Cats, Classes, and the Philosophy of Personhood

Happy Saturday to you all, good people!

These last two weeks have been a Moderate on the Epic Scale of Crazy in Lily’s Life, which is about normal for this time of year. We’re just late enough in the year for things to begin picking up pace, although we’re also still sort of in the post-syllabus-and-terrifying-the-slackers-out-of-class and pre-midterms-madness lull. This last week was a tad more difficult because I’ve been sick for most of it, and although this was about the perfect time for me to get sick (if there is one), it made my brain go all fuzzy and distractible (more so than usual)—which is bad for brainwork. All I really wanted to do was sleep, read, and watch episodes of my latest favorite-cult-classic-TV-show (Mom and Dad, I can hear your groans all the way out here in the wilds of Minnesota, but I promise I’m still doing my work and being sociable, so you have nothing whatsoever to complain about). Luckily it was just a cold—annoying, fatiguing, and generally bothersome, but not nearly bad enough to miss class for (not that such qualms stopped half of my class from skipping 18^th Century British Literature on Tuesday for reasons ranging from “illness” [heavy velociraptor air quotation marks implied] [read: hangover] to alarm clock malfunctions to [actual] illness). Anyway, I’m nearly better and looking forward to a more productive and less cough-filled week.

On the subject of classes—all of them have continued to be pretty damn awesome. I’ve had some incredibly fascinating and engaging discussions in my 18^th century and Harlem Renaissance classes about personhood and literary devices respectively. I’m also experiencing a mix of love and hate for being in upper-level English classes. On the one hand, everyone is far more knowledgeable and interesting and interested, but on the other hand, they’re all seniors who think nothing is wrong with skipping class and showing up late (unlike the poor terrified freshmen).

Visual culture continues to be about seven times more interesting than I’d expected. On Wednesday another Mac professor guest-lectured for our class about print-making as political expression and I’m considering taking her topics course next semester. And today our class went on a field trip to the Walker art museum, home of the [in]famous Spoon with Cherry.

The Walker is dedicated to modern art (unfortunately), but our professor had us looking at a particular exhibit that was highlighting eighties artworks. It turns out these things can be a great deal more approachable and interesting when discussed in the context of “visual culture” instead of “art,” and I think we’ll have some interesting things to talk about on Monday. Either way, it was an adventure, complete with getting lost on the way there (Cranberry the smart phone led us back towards our route). It was also nice to get to talk to my professor a little more—we chatted on the bus—because I’m considering asking her to be my art history advisor.

The outside of the Walker.

Drawing continues to be challenging and wonderful, although I had a lot of trouble staying focused in class on Monday. Standing up in silence for three hours when you’re sick is very difficult. My professor was extremely understanding (said I could go home and come draw on my own time), but I didn’t want to miss class this early in the year, so I stayed. Free (disgusting) art department coffee made the trial a bit easier. We’ve been getting into more complicated things lately, mostly using subtractive value, which is when you draw by removing color with erasers. For pencil, this meant that we sketched everything out very loosely, smudged all of our lines, and then erased out the shapes that were bright and darkened the rest to various degrees. When she described this, I was absolutely terrified, but it went far better than I’d expected. This was my homework for last Monday using this technique. We were supposed to pick one object with a lot of planes and then draw it eight times from different angles as though all of the duplicates were present at once. The leaf I used is resting on the drawing.

I had to spend a lot of time on this project, but it’s still the most therapeutic homework imaginable. After that project, we switched to a similar kind of drawing, but with charcoal. May I first mention that charcoal is basically the messiest substance in the universe? I’ve been leaving a shirt in the art room for the days we work with it and that has been one of the best ideas I’ve had in a while. It looks like I rolled in the stuff.

Anyway, we started the picture by rubbing powdered charcoal into the entire paper and then spent the next two hours using our (fancy, kneadable) erasers as our only tool (we could also use the powdered charcoal to “erase” mistakes). We erased out sketches of the large shapes and then tried to find areas that should be a particularly bright white. After a while, we were allowed to use other charcoal tools to darken areas. We have three kinds of charcoal: vine, compressed, and pencil. Vine is the lightest, compressed the darkest, and pencil depends on the type. You’d think (at least, I would and Charmaine would) that the pencil would be the easiest to use, but I ended up using the vine and compressed far, far more.We spent several days working on these drawings in-class and here’s what my drawing turned out like:

(It was a randomly Halloween-themed set-up).

