Early autumn bouquet

Drawing ritual

What have we been up to this week? Can you guess?

Down

Sometimes I really don't know which team we're playing on any more, or even what game...

Morning shadow play

Storm-tossed

Nor'easter!

Having fun yet?

Hooked!

Can't really show you a picture of it, but "Religion of Trees" became a carpentry workshop today! My friend and colleague O, a Swedish design provocateur, led us in in a whittling workshop that ended up producing a piece of usable furniture - a coat rack, just in time for the colder weather. O had scouted a freshly fallen branch from Prospect Park and cut it into small enough pieces that each students was charged with whittling down one "hook." All of them were ultimately power-screwed to a stand assembled (also in class) of pieces of leftover wood from the wood shop. Here it is as you'll never see it, posed in an empty hallway without any coats or bags hanging from it. 

It was a deeply satisfying community activity. I'm hoping our hands-on work cutting the flesh of a tree (nice that it was from a fallen branch rather than a cut one) in making something of human use will also deepen our discussions of trees as what Roland Ennos calls "partners in life."

Weapon of mass destruction

Threatening genocide in the house of peace. A desecration. 

In another setting today (someone's discussion of international students' willingness to study in the US) someone said the damage done by this administration will last a generation, even if we kick the bums out. Kick them out we must, but the shame of their violation of every norm of decency, national or international, will endure for a long time.

Wounded/healed

The "Religion of Trees" class returned to the storm-damaged callery pear on 12th Street today. While I was the only person who'd been back to check on it since last week's class (...), I'd noticed that it had, in fact, grown back pretty valiantly. If they hadn't noticed its scars, that's because it wasn't just a wounded but a healed tree! 

Perhaps I was too focused on the scars. Our reading had faulted citified people for exaggerating the negative consequences of felling trees.

Historians ... have for the most part ignored the role of wood. ... The foresters and carpenters who were the real experts were generally humble folk who left few written records, while the few people who did write about wood, such as Pliny the Elder and John Evelyn, were aristocrats and gentlemen with no real hands-on experience. These writers were apt to be swayed by their personal experience of seeing trees being felled, a highly dramatic process that is far more memorable than the almost imperceptible growth of the trees around us that occurs throughout our whole lifetime.  

Roland Ennos, The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization (Scribner, 2020), 245

I confessed that I had never paid attention to that particular tree before the storm, giving them (generous!) cover for not having paid it much heed when drawing last week. This week's prompt was Wounded/healed tree. Compared to last week's drawings, you can really see the tree now.

God of all the nations

Decided to to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine this morning, and the whole world was there. In many senses! I'd known that artist Luke Jerram's "Gaia" was suspended in its cavernous nave, but not that the Cathedral celebrates the opening of the United Nations General Assembly - and this was the day!

Jerram's illuminated globe is designed to make accessible the "Overview Effect" reported by the tiny number of human beings who've seen the earth from space. So beautiful, so integrated (no borders!), so small, so precious... The 7m wide sphere turns gently - one rotation every two and a half minutes. We found ourselves seated beneath it. How big Antarctica is! The other continents were mere ciphers: I noticed the southern edge of Australia, and the southern tips of Latin America and Africa sweeping by on the margins. At a greater distance, when the globe is seen from the side rather than below, the true size of Africa and South America are clear - and of course the vast Pacific Ocean! Those northern hemisphere countries which ruled the roost in the Mercator projection maps just replaced by the UN General Assembly? Hard to see from any angle in this configuration. A skullcap at best!

"Let us pray that we may not steal futures from generations to come," Dean Winnie Varghese said in a sermon on the invaluable work of the UN and of all committed to the right of every human to a life free of poverty, hunger or fear - including fear of climate disruption or genocide. You can find it here.

The music was suitably pleasing (the UN Orchestra was there, making a jolly ruckus), but I was brought to tears by one of the hymns, a setting from Sibelius' Finlandia called "This is my song," written by an American in 1934. It starts

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations, 

A song of peace for lands afar and mine. 

This is my home, the country where my heart is; 

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine. 

But other hearts in other lands are beating, 

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

Word on the street

True that.

Teachable moment?

I tried an experiment in "Religion of Trees" today and it failed. Or maybe it succeeded. 

One of our readings for the day focused on images of trees, especially in art and religion; the other recommended we learn "tree thinking" from actual trees, and in their terms. After exploring the articles, I handed out a sheet with our first sixty class sketches (above). We marveled in the variety of styles and approaches. There's a lot of fancy in them!

