A response to new learning:<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t shocking; it was mysterious and beautiful; one felt no resentment, only a different kind of joy, and a curiosity that was new to me.”<\/p>\n
Robert Hughes, “My Friend Robert Rauschenberg,” in The Spectacle of Skill<\/i>\u00a0(2015).<\/p>\n
A favorite Baudelaire aphorism, on the purpose of study:<\/p>\n
Je resous de trouver le pourquoi, et de transformer ma volupt\u00e9 en connaisance.
\n—<\/i>I made up my mind to find out the why of it, and to change my pleasure into knowledge.<\/p>\n
Robert Hughes on the “unspoken but always present motto” for his book and television series The Shock of the New<\/i>. In Hughes, “The Shock of the New,” The Spectacle of Skill<\/i>\u00a0(2015). (My friendly amendment: not simply to change pleasure into knowledge, but to charge each with the other.)<\/p>\n
A reminder of our stewardship as scholars, and our failings:<\/p>\n
“Repeatedly, we will find scholars using theory–or simply attitude–to burn through whatever is small, tender, and worthy of protection and cultivation. Academic cool is a cast of mind that disdains interpersonal kindness, I-thou connection, and the line separating the self from the outer world and the engulfing collective.”<\/p>\n
Lisa Ruddick, “When Nothing Is Cool<\/a>,” in The Point.<\/i><\/p>\n And finally, a crucial observation about writing:<\/p>\n “[T]he real challenge of writing is not mechanical, but epistemological: how we say something isn\u2019t separable from what we know and how we think we know it.”<\/p>\n Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres,”Introduction,” in\u00a0The Future of Scholarly Writing: Critical Interventions<\/i>, ed. Angelika Bammer & Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres (2015).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A response to new learning: “It wasn’t shocking; it was mysterious and beautiful; one felt no resentment, only a different kind of joy, and a curiosity that was new to me.” Robert Hughes, “My Friend Robert Rauschenberg,” in The Spectacle … Continue reading