Well, this past week was pretty wild pour moi just given exams, my thesis, and the Brown Symposium (for which I acted as the only student liaison for Dr. Robert Watson, professor of Shakespeare at UCLA). However, I couldn't be more grateful to have gotten to crown my senior year with this experience. I was invited to attend the Wednesday night Inaugural Performance (got to see Dr. G stand up and be recognized for her honor and role as a future Brown Symposium director (Go, Dr. G! Whoop!)) and actually saw Dean Gaffney do some acting! A small group of orchestra students played up some very rockin' Stravinsky during which the Dean gave a dramatic reading (the script detailed a soldier who unwittingly makes a deal with Satan (the script was awful but the Dean was fantastic, a great prelude acting-wise to the upcoming Into the Woods (which has a phenomenal script))).
Of course, on Thursday the true festivus for the restofus began. I attended the first lecture given by Dr. Beasley from Dartmouth (a French, Indian, Feminist, Literary Scholar), who discussed how the development of French literature and culture was affected and influenced by the 17th century salon culture/movement. She focused primarily upon the famous salonierre, Marguerite Hessein de Rambouillet, Madame de la Sabliere. And, I must say, interesting as the topic was, I found myself less interested in any of the specifics she gave (which were many) and more interested in how this broadly connected with Paideia. Because, after all, I feel as if my development as a literary and American cultural scholar has been greatly affected and influenced by the salon culture of our Paidiea group -- enabling me to think more holistically about my education and what I'm learning in each separate course (just as a I tried to connect and consider the Symposium as a whole, single entity). I got to focus on this question a great deal during this Symposium and even spoke to Jim Hunt about it at the President's Dinner Thursday evening (he was assigned to my table and we spoke a great deal about what the Paideia program has meant to me, etc. etc.).
At any rate, though the history of Indian textiles doesn't really grab my passions, it did interest me to think that clothing was such a heavy salon topic during the 17th century and that fashion was even of political concern -- King Louis' view that Indian fabrics as a threat to his absolutist rule reminded me of the importance of fashionable hats to the American women in the early 20th century working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (where the great NY fire of 1911 took place) and how the safety of those hats the women bought with their own incomes came to represent women's right to autonomy in the public and domestic spheres and how that dramatically affected the power structure in America (perhaps similarly to how Louis perceived a possibility in his power structure altering).
It made me wonder about what gives people strength, impetus, and passion to move forward; what makes people demand equality and knowledge? (Speaking of "Equality," we've been discussing this topic rather heavily in my American Politics class lately and, I have to say, I'm hooked. Dr. O'Neill mentioned to us this story by Kurt Vonnegut entitled "Harrison Bergeron." In the story, a futuristic America has decided to make everyone forcibly equal -- attractive people wear masks, intelligent people are given shock treatments, people with above-average singing voices have their voices distorted, etc. And I keep coming back to this story now, it's haunting me, because, as Dr. Beasely explained via Bernier: "diversity leads to knowledge" -- thus, we should take care in how we discuss equality and what we mean by desiring it and seeking after it. You all should really check out an article by John H. Schaar called, "Equality of Opportunity and Beyond" -- it's pretty astonishing.)
Anyhoo, Brady and I teamed up at one of the guest luncheons (with Jonah Lehrer in Howry (he's a science writer, young, handsome guy, dropped science for writing at the beginning of grad school which reminded me of our Mr. Steven dropping biology for philosophy (and I told Mr. Lehrer as much)) and that was a great deal of fun though we really didn't get to talk with him much at all (too many other people). However, it was nice to have that bit of background knowledge of him given his often broad remarks during the first salon concerning the origins of human morality and perception.
Being in this first salon really did remind me of our Paideia group. Thinking about the older purposes of salons which was often to inspire new legislation, music, books, and ideas generally made me recognize the successes of our Paideia group in doing the same -- in introducing us to new ideas in science, human behavior, art history, literature, and culture studies to inspire (at least for me) articles, a book, and even some artwork. It's helped me act as a theoretical salonierre, a negotiator of conversations between different classes and schools of thought in order to better understand them as a whole, hence papers like my "Steinbeck, Snyder, and Barthelme: Literary Perspectives on Urban Environments" which connects modern literature with urban studies and my thesis paper "Howling Coyote" connecting Allen Ginsberg with Native American trickster narratives.
