Dean at Home: The Pandemic Blog

Sleeping with Axes Tonight's soundtrack: Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A major, Seiji Ozawa, Boston Symphony Orchestra In high school, Mr. Walker had us read Alan Paton's, Cry Beloved Country , and  Jerzy Kosiński 's  Painted Bird, and Ms. Busse had us read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man . These three books made an indelible impression on my young mind about literature and the power of learning.  Screenshot of my dad from tonight's soundtrack. It is hard to remember back to a time when we were innocents and unaware of the world around us. I suppose life is about awakening to the world we inhabit by degrees. While I had been becoming more aware, before Cry Beloved Country , I had no real concept of apartheid in South Africa. Before Painted Bird , I had not real concept of the Holocaust and the experience and memories that Jewish people might carry forward. And, before reading Invisible Man, I had only the vaguest sense of what it meant to be Black in America.  Mr. Walke...

Community Service Today's soundtrack is yesterday's soundtrack continued: (about 1.5 hrs in) 3hr. Dark Star I am engaged in a writing project with a couple of friends and we are trying to investigate the roots of our social justice focus in life. Where did that come from? Who influenced us? What made a difference?  I've tried to write a bit about the importance of reading, how some of our childhood failings shape us, how we sometimes are lucky enough to find mentors in life. Sometimes it is just living that shapes us. Subconsciously, I have always been aware of being different. Somewhere in the pre-history of the self, was a history of war. In school, the only times Korea was ever mentioned was in relationship to the Korean War and references to the hermit kingdom.  What bleeds out of a Bueno y Sano Thai chicken burrito. I still remember in grade school wanting to do a report on the first ironclad ship, and the teacher asked if I was going to write about the Monitor or the ...

 Big Yellow House in Lenox Tonight's soundtrack: A 3 hour long compilation version of "Dark Star" discovered in an interview with Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes  (Thanks, Claiborne!) Sometimes, when I start writing, I feel like I need to put on sunglasses, or blinders, like those things they put on mules so they continue walking forward and don't get distracted by all the things going on around them. It is as if my mind knows, that just beyond my peripheral vision, one of the Christmas cactus buds is falling off and dropping to the floor, and it is almost impossible to not turn and look, wait for something to happen.  Franklin sat in a nice window of sunlight today. Mr. Smith lived in a grand old victorian on the edge of Lenox center. The year we rented an upstairs apartment from him I must have been three or four, I don't remember my brother being born yet. It was one of those marvelous houses where it seemed every room held some kind of secret just wai...

Bluegill (Trigger warning, a fish meets a violent death) Today's soundtrack: Stuff Live in Japan 1977 What do we remember from our mistakes?  There was that time when we were at the beach at Goose Pond and there were friends of the family visiting with little kids. My brother and I had brought the kids to the beach to play and keep them out the parents' hair while they prepared dinner. I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. The trail down to the river just after dawn. I think it was a strange time for me. I don't recall if it was the same summer, but around that time I made friends with a kid on the other side of the lake. His father had recently passed away, crushed by a tree he was cutting down that fell the wrong way. I don't quite recall the allure of playing with this particular kid except that he was near my age and he had been given free rein of the entire basement in his house, so the downstairs was one great playroom. I didn't notice anything particularly odd about...

Inauguration Day Today's soundtrack: Joe Pass live at A&E Music, 1985 From where do we emerge as activist educators?  I think you could just as easily ask, from where do we emerge as individuals? We like to think that there is something innate, biological that has gifted us with the ability to draw swords from stones or possess supernatural qualities of one thing or another. But clearly, that is not the case. There is an idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at a thing ( 1993 ), and that gives rise to the intensity of practice that my father engaged in as a classical violinist, and what I see my son engaging in as a graduate student in classical piano. I, unfortunately, never had the fortitude or aptitude to practice an instrument with such dedication. But when I think back on what I might have practiced to such a degree, I think the closest thing I can think of is reading.  When I was growing up, the English language was always a challenging thin...

 "The Question is Whether Our Nation Has the Will..." Tonight's soundtrack: The Ray Brown Trio and Friends, Germany, 2001  (check out at 1:08:56 George Fludas' super slick transition from brushes to sticks on the drum kit) A Frozen Cranberry Pond It is quiet out. Only a few cars out on the roads. After a busy day meeting with students and various other people on Zoom, it is easy to imagine that I have been aware of all that has been going on, but I haven't. I'm mostly off of social media during the workday, and I don't see what's happening on the New York Times unless a particularly noteworthy headline appears in my inbox. Like almost all of us in this pandemic moment, all I know is what I read and watch a mere 24 inches from my face, and what I sometimes see and smell when I walk the dog. So, admittedly, my own view is narrow. Life is in many ways an experiment in parsing out causation and correlation. In recent years as I've struggled with ulcera...