I have another one of these due (mostly completed) on Wednesday, although this time we’re only supposed to draw two objects, one of light value and one of dark. I’m thinking maybe my pocketwatch and my (navy blue) TARDIS mug? They’re interestingly different shapes, although it’s possible that they’re too simple. But shadows/highlights will add to the complexity. I’m not sure yet. Unfortunately, I can’t work on the project at the moment. When I tried to buy the specialized paper on Friday from the Mac art store, they were closed (both times I visited)! They always have irregular hours, but they should have been open at least one of the times. I’m either going to have to see if Wet Paint (the commercial art store down the street) has the right kind of paper or wait until Monday to start. It’s a bit of a stressful development, but I think it’ll work out in the end.

To finish off this (probably overly) long discussion of my art class, here’s the rose-silhouette drawing I did, finished in all of its Sharpie-fume glory!

I got these back on Wednesday, and I got a perfect score on them. HUZZAH!

I haven’t been spending all of my time studying (or goofing off watching television shows)—there’s actually been a surprisingly high rate of other-fun-time-activity happening as well.

Charmaine and I continue to be goofuses and increasingly awesome roommates. I think this year we’ve suddenly become a great deal closer, and I’m not sure if it’s because of living together all of last year or the tough stuff at the beginning of this year or if something just clicked into place, but it’s fantastic. Since I converted her into a Doctor Who fan, we ended up watching the last couple of week’s episodes in our room (once with Emily, once without). It’s been very fun and very silly, especially since last week’s was pretty scary and we ended up making faces at each other and rocking back and forth in terror. Then, because we were cold and afraid, we decided to wrap scarves around our heads. Because clearly that helps.

We have plans to watch this week’s (which is the mid-season finale and rumored to be pretty terrifying and tragic, but then the show-runner (MOFFAT!) is a confirmed and terrible liar, so who knows) tomorrow with Emily and Cassidy, and I’m very excited.

The weather continues to fluctuate, but last week it was extremely cold (for this time of year). Charmaine and I, being the stubborn, fresh-air lovers that we are, refused to close our windows and consequently spent several days shivering in our room wearing ridiculous coats and scarves and drinking gallons of tea. We then decided to build an igloo (although we have not, as yet, obtained the ice necessary for such an endeavor), so Charmaine drew one on our whiteboard and I added fashionably-attired penguins.

We are indisputably the coolest room ever.

(She also brought me balloons from an event at her work because she knows that I have a five year-old’s love of balloons and she’s a sweetheart.)

(They look pretty with my Mac blanket from Grandma Tschudi and Aunt Mimi.)

We also finally finished compiling the Avengers on the downstairs bulletin board, just in time for a free Program Board showing of the movie in one of the Mac lecture halls. We left a note about it for them on the bulletin board:

And, of course, we attended the movie together like the goofy fans we apparently are. I don’t think I can express how much more fun a movie or show is when the audience is universally excited and invested. I know I mentioned this with the Doctor Who showing a couple of weeks ago, and for Harry Potter premiers in general, but this was another instance of the fan-viewing phenomenon. There were cheers and yells, claps, some wolf-whistling, uproarious laughter, and general applause and cries of “NO!!” at the death of a favorite minor character. It was just such a united audience and everyone seemed to be enjoying it in equal parts, although some members of the audience had something to say to the people crazy enough to leave a Marvel movie before the credits (for those of you who avoid superhero movies—Marvel movies always have a teaser clip or joke short [in The Avengers’s case, both] after the credits). It was silly and fun and an excellent roommate-bonding experience. To further the excitement, Charmaine and I have plans to put a huge picture of Loki (the villain) up over the Avengers tomorrow as a finale to our ridiculous pranking.

I’ve also been able to just hang out with other friends too. I was really worried at the end of last year that my lovely Doty 4 friends and I would drift apart without the unifying factor of a shared floor, but so far (knock wood!) that hasn’t been a problem at all. We see a bit less of each other, but we manage to hang out and run into each other at least once a week all the same. Last weekend a bunch of us went to Cow Bella (a new gelato joint) together where we ate lots of samples and generally terrified the populace. I’m pretty sure the staff members love us, though, because we livened up their days with our indecisiveness and silliness. I had dark chocolate and some sort of sour-cherry and they were both pretty delicious (although not what the Rome-travelling snob in me would call “gelato”).

