Having been up to my knees in fresh powder on Friday, Monday turned out to be very warm and sunny. Our building got somewhat overheated, so that even my deathly cold office was suddenly uncomfortably warm instead. Then yesterday, Tuesday, it reached 27°C. I had to drive around a lot in the afternoon, and sweltered unpleasantly in my un-air-conditioned little car up and down the Interstate. This morning I looked out at the bright sunshine and realised that though I had been rather slow and reluctant to accept it, it was time to switch to summer clothing. I went to work in a light shirt - no sweater or jacket - and so naturally it was snowing by evening.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Atlanta
Another week passes in a frenzy of last-minute preparation. It was difficult to catch up after being away, especially since I came back from Atlanta late on Saturday night and got up early Sunday morning to go skiing. Monday to Thursday was a flurry of activity, and then I went skiing again yesterday. It's the last weekend of the season at Winter Park, but there was an enormous snowfall through Thursday and into Friday. Deep fluffy powder, and at the beginning of the day the top of the mountain was strewn with people fallen and falling like fat baby birds trying to leave the nest. It was such a funny sight that it was difficult to ski for laughing, as well as being just difficult to ski.
I meant to write up my visit to Atlanta earlier, but didn't have the time or energy through this week. It was an interesting trip, though. The paper went OK, though I galloped through it rather fast since it was clearly too long (too long for 25 minutes, and at the beginning our chair reminded us that we were supposed to try to stick to 20 minutes). Well, it was no great piece of innovative research, but it is a new line on my CV. We had no time for questions really, since the presenter after me had a lengthy equipment crisis.
I went to two other panels on the Friday afternoon and evening. In the evening one I wanted to ask a question. As I sat there formulating my question and then getting up the courage to actually break into the discussion and ask it, I felt myself going cold and clammy all over, and realized that after all this time this is the one thing that still completely terrifies me. It's absurd (though I've asked other people since and discovered that it's perhaps not unusual): I can present a paper and talk to the audience, I can stand in front of a class of 120 students and lecture, I can listen to student presentations and ask pertinent questions - none of these without some kind of nervousness, but also with an underlying quiet confidence - and yet faced with asking a question of a fellow academic in a room with perhaps only ten people in it, I'm horrified. It's funny, really. But yes, I formulated my question and asked it without exposing myself as an ignorant fraud (I hope).
Feeling as if I'd paid my dues by going to those panels on Friday, I took Saturday off and set out to see the High Museum of Art. I walked there from the hotel because I wanted to get a sense of Atlanta. For the previous two nights I'd made some attempt to walk out of Peachtree Center, which is a little island of big hotels and restaurants with a faceless corporate feel, but had given up at the sight of big roads and towering parking garages and wandering weird people. On Saturday I walked north up Peachtree Street, a long, busy, and largely unexciting road which nevertheless had a few interesting older buildings scattered along the way. As I got near the area where the museum should be, though, I mistakenly took a right turn instead of a left, and in a few strides I found myself in a quiet and astonishingly beautiful street, Peachtree Circle. I should say that in the three plus days I was in Atlanta, the weather was almost continually a light wet blowing drizzle, almost like walking through a cloud - the tops of the hotel towers were usually hidden in mist - and that it is presumably this climate that was responsible for the wonderful profusion of the gardens I came across. There were so many colours and textures - green lawns, maple and cherry and dogwood trees, sometimes roses trained over doorways, flowers of all kinds, pollen scents. The houses too were lovely - neat squared Georgian-looking buildings. I'd like to go back and look at more of this town. In the museum, the woman behind the desk told me that the area to the north was full of beautiful architecture, so next time I will go and look there.
The museum was great too. The building is very interesting - at the top of one wing you have a warehouse-like openness for the immense works of modern and contemporary art that mostly don't do much for me at all - all those canvases with just two or three colour blocks on them - but at the top of the next one is a wonderful play of space in the American folk art and contemporary art collections, where walls, pillars and framing windows keep changing the composition of what you're looking at. The collections themselves were unusual, too - especially the folk art collection, which was mostly modern Christian art, much of it African-American. It's nice to see something so exciting from a culture I otherwise find so alien (the earnest Christian side of it, that is) - a case in which putting something in a museum makes it easier (for me, at least) to encounter it. It makes it seem something unexpectedly productive, too.
