Williams-Sonoma as a Longing Machine
Back in July, Carina Chocano wrote an intriguing piece, “Pinterest, Tumblr, and the Trouble with ‘Curation’” about the “curation” or reblogging of other people’s ideas and images on sites such as Tumblr and Pinterest. The line in her piece that smacked me with its perfect arrangement of words was this one: “In other words, your average Pinterest board or inspiration Tumblr basically functions as a longing machine.” “That’s it!” I responded, like Charlie Brown when he recognized the perfect appropriateness of the precise word which “The-Doctor-Is-In” Lucy had used to diagnose him in that famous Christmas video. Williams-Somona is a ne plus ultra longing machine! For years now our kitchen table has hosted, often for several days at a time, the various Williams-Sonoma catalogs that come in the mail, from month to month, from that wonderland. But it is holidays...
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Reflections about Snake Lake, Poland, Hate – and Your Senior Thesis
I wrote this blog post originally for the CSoc Blog – describing how Comparative Sociology faculty and senior thesis students spent a Saturday in early September from 10 am to 4 pm, working together to demystify the research process involved in producing a senior thesis. Just before leaving my house on a Saturday morning for the senior thesis retreat at the Tacoma Nature Center at Snake Lake on September 8, I briefly checked my Facebook news feed and came across this disturbing reproduction of a tweet that had been earlier posted to Twitter: “Someone needs to assassinate Obama…like ASAP #DieYouPieceOfShit” I barely had time to re-post the link and the quote with my own brief comment about the poster (“Right-wing hatred from a 16 year old girl”), before I had to leave for day’s event. But in the moments before the...
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For Those Who Mourn…
This post should be read after first reading my post “To my cousin Kathy (August 10, 1954 – April 15, 2012)” – below) As I begin writing this in a time zone three hours behind Buffalo’s, Kathy’s funeral must be just concluding. For all of you who, like me, mourn her loss very deeply, I want to share something I discovered quite by accident on my Facebook news feed not long ago: a link to the music of Zbigniew Preisner, the premier composer of film scores in Poland today. The following two YouTube links come from Preisner’s entire hour-long work, Requiem for My Friend, a work that so moved me that I bought and downloaded the complete album, and have been listening to it on my iPod or iTunes almost nonstop for the past two weeks. The words to the first of...
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To My Cousin Kathy (August 10, 1954 – April 15, 2012)
Who would have predicted, 30 years ago when we were both newly pregnant with the new life that would become our first-born sons (born two days apart in the early months of 1983), that the letter-writing you started between us would grow and develop to make us so close, so verbally attuned to each others’ lives? You were the premier family correspondent, with your long, newsy letters delighting your recipients. I learned to follow your lead, attempting to match the level of detail and feeling that you put into your writing. Trying to put in words the physical pain of childbirth? Check! Sharing pictures of beaming grandparents? Check! Proudly describing our one-year old sons with the 30-word vocabularies? Both of us – check! Later there would be other topics of conversation, not always so triumphant. Your daughter’s critically necessary...
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Zbigniew Preisner’s album – Requiem for My Friend (1:07:29)
From Preisner’s website: “Once, we had a joint conception to create a concert telling a life story. The premiere was planned to take place on the Acropolis in Athens. It was intended to be a large event, a hybrid of a mystery play and an opera. Krzysztof Kieślowski would be the director, Krzysztof Piesiewicz was responsible for the script, and I was planning to compose the music. “Once, we thought it might be the first of a series of musical performances, to be developed in various interesting places around the world in the next few years. “But it was life that authored a different ending: Krzysztof Kieślowski died on 13th March 1996. “The first part of Requiem for my friend is meant as a farewell to Krzysztof Kieślowski. “I dedicate this music to him.” Zbigniew Preisner album released 16 May...
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