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.