Last week, we had Larry Lessig in as a guest speaker by virtue of this video. The whole thing is about 20 minutes and it’s very good — it’s a presentation he gave on creative freedom.

If you’re just looking for some funny, however, skip the video ahead to about 8:40, where Lessig presents three examples of what he calls “remix culture.” The first will particularly amuse fans of the Muppets. The second (at 9:30) becomes a bit of an eyesore, but just wait for it… And it only lasts a minute, because at 10:30 there’s a beautiful political romance.

In other news, a notice on the school website announces that the main dining hall “will be going trayless February 25th to 29th.” (I love the way they phrase it.) We’ve got about six inches of snow on the ground tonight — I guess the cafeteria-tray-as-makeshift-sled phenomena is universal.

I’m sure it was all a matter of scheduling…

Heehee. Must have been all kinds of interesting in the land of conservative students and liberal faculty.

• The library.
• Feeling useful at the CCLC.
• Learning stuff just for the hell of it. ‘Cause medieval history is cool, Africa is incredibly fascinating, and I still dream of being fluent in German.
• The English department lounge where EF and I hung out on fall mornings.
• And people!!! The incomparable Poke, who was there from beginning to end, and her delightful hubby. My wonderful roomies, KW, who went to concerts with me when she wasn’t on stage herself, and BS, who is far more genuine than her initials might suggest. Freshman hall buddies like KF, who I can count on for a bit of deep thinking, and the warm and friendly TV.

  All my friends and partners-in-crime at the CCLC. The three J’s and their (collective and separate) genius, mischeif, and fun. The brilliant CO with whom I shared my first class, last awards dinner, and more than a few laughs in between. My poetry buddy EF, my waterbird buddy LA, my Spinergy buddy AW, my Shakespeare buddies RB and EB, rising star EC, and the rest of the family.

  The whole gang from foreign study. My Berlin buddy HB. CS, with whom I tried to find the Oxford college that doesn’t exist. SM, with whom I figured out London’s bus system and ate PB&J while watching Ready, Steady, Cook. JG, whose Great American Novel I expect to read someday, and DG, who did the dirty work in setting up our trip across the continent.

  And all the profs I looked up to, like MO who won the surrogate mother award for telling me to eat before I collapsed; JL, who is actually closer to being family, though don’t ask me what that relationship would be (it simply emerged, of course); GA, who thought I ought to do an MFA program; BA who showed me that even Unitarians have to watch out for piety in their poetry; LB, who went out of her way to fit me into her schedule; and my foreign study profs, who helped us leave the dry campus far behind.

So raise a glass: Here’s to the good times. And here’s to knowing that the best part of moving on is that the bad times can be mostly ignored. Cheers! A very happy graduation to all the Furman graduates of 2007!

First reaction: Uh…duh? Like I said in the comments on her blog, trying to use Wikipedia as a source for a research paper is not only a poor choice of source material, but also incredibly lazy. I wasn’t allowed to cite encyclopedias in my high school essays; college students should be digging much, much deeper than that. Wiki is a great tool, but not a scholarly tool.

I do think that the idea of assigning students to create Wikipedia entries is pretty nifty, though.

My great joy in the NY Times piece is that Jimmy Wales seems very calm about it and says pretty much the same thing I did. Awesome guy.

The chronic problem with this thing is that I put it off and then I start to get intimidated by how long I’ve put it off. First, the news summary.

1. I graduated. (And there was much rejoicing.)

2. I’ve been to Boston.

3. I’m home. And I am calling Tae TOMORROW, because I’ve been a bad person and have let piles and boxes and unpacking/repacking get in the way of spending time with my friends.

