Things I Learned This Week

Selma Burke, Never Let Me Go, Adorno, and Carly Rae

Almost finished with the semester. Only a few more days to go. As the previously scheduled anxiety begins to subside, here are the things I learned this week. Warning, some of it is kind of a downer. Apologies in advance.

They say fake it ‘til you make it, but you really have to spend many hours (months) on the potter’s wheel before you can even begin to fake what you’re doing. I’m only just now sort of feeling like I know what’s what, and I’m in month four. Getting into the practice makes me appreciate more what my sister, Katherine Maloney (one of my favorites from Virginia whose work I collect), or a pioneer like Selma Burke, does/did. Burke was from Western Virginia and would form small animals in clay she collected from the river. She became one of the most influential artists of the Harlem Renaissance, creating sculptures and portraits in clay, brass, wood, marble, and stone. The lady lived her art and worked until she was 95, especially famous for doing portraits of prominent African-American figures like Ellington and Booker T. Washington. Queen.

(Trigger warning, here comes the bummer stuff.) Never Let Me Go is a piss poor film adaptation of the Ishiguro book. We watched it as a class, and the general consensus was that it took all the good stuff out of the book and threw it in the trash. Not even Carey Mulligan could save it. I imagine Ishiguro literally squirming at the premiere when they reduced his Nobel-prize winning novel to a weak love story with one dimensional characters. He says he loved it, but me thinks he was kidding himself. I am giving it a quadruple Zzzz. Read the book, obviously.

My husband was watching the documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, and I tuned in about halfway. The Rolling Stones muse was a firecracker and a brilliant beauty; then, as she moves from being an actress and model to lovers with Brian to Keith to Mick (sort of) and back to Keith, she slowly dissolves into a mangle of drugs, shitty parenting, and death-adjacence. I had a hard time feeling empathy for her. When female talent gets lost in the orbit of celebrity and illicit substances, it’s sad, but so are a lot of things. The real heartbreak of the film is the children who have to suffer in the shadow of narcissistic, drug-addled parents.

While I’m still in the crapper, here is another not-so-fun fact. In World Lit, we read the work of Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher active during the 1940s-60s who basically laid out that even though we revel in the idea of free time, our free time is spent consuming popular culture and riding the hamster wheel of capitalism. There’s no such thing as free anything, right? And he said this in the 1960s. What do you think he would say about today? Oh, and there are Adorno memes that you can buy on things like stickers and shirts. (Cue sound of dead white guy rolling in grave.) Follow that reading up with E.P. Thompson's sunshiny Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, where he explores how homogenizing the world’s varied perceptions of time into the uber-structured Western clock-time of hours and minutes literarily turned time into money. A devastation the global universe has been grappling with ever since. Good times, friends. Good times.

Last fun fact, I promise! Drawing a self-portrait is hard. I’ve only been noodling up to this point, but come Monday, I’ll be expected to show something for critique in my drawing class. Wish me luck because, damn, it’s almost over! Time to blast some Carly Rae and get this shit done.

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Quote of the week?

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two -
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

Tired by Langston Hughes

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‘Til Tuesday kids.

Burgin

(I’m finishing college at 50+, follow along and read my story here.)