Notes from the road

Travelling and working in Arlington, Texas this week. Here are a few things that caught my eye.

On reading at random:, Elspeth Wilson notes:

Just before Christmas 2019, a friend told me that the less they know about a film, the better. If they see a trailer or read too much about it, it makes them less likely to want to watch the film. They explained that there’s something about encountering a piece of art with as few preconceptions as possible that makes you meet it where it’s at, on its own merits. This also basically made them uninfluenceable, I realized. Why not try it with books?

I started off by picking up books from the library in the tube station near my house, swapping ones I’d read for whatever caught my eye. I might glance at the blurb but considering I was choosing from a limited selection, I usually had no choice but to pick something I wouldn’t normally gravitate towards. I asked family members—often older with different interests—if they’d got any books they were looking to pass on. I joined a book club with people with different taste from me and made myself read the books, even the ones I didn’t like the sound of.

My reading has certainly got less aesthetic as I have read more randomly. My shelves don’t always look beautiful but they are a lot more varied than they were before.

A bunch of my reads from last year came from little free libraries scattered around neighbourhoods, or as is the case on Bowen Island, the waiting shelter at the ferry dock. The book I’m reading now is from my local library’s “give away” shelf.

Patti Digh reflects on a trip she took to East Germany as a student and an uncomfortable stop by the East German police.

I did not yet know what a wall could hold in place. Only that the air felt heavier on that side of the border, as if weather itself were governed. Rules applied not only to movement but to posture, to appearance, to how long one could be looked at without flinching. At twenty, I mistook compliance for safety. I believed that if I followed instructions closely enough—kept my hair where it belonged, my hands visible, my answers brief—I would pass through unchanged.

The post is called “Close enough to share weather” and it’s a pretty powerful story.

Patti is always good for some insight a couple of times a week! Here she is talking about imperfectly tending a garden – which I can relate to – and drawing it into a reflection on the stewardship of we can do:

Tending the garden you can touch does not require mastery. It requires that we return to it. It asks only that we keep coming back to what is in front of us, willing to notice what failed, what survived anyway, and what might still grow with a little more care.

One of the profs I met this week at University of Texas Arlington is Desiree Henderson. She’s teaching a course called Literature and The Good Life. It’s designed to cultivate a love of reading in students. The featured novel is my favourite book of last year, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, but it also features which features works by George Saunders. I don’t know Saunders’ work but Open Culture has me covered with links to ten of his short stories available online.

Another professor I met is Tim Richardson who teaches English and dives into his passions around ambient sound and music. We had a great conversation about radio, the artist Chainsaw and our various artistic endeavours over the years using sound and music in multimedia performance contexts. Our conversation reminded my that somewhere I may still have a recording I made of a flute and guitar improvisation recorded in a squash court at Peter Robinson College at Trent University. I made it with Todd Hildebrandt, one of the original members of the Born Again Pagans.

We met these folks through participatory leadership training we have been doing at the university. This is our fourth cohort of senior leaders from UTA and one can imagine all kinds of conversations that we are having these days. Over lunch today a group of us were discussing assessment, compliance and the bigger purpose of higher education. This afternoon I came across this interview with Jennifer Frey from the University of Tulsa. Worth a read and a think. We need an active conversation about this stuff outside of the academy.

Final boarding. I’m travelling back on American Airlines. When you check in the ask if you’d like to check a bag which we needed to do for one of our small otherwise-carry-ons. The charge is $25. You pay it and the next screen says “would you like to check your carry on bags for free?” That represents the shittiest behaviour of customer facing businesses who see their customers as eternal ATMs. So word to the wise. Try checking in first WITHOUT paying for a small checked bag on American and see if you get the free screen.