What Came Next  Today's soundtrack: Shostakovich, Violin Concerto No. 1, David Oistrakh, violin I woke up last night with the first sentence of a new short story running through my head. It was so vivid and clear, I couldn't fall back asleep and kept adding to the story bit by bit, until I had a full paragraph running through my head. I was worried if I fell asleep I would forget it all, so I painstakingly typed it out on my phone because I was too lazy and cold to go downstairs to work on the computer or get my notebook. That worked, and in an odd reversal of patterns, I spent my breakfast transferring what I had typed into technology into my analog notebook.  This used happen more often for me, the arrival of a line, a sentence, when I was writing fiction regularly. They are amazing sentences because attached to just a handful of words is the tendrils of everything else in the lives of these characters. That one sentence then gives way to the first paragraph, and then that b...

 Learning What It Means to Be American Tonight's soundtrack: The Art Blakey Group, France, 1972 (Jeremy Steig, George Cables, Stanley Clarke, Art Blakey, Tony Williams, Ray Mantilla, Buck Clarke) In October of 1976, I was visiting Korea for the first time and I remember seeing a presidential debate on the black and white tv in my grandparent's house. I also remember seeing the image of President Ford disembarking off a plane. I don't recall if anyone else was watching with me, or why it was on, except that maybe it was one of the few programs where people were speaking in English, and so that might have eased my displacement.  At the age of 5, that is my first memory of anything political. Much later, I learned that my grandfather had a deep connection to the politics and political upheaval of postwar Korea, or at the very least, he was a constant bystander. He witnessed and survived the arrival and deposition of several waves of attempts at democracy that floundered in gr...

Little Things Today's soundtrack: Stuff live at Montreal, 1976  (Think Paul Simon's One Trick Pony band. This is tasty Stuff.) ((some reason there are a lot of commercials in this video, but it is so good it is worth it)) Here we are, three hundred and three days into the pandemic. Hopefully, we've started to discover some things about self care and the long run. I've been talking with a lot of students recently, and because of the time of the year, most of these students have been struggling academically... but all their academic struggles are tied to their day to day struggles with anxiety, sleep, screen time, substances, finances, family care, all those things that are so hard to manage, balance, and sequester through the pandemic.  I started to wonder what would happen if this were the way things were. If I always worked out of the house and always transitioned to dinner and then television... if that were all there ever was. What would need to change? I think we pr...

A Rubric for the Future Tonight's soundtrack: The Miles Davis Septet, Jazz Jamboree, Warsaw, Poland,1983 The prevailing question from the people I've talked with today, in those moments before a Zoom meeting starts, or as one is wrapping up, is, where do we go from here? What comes next? And by this they mean, both in the next two weeks as we wait for whatever destructive action the President might facilitate in his remaining days in office, but also, what does it mean to face this ideology that has been planted, fertilized, and taken root in our country? What happens to all those thousands of people who gathered in Washington D.C. Wednesday when they return home to our respective cities, towns, and neighborhoods?  To a certain degree, it appears that the attempted coup was an awakening of sorts to people and corporations who had blindly followed the President with a benign profiteering perspective. He was, after all, the embodiment of capitalism, and how could that be wrong? ...

Building Things Tonight's soundtrack: Duke Ellington's Big Four (with Joe Pass, Ray Brown, Louis Bellson)  This is such a marvelously relaxed session. At one point it looks like they are finishing eating lunch. They are all having fun, especially Louis. After being immersed in a busy day at work, I am wary to look at the news for fear of being sucked into whatever else has happened, and yet, it also feels eerily quiet... which I suppose is what might happen when you take the President off of social media. So, maybe the quiet is a good thing, it is certainly something we all need after the rollercoaster of the last few days. Morning chickens with  their treats. I was emailing with a colleague today about the value of constructing things at a time like this, how craft can be a solace to the woes and worries of the world, and I started thinking back to my days as a luthier. I started as an apprentice with Ivon Schmukler  and eventually had a shop next door sandwiched between...