After that, I announced we were going to do some "drawing from life," and told them to head out the door of our building and down the street; "draw the last tree on the left, the one just before o Cafe." After ten minutes we were to gather in the Lang courtyard and share what we came up with.

Well and good. The fifteen drawings were spirited and delightful. "We all saw a different tree," I quipped. There was only one problem. I'd selected that tree for drawing because it was one seriously wounded by a blizzard in February; three of its main branches are just splintered stumps now. Would all the students notice in their drawing or only some? In the end it was none of them! (The sketch at bottom right is my own.)

So much for drawing from life! It's not that hard to see the tree's wounds, or its asymmetry, if you're looking but the students were seeing something else: a flourishing, unblemished tree in all its splendor. I guess they were happy to be drawing an actual tree, not just sketching in a classroom. Except... were they drawing the actual tree?

I was initially discouraged that not even one student had noticed. Should I have told them to look out for wounds? Maybe they had never thought that trees could be injured? Or is it better this way: learning through experience that we don't really see trees even when we think we are seeing them, projecting all sorts of expectations and patterns instead. I could have told them this happens, but this shared experience makes the point far more convincingly.

When we gather again next Tuesday we're going back to the callery pear near o Cafe to draw. What will we see then?

I brought AI to class today. We'd spent the better part of an hour parsing two academic texts which addressed questions of intersectionality in France, focusing on French Muslims. The research and arguments were congruent but addressed different audiences and debates; one was addressed to political scientists whose analyses of "intersectionality" did not address religion but, the author argued, should. The other was part of a forum defending methodologies like "intersectionality" from critics on the French right who thought them unwelcome North American imports. We had a good time reconstructing the research, the different audiences and contexts, why the two sources were trustworthy - and how one might engage, critique, or go beyond the proffered research.

Then I showed the class a PowerPoint which Notebook LM had generated for me from the two articles. (This took a few minutes, but no specific prompts from me at all.) The slick presentation glommed the two articles together with striking visuals, making a monolithic assertion out of different arguments and interpretations - an aggregated argument neither of our authors had made. The names of the two researchers appeared only once, in tiny print at the bottom of the title slide; their quite different forms of research, reasoning and argumentative contexts - and the openings for engagement and critique - all washed away. 

I didn't spend long on it, though I pointed out various distortions and absurdities in the visualizations. (It gets a lot right, too, of course.) What did I hope the students learned? I told them that Notebook LM is very helpful opening up a single text, but that the work of critical engagement, weighing different sources, was beyond it. That's where you come in! In a week dedicated to the meaning and gift of plural perspectives and experiences, I hope they saw the threat in AI's mindless amalgamation.

Flash bang

A building across Broadway from us caught fire last night. The FDNY was there within minutes and managed to put it out quickly. I don't know how they got inside the apartment that was on fire with their hoses, but they did, thank goodness. The neighborhood flashed like a disco for much longer.

Caption contest

This is a snapshot from one exhibition at the Met that I'm going to let do double duty for another, and for broader issues too. From the crowded "Musical Bodies" exhibition, which closes in a few week, here's a "Cycladian female figure (ca. 3200-2700 BCE)." In the vitrine behind is a Stradivarius. The caption: 

Cycladian figures are some of the earliest representations of the human body. Tied to beliefs about life, death, and the divine, they likely had ritual and symbolic uses. Although the objects predate the violin by around four thousand years, the resemblance between the two is so striking that scholars refer to the statues as "violin-shaped figurines" - a comparison that also underscores the instrument's evocation of the human form. 

Say what? Do they have objects that look like iPhones too? It's harmless for specialists to notice the violin-like shape but for those unacquainted with mysterious Cycladic art it's irrelevant and distracting. If visitors find their way to the collection of Cycladic work currently on loan to the Met (this exhibition might have told them how to find it) they'll be at best disappointed by the absence of violins. If they engage a little more with the world of the Cycladian they might feel, as I did, that placing one of these objects together even with a Stradivarius is a little, well, disrespectful.

The rest of "Musical Bodies" isn't quite as forced, though the exhibition ransacks the whole museum for objects which make sound and evoke human forms. But there's a whole other exhibition not too far away which is composed almost entirely of jarring juxtapositions like this. 

