Save the Date: Physics, Wright, and Bosch

I promise I will write a real entry soon, but in the mean time:

TONIGHT at 7 p.m. in the Psych Auditorium at the University of Memphis, Alan Lightman will be presenting a lecture entitled "The Physicist as Novelist." From the press release:

"For more than 20 years, the Memphis-born Lightman taught physics and astronomy at Harvard University. He is now an adjunct professor at MIT, where he teaches in the writing and humanistic studies program. Lightman has been recognized for his writing by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has twice been a juror for the Pulitzer Prize in the fiction and non-fiction categories."

THURSDAY, March 1 at 7p.m. in the Meeman Journalism Auditorium, Michael Hatt, head of research at the Yale Center for British Art, will be giving a lecture "Speech and Silence: Richard Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices." From the Press Release:

"Wright's third book, published in 1941, gives voice to the struggle of black Americans to find a place in a society closed to them. The feelings of the book are intensified by Depression-era photographs by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein. The lecture in the Meeman Journalism Auditorium is free and open to the public."

Also THURSDAY at 7, Henry Luttikhuizen, professor of art at Calvin College, will present a lecture "Through Boschian Eyes" Thursday at 7 p.m. at Rhodes College. Again with the press release goodness:

"Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) is noted for his meticulously painted compendiums of monsters and demons meting out grotesque punishments in vast allegorical landscapes lit by hellish fires.Serving both devotional and satirical purposes, Bosch's work, filled with references to folklore and religious symbolism, grew out of the intense social and political tensions of his time. The lecture in the Blount Auditorium of Buckman Hall is free and open to the public. The event is sponsored by the Lillian and Morrie Moss Endowment for the Visual Arts."

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For those who may be interested, I've started sharing my events calendar via iCal Exchange. I don't go to everything on there (it would be physically impossible), but I put things on there that I find interesting just to remind myself of what I could be doing if Amber weren't so sick and I weren't working so f!@#ing much.

The iCal file itself is here if you'd like to subscribe to it, and the pretty HTML version is here.

I've also (just as an aside) been thinking of writing a back end system for the software that drives iCal Exchange as sort of a public service so that local organizations could easily syndicate their event dates the way blogs syndicate stuff, but I've got to get out from under my day job first.

Greatest Danger Redux

Can moderates write manifestos? It strikes me that so much of our discourse these days is nothing more than shrill extremists shrieking at each other while laying claim to vast majorities that really don’t belong to them. And I’m not just talking politics here. I see it everywhere… music, science, philosophy, religion, and, especially recently, in art; it’s all the same dialectic. But then I look around and it seems that if you put all the pieces together you can assemble a reasonable, if difficult to articulate, third way.

Without getting terribly preachy, I just have to get this thought off my chest: un-self-critical work in service of the dominant ideology, whether that ideology is supply side economics or abstract oil painting, is nothing more than propaganda. If you’re going to work in the dominant framework, you had better be aware of the power structure that props it up or you’re really nothing more than a shill and we know, deep down, that’s not where you want to be.

The flip side is, of course, the dominant structure is most likely not in place because it completely sucks. There must be (or have been) some value there or it would never have existed in the first place. I’m not saying you must rebel gently, but insurgents needn’t throw out the baby with the bath water; tyranny begins, after all, with the will of the people.

So today, just as I’m getting the urge to say “screw it all, other people have said this better” the good people at Lantana are kind enough to link to this. It’s not exactly Critical or even revelatory, but at least it mostly seems thoughtful. I particularly liked Hari Kunzru and Jeanette Winterson and not so much Matthew Collings. Note to Matthew: water is no less important to the individual because there is lots of it. (Better writers than him have made this same mistake, of course.)

Regardless, I’m going to have to grab a copy of the book.

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Also, from the I’m-not-just-some-pontificating-asshead department: I found while blog surfing today a nifty DIY project for anybody into photography. I wish I’d had one of these while shooting slides for Amber.