School seemed to end suddenly even though we had several days between finals and graduation. Somehow the amount of things that need to be done magically expand to fit the amount of available time. Some people might call this “making work for oneself”…

So suddenly there I was, packing boxes and ironing out my black gown. I still haven’t pulled the pictures off my camera, but I might put one up eventually. I owe some group shots to Jen and Kimberly if nothing else. Not sure there are any real stories about graduation. The whole graduating class processes down the mall and past a double row of our professors on our way into the stadium. The weather was gorgeous that evening, no problems there, and I didn’t trip. There were some problems in the line going into the stadium – a large gap formed in the line just before me, so there were a couple of us wandering across the field all by ourselves, but there it is. The commencement speaker (Furman has chosen a student to give the address for the last few years) was a communications studies major and an acquaintance of mine. She had some very appropriate things to say about the values of a liberal arts education, and I thought it was quite nice.

Did a little local sightseeing in the couple days before graduation that my parents were here. Notable was poet Carl Sandberg’s home, near Asheville, which was very nice – house on a hill overlooking a lake. A gorgeous part of the country. (Sandberg wrote the poem about fog coming in on little cat feet, if that helps anyone.)

I had to be out of my apartment the day after graduation, no leeway there, so we finally decided to get a small self-storage unit to leave my boxes and such – some things are still there, waiting to be picked up on the way up to Boston in September.

Boston! Boston was wet and unseasonably chilly, NOT the weather we expected, even up there. I was glad I had packed lots of pants! Fortunately, the tour of Emerson was largely indoors anyway. Rather than having various departments in different buildings, they have their own (more or less) floors of several ten- or twelve-story buildings in the middle of Boston. I think it would be a VERY weird place to be an undergrad, but somehow it seems less strange for grad work. Couldn’t be more different from Furman, but I’m looking forward to that. (Except there’s still lots of purple. Somehow I managed to pick another school that has purple as one of its colors.)

We were also able to meet the new roommate and see the apartment. It’s a short walk from Harvard (and more importantly, the Harvard subway station), and the apartment building is surrounded by lots of old houses, so it’s a nice walk, even in the rain.

It’ll take some time to get used to living in a city again. We saw just enough in the few days we were there to see that there are lots of places to explore. Moving in is going to be beastly; in general, it looks like it would be much easier to fly into Boston than to drive. This time we got around the issue by staying in the suburbs and taking a commuter train into the city. From there we could take the “T” (subway) or a trolly tour. My car is definately staying here.

So that’s Boston…I registered for classes just today. I have an overview course of magazine publishing (required for incoming students; I’ll have a similar course for book publishing in the spring), and a course in mag. design and production, which all sounds like great fun to me!

Other than that, I’ve been going through boxes, either re-packing them for fall (after seeing what is already in the apartment) or packing things I might have my parents send me later on. Or pulling out things I’ll want over the summer.

Speaking of which, I think most of you know that my next destination is Gainesville, living with J.C. (and E) and interning with the University Press at UF for the duration of their second summer semester. I’m driving down July 2nd and coming back…not sure when.

We’ll wrap things up with the trivial: Today I once again braved the Shalimar post office without fainting. And that’s all for the news today. We’ll see you on other people’s blogs and again here if you’re lucky. Thank you and good night.

They perform in an amphitheatre (there’s that word again…once again, we really mean “outdoor theatre”) in a gorgeous park right on the Reedy River in downtown Greenville. The weather was great tonight, so the setting was a huge plus. And as the title suggests, the price was pretty sweet, too, though it’s considered polite to offer a donation.

The show itself was well done — in general, Greenville seems to do very well by the arts for a city of its size. Though definately amateur actors, by and large, they were good amateur actors. (I don’t mean to sound snobby when I say that. Keep in mind that the other Macbeths I’ve seen have been a the ASF and the RSC; I would love to be in this sort of production at some point.)

I always get caught up in the witches in Macbeth – partly because I was one when we tweaked 1.2 for that project in 10th grade, but also because there are so many neat things a director can do with them in terms of design and concept. At the ASF, each witch was visibly handicapped in some way, emphasizing that they were outsiders from society. One was blind, one had a bad leg, and one had something wrong with her arms. That was cool.

Tonight, the witches were given a motive, which made all sorts of things interesting. The play opens with a battle, so the witches were shown to be mourning the death of the play’s first victim (Person X), who had just been killed in front of our eyes by Macbeth and his men.

