Mid-October sure did show up in a hurry! Guess I've been too busy with all my reading to update you here, reader.
Anyway, great season so far! Jeff, Jenn, and Tyler invited us out to some farm land for pumpkin picking and other good times last weekend:
Special thanks to Jeff for transporting the squash in style!
In other produce news, Franklin is really into the Broadway Farmers Market now that apples are in season:
Kid's got taste!
Speaking of taste, I was pretty excited to be reading about some of my former students in this New York Times dance review!
Emily and I enjoyed seeing that new show—and saying Hi to people back stage!
Meanwhile, school's keeping us all pretty busy, but thankfully Franklin and I still get to spend Fridays together. Here we are out for coffee and cake at Vivace:
All right, that about brings us up to date. Back to work on the seasonal decorations!
Yes, I know those rainyday photos might have made you think of fall, and I know my last post mentioned autumn mists, but let's not forget that we still have a few sweet days of summer left!
In fact, the opening bit of Melissa Clark's recent column is just about perfect:
The calendar may claim September as a summer month, but our national psyche insists that it’s fall. That’s probably because we associate going back to school with crunching leaves underfoot and bundling up in cozy sweaters, even when the temperatures are still in the 70s and the trees still green and full.
This is sad in a way, because in the Northeast September is usually the nicest of all the summer months...
Awfully nice here too of course!
And a nice time to celebrate the closing days of this wonderful summer.
Best summer class I've had the pleasure to teach:
In fact, simply one of the best classes I've taught.
Great experience!
Meanwhile, once fall's really here the new ballet season starts up. Check it out on their website. And yes, the woman sitting in the middle up above is featured on the home page of the Pacific Northwest Ballet :)
Pretty fun to have such an energetic and charming young man to walk around with lately.
And thanks to Pete and Emily for these great pictures from our walk at the Washington Park Arboretum:
I don't know about you, but I think Franklin just might like that new hiking carrier!
In other news, I'm getting excited for my summer class with the students from the Pacific Northwest Ballet. (But I'd better write that syllabus soon!) They even invited me to watch them in a dance class last week:
So beautiful! Might just need to go and see their current show later this week!
Finally, Franklin's really been into putting on this KU hat lately:
Starting to grow out of it already. But don't worry—a new one is already in the mail! :)
And why are my posts getting sparse? End of the quarter! Woo! In fact, I have so many papers to grade that I had to ask Emily to help with Franklin today. Fortunately, that meant my lunch break became a quick picnic in the park:
Best lunch ever!
Want to know more? Take a look at the full program. Should be a lot of fun!
I also had the pleasure of delivering an address to this year's cohort of students completing the Faith and the Great Ideas Program at SU. It was perhaps a celebration, but I decided to give a pretty serious talk about Plato (how could I pass up the chance to give another talk about Plato?); in any case, I'm particularly proud of my last line: "most of all, I hope someone comes along very soon and refutes all of your beliefs."
As far as refuting people goes, I don't usually like to give books bad reviews, but by the time I finished reading the book I reviewed recently, I kind of had no choice. Too bad, but what can you do?
Finally, I'm excited to report that I'll be teaching a special section of my Philosophy of the Human Person class this summer for some of the dancers in the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Yes, that Pacific Northwest Ballet :)
It's part of their Second Stage program, which, as I understand it now anyway, helps people prepare for the lives they'll live after their career onstage.
You can read more about the Seattle U part of the program here. I don't know much more than that now, but I can't wait to find out more this summer!
Okay, speaking of summer... Thanks for reading this far without seeing any photos of Franklin! In return, here he is today asking me to read one of his current favorite books: Mama, Is It Summer Yet? Thanks again, Jen!
And if you just can't get enough, here's a few minutes of raw video footage Emily got the other day:
Quite a guy.
All right reader, see you after I get back from California!
In anticipation of the amazingness about to get going here, we've been out enjoying some of the joys of life in a vibrant city.
An unanticipated and striking theme's begun to emerge: some of the most fascinating and arresting works we've taken in involved little or no speech. No language, no words; no λόγος. An exciting break for someone like me...
And what better way to share it than by talking it out here? ;)
First, a few weeks ago, we saw Melancholia. Quite impressive (if challenging) from start to finish, but as Manohla Dargis wrote for the Times, the opening eight minutes were wonderful. One of the most beautiful stretches of cinema I've seen in quite a while.
