Boo

Who's dressing up for Hallowe'en?

VLC

If last Monday's event critical of engaged scholarship felt a little un-New School, tonight's book launch for Eyal Weizman's Ungrounding, hosted by our Vera List Center for Art and Politics, was a tonic. Not the content, a meticulous and devastating forensic indictment of the Israeli's state's efforts to uproot Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip. But the energy and resolve in a packed Wollman Hall. Research and critical analysis can make a difference in a world of injustices, and should be supported.

In the cards

Visit to "Religion of Trees" today by a photo-grapher colleague who's just produced a New York Street Tree Tarot deck. The deck (which our class explored on its own last week) was eight years in the making, we learned, bringing together his abiding passion for street trees with a first year studio at Parsons School of Design where he'd been helping students develop tarot decks of their own. "When are you going to make one," people kept asking... In the event, his beautifully produced deck (and manual) came out just as New York was swooning over the Tarot exhibition at the Morgan - serendipity!

But before we got into his tarot, he took us out to observe some street trees whose often very difficult lives are visible if you pay attention, and before that he spread out some leaves on the table of our antiseptic classroom. Picked up in the park by where he lives in the north Bronx were leaves of kanzan cherry, pin oak and maple (and a cottonwood stick which feels like a magic wand). Amazing how little it takes to bring nature into a space, he observed. Take one home, he urged.

Surfacing

Talking to a friend today about our trip to Venice, which ended just two weeks ago (!), I found myself enthusing about two completely opposite works of art, Giovanni Antonio Fumiani's vast trompe-l'oeuil ceiling of San Pantaleone (1680-1704), perhaps the largest painting on canvas in the world, and a cannily perfect conceptual work by Joseph Kosuth (1965) on display at a special exhibition at the Berggruen Institute on La Giudecca. Sharing the improbable gift of these works helped me savor the gift of our trip, too; undigested, my memories have been defaulting to the surface views of Canaletto cliché.

Touched

In Religion of Trees today, we delved into Stephanie Kaza's incredibly embodied Buddhist practice-buoyed Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology, noting how tactile her encounters were, starting with "extend[ing] a shy hand" in response to an alder's invitation. 

I am simply trying to say hello across the barriers of form and language. I believe the hands communicate this intention most honestly. The voice and mind are not direct enough. Or perhaps they are too complex for the first step of making contact. Besides, the tree and I have such different minds and voices. I don't know the language of these alders at all. I can only guess at the shape of a tree's mind and what it knows about life on the edge of a pond. (Boulder: Shambalah, [1993] 2019), 25

Connected by touch she discovers affinities in respect to water, light and rhythms... In further chapters I assigned, Kaza's hands dip into a manzanita's magnetic energy, stack a woodpile and even operate a chainsaw. So of course our drawing prompt was "a human touching a tree," which students took in terrifically different directions. 

After class one student lingered and asked me what tree first touched me, sparking my interest in this subject, and a parried. The Lang courtyard maples, of course. But there must have been others, deeper in my past. By happy coincidence a Facebook group I don't remember joining called "Trees of life" today shared this 1907 painting by Koloman Moser which sang to me. The scene looked familiar, and indeed it is: a view of the Raxalpe, a place we often went when our family lived in Vienna. The Rax is above the treeline but to get there (or if you walk down, having taken the ropeway up) you have to travel through the verdant worlds so beautifully depicted here. Couldn't not share!

DIY+

This year's round of first year interviews/conversations with alums yielded a rich harvest today. I scaled it back a little from last year, when pairs of students were tasked with interviewing two alums. For good and bad reasons that ended up with each student anxiously interviewing just one alum on their own. So this year pairs of students (in one case a team of three) were assigned a single alum to talk to, and all managed to make it work. The students' work together, during and after the interview made for better conversations and better reports, too.

So what did we learn? The six alums interviewed, ranging from the classes of 2006 to 2018, were a diverse group - two born abroad, one in Boriken - and had very different majors while at Lang: literature, economics, sociology, culture and media, fine arts - and one student who made religious studies their major, not just a minor! Since departing they have worked and studied in fields from education to journalism to art therapy to ministry. They shared with students engagement of various forms with Zoroastrian, Christian, Muslim, Taino and (mostly secular) Jewish tradition - most availing themselves of some Buddhist practices, too. They spoke of rituals they participated in with more and less conviction, and when some mentioned partners, it emerged that none of the partners were in the same religious space.

Each shared (and the interviewing students were able to solicit, understand and share) fascinating thoughts on DIY religion. An atheist alum described developing an appreciation for religious conviction in her graduate school friends, and offered a secular appreciation of the work of communal gathering. In college she was figuring herself out, she said, and now takes joy in being able to help others do the same. A "nontraditional Christian" described religious experiences while riding horses, and how reincarnation made more sense to her than heaven or hell. A priest distinguished her own DIY religious life from her work as a clergyperson, and recommended songs that criticize Christian hypocrisy by ex-Christians familiar with the tropes of faith. The Taino student described the inspired DIY of reviving and reconstructing a tradition the colonizer thought dead - a tradition they carefully don't call a religion. 

