myself) on doing it all unassisted. I’d like to think I’ve learned from that mistake. One of the favorite adages of my boss from the pool site, Gary, is “I never learned to do anything except by doing it.” I couldn’t agree with his sentiment more, but I’d like to add, “and you have to do it wrong before you do it right” (though perhaps that’s already implied). This applies to all kinds of practical learning—even at Shimer, you have to suffer through some terrible first-year classes, fumbling at discussion, in order to cultivate your dialogical skills.

With this in mind, I see more clearly than before that what I still have yet to learn is balance. (Incidentally, this is a major theme in my life and on my yoga mat, too.) I suffered, psychologically at least, from a great deal of anxious uncertainty during the entirety of my oven-building endeavor. Was I mixing the cob correctly? Were the walls thick enough? Was I using the right kind of clay, soil, straw? These questions plagued me, but their only answers were found in a series of contradictory online articles. I had to forge ahead, and accept that I might do it wrong in the process of learning to do it right. But other questions, such as, Is this sturdy enough? and, Can I expect these blocks to remain level with the passage of time? could have been answered by others around me. I didn’t have to bear all of my uncertainty, or at least, not alone. There is, somewhere, a balance to be struck between learning by doing (accepting initial failure) and allowing others to help you. I haven’t figured it out how to strike it yet, and I still might not figure it out for a long time to come. But knowing that I need to feels like a good first step.

All of that said, I didn’t entirely screw up the oven, and it is, for the most part, finished. I left it in a condition which will require others to add some finishing touches before it’s really complete. But I’m okay with that. After all, it’s been my hope that this oven would bring people together in community. Ideally, when others put their work into the oven, they’ll feel connected with it, and with each other (I always did like Locke’s theory of property).

Without further ado, here's the completion of the oven, in pictures:

 

The oven at the end of Tuesday, coated in its first layer of cob. The finger-indentations were added to help the next layer adhere to the first.

 

 

The athletic socks I wore to mix cob on Wednesday, after cutting my feet painfully the day before. As the clay dried on them and they looked more and more reptilian, I began to think of them as "dino feet." Ultimately, I mixed up the cob with my hands.

 

 

Late afternoon on Wednesday; the first layer of the oven is mostly dry and cob has been freshly applied around the base, covering the top of the cinder-block foundation.

 

 

Thursday: the second layer of cob is on the oven.

 

 

Friday morning: a smooth layer of slip (liquid clay) is applied over the entirety. I also attempted to add a level area in front of the door, but this was a case in which I should have asked for help, and by the time I'd left on Friday it was already cracking and crumbling. Ed Noonan suggested that it could be replaced by a flat rock or slab of concrete.

 

Meet Naomi & Meet Tryon Farm

I’m Naomi Neal and I come to the Shimer Blog as a soon-to-be-senior. I grew up on the California coast, but for the past three years I’ve lived in the Bronzeville and Bridgeport neighborhoods of Chicago, majoring in Social Sciences at Shimer. During this time, my innate love of reading has transformed and found new outlets in core readings and electives such as German for Reading and Bioethics. I’ll be completing my studies with a yearlong stint in the Shimer-in-Oxford program, beginning this fall. At Oxford, I’ll continue my exploration of the German language, as well as the investigation of humankind’s impact on the environment which I began in Bioethics.

It’s this interest—in living sustainably—which led me to the internship at which I’ll be working this summer. I’ll be working at Tryon Farm, which is (not a farm but) a rigorously planned housing development and intentional community in Michigan City, Indiana. Tryon is the brainchild of architect Ed Noonan, who served the past two years as Shimer’s interim president. Noonan and his associates have crafted a new kind of land use on a property which was once a dairy farm: part nature-preserve, part-architectural showcase, and part-model community for incorporating sustainable development tactics into everyday life. Housing clusters are planned so as to disrupt the ecosystems and the visual flow of the landscape as little as possible, and much of the property is permanently barred from development, protected in perpetuity by the Tryon Farm Institute (TFI). Houses at Tryon bear simple, elegant design features (Noonan was a student of IIT’s Mies van der Rohe) which emphasize the beauty of the natural environment, and they’re built to last and conserve resources.

One of the most interesting methods of conservation at Tryon is the wastewater management system. The home sewers do not feed into municipal lines, to be carried to the treatment plant and sterilized with harmful chemicals. Instead, Tryon’s sewage feeds into a number of Certified Wastewater Wetlands, where biological organisms clean the sewage without the use of chemicals. At Tryon, a week after you flush, that same water is clean enough to drink—and all without introducing toxic chemicals to the ecosystem.

This summer at Tryon, I’ll spend ten weeks working a flexible four days a week, depending on which days I’m most needed. For example, everyone at Tryon is getting excited for a week of events coming at the end of June in celebration of National Pollinator Week—but more on that to come. My duties, too, will be flexible. One of my main concerns this past month (via email communication, for the most part—my internship doesn’t begin until June 4^th) has been coordinating the planting of a pumpkin patch at Tryon, which was the idea of Jim Ulrich—TFI board member, Shimer registrar and faculty member, and my former Bioethics facilitator. When I start working on-site in just over a week, I’ll be continuing work with the pumpkin patch as well as assisting in the TFI office with preparations for National Pollinator Week. Later this summer I’ll be working on some small construction  projects, and even taking on one of my own (a climbing structure for goats). From my work in TFI office, I hope to learn how communities can work together to ensure and promote environmental sustainability. From working hands-on in construction, I hope to gain some practical carpentry and design experience, and explore whether the field eco-friendly design and construction could be a fulfilling career one day. Throughout it all, in true Shimerian fashion, I’ll be bolstering my hands-on praxis with related textual readings.

For more information on Tryon Farm, please see their website: www.tryonfarm.com

 

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.

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.

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.