End of summer

 

 

Can it be the end of August already? I've only had ten days to delight in this image on our Metropolitan Museum calendar of New York in art, part of Mark Tobey's delirious "Broadway" (1935-36).

Colors of the season

A whiff of fall in the woods and some Van Gogh vibes over the native plants garden at the New York Botanical Garden

Fall blooms

 

Both of my classes are off to a good start, I think. Back in the saddle!

Roof/treetop

The newest iteration of "Religion of Trees" began today, in a classroom with this glorious view. (I think you can just see the window I took this picture from from the much less green views afforded by the last version's classroom.) Our friends, the Lang courtyard maples, are below (and reflected in the windows of Wollman Hall on the 5th floor opposite). They seem to be communicating with the trees on West 11th Street, beyond that hall, perhaps also with the boutique solitaries perched on rooftops into the distance toward downtown!

Nuages

Cloudful skies from west in the morning via north in the early afternoon (from the West Village) to east and west again back in Manhattanville...

Riverside church

 Starting to take on an autumnal hue...

Drift log

A piece of driftwood from Kalaloch Beach on the Olympic Peninsula - the biggest I thought could fit in my bag - has washed up on my office windowsill. The courtyard trees don't know what to make of it.

Blueprint for disruption

The New School's new president is a member of the faculty - only the second internal president we've had - and an architect. He kicked off his presidency with a talk today framed by the architecture of the first building purpose-built for us, which included the large lecture-performance hall in which he spoke as well as a dance studio, a library, classrooms, and studios for "design and modeling" - whatever that meant in 1930! I took this picture shortly before student protesters started interrupting him with questions about his predecessor's decisions regarding the university's alleged investments in companies profiting from the Israeli siege of Gaza and police and disciplinary responses to protestors last semester. He was trying to describe the university as a precious and precarious space which balances comfort (everyone feels safe and respected) and discomfort (all open themselves to the challenges which facilitate learning and new ideas), but they wouldn't hear it. Compared to Gaza, whose very universities are among the casualties of the war, anything we do can feel like hand-waving. It made for a grim start to the year.

My happy place

Back to school! It's orientation week, so the courtyard was empty when I arrived at 10, but by the afternoon it was full of new and transfer students. I was there too, as part of a "Meet the Departments" event few students took advantage of in the past, but this time there were more - perhaps because there was a fancy iced coffee station with cookies for which people stood in a long line. By chance I was placed at the first table you see here, to answer questions about the Liberal Arts and Religious Studies program, and, while still few, there were enough takers for some fun exchanges. 

Does the religious studies program have a specific approach? - It's academic but knows students have a more than academic interest in the subject, or at least in spirituality. Perhaps one could say that we explore the possibility that there is more than just human experience and community.

Could one design one's own major in art therapy? - Sure. though it might make more sense to do a major-minor combination in psychology and visual arts (or vice versa).  

What about writing, publishing and marketing? - If you can find the classes and get the instructors' permission to register for them.

What about linguistics? - Someone tried a few years ago but had a rough time: we don't really offer enough courses, so if that's your interest you should probably go somewhere else... But this led to a fascinating conversation, as the student said linguistics was their passion, but would there be any jobs for a linguist? In the age of machine translation, the profound differences between languages - what makes it so valuable to know more than one - will be harder to convince people of, but only of greater value: I directed them to our Literary Studies representative, who specializes in literary translation (if not to a job!).

And then a student, fresh from the Philosophy table, asked if it was possible that in the afterlife everyone's beliefs came true: those who believed in heaven went there, atheists went nowhere, etc.? It's an interesting question! I'm not sure I won them over with my response, referring to the increasing prevalence of religious double belonging, not to mention syncretism, which might make it hard to know just what a person's beliefs about the afterlife really were... but wasn't it interesting that people find ways to live with pluralism and uncertainty over so momentous an issue? And yet isn't there a fact of the matter, whether we can know it or not?

Sabbatical is over, and I'm happy to be back in the fray!

Homeward bound

Back to New York, after four weeks gallivanting about the West!

Shadow puppet

Can any pine but the Torrey pine gesture as exquisitely? No wonder they so charmed Tsuyoshi Matsumoto! (That's Palomar Mountain in the distance, btw, the pic taken looking northish from the TPSNR Lodge.)

Happy 90th!

I don't usually post pictures of people, but there's no other way to show the socko t-shirts we designed to celebrate my father's ninetieth birthday today... and they make us look good, too! The coral reef theme nods to the celebration of my dad's sixtieth a few years ago, on the Great Barrier Reef, and the Australian family present!

Stranglers!

In a furniture/home goods gallery in San Diego I happened on some strangler figs! Undeniably fascinating in a polished form reminiscent of driftwood, they look like models of animal skeletons. While described as "corked vine sculptures" they really are the remains of fig trees which grew in the top of trees which they subsequently asphixiated. The "host" trees remain as a spectral presence, as each of these has a hollow cylindrical core. For these particular figs, their roots and branches lopped off to render them decorative objects, may we say what goes around comes around?

Arboreal faith

There are trees all over the upcoming ecumenical "Season of Creation"!

Lasso

Startlingly satisfying mountain, forest, lake and back country destinations so close to our ocean-facing base! You could see them in a day, I suppose, but we took three. Some late summer gleanings...