Carleton Archives | Page 8 of 10

Best Week Ever?

Driving back yesterday from seeing friends in Rochester, I realized that it has been a damn good week – probably one of the best “usual” weeks ever. Last Sunday was a pretty uneventful day around the house, but I got to spend some great time with the girls and enjoyed a nice 90-minute ride in sunshine that has been rare this spring. And I also played perhaps too much with my new iPhone, which is just as amazing as I’d hoped.

On arriving at work on Monday, I found an email message revealing that a very worthy junior faculty member had been recommended for a major grant, one we’d worked very hard to assemble last fall. Though we spent much of the week finalizing various details, the grant award should now come through pretty soon, which will be very satisfying to see.

Feeling pretty happy on Monday, I had lunch outside in a picturesque spot on campus and finished Steven Johnson’s remarkable book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, which is part intellectual history, part how-to for thinking better, and entirely inspiring. I’m already thinking of ways to start practicing some of the ideas he describes. And I was surprised to get a text, of all things, from my wife, of all people.

Tuesday, my work email brought another good message, this one regarding the award of a very prestigious and hard-to-get grant to another worthy junior faculty member. Great in its own right, this news got even better later in the week when we engineered a way for him to both accept this grant and a smaller but equally important grant he had already received – effectively giving him 15 months of funding to work on his current project, not 3. Again, very satisfying.

Tuesday night, on a whim I watched the first half of the excellent French biopic/crime thriller Mesrine, which blew me away. I watched the second half on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and found the whole movie to be an exceptional piece of work that anyone who likes crime movies should see.

Wednesday morning was spent on a United Way allocation panel, helping divvy up the local UW’s campaign funds to various area organizations. It was equally rewarding (giving away money!) and frustrating (giving away too little money), but definitely confirmed my eagerness to help run the College’s United Way campaign again next fall.

Thursday was divided into a rush-rush morning at work, getting all kinds of stuff done, and a tough but fun four-hour bike ride in the afternoon – my hardest ride yet this year, and a key session on the way to the Almanzo 100 race on May 14 – two weeks from today. Conditions were borderline terrible, which only made the 240 minutes in the saddle that much better.

Even given the quality of previous five days, I had high expectations for Friday, and I wasn’t disappointed. I spent all morning at the Minnesota Zoo, chaperoning Julia’s first-grade field trip. I spent pretty much the whole time with Julia and her hilarious best friend, which was absolutely great. After a week of rain and gray, we actually had good weather, and we took advantage, hitting all of the zoo’s high points and enjoying each other’s company.

After a couple quick hours at work that afternoon, I collected both girls at home and went to a great art fair at the Northfield High School, where we had pizza and circulated among the amazing arts and crafts stations set up all over the school. We made a bunch of art, tried out some musical instruments (Julia liked the cello, Vivi – unsurprisingly – liked the drums), and people-watched. Separately, each girl shyly pointed out a high-school age boy that she thought was “handsome” – funny and mildly shocking.

Then finally, today, we went to Rochester to visit with friends there. The girls enjoyed the trip and the visit, and we got back in time for me to sneak in a short ride while Shannon and the girls assembled May baskets to distribute to friends on Sunday. The day was capped with a good dinner, a beer, and a video. I know they can’t all be this good, but it’s nice to have an such a good one every now and then.

Werewolves of Carleton

These posters are up all over campus right now. Let’s just say that I’m not exactly scared to run in the Arb at night, but that I’m carrying a pistol loaded with silver bullets.

Jazz (History) Is Over (part I)

Yesterday I sat for the final exam for the “Jazz History” course I’ve been taking this term, a course taught by Steve Kelly, who is about to retire after a long, distinguished career at Carleton. I took the course because I wanted to learn more about the history of jazz, a musical style that I love but know very little about. I wasn’t disappointed. Kelly was a great teacher, both as a conveyor of technical knowledge about jazz and as a teller of stories about his own experience playing and hearing jazz. By the end of the term, I had a far better sense of the history of jazz, of the key players and periods in that history, and of the rudiments of the technical aspects of the music.