I ran into one of my Boulder colleagues in the museum, and in the evening I ran into a number more. I saw some people from other places, too, but perhaps of all things re-establishing relationships with my local colleagues (who, for all that they are just up the road, I don't see often) was most worthwhile.
I meant to write up my visit to Atlanta earlier, but didn't have the time or energy through this week. It was an interesting trip, though. The paper went OK, though I galloped through it rather fast since it was clearly too long (too long for 25 minutes, and at the beginning our chair reminded us that we were supposed to try to stick to 20 minutes). Well, it was no great piece of innovative research, but it is a new line on my CV. We had no time for questions really, since the presenter after me had a lengthy equipment crisis.
I went to two other panels on the Friday afternoon and evening. In the evening one I wanted to ask a question. As I sat there formulating my question and then getting up the courage to actually break into the discussion and ask it, I felt myself going cold and clammy all over, and realized that after all this time this is the one thing that still completely terrifies me. It's absurd (though I've asked other people since and discovered that it's perhaps not unusual): I can present a paper and talk to the audience, I can stand in front of a class of 120 students and lecture, I can listen to student presentations and ask pertinent questions - none of these without some kind of nervousness, but also with an underlying quiet confidence - and yet faced with asking a question of a fellow academic in a room with perhaps only ten people in it, I'm horrified. It's funny, really. But yes, I formulated my question and asked it without exposing myself as an ignorant fraud (I hope).
Feeling as if I'd paid my dues by going to those panels on Friday, I took Saturday off and set out to see the High Museum of Art. I walked there from the hotel because I wanted to get a sense of Atlanta. For the previous two nights I'd made some attempt to walk out of Peachtree Center, which is a little island of big hotels and restaurants with a faceless corporate feel, but had given up at the sight of big roads and towering parking garages and wandering weird people. On Saturday I walked north up Peachtree Street, a long, busy, and largely unexciting road which nevertheless had a few interesting older buildings scattered along the way. As I got near the area where the museum should be, though, I mistakenly took a right turn instead of a left, and in a few strides I found myself in a quiet and astonishingly beautiful street, Peachtree Circle. I should say that in the three plus days I was in Atlanta, the weather was almost continually a light wet blowing drizzle, almost like walking through a cloud - the tops of the hotel towers were usually hidden in mist - and that it is presumably this climate that was responsible for the wonderful profusion of the gardens I came across. There were so many colours and textures - green lawns, maple and cherry and dogwood trees, sometimes roses trained over doorways, flowers of all kinds, pollen scents. The houses too were lovely - neat squared Georgian-looking buildings. I'd like to go back and look at more of this town. In the museum, the woman behind the desk told me that the area to the north was full of beautiful architecture, so next time I will go and look there.
The museum was great too. The building is very interesting - at the top of one wing you have a warehouse-like openness for the immense works of modern and contemporary art that mostly don't do much for me at all - all those canvases with just two or three colour blocks on them - but at the top of the next one is a wonderful play of space in the American folk art and contemporary art collections, where walls, pillars and framing windows keep changing the composition of what you're looking at. The collections themselves were unusual, too - especially the folk art collection, which was mostly modern Christian art, much of it African-American. It's nice to see something so exciting from a culture I otherwise find so alien (the earnest Christian side of it, that is) - a case in which putting something in a museum makes it easier (for me, at least) to encounter it. It makes it seem something unexpectedly productive, too.
I ran into one of my Boulder colleagues in the museum, and in the evening I ran into a number more. I saw some people from other places, too, but perhaps of all things re-establishing relationships with my local colleagues (who, for all that they are just up the road, I don't see often) was most worthwhile.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
At leisure.
Atlanta, an hour before I present, and I have finished my paper. What shall I do with all of this free time (other than try and work out how I can cut out several pages of it as I speak)?
After almost twenty years at this, I still can't find a way to get over that initial writing block more quickly and to be able to write a readable sentence sooner than the just-a-little-bit-too-late that has me out of bed at 5 am or earlier three days in a row. Oh well.
After almost twenty years at this, I still can't find a way to get over that initial writing block more quickly and to be able to write a readable sentence sooner than the just-a-little-bit-too-late that has me out of bed at 5 am or earlier three days in a row. Oh well.
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