(no subject)
So it seems to have gone pretty well--I basically went in there and said, "Look, I like some of the book, but some of it's kind of crackheaded. Like where she talks about the palm frond motif in Matisse paintings that... don't actually have any palm fronds. And doesn't link it to any kind of higher universal 'Well, he was in Nice, and that's what beauty does, it imprints on you in indirect and less-than-literal ways as well as literal ways.' Just... talks about palm fronds in paintings that don't have them. Here, she did really crappy ink sketches to show you, rather than get the rights to reprint the paintings or anything." Fortunately, the professor was like, "Uh, yeah... and that doesn't even start to cover the problems I have with the book," so it went over pretty well. Thanks for all the good wishes. : )
The class itself was pretty wild--the prof ducked out for about fifteen minutes at the beginning, leaving the eight of us to sit around this table and shoot the breeze, as we do, and then Tabitha discovered A GIANT SPIDER in the huge bowl light fixture over our heads, and we spent several minutes shrieking at it as, once it had been disturbed, it started racing around and around the bowl. Seriously, it was huge--probably the diameter of a softball, with an unusually thin body and unusually thick legs --or so they tell me, because I wasn't about to get up there and check. Tabitha did, and then Regan did--like, seriously, got up and stood on the table. Regan was wearing an ankle-length skirt and I think socks with her shoes; she's a very cool, down-to-earth, modest poet/writer type, and the only guy in our class, Chris, is really sweet and fairly quiet, so you see why it was hilarious when he pulled out a dollar and started waving it at her. And meanwhile, Tressa was high on fever and Excedrin ("I don't normally take any kind of pills, you guys! I have no tolerance!"), which meant that she was kind of woozy ("You guys, I have too many limbs"), but surprisingly lucid--maybe more so than the rest of us--when it came to talking about this book ("Maybe I should be high more often..."). And meanwhile, I'm going ninety-to-nothing because the class is so short and I've got to get in 120 pages of highly abstract Harvard-Chair-of-Aesthetics rambling about the nature of beauty, talking with my hands like that's somehow going to make it any clearer, and I'm all like, "So she's talking about how beauty is sacred, and in her example she uses Homer's Odysseus monologue about meeting Nausicaa and how she's like nothing he's ever seen, but--wait, there was this palm tree he saw (that's actually how the monologue goes: '--wait') so beauty is both unprecedented and takes as its only precedent that which is also unprecedented--you guys, how's the spider doing? Still up there? Not coming down? Sweet--but I don't really see how she establishes that all beauty is sacred just because, in her example, this palm tree is growing by a temple. I mean, I see where she's going, but she skips a few steps in her logic or something," and the professor's all like, "And how do you even DEFINE what sacred IS? Which she doesn't even TRY to do," so I think it went fairly well. Sweet.
The class itself was pretty wild--the prof ducked out for about fifteen minutes at the beginning, leaving the eight of us to sit around this table and shoot the breeze, as we do, and then Tabitha discovered A GIANT SPIDER in the huge bowl light fixture over our heads, and we spent several minutes shrieking at it as, once it had been disturbed, it started racing around and around the bowl. Seriously, it was huge--probably the diameter of a softball, with an unusually thin body and unusually thick legs --or so they tell me, because I wasn't about to get up there and check. Tabitha did, and then Regan did--like, seriously, got up and stood on the table. Regan was wearing an ankle-length skirt and I think socks with her shoes; she's a very cool, down-to-earth, modest poet/writer type, and the only guy in our class, Chris, is really sweet and fairly quiet, so you see why it was hilarious when he pulled out a dollar and started waving it at her. And meanwhile, Tressa was high on fever and Excedrin ("I don't normally take any kind of pills, you guys! I have no tolerance!"), which meant that she was kind of woozy ("You guys, I have too many limbs"), but surprisingly lucid--maybe more so than the rest of us--when it came to talking about this book ("Maybe I should be high more often..."). And meanwhile, I'm going ninety-to-nothing because the class is so short and I've got to get in 120 pages of highly abstract Harvard-Chair-of-Aesthetics rambling about the nature of beauty, talking with my hands like that's somehow going to make it any clearer, and I'm all like, "So she's talking about how beauty is sacred, and in her example she uses Homer's Odysseus monologue about meeting Nausicaa and how she's like nothing he's ever seen, but--wait, there was this palm tree he saw (that's actually how the monologue goes: '--wait') so beauty is both unprecedented and takes as its only precedent that which is also unprecedented--you guys, how's the spider doing? Still up there? Not coming down? Sweet--but I don't really see how she establishes that all beauty is sacred just because, in her example, this palm tree is growing by a temple. I mean, I see where she's going, but she skips a few steps in her logic or something," and the professor's all like, "And how do you even DEFINE what sacred IS? Which she doesn't even TRY to do," so I think it went fairly well. Sweet.