My husband Brian is on the left in profile, holding the stats clipboard. And his best pal Todd Beamer is number 23, back to the camera. Circa 1983. I will tell my students today about virtue ethics: ordinary normie courage in the everyday can become extraordinary courage when the time comes.
A quarter century after 9/11 tomorrow. It’s on my mind a *lot. Just me?
Day one of a class I’ve been dreaming of for several years! Much more to report.
my daughter is dining hall maxxing in her freshman year
At the Royal School of Needlework, conservators restore a reredos.
This is another one of those weeks with my teenage son where I can hardly keep up with the whiplash. His room looks like a bomb AND a tornado hit it. But he’ll come sit on my bed at the end of the night and speak like a much older human about his coming year, his choices, his wishes for the future.
I am taking our youngest son, 16, with me on a work trip to London later this fall. We’re planning to spend a weekend in Oxford afterwards. First time for both of us. He’s a rower and we’re both Tolkien-and-Lewis heads. The anticipation is as fun as the trip, they say, so send me your recs?
As promised, details about painter Bradford Johnson’s show at Claire Carino Contemporary. Runs 9/15-10/9, and our conversation at the gallery will be on Saturday, 9/19, 4:30-6:30. This work is so luminous. Highly recommend seeing it in person.
We dropped off our girl ten days ago. She’s in terrific classes but still pretty wobbly personally, waiting to find people with an easy connection. Hard for both of us. But honestly, to see her struggle is to see her big growth starting. She sailed through high school; in the rougher waters now.
PSA if, like me, you’re wanting to make food for a friend doing chemo, grieving, welcoming a new baby, etc: breakfast can be a sleeper hit. Homemade granola—my mom taught me this long ago. I have that basic formula so automated that I always have the ingredients around and never even measure. It’s endlessly forgiving. With yogurt and whatever-fruit compote (I just did this plum one; raw stone fruits are often disappointing but as compote, yum.
Benjamin Riley continues to provide a great service for those of us in education. Here he walks through the data in a new study on AI usage and learning outcomes — one of the first large-scale and empirically rigorous assemblages we have. You…won’t be surprised at the findings.
Brad Johnson’s show at Claire Carino Contemporary opens in September. I’ll be in conversation with Brad on 9/19. Details to come!
Among the things I wrote in a letter I’ll leave with my daughter after we move her into her dorm for freshman year tomorrow: A good classroom contains a mix of truth-seeking and social cohesion. Both are important; you probably can’t get to real truth-seeking without some bedrock of the cohesion part. But it is possible to foreclose truth-seeking by making cohesion the only goal. Students may speak about this as “validating” each other’s experiences or by insisting on only elevating exceptions to all generalized principles before the principles can get real analytical traction.
Got to do a studio visit with Mark Thomas Gibson while we were at a residency together last month.
I got through a scary-for-me medical test this morning thanks to my husband Brian. He brought the exact right mix of physical reassurance, holding my hands through the entire thing, and charming all the clinical staff by making jokes right and left. I laughed out loud in the middle of it. When I met Brian more than three decades ago, his capacity to make me laugh was a huge attraction, but I had no idea then just what a lifeline it would be.
I enjoyed the first half, so far, of The Correspondent on audiobook for a lengthy road trip. Epistolary form throughout, and the various letter writers are played by different voice actors. A quiet book with rewards in it. Recommended if you’ve got drive time coming up.
Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy is the book form of his Norton Lectures in 1977-78. He says in the lectures that he is not a man of faith, but he takes up the gospels of Christ for an extended meditation of the work of the translator and interpreter of ancient texts. Here he is below on Mark’s gospel; Kermode sees this widely recognized first and source text as underrated, literarily speaking, compared to Luke or John:
[Corrected link] Now this is a great commencement speech. I’m still smarting from the extremely silly choice of speaker my institution made this year. May more go forth and be like Angelou, here in her prime.
thirty one years ❤️
my daughter’s further lino print adventures
