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Sussex
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Each New Year begins for me not on January 1, not on Rosh Hashanah, but on the first day of classes. I must then put away my laconic interiority, my meditative vegetative stupidity, and perform that public act of assertive eloquence and flimflam showmanship known as teaching. It can be a wrenching transition, and I have discovered I am not alone in feeling frightened the first day. Other university teachers I have spoken to, who have been at it even longer than I have, report butterflies in their stomach, a tightening of the chest, and the equivalent of stage fright. Fortunately, that first day I can get away with passing out syllabi, projecting an air of authority, cracking a few jokes, and dismissing the group early. It is in the second week that I will truly have to pull myself together.
Phillip Lopate. I, on the other hand, am on research leave and so have not returned to classes. It is a weird, weird, feeling.
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[gallery] cover of the book prospectus; book description here
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[gallery] All About Lettering
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That, I suspect, is what really rankles those who gnash their teeth when someone lectures them about how art is all about borrowing and exchanging freely. That’s exactly what art is, but our whole edifice of intellectual property law is increasingly designed not to facilitate that borrowing and exchange, but to frustrate it, in the service of protecting the value of incumbent cultural products — the ones owned by corporations. The solution, though, isn’t to build more walls, so that everyone sticks to their cultural knitting. That will just exacerbate existing baleful trends. Rather, what’s needed is to restore the artistic commons, before the only culture we know is one we’ll have to pay a fee to join.
Who’s ‘we’ kemosabe?. This is just brilliant by Noah Millman.
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[gallery] Every new banknote deserves its very own explanatory website.