The first salon concerned itself with "Arts - Sciences - Religions: Conflict or Convergence?" And right away this reminded me of Brady's surprise at people believing in both evolution and the Biblical text as explanations of the beginning of the world because, I truly believe, that this trio works beautiful in convergence and that it is only with ignorance and misunderstanding in people that they come to conflict with one another. Some of the most interesting ideas proffered during the salon, I thought, surrounded the image of Onca Mouse (I know that's misspelled, but I have no idea how to spell it -- Dr. Hobgood-Oster introduced the salon with this image of a mouse wearing a crown of thorns, possessing human limbs, and trapped in a windowed box while being carefully watched by human eyes peering inward). For me this image was interesting because Dr. Cooper continuously returned to the idea of "breaking down the 4th wall" between the lecturers and the audience in order to facilitate the best conversation possible, however, for Onca Mouse, we literally were the 4th wall of eyes peering inward upon the poor Mouse and there was no escaping that wall or our role as part of it.
But this observation in itself fits beautifully with the larger conversation that took place as people seemed to come to the consensus that it is the interpretation of facts (and not necessarily the facts themselves) that is essential to the progress of the human project (thus, art, science, and history do all work together or at least can given our multitudes of individual interpretations.
This reminded me of our own Paideia conversations and all the different interpretations and backgrounds we bring to the table over every subject and reading, how we only sometimes reach a consensus but always manage to agree on the fact that all opinions should be given some modicum of respect (although, given our last article about Republicans as a minority in academic circles may bring us to question just how true we are to this agreement :p).
I, sadly, had to miss out on the second salon in order to go to class. I think I could've actually contributed to that salon too, given what I learned while in Monterrey. The second salon brought issues of technology into the discussion and, in Monterrey, I sat privy to discussions about introducing electronic text books into the classroom between professors and text book publishers. Anyway, cest la vie.
The third salon, the closing salon, was entitled "Ethics, the Arts, and Public Policy." Dean Gaffney was the salonierre for this one and began with his own definition of art which I'll paraphrase here because I liked it so much:
"art is something selected, edited, arranged by a human being that communicates something that cannot be communicated in any other way." Post-defining art, he opened up the conversation with the question: what is art in a public policy sense?
This led into another interesting slew of conversations concerning the connections between art and democracy (which especially interested me given my current involvement in Dr. O'Neill's American Politics class). I played usher for Dr. Mariotti in this salon and found myself particularly impressed by many of her comments on the issue. She brought up questions of what democracy looked like in theory versus practice (demos-kratia translating to the people rule) and how both the concepts of art and democracy function as vital concepts to American culture given their invaluable role in prompting us to think in new, individual, and diverse ways. A democracy, she explained, requires critically thinking citizens, and art helps promote critical thinking.
There was also a great deal of talk over economics and whether or not the market decided what was and what wasn't art, but, given my English capstone paper over Shakespeare's use of intrinsic value versus "economic" value in his plays, I can't say that I think the two types of values are separated all that dramatically in our minds and thus, it's up to art to differentiate between the two -- thus, as someone pointed out (I apologize for not having a name) the truths of analytic and emotional dialogue: certain things simply cannot be quantified/valued by market forces but by individuals alone. This made me think, again, of the issues of Beauty and Equality, and how to define major concepts we all individualize without ever consciously recognizing we do. Romeo and Juliet serve as an excellent example of art as a social good in this context as it is a play discussing just this issue -- the issue of conflicting definitions over a single entity, the tension which arises between conflicting beliefs/perceptions/interpretations over names, definitions, and values. All of this then reminded me of James Madison, that wonderful man, who wrote in the Federalist Papers about the need for majority coalitions versus majority factions because factions could monopolize the democracy and thus destroy it -- and yet, to destroy the factions would be to destroy liberty itself and also destroy the democracy -- hence his own world of concentric paradoxes (and, the Constitution, I believe, is a work of art in and of itself) in which he discussed the ideas of art, ethics, and public policy (though perhaps without recognizing he'd entered the realm of art as well).
As Dr. O'Neill explained, liberty to factions is as air to a flame. And so, according to JMad, "ambition must be made to counter ambition" -- art, ethics, public policy, science -- all these things must work for themselves in recognition of the others, forcibly progressing as a whole by existing in a world of simultaneous competition and cooperation. It's how are Congress is supposed to work and, I think, how a great deal of our Southwestern works as well.
What do you think?
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