Showing posts with label Columbia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Columbia. Show all posts
Friday, August 08, 2014
Wednesday, March 05, 2014
Midweek brain fog
I feel that I am operating at only about 60% functionality due to fatigue - it is not good! My Friday meeting this week is canceled, which gives me a bit of a breather (usually I have a Wednesday morning deadline for initial round of reading and reports), but on the other hand I have to write up some thoughts for my other committee by late morning today, if I can pull myself together sufficiently. Hoping to fit in a run at some point, but it has been a disastrous winter for exercise, and it's not quite as warm today as I had hoped....
No Exit at the Pearl was thoroughly enjoyable (tasty dinner afterwards at Ktchn - it is bizarre that there should be a restaurant of that ilk on that block, times have changed!).
Two funny things later today: first of all, at three some people are coming to my apartment to film interview footage for Aaron Brookner's documentary about his uncle Howard Brookner, a documentary filmmaker and admirer of William Burroughs; Brookner did not live in my actual apartment while he was at Columbia in the 70s, but it was one with similar layout in the same building, and the notion is that it can be used to capture the flavor of life here at that time.
Then at 6:15 it's the Rape of the Lock reading! Hmmm, must not forget to prepare a few introductory remarks - I am speaking briefly beforehand then reading the opening stretch of lines.
No Exit at the Pearl was thoroughly enjoyable (tasty dinner afterwards at Ktchn - it is bizarre that there should be a restaurant of that ilk on that block, times have changed!).
Two funny things later today: first of all, at three some people are coming to my apartment to film interview footage for Aaron Brookner's documentary about his uncle Howard Brookner, a documentary filmmaker and admirer of William Burroughs; Brookner did not live in my actual apartment while he was at Columbia in the 70s, but it was one with similar layout in the same building, and the notion is that it can be used to capture the flavor of life here at that time.
Then at 6:15 it's the Rape of the Lock reading! Hmmm, must not forget to prepare a few introductory remarks - I am speaking briefly beforehand then reading the opening stretch of lines.
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Monday, April 23, 2012
Good news in the interim
Got written confirmation today that I am authorized for spring semester leave from teaching at full salary. Will teach full load in the fall and then have spring 2013 totally off from teaching. (It is not a sabbatical as such but rather a benison of the mysterious TFRP; it does not affect sabbatical eligibility for one semester in 2015-16.) I like teaching very much indeed, but there is no doubt that this is extremely good news!
Monday, January 03, 2011
Production of quota
Didn't get started till mighty late today: it was the first day for a week when I really could lounge as opposed to getting up and hastening out of the house to write quota, and then I got diverted onto the complex job of beginning to pack up all of my things, including a vast number of books - I'm going back to New York on Wednesday afternoon, I'll be teaching again in the spring semester.
But I did in the end squeeze out quota.
(I am still disconcerted by the way the shape of the novel has suddenly come into focus for me over the last few days. I don't think it's going to be a very long novel - in fact I would be surprised if it comes in much over 65,000 words max, which means I really am pretty much halfway drafted...)
c. 1,100 words, for a total of 32,117 words
But I did in the end squeeze out quota.
(I am still disconcerted by the way the shape of the novel has suddenly come into focus for me over the last few days. I don't think it's going to be a very long novel - in fact I would be surprised if it comes in much over 65,000 words max, which means I really am pretty much halfway drafted...)
c. 1,100 words, for a total of 32,117 words
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Honored
My big news for this year is that I have received a true honor.
The rubric for the Mark Van Doren Award is that it is bestowed on a CU faculty member for "humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership" by a committee of Columbia College undergraduates. I will endeavor to live up to it - in the meantime, here are the remarks I made at the ceremony this evening:
It is very difficult for me to imagine a more meaningful honor – meaningful to me, personally – than the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award.
I came to Columbia ten years ago as an assistant professor, and I must confess that I immediately found that my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. My students were responsive to my excitement about the material I was teaching and more than willing to be seduced by the relatively recondite pleasures of eighteenth-century British literature.
Most of all, I felt that we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked: a belief that the stakes were high, and that what happened in the classroom each day really mattered, not because of professional futures and the need to apply to graduate schools and get jobs and so forth (though I’m not knocking those things either) but because learning things – and learning how to find out the things one doesn’t yet know – and learning how to think about things is for some of us almost a spiritual vocation, one for which it’s worth submitting to a stringent discipline in the short term for the rewards those habits of thought, once they have been successfully cultivated, will pay out to us in the future.