I could have had Maple and Bacon or Pineapple-Basil or any of the other crazy flavors listed here,

but I chickened out. I tried the Goat Cheese and Fig as a sample, but couldn’t imagine eating an entire cup of it (it basically tasted like goat cheese and fig ice cream which is a weird sensation) and felt too sheepish of the ruckus we were causing to ask for any more samples. And I was not getting any of those other flavors without testing them first, especially on a college student’s budget.

I’ve also run into a couple of friends outside of Café Mac or at a talk we all went to or at the first poetry slam of the year and ended up chatting for a while without any particular plan. It’s amazing what a difference it’s making to my semester to have this solid friend network. And tonight I went to the Tea Garden (the favorite boba-tea serving hipster hangout of Mac students) with Emma and Tori, where we talked about cats, classes, and the philosophy of personhood. I have amazing friends.

In other random news:

Someone near the Mac campus is a closet Doctor Who fan. I found this picture of a TARDIS taped to a stoplight pole next to Breadsmith:

Our room gets fantastic shadow patters in the afternoon sunlight, which Charmaine and I naturally use to practice our shadow-puppet skills (or lack thereof). I am tremendously proud to announce that I have invented a new one: the Ood (a sort of bizarre octopus-faced Doctor Who creature).

Macalester is the kind of ridiculously idyllic place where some professors actually host class outside on gloriously warm, sunny, fall days.

Tea is a fabulously lovely drink.

 

I mentioned going to a talk earlier in this post. That was on Thursday, when I went to hear our Director of Campus Life (the outstanding Keith Edwards) give his nationally-renowned speech about ending rape on college campuses. It’s a truly excellent speech and used to be a required part of orientation for freshmen.  For some reason, Mac cut it this year, but had him give it as a scheduled talk on a random Thursday (which, of course, very few people attended). I honestly attended primarily as a protest for this decision—as a way of saying to the Mac administration that “Hey, we care about this speech, we remember this speech, and you need to add it back into the orientation program.” He delivers it very well and manages to keep it from being either too horrifyingly dark or too lighthearted and dismissive. He is blunt but grimly humorous and delivers not just warning statistics, but information and activism. What he’s stressing is a proactive approach to the problem. Instead of just telling women how to avoid rape (which is indisputably still necessary and important), he’s telling everyone (but particularly men) what exactly rape is, how our culture normalizes it, and how to keep it from happening. To avoid being too depressing here (and because you people are hardly the ones who need to be hearing this speech), I won’t go into much more detail, but suffice it to say that it’s a truly empowering and educational speech and I sincerely hope they return it to the orientation program. It’s honestly one of the things that impressed me most about Mac in my first few weeks at the school.

On a more cheerful note, Fairfax and I had Second Breakfast last Friday with Clara and Wesley over the phone, which was lovely! In honor of the 75^th anniversary of the publishing of The Hobbit, someone on the internet decided that everyone everywhere should have Second Breakfast (hobbits eat lots of extra meals, including second breakfast and teatime) at eleven o’clock on the 21^st. Mine was more like second lunch (we had it at Clara’s eleven), but no less charming and delicious. Although Fairfax and I are jealous of Clara and Wesley’s feast!

 Fairfax and I celebrate Second Breakfast

Clara and Wesley celebrate Second Breakfast far more elegantly

And to conclude: I finally have those room pictures I’ve long promised! Here they are:

Our door

Charmaine’s side

The sink area (with refrigerator and tea station!)

The poetry wall 2.0—notice how awesome it’s beginning to get!

My side

Assorted views of and from my window

This is one again extremely long. I really though these would start to shorten (and perhaps they will), but right now there is just a lot going on that I want to share with you all. Feel free to skim or perhaps read half today and half next Saturday when I won’t be posting anything. Either way, I love you all, and hope you’re all having lovely weeks and weekends!

Toodles!

My “ticket” to the Walker and sticker from the Tea Garden (they use stickers to stop the tea from splashing out of the sippy-hole on hot drinks) from today’s adventures.

In Which College is Awesome for None of the Reasons One Would Assume By Watching American Media Productions (Or, Tea Parties!)

Before any of you try to call me on this, I do realize that it’s technically no longer Saturday, but I contest that because it is still part of my Saturday day-unit (in that I have not slept since I awoke on what was indisputably Saturday morning) I am following, if not the letter of my law, then at least the intent. And at least I was spending my Saturday working on homework instead of various other alternatives that would make much less excellent excuses.