Yes, I finally made it to "Costume Art," the first show of the Costume Institute in its new digs on the ground floor (where the gift shop used to be). Here some two hundred works of couture, most quite recent, are paired with works from the Met's seventeen other departments, in aid of the claim the "the dressed body" is an important participant in the history of art and culture as a whole. The method is explained:

Pairings between fashions and artworks will present a spectrum of connections and experiences: from the formal to the conceptual, the aesthetic to the political, the individual to the universal, the illustrative to the symbolic, and the playful to the profound.

The actual pairings are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes witty, sometimes silly, sometimes obvious, sometimes sacriligious. I think a dozen such juxtapositions might have made for an engaging celebration of fashion's arrival at the Met, but two hundred feels not only forced but heavy-handed. The non-garments - many of them treasures - feel like loot. Mostly they are in display cases beneath (and usually dwarfed by) the garments and most, so far as I can tell, are gritting their teeth waiting for their command performance to end. 

I don't begrudge fashion a place at the Met (we've already got a whole hall devoted to arms and armor after all), and I've worked with enough fashion students to know that this is the way fashion designers make use of the past through "moodboards." ("Moodboards and museums" would make a great topic for an exhibition, actually.) But with the actual treasures pressed into what feels like supporting roles here, it feels like a hostile takeover. Sure, a curious viewer might be inspired to learn more about the non-garments but, as with the person who might seek more "violin-shaped figurines" among the Cycladic art, they'll hardly know what they're seeing or why.

Did I say there was a broader issue this might evoke too? Only the plight of the liberal arts at a university dedicated to designing the new...  

Drawing out

Another week of "Religion of Trees" class drawings. Above are efforts to convey one of the "13 ways of observing a tree" we read about in an essay by David Macauley, drawn in the courtyard. Below are drawings of a human and a tree inspired by Sumana Roy's How I became a tree.

God help them

Thousands of people repeated these words, hand raised. "I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do. So help me God." Is it worse if they think words mean something or if they don't? How is this whole scene not demonic?

Every branch of the NYPL

 

I love the New York Public Library for connecting me to worlds of books! The research division allowed me to read the Indian-published work of Nandalal Bose, discussed in Sumana Roy's How I Became a Tree.

But NYPL affords access to more than academic titles. Delivered conveniently to my nearest neighborhood branch I can check out books no university library would stock, from children's books like Sylvaine 

 

Jaoui and Anne Crahay's I'm like a tree and a tree's like me (with clever holes in its pages) to comic books like Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester's rather darker Family Tree, where some humans become trees.

Mayday

The President of the United States is a mad menace to the whole world.

Isometric NYC

When I learned that someone had used AI to generate an "isometric" representation of NYC to look like something from animation or a video game, I had to check out the neighborhoods I've lived in and live in.

A fun feature is that you can click a button and it's suddenly winter! (Try it for yourself - the snow blows by in gusts and flurries.)

The real world

Just one UN member state voted against today's General Assembly motion to switch from using the Mercator world map to the Equal Earth map. Mercator exaggerates the size of the global north; it makes Greenland and Africa look about the same size, when Africa is in fact 14 times bigger! Equal Earth is one of several alternative mappings which offer a more accurate representation of the true relative size of continents and seas, though still imperfect. Who could object? 

9/11: This map - not sure its provenance - shows northern northern hemisphere countries cut down to size from Mercator inflation.

Ringing in a new year

Have I told you "Religion of Trees" drawing is back? Tree rings, boababs!

The war on universities

The New School has, perhaps, made it out of the fiscal woods, painfully reducing a structural deficit. But new threats keep coming. 

Last week I was sure that the government's ever more aggressive limits on visas and especially on being able to work a year after getting a degree (the F1 OPT) would decimate our international student body, coming on top of the outrageous $103,000 fee for hiring someone on an H1-B visa. 

In the last few days, it was that health insurance costs are going up next year, the steepest increase in decades, challenging for any organization but especially for non-profits who do labor-intensive work like teaching and research. 

Now comes this. I think this is what's called a "hostile work environment."

Comfort/Consume (Me)

Reprise, in a new year in a new room, of the first alum visit to "DIY Religion," complete with their fabulous room-filling artwork. A new crop of students asked new questions, but the artist and artwork have changed in the last year too (including the work's title). And a surprise: when we suspended it from the ceiling in a nearby room, parallel to the window rather than perpendicular to it, the two sides looked completely different, the blurred edges, loopy shapes and gentle Disney colors replaced by jagged silhouettes, bold colors and what looked like abstract expressionist brush strokes. Even more beguiling/disturbing than last year ... I was happily upstaged!