A collection of Lionel Trilling’s essays was published a few years ago with the striking title The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. That phrase is actually the title of a 1915 essay by John Erskine, one of the pioneers of Columbia’s core curriculum, an educator and a theorist of education. (Erskine received his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. from Columbia and taught here for almost three decades. An aside: I looked up his biography online and was laughing to myself as I read these two sentences: “Although he was a gifted teacher, Erskine seems to have lacked a traditional scholarly disposition. His flamboyance, eccentricities, and literary ambitions set him apart from most of his more staid colleagues at the College.”)
“Intelligent” here doesn’t mean smart or clever so much as it means thoughtful, and I would revise that phrase to read “the moral obligation to think clearly.” Some people have a natural gift for thinking clearly, but it is a talent one can work for as well as having it simply handed to one as birthright.
That is always the underlying goal of what I’m doing in my classes. I would certainly like my students to learn about the battle of the ancients and the moderns as it coalesced around Swift’s Tale of a Tub, or about the forms of presentation of the self that we see being developed in Restoration comedies like The Country Wife or The Man of Mode, or about the lightning-rod role that Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France played during the 1790s. All of these are interesting and important moments in literary and cultural history that case some light on aspects of our own culture as well.
But it is more important to me that the students I teach continue to learn and stretch their abilities to recognize and work towards comprehending things as yet unknown to them, things that may in many cases be important and difficult and even almost inscrutable.
I am happy to spend half an hour in class working through a single sentence or paragraph of prose – obviously not just any prose, it’s going to have to be something really significant – one of those dense rich paragraphs you find in Richardson’s Clarissa or Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or for that matter Austen or Henry James or Proust. It is tempting to rush to broad thematic generalizations about a work or an author, but how can you answer a big question about what something means if you can’t parse the meanings of the words in one enigmatic sentence? It takes a willingness to puzzle over small things – and often to admit that one doesn’t understand some particular turn of phrase or twist of argument – to earn the right to answer the bigger and more glamorous questions.
The joy of puzzling meaning out of an intricate sentence is something I never grow tired of. My students will perhaps laugh when I say this – I have been known to mention it now and again! –but when I was a little kid, like many children I was fascinated by tales of magical adventure. I had a particular love for stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, stories that take many different incarnations, from the redactions of Roger Lancelyn Green to the chronicles of Malory and Mary Stewart’s Merlin books and the lovely upside-down versions of the stories in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. I yearned to perform heroic tasks and live in a magical world where everything would be larger and richer and more colorful than ordinary life.
I realize it doesn’t look particularly glamorous from the outside, but I am very lucky to have found something surprisingly like that magical and rich and colorful life – in the classrooms of Hamilton and Kent and Philosophy. I walk into the classroom and everything is heightened for me – the language on the page before us comes alive, and the exchange of thoughts and the playful back-and-forth between the people sitting in that room are at best absolutely electrifying.
I use the word “playful” deliberately, because in the end what I most cherish about my life of reading and writing is the sense I have, while conducting it, of life's taking place in a very high-level and stimulating and challenging and utterly enjoyable game, something better and more rewarding but just as adrenaline-filled as any other sort of adventure one might have, whether real or virtual. It is a pleasure and a privilege, then, to invite my students to join that game – an unusually meaningful game that can be played, whether as a professional or just as a serious amateur, both in classrooms and out of them for the rest of our lives.
The rubric for the Mark Van Doren Award is that it is bestowed on a CU faculty member for "humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership" by a committee of Columbia College undergraduates. I will endeavor to live up to it - in the meantime, here are the remarks I made at the ceremony this evening:
It is very difficult for me to imagine a more meaningful honor – meaningful to me, personally – than the Mark Van Doren Teaching Award.
I came to Columbia ten years ago as an assistant professor, and I must confess that I immediately found that my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. My students were responsive to my excitement about the material I was teaching and more than willing to be seduced by the relatively recondite pleasures of eighteenth-century British literature.
Most of all, I felt that we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked: a belief that the stakes were high, and that what happened in the classroom each day really mattered, not because of professional futures and the need to apply to graduate schools and get jobs and so forth (though I’m not knocking those things either) but because learning things – and learning how to find out the things one doesn’t yet know – and learning how to think about things is for some of us almost a spiritual vocation, one for which it’s worth submitting to a stringent discipline in the short term for the rewards those habits of thought, once they have been successfully cultivated, will pay out to us in the future.
A collection of Lionel Trilling’s essays was published a few years ago with the striking title The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. That phrase is actually the title of a 1915 essay by John Erskine, one of the pioneers of Columbia’s core curriculum, an educator and a theorist of education. (Erskine received his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. from Columbia and taught here for almost three decades. An aside: I looked up his biography online and was laughing to myself as I read these two sentences: “Although he was a gifted teacher, Erskine seems to have lacked a traditional scholarly disposition. His flamboyance, eccentricities, and literary ambitions set him apart from most of his more staid colleagues at the College.”)