Trailer:
And we had a great time at the Pacific Northwest Ballet's production of Don Quixote. As you may already know, it's pretty cool. The Seattle Times loved it. The New York Times (aka "the Times") liked it well enough... but hey, they reviewed it, which I think says quite a bit.
And speaking of dance, we just today saw Pina. Words fail me, but it sure was cool.
Trailer:
New Yorker ran a great review. Here's a great excerpt:
The question is, What do you get from “Pina” that you could not get from watching the Tanztheater live? Answer: More than you could possibly believe. This is not just a matter of the al-fresco scenes, or of our proximity to the dancers, near enough to hear them pant. There is also Wenders’s decision to shoot the film in 3-D, and, in so doing, to goad stereoscopic technology into its first leap since “Avatar.” Not before time; 3-D was stalling badly, but now we are back on track, thanks to Scorsese’s “Hugo” and to Wenders, who takes no more than a minute to flourish his credentials. Dancers file across a stage, then loop around a transparent curtain. We watch for a moment from the wings, as they process toward us, and our vision carries us down the line of people and through the veil. You can trawl through cinema and find few more beautiful, more unforced, or more fleeting representations of the bourn between the living and the dead.
In reverse order (and note, this is only about half of all the crazy busy fun I've been having lately)...
The plot of Giselle sounds a bit over the top, but the Times review was so fascinating, especially all that stuff about old choreography—and balletic mime! So that's how we spent our anniversary.
I'm not sure it was my favorite thing ever (Romeo and Juliet from a couple of years ago still stands out as far as ballet goes), but I really enjoyed it, and the program is full of so much interesting info—I sincerely hope to find time to take a closer look at it :)
And the next day Emily and her teammates reunited and ran in the Briefcase Relay (remember?):
I'm just glad I was there to get this awesome handoff photo!
On their way to tenth place! And out of 46—not too shabby!
Finally, in between grading and submitting grades, I joined some friends for a great hike up to the amazing and amazingly cold and frozen Lake Serene.
Wore my finger shoes for the 4.5 miles up, but had to put socks and shoes on once we got to the snowy lake itself...
Kascha, her dog Mattie, Anupa, and Jerome
Great time, despite my cold toes.
And here's a video of our walk, thanks that awesome Nike+ app:
Okay, soon we'll be off to see the Redwoods. (Map's here, in case you forgot.)
I know it's been a while, but I've been so busy having a great week (great month? year?)... Too much for one post, perhaps, but what the hell?
First Rodrigo came to visit. So cool to catch up, see some lovely sites, and enjoy some great film and food in Capitol Hill (okay, downtown too I guess).
Then like the day after he left I heard that the Classical Quarterly accepted my essay on Plato's Symposium for publication!
I've been working on it (and talkingaboutit) for a while, and it's a great feeling to know it'll end up in a good place.
I also celebrated a birthday, and was given the excellent gift of dance lessons at the Century Ballroom. Can't wait!
Among other good gifts was this play in yesterday's Kansas game. Beautiful:
Part of what makes the first weekend of the tournament so cool, of course, is that there are like four games at a time all day long for like four days. So much fun to be had! Emily's facebook caption: "It is technically possible to watch every game at once but there is a problem of diminishing returns. Still pretty cool."
Had a great Saturday: got up early, had a fun day, got some good news. In the evening we saw Romeo & Juliet at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, which was just amazing. ...Oh, and we went shopping & got some back-to-school (?) clothes. So that's always fun. Pictures (maybe) soon.
We'd heard and read good things about the ballet, but I never expected it to be this awesome.
A video that won't come close to doing it justice? Sure:
Nice Sunday too: Enjoyed the beautiful fall weather while walking through the park near the Dahlia Garden...
Oh, the good news? So one of the great things about my schedule is that we have time to visit lots of friends and family during the summer. And one of the questions that lots of those friends and family like to ask is: What do you do during the summer, anyway?
This past summer, or for at least two-thirds of it, I read nearly everything I could find having to do with the Symposium, by Plato. I must have read at least five or six full-length books, along with well over 30 articles and essays. My goal: to try to understand things a little better, and try to see if there were areas where I might make some contribution of my own. Nothing helps you understand a book or an argument like writing and working your way through it.
And now the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (the big time!) has accepted my paper on the Symposium for the upcoming April 2010 meeting!
My paper has to do with the tension between what Socrates says about the ideal lover and what a jealous, drunken young man named Alcibiades has to say about being in love with Socrates.
If you'd like to take a look, the APA will post it online in January. Can't wait? Okay, I've posted a draft--feel free to give it a read! Let me know if you'd like to talk about it!