Anyway, hello! Hope you all have had a pretty good week—I certainly have! Classes continue to go swimmingly, friends continue to be excellent, the weather continues to be gorgeous, and Mac continues to be its unrepentantly nerdy self.

(A random Macalester kid who had awesome buttons on his backpack, including a Doctor Who pin that was on my backpack at the same moment that I took this sneak-attack photograph.)

Classes first!

Visual Culture is still going so much better than I expected. I’m really enjoying it, even though it’s not really as challenging as I’d like. But it’s introducing me to some new ideas and cementing some that I’d only really heard in passing, so I think it will be very useful for future studies.

This week we’ve mostly been talking about photography and how it exists with regard to truth and subjectivity. Apparently photography was originally understood as truth, as a direct representation of reality, and we’ve been talking about the ways in which that’s not true. One way we looked at this was by seeing two different magazine covers (Newsweek and Time) following OJ Simpson’s arrest. The two used the same mug-shot photograph, but Time altered the color scheme of theirs a bit (and they of course had radically different headlines). Interestingly, my immediate, instinctive understanding was that the Time magazine was trying to present a more unbiased approach, while the Newsweek was condemning him on the spot. But when the professor called on a student to discuss the images, that student immediately expressed (with a great deal of certainty and passion) the exact opposite opinion. And then about two thirds of the class vehemently agreed with her! It was such an interesting intersection of the ways in which the magazine failed/succeeded in portraying whatever message they had been intending, since we had managed to get such completely contrary ideas.

18^th Century British Literature has also been pretty awesome, although right now we’ve been discussing 17^th century philosophy (so not-literature written in the not-1700s). Professor Chudgar’s justification for this (and of course he has one) is that the “long 18^th century” goes from mid-17^th to the present day (after a pause in which a few of us chuckled, he said rather wistfully, “That’s funnier to eighteen-centuryists.”) and that, in the 18^th century (which we are not yet studying) there was no distinction made between philosophy and literature. I admit that those are pretty awesome excuses.

Lately we’ve been discussing the nature of personhood (mostly based on the descriptions given by Locke and Hobbes). It’s been quite fun, occasionally hilarious, and frequently confusing. One of the ways he’s had us think about this is by having us interact with the website Cleverbot, which houses an AI. The AI responds to questions and comments by saying what has been said to it previously by other users—saving those previous answers as the way one responds to those particular stimuli. Consequently, it sometimes says extremely silly things. In the course of my correspondence with it (it communicates though instant messaging), it told me that I was a computer, accepted an offer of marriage that I did not in fact make, told me that a cute boy had a crush on it, asked several invasive questions, proclaimed itself variously a computer, a girl, and a man named George, and then eventually dumped me. Apparently this is not unusual behavior for Cleverbot—according to Professor Chudgar, who didn’t know that it was a robot the first time he stumbled upon the site, it professed its love for him numerous times while he tried to politely extract himself from the conversation. Finally, after thanking it for its time and conversation, he told it, “Goodbye” and it reportedly responded with something to the effect of, “I love you. Make me a sandwich.” Clearly cleverbot is a fickle, fickle machine.

Harlem Renaissance has still been very interesting, but I have a premonition that the professor’s extremely roundabout teaching style will drive me up a wall by the end of the semester. I’m still a bit on the fence about this class overall, but hopefully it will improve as I get used to her style.

And drawing! As you might have guessed from my last mini-post (go read that if you haven’t yet—I posted it on Wednesday), I am loving this class! It has been so fun and so relaxing and surprisingly easy (if extremely time consuming) so far. On Monday we started with positive and negative space drawings in which she entreated us to try to draw the negative shapes instead of the positives and to allow the positive spaces to blend into each other. They end up kind of looking like shadows or silhouettes. It’s interesting because her mentioning this made me realized that I’ve been fascinated by images like this for years—tree branches against the sky, shadows of leaves, etc. A decent number of the photographs I have up on my wall right now (maybe six or seven?) could qualify for this sort of project.

On Wednesday we did contour line drawings, which means (at least in this context) that we only drew lines that demonstrated an actual physical change. For example, we were drawing stargazer lilies, and we were supposed to draw all the lines describing the point where petal met air as well as all of the creases and folds, but none of the spots or changes in color.

