Film Noir

 It's funny that a person who has voted against Champlain's new Core curriculum at every step of the way would make such a deliberate and sustained effort to take advantage of said new curriculum - or maybe, more accurately, subvert said curriculum. In the fall semester I have, foolishly, four preps, covering subjects like: the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun; the Chinese novel Journey to the West; the Bedouin of the Wadi Rum (forming the core of a travel course); and a third year course on Japanese film noir.

Don't blame me, blame the Criterion Channel. It wasn't that long ago that I didn't know how fascinating Japanese film noir is.

FLA

 OK, so this is definitely not the #YankeeHellhole. A couple years ago I set myself the goal of spending more time with my oldest friend Jack and his wife Julie. It doesn't hurt that they live in Florida, which is a perfectly lovely place to spend time during the winter in VT - and maybe even more so during the wretched Mud Season (more on that later).

It's hard to believe that my ex-wife Brenda and I introduced the crazy kids to each other almost forty years ago. Like so many of the women in my life, Juju is obviously a shirt thief.

Meditations #30

 "A poor soul burdened with a corpse," Epictetus calls you.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Four

I really do need to design a Champlain course based around the Meditations. A couple years ago I put in a proposal for a first year course as part of our new curriculum, but it wasn't chosen. While I suspect this particular passage wouldn't resonate with my students (if anything resonates with them . . .) but it definitely speaks to me as I slide deeper into my 60s. 

More Beautiful Winter Desolation

 Some more pictures of the backroads of Vermont. As my life seems to inexplicably lead me to central Vermont I guess it's natural and unavoidable that more pictures of it pop up. I wish I could say that I took these with my new camera, but I simply snapped them with my phone. And, no, they're not black & white, but simply the extraordinary winter beauty (desolation) of Vermont.

Sentimental Education

 My friend Frank sent me this picture this morning. It's of my friend Doug and me in our first year of graduate school. This picture was taken in March 1983. Was I ever actually this young - and in graduate school? God, no wonder our professors in graduate school at UC thought we were morons (plus, they were perceptive).

It also got me thinking about the time that Doug was a finalist for the position of Provost here at Champlain. The college, as part of an endless string of dreadful administrative hires, didn't choose him. It did give us the chance to spend several blissful hours on the deck of the Saint John's Club reflecting on life, history, love, and friendship; essentially, it turned into the closing passage of Flaubert's Sentimental Education (which I recently re-read - it simply, unlike us, gets better with age).

It's hard to believe that these utter lunkheads somehow became reasonably successful and respected professionals.

Meditations #29

 Injustice is a sin. Nature has constituted rational beings for their own mutual benefit, each to help his fellows according to their worth, and in no wise to do them hurt; and to contravene her will is plainly to win against this eldest of all the deities. Untruthfulness, too, is a sin, and against the same goddess. For Nature is the nature of existence itself; and existence connotes the kinship of all created beings.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Nine

As we're dragging towards the end of Year Two of COVID, and considering the implications of Year Three and Year Four, I'm drawn back to this passage from the Meditations. As usual MA is correct when he pointed out that "existence connotes the kinship of all created beings." The great trick of capitalism is to make us forget this fact, and to instead celebrate the individualistic accumulation of as much as inhumanly possible, and to decry compassion for our fellow human beings as weakness. I'd hate to think how many COVID-related statistics I've posted on Twitter or Facebook which then cried out for the same tagline: "But my freedom . . ." In the end individual freedom doesn't mean much when it endangers the collective good. Aren't we told this on every visit to our houses of worship (well, not the Evangelical mega-churches), and yet we forget it as we pass out the door.

Backroads

 Lately I've spent a lot of time roaming around the backroads of central Vermont, and I think I've done more exploring than when I actually lived in central Vermont. As a result I've snapped a couple decent pictures that vaguely and clumsily captured the stark beauty of VT in the winter (not Iceland in winter beautiful, but still pretty).