(Tangent: There was a lot of killing-in-front-of-our-eyes tonight. Am reminded how much I like the subtle suggestiveness of the doomed person getting dragged offstage just before the fatal blow falls.)

Anyway, that brief twist at the beginning set the whole play to be about the witches’ revenge on Macbeth and their manipulation of his life. Which then helps him — suddenly he has an excuse for going bonkers and murderous: they’re almost always on stage, watching, constantly working on him, instead of just putting a thought in his mind and leaving it to fester. Makes him less culpable, perhaps.

Macbeth himself was quite good, as was Lady M., though she could get a bit screechy — the sleepwalking scene was all screechy. I worried a bit about her and one or two of the witches in that regard: they were doing a lot of screechign and rasping and growling, and sometimes it sounded painful. As in, will-make-you-hoarse-and-hurt-your-voice painful. Damn, this is getting to be full of all kinds of patronizing. Well, let’s go out with a bang, then: Malcolm, the Scottish prince who saves the day and is crowned at the end, sounded like he’d wandered out of the hills of West Virginia. He seemed to be trying to change his accent, but if he had too much to say, he slipped into Hillbilly. A bit distracting….yet overall, a fine evening.

For those who might be in town, I hear they are doing Love’s Labors Lost in July/August, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in October (so it’s not even all Shakespeare). Free storytime in the park! Can you ask for more?

Staged.doc
You’ve seen this one before.

Oblivious.doc
Here, the assignment was to tell the story in first person as though the narrator is telling the story to someone else; reader must be able to infer who the narrator is speaking to and where this is taking place. Challenging!

Applegate.doc

Enjoy!

Classes ended Wednesday, and two of my four classes are completely finished. Since I was auditing the Shakespeare class, I don’t have to take the final — auditing is the best thing ever, I get to have all the fun, but all I have to do is keep up with the reading, no tests, no papers. I’m also done with the voice class I was in this term: we had a brief written final on Wednesday and I did my final evaluation of all the songs I’d been working on later that morning. The only things left now are to revise stories for my fiction class and turn in my portfolio on Saturday, and to take part three of my medieval history test on Monday. My prof is leaving for Turkey as soon as he turns in grades, so he wants to get them done quickly! We already did the two essay sections on the last two days of class, and now he’s just throwing the short answer/ multiple choice??? at us on Monday. Then I sit on my hands and pack for the rest of the week; graduation is Saturday the 3rd.

Tonight was the end of year party for the CCLC staff — Jane had us over and we brought things for tacos, which was yummy. Jean presented all the superlatives we’d come up with; I am “Most likely to face varying levels of success in my attempts to create a living dragon. Those poor bats and lizards…” Sounds a bit like Carmen’s IB senior superlative, tee hee! I was a bum and forgot to print off Jean’s; must remember to do so tomorrow. Better late than never? Eep.

The senior gifts that Jean and Jane came up with are really cool — they have ordered each of us a black messenger bag with random-yet-appropriate mottos on them, mostly Latin ones with English translations, though Chris’s is a Shakespeare quote from Julius Caesar. Mine — can you guess? — is tonight’s title line, ut apes, geometriam. “As bees, geometry.”

Confused? This might help; it’s from a Victor Hugo novel called The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You might have heard of it.
“I possess philosophy by instinct, by nature, ut apes geometriam.”

Having a verb helps, doesn’t it? But see, Jen, it does refer to hexagonal-shaped honeycombs! At least, that’s the link between bees and geometry. There also seems to be an implication about some quality I innately possess, so I’m going to make the leap and consider it a compliment. It also appeals to my appreciation of things interdisciplinary: no subject can exist in isolation. Geometry can be found in the natural world and music is mathematical. Etcetera, a thousand times etcetera.

Hell, if nothing else, I’m going to enjoy tossing off obtuse explanations about why I carry a bag with some Latin quip about bees and geometry. Ha! And I think Jane and Jean were counting on that, too.

Reports of my graduation are still premature. (I have three more days of class. I get my piece of paper on June 3.)

So hello again! Carmen can stop frothing (geez, get a rabies shot!) and perhaps my rabid fans will be appeased.