 Contour line drawings (on the left, the lily that I was particularly proud of; on the right, the entire composition)

It was a rainy day on Wednesday and it was just so nice to get to sit in a quiet studio with music in the background and coffee nearby (the art department, like so many buildings around this college campus, provides free (terrible) coffee all of the time) and work on drawings.

 My set-up for drawing--water, coffee, and an adorable umbrella. (Bottom right is a charming sign on the wall of the drawing studio that is opposing the "Keep Calm and..." meme that is ongoing right now.)

Both of these projects seem pretty brilliant to me because they are relatively easy and require very little training, but they teach us something important about learning to look that will help us later. Not only that, but they’re drawings that we can complete well and be proud of, instead of having us try something that we can’t really succeed at and telling us that it’s okay if it sucks now, we’ll learn to make it better. That kind of learning isn’t very satisfying, but this way we have all of the satisfaction of a finished project that can pretty easily be finished well.

As homework, we were assigned three postitive/negative space drawings to turn in on Monday and I’ve also really enjoyed working on those. We were required to draw them from natural things and not from photographs, so I’ve been spending a lot of my time outdoors around campus lately.

My three drawing locations (the third one was particuarly comfortable because the tree root made a perfectly-shaped seat.)

After we finished drawing the shapes, we were supposed to color in all of the negative space with Sharpie (or black ink, but that looked difficult to make precise). This has been by far the worst part of the project. I’ve been working on the coloring for ages and still haven’t finished—I’ve finished two out of three, but the third will have to wait until tomorrow. (On that note, I’ve been inhaling Sharpie fumes for the last four (or so) hours, so blame that if this post is a little loopier than usual). Here are those three, with the third one Sharpie-less.

(Sorry for the awkward inclusion of my legs...) 

So huzzah for this semester so far!

Hanging out with my friends has been awesome too, per usual. I discovered the existence of the English department reading room recently and have been spending some time there with Rachel and Charmaine and Emma (my three English major or should-be-an-English-major-damn-it! friends) lately. It’s a pretty small room but stocked with tea and coffee and hilariously garage-sale-style furniture.

Keo also spent the evening in our room last night and the three of us had a ridiculous evening of philosophical discussions regarding the nature of memory and narrative and slumber-party-esque discussions of romantic relationships (budding or established). We also drank large amounts of tea (as is common in the Lily-and-Charmaine-party-room), ate the delicious cookies my lovely family sent me in a care package, and generally had an amazing time. There was a tragic moment, however, when I tried to open a type of milk jug that I’ve never seen before and only managed to create a tiny hole through which to pour the milk very slowly. It was one of the great crises of my college career so far. Luckily my friends were there too counsel me through it.

Sorcha and I went on a walk to the river today to catch up and chat. It’s a really lovely walk as well as a lovely destination, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to just get to talk to Sorcha. Along the way, we also encountered a hopscotch court that I insisted we jump for, so we spent a small portion of our journey leaping about like mad people. Always a good component of a Saturday afternoon stroll.

The Mississippi today.

As for the continued saga of the whiteboards and bulletin boards:

Charmaine and I continued the battle of the Big2 Avengers Assembly by adding Hulk and Hawkeye respectively, following the mysterious disappearance of the original Iron Man (while Captain America stayed resolutely in place). Captain America then had a brief conversation with Hawkeye (in speech bubbles) regarding the whereabouts of Iron Man, following which Tony Stark (of whom Iron Man is the alter-ego) appeared with an apparently unrepentant attitude for his earlier disappearance.

Someone altered our whiteboard that originally read “Hi, new neighbors!” to be an entire advertising campaign for Doctor Who. We tried to be offended at this escalation of the conflict, but failed.

 The drawings were too awesome. With misery in our hearts, we eventually erased said drawings to allow space for our first word of the week.

Finally, a stealth triceratops was added the bulletin board of the infamous Cassidy and Emily by my incredible roommate (who also colored it and added the golf ball as a reference to the episode).

Because I am a terrible person, I once again did not take pictures of our room early enough in the day for them to be successful (since Charmaine and I have an injunction against turning on the evil, evil, fluorescent overhead light). I’ll try to post them tomorrow at some point, but for now….sunsets! From my window!

 

Lots of love!

P.S. It was requested that I explain what WGSS was (from my last (full-length) post). WGSS stands for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, which is the name of one of our departments.

P.P.S. It was also requested that I post pictures of the new Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, so here is a photo of the interior from the Mac website.