I just spent two days in New Haven, nominally to attend a conference called "Exploring the Post-Secular." After a long day of that yesterday I'd had enough - actually, not enough, as the conference didn't convince me "the post-secular" is a meaningful phenomenon or category - so I headed with my friend R to the current show at the Yale Rep, Bill Camp and
Robert Woodruff's contemporary adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "
Notes from Underground," savagely brilliant and disturbing (so disturbing I can't really recommend it, though you might be glad to have seen it). Today R took me around Yale's intoxicatingly pretty buildings - behold the history of writing from the entrance to Sterling Library, some of Yale's striking spires, and law & order carvings from an entrance to the Law School.
And at the Yale Center for British Art I was able to see an exhibition I'd heard good things about called "
Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts." It shows images of (among other things) animals, geology, competition in nature and society, ecological fitness, native peoples from around the world and the play of the sexes which Darwin will have known, and later images which in various ways take his ideas into account. Fascinating. Trip to New Haven redeemed!
I just spent two days in New Haven, nominally to attend a conference called "Exploring the Post-Secular." After a long day of that yesterday I'd had enough - actually, not enough, as the conference didn't convince me "the post-secular" is a meaningful phenomenon or category - so I headed with my friend R to the current show at the Yale Rep, Bill Camp and 
Robert Woodruff's contemporary adaptation of Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground," savagely brilliant and disturbing (so disturbing I can't really recommend it, though you might be glad to have seen it). Today R took me around Yale's intoxicatingly pretty buildings - behold the history of writing from the entrance to Sterling Library, some of Yale's striking spires, and law & order carvings from an entrance to the Law School. 
And at the Yale Center for British Art I was able to see an exhibition I'd heard good things about called "Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts." It shows images of (among other things) animals, geology, competition in nature and society, ecological fitness, native peoples from around the world and the play of the sexes which Darwin will have known, and later images which in various ways take his ideas into account. Fascinating. Trip to New Haven redeemed!