“Intelligent” here doesn’t mean smart or clever so much as it means thoughtful, and I would revise that phrase to read “the moral obligation to think clearly.” Some people have a natural gift for thinking clearly, but it is a talent one can work for as well as having it simply handed to one as birthright.
That is always the underlying goal of what I’m doing in my classes. I would certainly like my students to learn about the battle of the ancients and the moderns as it coalesced around Swift’s Tale of a Tub, or about the forms of presentation of the self that we see being developed in Restoration comedies like The Country Wife or The Man of Mode, or about the lightning-rod role that Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France played during the 1790s. All of these are interesting and important moments in literary and cultural history that case some light on aspects of our own culture as well.
But it is more important to me that the students I teach continue to learn and stretch their abilities to recognize and work towards comprehending things as yet unknown to them, things that may in many cases be important and difficult and even almost inscrutable.
I am happy to spend half an hour in class working through a single sentence or paragraph of prose – obviously not just any prose, it’s going to have to be something really significant – one of those dense rich paragraphs you find in Richardson’s Clarissa or Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments or for that matter Austen or Henry James or Proust. It is tempting to rush to broad thematic generalizations about a work or an author, but how can you answer a big question about what something means if you can’t parse the meanings of the words in one enigmatic sentence? It takes a willingness to puzzle over small things – and often to admit that one doesn’t understand some particular turn of phrase or twist of argument – to earn the right to answer the bigger and more glamorous questions.
The joy of puzzling meaning out of an intricate sentence is something I never grow tired of. My students will perhaps laugh when I say this – I have been known to mention it now and again! –but when I was a little kid, like many children I was fascinated by tales of magical adventure. I had a particular love for stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, stories that take many different incarnations, from the redactions of Roger Lancelyn Green to the chronicles of Malory and Mary Stewart’s Merlin books and the lovely upside-down versions of the stories in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. I yearned to perform heroic tasks and live in a magical world where everything would be larger and richer and more colorful than ordinary life.
I realize it doesn’t look particularly glamorous from the outside, but I am very lucky to have found something surprisingly like that magical and rich and colorful life – in the classrooms of Hamilton and Kent and Philosophy. I walk into the classroom and everything is heightened for me – the language on the page before us comes alive, and the exchange of thoughts and the playful back-and-forth between the people sitting in that room are at best absolutely electrifying.
I use the word “playful” deliberately, because in the end what I most cherish about my life of reading and writing is the sense I have, while conducting it, of life's taking place in a very high-level and stimulating and challenging and utterly enjoyable game, something better and more rewarding but just as adrenaline-filled as any other sort of adventure one might have, whether real or virtual. It is a pleasure and a privilege, then, to invite my students to join that game – an unusually meaningful game that can be played, whether as a professional or just as a serious amateur, both in classrooms and out of them for the rest of our lives.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
Memorials
Just on the off chance there's anyone reading here who'd like to come and hasn't heard about it elsewhere, the memorial service for my colleague Karl Kroeber will be held tomorrow, Thursday, April 8 from 3:30 to 5:30 in St. Paul's Chapel on campus.
Monday, November 09, 2009
On curiosity
I just learned, in an email from my department chair, of the death of a much-valued colleague, Karl Kroeber. Karl has been seriously ill for some time, and I heard at the end of last week that he was in hospice care at his home, but the news still comes as a blow.
If you have a few minutes, go and read this wonderful interview that Adam Katz and Josh Schwartz did with Karl for Columbia's Bwog a few years ago - it really gives the flavor of his interests and character and his wonderful restless roving intelligence...
Karl made a very lovely gesture upon his retirement last spring. It is common in such circumstances for the university to host a lavish but exclusive party, usually for an elect group of senior colleagues. But Karl observed that the people he'd learned the most from at Columbia were in fact his junior colleagues, that reading their work for various reviews (tenure and otherwise) was what kept him abreast of interesting new developments in various fields and that really he would much prefer to take his younger colleagues out for a really lavish lunch at Terrace in the Sky! And that was what happened - it was a true valediction.
If you have a few minutes, go and read this wonderful interview that Adam Katz and Josh Schwartz did with Karl for Columbia's Bwog a few years ago - it really gives the flavor of his interests and character and his wonderful restless roving intelligence...
Karl made a very lovely gesture upon his retirement last spring. It is common in such circumstances for the university to host a lavish but exclusive party, usually for an elect group of senior colleagues. But Karl observed that the people he'd learned the most from at Columbia were in fact his junior colleagues, that reading their work for various reviews (tenure and otherwise) was what kept him abreast of interesting new developments in various fields and that really he would much prefer to take his younger colleagues out for a really lavish lunch at Terrace in the Sky! And that was what happened - it was a true valediction.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
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