Liberal arts and virtues

After a whirlwind tour of New School history in "DIY Religion" today, we have a session on liberal arts on Wednesday. Nominally it's about our particular college's understanding and practice of the liberal arts, but the momentum of doing 100+ years in 100 minutes today tempts me to be more ambitious. Liberal arts really matter in an illiberal time! 

I'm also looking for an excuse to share some images I've recently enjoyed in exhibitions, and some of which the class will have a chance to enjoy too. Here's the first:  

These are two panels by Francesco Pesellino, c. 1450, painted for a cassone, a kind of trousseau for Florentine brides. Currently in the collection of a museum in Alabama, they are part of the Morgan Library's exhibition on the Tarot - which we'll be visiting in a few weeks. The seven liberal arts (above) and seven virtues are represented as women; at their feet are associated historical or biblical figures, all male. 

Who do we have here? 

In the representation of the seven liberal arts, above we find, at right, the Trivium: Logic (with Aristotle), Rhetoric (with Cicero) and Grammar (with Priscian). At left, the Quadrivium: Arithmetic (Pythagoras), Geometry (Euclid), Music (Tubalcain) and Astrology (Ptolemy). This array allows the artist to place astrology/astronomy at the center! 

The panel of the virtues places the theological virtues at center: Faith (with St. Peter), Charity (with St. John the Evangelist) and Hope (with St. James the Greater). Flanking them are the four cardinal virtues: Prudence (Solon), Justice (Solomon), Fortitude (Samson) and Temperance (Scipio Africanus). I get all this from a website which informs me also that these panels were once in the collection of one Ludwig Wittgenstein!  

These might be a fun invitation to think about what the liberal arts are today, and who exemplifies them... and if there's a connection between the liberal arts and virtue! 

Maybe I'll have an excuse to share a contemporary work I just encountered at the Wassaic Project's summer exhibition, Tim Olson's "The Seven Heavenly Virtues at the Seventh Heaven Academy of Beauty" (2025). Painted on glass in fabulous detail (and with the same emplematic objects as Pesellino, if sometimes wittily updated) you'll find again Prudence, Faith, Hope and Charity (above), Fortitude, Justice and (below). The work is a pendant not to liberal arts but to "The Seven Deadly Sins at the Super Seven Motel" (2024).

I feel like sharing all of these, old and new, as an antidote to something I'd rather not share, a creepy selection of virtues included in a work showing as part of a Christian nationalist exhibition at the State Department, disingenuously called "Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy." 

This is "Valor, Purity, Justice (Old Glory)" (2026). While these virtues are apparently associated with the colors of the American flag, they here look so like something from Fascist Italy it makes my skin crawl (especially the Christian resonances of "purity" - which is conspicuously not one of the classic seven virtues). It's the work of a satirical painter, but the show it's in seems to be as unironic as they come. No doubt they'd place scary white men in front of each of the three droopy white women. 

As it happens, the forces of darkness are claiming the liberal arts for their reactionary attack on democracy and learning. I call on all the traditional virtues and liberal arts to come to our rescue!

Access restored!

Last days of summer

Onboarded

My courses are both off to a good start, new versions of old courses but already, with the students' help, breaking new ground.

In "DIY Religion" yesterday we brainstormed "religion" and "DIY" on their own before imagining what "DIY religion" could be, discovering at least three kinds of DIY - and so three kinds of DIY religion - on the way: (1) learning by doing, (2) finding what you need, (3) making do with what's to hand. These are quite different, and lay the groundwork for richer conversations than we had last year.

And in "Religion of Trees" our regular starting encounter with an elder - the elm in nearby Washington Square Park fêted as Manhattan's oldest tree - was enriched by the brand new New York Tree Genus Map, and revelations about the tree itself from Harriet Rix's wonderful The Genius of Trees. We call it an English elm (a colonial tree!) but it's not originally English either, having been brought to the British Isles as a cutting during the Roman Empire - and originally from Spain!

I'm not sure students were quite ready to follow me in wondering if this makes it the same tree as the one it was cut from, almost four centuries ago, and the same as all the other cuttings before and after, but notice has been served. We'll follow up on the surpassing strangeness of trees (not just clonal ones like elms) in our next class, when we consider what pronouns to use when referring to - or addressing - them.