My favorite insight? The Muslim alum reflected that all religion must be DIY, and that that is as it should be. The Quran is beyond complete human comprehension, so the best we can do is interpret thoughtfully (optimally reading it in the original Arabic, and attentive to the human penchant for self-dealing interpretation). Indeed, DIY religion - doing your best to understand and live it out - is God's will. It would be sacrilegious to suggest that Allah didn't anticipate all these interpretations. Wow!

The interviews will bear one more harvest of fruit: the student interviewers were tasked with asking their alum interlocutors for recommended readings. They have two weeks to track these down, read/watch/listen to them, and tell the class about them. We can look forward to hearing about everything from theology of disability to a self-help book by a queer astrology influencer. More anon!

Loaves and fishes

Not too shabby, considering...!

Esperança e alegria

 LULA!

Peeps

Went for the annual leaf peeping trip this weekend. Given my teaching schedule this semester, I can't swing an Adirondacks stay so we made do with the northern Catskills. Far enough north, it turned out, to be well "past peak" according to the 

New York Foliage Map. The maples, with a few luminous exceptions, were already a memory, a red shag carpet beneath clear blue punctured by wintry greys. But bright bands of oaks proved virtuosic in radiant yellows, browns, reds and and even deep purples, while beeches glowed green and gold and hemlock shimmered almost bluish green. The drive up offered the comically compressed fall we're accustomed to, the drive back the Cassandra-like return to carefree red and heedless green.

Rededicated!

In the midst of all the bad news and worry, it was wonderful to be present to celebrate something good and hopeful - the rededication of the Holy Apostles Mission House, now not only fully ADA-accessible and kitted out with gorgeous colorful new spaces but boasting a bright new entrance. Assorted political representatives joined the bishop to mark the occasion, a rededication also of the kind of community so sorely needed at this juncture.

Tragic scene

Still reeling from these brutal enrollment numbers, just published by our Institutional Research office, I was confronted with the White Oak Tower card in my colleague Matthew Lopez-Jensen's "Street Tree Tarot," which we were exploring in "Religion of Trees." Outside intervention required!

Fall in the city

overhead and also underfoot

Assemblage

Very cool out of the box thinking in "Religion of Trees" today. I'd divided the class into teams each charged with reading and giving a short presentation on an important book on our subject, together with a handout. A handout - how retro in the age of AI-assisted powerpoints!!! 

The group entrusted with Mircea Eliade had handouts, but it turned out they were all different, each with some lines from the text on the top, some images below, and a number on the back. Students were invited to tape their sheet on the board in order, and before long we saw the outline of a tree which turned out to be a banyan! IThis was both a fun way to get people engaged and a quite brilliant illustration of Eliade's method, assembling examples from every place under the sun into supposedly universal patterns. These shared patterns were discernible only through the comparative method, he claimed; indeed the meaning of any given example was indiscernible without this larger comparative scaffolding. 

Roiling

Attended this rather curious event today. The organizers pitched the event  

Questions of "viewpoint diversity" and "institutional neutrality" are roiling higher education, though the intensity of the debates around these issues too often precludes the kind of honest, nuanced engagement that might yield results.

The panel, straight out of central casting (well, the Chronicle of Higher Education), was lively if not diverse. The panelists were squeamish about "viewpoint diversity" - a Trojan horse for "affirmative action for conservatives," several said, especially in the context of the government assault on the autonomy of higher education. But all accepted that there was some unspecified problem of political imbalance in research, university culture or professional academic societies. (DEI wasn't mentioned, or Gaza, the usual referents of these terms.) Discussion also avoided the grandiose title of the event to focus on the contested "State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences" study commissioned by the presidents of Vanderbilt and Washington University earlier this year, one of whose members was a panelist.

Did it "yield results"? All on the dais were in favor of "good research," defined by rigor and openness to alternative interpretations of data. But they worried about the health of the structures (like peer review and professional societies) that in the past promoted "good research" and so sustained public trust in higher education. With the Vanderbilt report, they suggested some of these structures are today captive to ideological interests and eroding public trust. Other interpretations of this loss of trust, or of the place of "political" considerations in higher education, were not considered, nor that the New School proudly calls itself a "progressive" institution. Is the solution to undisclosed problems more hand-wringing events like this?

The discussion was hosted by our university's newest feature, the "Center for the American Experience" - "American experience in all its complexity," one of the founders explained. The other founder introduced tonight's event by talking about Horace Kallen's "cultural pluralism" and how the New School was thus uniquely well-placed to host this discussion. The implication of CAE's pronouncements is really the opposite, though: The New School, once a haven of pluralism, needs to be freed from (unspecified) ideological capture to restore the spirit of free inquiry and debate. I think the weird stencilled image generated for this event (above) conveys their sense of being the radical outsiders now, storming the barricades. 

Consider them stormed.