Topics schedule, formal and social, for Writing About The Built World. Seven grad students and me. So excited.
Spent this last evening of the year with my littlest nieces and nephew — chocolate fountain, dance party with strobe effect bulbs in the suburban living room can lights — and with my niece & her husband, expecting my first great niece or nephew in June. In snowy Indiana. A beautiful close.
“My mind is still open to revision, thank God.” — Francis Spufford, naming that truly rare virtue, alongside many other jewels from his singular imagination: amp.theguardian.com/books/202…
“But if democratizing politics would go some way toward improving culture, the reverse does not hold: democratizing culture has gone no way toward improving politics… sarahendren.com/2023/12/2…
Advance copy of Becca Rothfeld’s forthcoming essays ❤️❤️
Soon I will tell you all the back story for the Stolen Bonsais. Tragic. But here is our older son’s suggested attempt to get them back.
Finally got around to seeing The Sound of Metal. Highly, highly recommended.
Buying my tree-loving husband a membership and subscription to the Arnold Arboretum’s magazine based on this beautiful essay from editor @mbattles. The doctor’s office, Gaza, nursing our wounds and the living flora all around us: matthewbattles.substack.com/p/balm-fo…
Speaking of this tiny urban footprint: I’ve been walking the 75 minutes or so to office or studio lately. Down Mass Ave, the city’s pulsing artery, over the bridge and the magificent Charles River, every mixed zone of life and work. For a professor of the built world and locomotive thinker: heaven.
Subway maps of downtown Boston reassure visitors: this place is tiny. You’re looking at the whole “downtown” and you can easily traverse it all day long.
And so glad to see my hero Danielle Allen weighing in on higher ed and the latest free speech thicket: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/…
All synapses firing! Philip Bess on the sacred city: urbanism as spatial or anti-spatial, human flourishing and sacramental form, the Nolli map of Rome, the ten minute walk as the heart of pre-modern towns. Recommended. thejosias.com/2023/11/1…
Moss really does grow everywhere.
Foreboding, spare, approchable, organic, monumental: I wrote about learning to describe the built world. sarahendren.substack.com/p/vocab-l…
something-something about the way my teenage daughter takes most selfies and friend photos with fish-eye or other distorted lenses — the latest incarnation of self-consciousness, or the photographic equivalent embodied in the distancing of “like” in spoken language
quietude in the face of stranger’s messes: sarahendren.com/2023/12/0…
So so glad to see my friend and likeminded thinker-writer-maker @mbattles here on micro.blog! Welcome him, will you?
Two mentions in one week of Whit Stillman’s films in my feeds/podcasts. Time for a house festival, I think.
Three-hour seminar structure: favorite practices to break it up? Student-led presentations, guest lectures, pair-and-share discussions, writing about reading prior to class, quizzes to warm up, journaling, what else?
Blank slate. New studio space for the next three years. Thank you, City of Boston, for subsidizing artists’ work in the year of our Lord 2023.