Though this was pleasing, I was well prepared to realize this goal. Having studied an awful lot of history in my life, I was equipped to understand the periodization of jazz, and to start to map the connections and disconnections between periods – say, the swing era that ended during World War II and the bebop era that started then. Putting particular musicians and pieces into those periods was no harder.

Where I did falter, and had to work pretty hard, was in trying first to understand some of the technical dimensions of jazz music (or, really, any music) and then to apply that understanding in an analysis of particular tunes. 32-bar AABA form? 12-bar blues? I barely remembered (from junior high band) the definition of a “measure,” much less how to keep 4/4 time or, worst of all, how to read music.

I’ll be darned, though, if knowing how to study and learn didn’t pay off. Though I probably had the worst tune-analysis skills of anyone in the class, I did acquire a rough facility for analyzing a song, and – what’s more – found that process remarkably interesting and fun. For my final project, I analyzed a little-known Duke Ellington tune, one which I’ve loved for a long time and which gradually revealed its inner structure as I listened over and over to it. I probably replayed the song about a hundred times to get it down for my paper – and even then I missed two key features of its structure.

What helped me even more than a facility for learning new things – even things as inconsequential as how to hear and diagram a 12-bar blues form – was being able to write clearly about what I was hearing. I found it was pretty easy to describe songs, artists, styles, et cetera, both objectively (“What are three main characteristics of bebop?”) and subjectively (“Explain why you like this song.”) Before I could get too high on myself, though, I did the math and realized that I’ve been writing fairly intensively for more than half my life – longer than most of my classmates have been alive. I’d better be halfway decent at it: I’m old.

Winter Oddities II: Bike Rack Towel

I have no idea why this frozen towel hung from a bike rack on campus for a week. You can’t tell from this picture, but it was frozen solid, and sometimes seemed to be waving in an invisible, frigid breeze.

Winter Oddities I: Libe Bike

I dunno what students are thinking when they leave their bicycles outside all winter, but the snow does make for some interestingly immobilized bikes. It’s a good thing this bike’s owner put that plastic bag over the seat. At least that’ll stay dry.

Inter-Modal Friendship

Looking out my office window throughout the day, I often feel a pang of sadness for my bike, which sits out there all day in the cold, halfway up the snowbank that covers most of the bike rack. (I’ve anthropomorphized my belongings like this as long as I can remember: I recall introducing my G.I. Joe figures to each other as I acquired them.)

So imagine my happiness when I discovered, the other day, that my bike had a new friend! They come from different worlds, but they seem to have gotten on well.

Ski Camp

Over the Christmas break, I took advantage of a week away from work and plentiful, excellent snow to hold my own little ski-training camp. Not only was the “camp” a great way to burn off the Christmas calories, but it turned to be a decent way to get into something like ski shape as I look forward to the City of Lakes Loppet race on February 6 (and maybe a couple of short local races between now and then).

All told, I skied on ten straight days, and only stopped because I had to go back to work on Tuesday and because my almost-forty-year-old back needed a day off. I totaled only seven and a half hours of skiing in those ten days, but the hours were high quality, starting (almost by accident) with a good classic-technique coaching session and including equal amounts of technique drills and interval sessions. Though there’s always a lot of room to improve my technique, I was happy to discover that I still had some decent strength and stamina, even after losing the month of November to traveling, busy-ness, and sickness. Now I need to log some longer ski sessions, to get the body somewhat readier for 25 kilometers of racing at the Loppet.

Aside from the good “training effects” of this skiing, my time on the trails was invigorating in a couple other ways. I met a bunch of other skiers, and got to chat with a couple of them quite a few times. I also relished the renewed challenge of trying to ski fast – and the very occasional success at actually doing so. And most of all I enjoyed seeing the Arb turn from the brown of late fall to the white and gray of high winter. I’ll never get enough of sights like these:

Post-Blizzard Northfield

A few shots of indoor activities on the snow day and a number of them from outdoors, where Northfield looked awfully U.P.-ish.