Charlie Brown went off pretty well. Out first performance was out in the amphitheatre as planned — the forecast had been scaring us all week, but the only possible back-up location was already booked that first night. But the show went on! In fact, it did drizzle a little during the first act, but it cleared up after five or ten minutes and then it was lovely. Miraculously, the crowd didn’t leave!

Since we did have McAlister reserved for Friday and Saturday, we went ahead and moved to the auditorium Friday afternoon — and it did rain off and on all weekend, so we were glad we did. The show went better inside anyway (depite the fact that we were thoroughly turned around at first), so that was good. And there it was, my exit from Pauper Players. Sort of…I had set up a couple of video cameras during the last show, so I’ve been editing and burning copies of the video ever since. Finally got the last of those done this afternoon.

I also sang with Furman’s oratorio chorus (basically all the choruses combine to do a major work at Christmas and again in May) for the last time. I hadn’t been in women’s chorale since sophomore year (partly time constraints, partly personalities), so it was fun to be in a big chorus again. The performance was the day Pug arrived up here after his exams, so he got to come!

It was great fun to have my boy up here for a week, and he insists that he had a good time, despite the fact that he had to entertain himself while I went to class, worked at the CCLC, and wrote a research paper. I guess I even believe him, since after all I had a lovely time, despite going to class, working, and writing a research paper…

Some Linkages:

The Plains of Abraham: There is a Canadian classicist whose specialty is the performance aspect of Homeric poetry. So what does he do but write his own epic in the Homeric style about an event in Canadian history. And he goes around and performs it! He came to Furman the week between Charlie Brown and the oratorio — really cool!

NY Times on Da Vinci: Whatever you think about The Da Vinci Code, book or movie, check out this movie review from the New York Times. Harsh — but very funny! I thought the book was a good read and want to see the movie sooner or later, but it might wait for video. We shall see.

Speaking of movies, the group that brings films to Furman has been doing well this spring after performing way sub par for most of the year — they spent about two months advertising Saw 2 this winter. Ewww!! But now I’ve seen nearly everything I kinda wanted to see over Christmas but didn’t get around to:
Pride & Prejudice: pretty good; worth seeing for cheap; hated the final scene they wrote in.
Brokeback Mountain: I like it. And I think it’s really cool that they can make a tasteful movie about gay cowboys. Really cool.
The Producers: good funny! Though some scenes feel constrained, as though the blocking was pulled straight from the stage version and the camera angle is too narrow.
Good Night and Good Luck: I love black and white. Required viewing for anyone who thinks the Constitution is being trampled on. It doesn’t actively draw parallels between McCarthy and anything modern, but its very presence suggests them. Possibly just me. Also really neat to see the movie and then see a clip of the real 1950’s newscaster who is the main character of the film.

Those of you who remember a certain tenth grade English project may be amused to know that my Shakespeare class is doing something very similar! This time, though, we have to stick to the plot as given, though we may pull from multiple scene or overlay bits to make a point, provided that the point is substantiated by the text in the first place. My group is doing Richard III, a play I didn’t know much about until a few weeks ago. (However, now I can tell you if you don’t already know that the film of Richard III from about ten years ago starring Ian McKellen is phenomenal and you should all see it. So creepy!!) Anyway, I was experimenting with costume bits for this, and then I started playing with my camera and the mirror…ending up with this, which is kind of fun…
Odette casts magic missile.

First dress rehearsal is tomorrow; we open on Thursday. Everybody do the no-rain dance! – we’re performing in the Amphitheatre!! (which as Jen has enlightened me, is not technically an amphitheatre because it is a half-circle, not a full circle, so basically common usage of the word is historically…wrong. Gotta love it.)

Speaking of whom…as of a week and two days ago, Jen and Cort are really, truly married. The short story is that despite a couple of unlucky incidents, the wedding was beautiful, the bride was gorgeous, and went off without a hitch. And it’s all still a bit weird…but since her school e-mail address has her new name now, I guess it really happened!

And then there’s this school thing…but we’ll think about that next week.