November 15, 2009

Studio stroll yesterday, fully uneventful, but also not annoying. I have that vast lovely space to myself, and though I miss J, I DO have that vast, lovely space to myself. I think we should hand out sheets of studio etiquette at the door, though, which would specify that visitors should not comment so much on the beautiful light or the quality of the space, but on the work. Could do no detail work because no canvases were prepared, so when people came in they saw me slathering on gesso and brushing vast planes of underpainting.

Cantaria sang for UNCA’s Picturing Human Rights Anti-Conference. The event turned out to be sweet and energizing. One didn’t foresee that it would be.

Last night was by far the best Hamlet yet. A was coherent and centered, whereas before he was inclined to be a little wild, his spontaneity occasionally flighty. I felt better than I had about my little scene, thinking I had hit the right mix of pathos and eeriness.

SW says, “I was a medical student. On the day John Lennon was shot, I forgot to shave. I have had my beard ever since.”

Meetings at school tend to revolve around the question of assessment. It is both amusing and exhausting to see with what alacrity people fall behind a process-- and a principle-- that is at once demeaning and idiotic, in that name of–what? Cohesion? Collegiality? Cowardice? The whole mess is imposed by people who have too little to do and are overpaid for doing it on people who have too much to do and are barely compensated for time already encumbered. It suggests that numbers measure all, not because they do, but because the people who think they are running the show have no understanding outside of numbers. And though our whole lives are spent convincing students that the numbers are only a start, here we are genuflecting to idols we would abhor in our own classroom. You begin to understand how tyrants rise and tyrannies persist, noting how easily we obey those who, from any rational or academic perspective, know less than we-- to the point of clearly not understanding how education works-- consenting to measure the immeasurable in order to win favor in the eyes of those who should be held in general contempt. At the end of it, it’s simply a waste of time. We laugh and mock, but we square our shoulders and get down to it, as if we didn’t trust our own laughter and our own mockery. We are Laputians licking our way through the dust to the thrones of our inferiors.