Wear Your Breath

Go cross-country skiing and wear your breath.

22° of Heaven

Friday’s snowfall – mini-blizzard, at best – laid down an excellent layer of snow, and by gum Northfield’s intrepid skiers had created some excellent trails by the afternoon. I enjoyed a good hour-long ski (actually, 40 minutes of skiing and 20 minutes of happy conversation with other skiers and a bowhunter [!]) in the near-perfect conditions. Heaven at 22°F, and more of the same tomorrow.

Goose Lake

Lower Lyman Lake on the Carleton campus is apparently a major stop on the Canada goose flyway. Until seeing this sight, I had always kinda wondered why Canada geese are gray, black, and white. Turns out, their coloration evolved not in response to golf courses but to wintry bodies of water. Clever, geese! Clever!

Winter Walk

I had to cross campus today on some errands, and the the outing turned into a wonderful winter walk. Campus was almost visibly settling down into its late-year hibernation, now that almost all the students are gone for winter break (and all the profs are off in their “grading jails”). The cold quiet was magnificent, broken only by the honking of hundreds of geese on the lakes. It was a good time to be outside.

No Bad Weather, Only Bad Clothes

I got pretty soaked riding to work this morning, which got me 90% of the way to deciding to finally buy some Gore-Tex gear. The only thing repellent about my water repellent shell (eight years old) or my windpants (five years old) is how much water they let through. (The worst day I’ve ever had at work was a day last winter when I sat in wet chinos all day, thanks to wet roads and those over-the-hill windpants.)

My ride home provided the other 10% of the impetus to get some Gore-Tex. By the time I headed out, the rain had mostly stopped, but a harsh northwest wind was driving water off the trees and onto me, where my “rain gear” soaked it all up. I was almost ready to feel sorry for myself after having to ride through a windfall tree

when I discovered that others had it much, much worse, such as the football team, drilling on a windswept, soaking-wet field

or the men’s soccer team, in the thick of a match against the University of Wisconsin-Superior. I watched a corner kick sail at least twenty yards upfield after being caught by the wind. Brutal.

Bikes Are for Riding, Not Blocking

One of the many construction projects at Carleton this summer was the remodeling of the entrance to the campus center, Sayles-Hill:

The plaza area in front of Sayles-Hill has been redesigned to provide additional bike parking and better pedestrian circulation. Most of the existing sidewalks will be removed. The project will be staged so that the front doors and the accessible ramp will be available for use at all times.

As the design illustration shows, the new plaza is pretty nice, with new masonry, new and better benches, a shady sitting area, and new bike racks. Lots of new bike racks, many of which were empty when I came out of the building today around 2:00 to find this at the bottom of the wheelchair ramp:

Nice parking, liberal-artsers. (For what it’s worth, the bike on the right is often parked almost this badly behind my office building, blocking the rear entrance.)

Ben Katchor at Carleton

As I often say, one of the best things about working at Carleton is going to all the excellent events that the College sponsors. Tonight’s example was a wonderful lecture by the cartoonist/graphic novelist Ben Katchor, best known for his comic strip, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer – a strip I discovered in the Chicago Reader newspaper soon after graduating from Macalester and moving to Chicago. It was then unlike anything I’d ever read, and Katchor’s lecture – which he said he delivered to meet a special request from someone here – was no different: a “picture story” entitled “The Great Museum Cafeterias of the Western World: An Illustrated Lecture on the Design and Culture of Museum Cafeterias.”

Yes, that really was the topic, and yes, it really was that weird, as well as charming and hilarious and moving. More than anything, the story reminded me of the sort of story that Jorge Luis Borges might have written – a few bright threads of truth and reality woven into a cloth of fiction. Katchor’s story had some magic realism, some silliness, some heartstring-tugging , some facts, and tons of great pictures, of which my friend Doug Bratland took some shots (thanks for sharing them, Doug!):