Subtle Beauty

Disciplinary nodes

Lyn and I picked these dry plants on the San Raphael Swell. Besides their simple beauty, they work as a metaphor for me of interdisciplinary work.

The swellings are those biology or music or history emphases, those disciplines where we gain depth of focus and the tools we need to investigate whatever problem or question we're interested in. The stems between the swellings are the connections without which we remain in disciplinary isolation.

And the snowy ground behind them?

I think I'll just let the metaphor rest.

For an interesting look at recent thinking on interdisciplinary studies, see
http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-wi08/le-wi08_Inter_Studies.cfm

Stormy Weather

Sunday Afternoon / Sunday Evening

The Complexities of "Modern Legacies"

Like all new semesters, Winter Semester 2008 promises all the pleasures of a complex and unpredictable new beginning.

This is especially true for me this year because for the first time I'll be teaching a class for the Honors Program called "Modern Legacies." 25 years ago I taught a slightly different version of the course for Vanderbilt University honors students, and the good memory is still with me.

Like the photo I took through the entryway window of Lyn's and my house in which it's hard to distinguish between reflections from outside and the stairs and windows inside, the idea of "modern legacies" has so many variables that it's hard to know just where to focus.

I've decided to start with four of the lenses we must look through, no matter who we are, as citizens of the 21st Century: the work of Wollstonecraft, Darwin, Marx, and Freud. With those tools in hand, we'll move from Boccaccio through Voltaire to James Joyce and Kafka -- writers of short fiction all -- and try to make some sense of how each of the authors conceives human nature. Just who are we? And how will we change once we have read and discussed these stories?

With about 15 students, each of whom will bring expectations and expertise to the class, it should be a stimulating journey.

Reflections

The stairwell of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. My eldest son Joe has found a window that gives his cell phone access to a signal. And I've found a striking double image: Joe and his shadow.

You see differently after you've been worked over by works of art. Shapes and colors become more vivid. Images more suggestive. Thoughts more graphic.

It was a family trip to hear Joe's brother Tom play his senior recital at the New School University in Manhattan. We stayed in Brooklyn, and spent a long afternoon exploring this museum, looking into artistic mirrors, surveying our souls.

Here's Tim, for instance, taking a picture of himself in front of an ornate concave mirror. And Maren picturing an Egyptian artifact.

And I, of course, am making images of the children who are, in part, images of myself.

We walked from painting to painting, exhibit to exhibit, and I found myself the eager parent, anxious to teach my children everything I know, and equally anxious to see things through their eyes.




And that brings me to teaching.

I have a lot to teach. Even a slow learner picks up a few things over 58 years. But what thrills me, still, about walking into a classroom, is what will come back. At the end of a class (or a stroll through the Brooklyn Museum with my children), I'm never the same person who walked in.

Zarko Radakovic, Writing/Painting a Life

In the mid-1980's I worked for a semester at the University of Tubingen in southwest Germany. While there I met a writer from Yugoslavia, living in Germanybecause his wife, a theoretical physicist, had a position at the University.

Over the years we have exchanged visits, have traveled together, and most important for me, have written together. Like no one I have ever met (with the sole exception of Alex Caldiero), Zarko is alive with ideas.

He knows jazz and writes about it.

He knows contemporary painting, and has, for instance, a book about his friend Julije Knifer. It's no biography in the sense we're used to, but an exploration of ideas that come bubbling up in Knifer's presence. With Zarko, I visited Knifer in his Paris apartment and came away with my head spinning. He paints only one thing: what he calls meanders. Black on white or white on black. Like the one at the bottom.

Zarko is a master of travel narrative. Together we once followed Filip Kobal, a character in Peter Handke's novel Repetition, from Austria into Slovenia, and later published our joint accounts as Ponavljanje (Repetitions).

He's a prolific translator, with more than a dozen translations of Peter Handke's work into Serbo-Croatian.

He's a former performance artist, I just learned this week. Belgrade about 1973.

He's a photographer (the photo at the top of this blog, of the goalie on a rural Austrian soccer field, is his).

He's a fine novelist, with six or seven works to his credit.

To my mind, each of these activities informs each of the others. He's a good novelist because he's a translator and jazz critic. He's a thoughtful travel writer because he knows art. Even when he's focused on one activity, interdisciplinary work is the result.

When Zarko last visited me in Utah, he gave an autobiographical lecture, part of which I'll include here:

Approximately fifteen years ago I left my country. Back then, in 1978, it called itself the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. . . . I didn’t have the least suspicion that in fifteen years, that is, now, my country would no longer exist. . . .

My ancestors were Serbian refuges. After the defeat on the Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds, they served as guards on the southern borders in the Dalmatian, Croatian, and what was then Austro-Hungarian hinterland. From there they moved as nomads to the fertile and sparsely inhabited plains of Pannonia, to Vojvodina – between Hungary and Romania. Several centuries later I was born there. I grew up in Belgrade. And since the late seventies I have lived in Germany.

Haven’t I always had something of the nomadic spirit of my ancestors in me? Haven’t I shunned every uniformity and every emphasis on a center? To be Serbian and not simultaneously some second or third thing on this always complex (unintelligible) Balkan peninsula – that seems to me today an impossible thought. . . .

Now the country has split into warring ethnic groups, of free movement in Yugoslavia there remain nothing but memories.

The war turned out badly for everyone involved; but even though political events may have made him "Serbian," he is very much still a second and third and fourth "thing."

Recently, a friend of Zarko's, Nina Pops (http://ninapops.blogspot.com/) has been painting Zarko's work, painting his life. Like Knifer's meanders, her complex, compartmentalized, connected and intricately related warrens or paths or lifelines represent the six decades of Zarko's rich life.

I can't wait to see painting number 7 in this series.