Negative capability

I'm enjoying my Canadian Studies class more this semester than I ever have before. Good cheerful students, and the course materials have come together better than in previous semesters. I'm finally figuring my way around Canada's culture, which took me a while to figure out. Yesterday in class I showed the 1922 silent film, "Nanook of the North," directed by Robert Flaherty and considered to be one of the great pioneering documentaries. Flaherty wrote and produced the film as well, and did the camera work to boot! Really the first Canadian auteur, no doot aboot it.
"Nanook of the North" depicts the daily life of an Inuit hunter and his family, following them through a walrus hunt, fishing on the ice floes, and building an igloo, among other adventures. Beautiful cinematography throughout. It is a little controversial in the area of film studies and anthropology, because Flaherty re-staged several of the hunting and fishing sequences for his camera, and of course he had a pre-conceived idea of what kinds of images he wanted to capture for his film. Moreover, Nanook's "family" presented in the film was actually a group of unrelated Inuit, chosen for their photogenic qualities, and rewarded with food and money for their "performances." Rightly, it's been called a "quasi-documentary" - but aren't all documentaries really "quasi-documentaries"?

Tomorrow in class we continue our discussion of "the idea of north" in Canadian culture. I'm giving a slide lecture on the Group of Seven Canadian painters. I'm such an easy guy, I only want my students to know three of them. One of them I want to know for certain: Lawren Harris (1885-1970)
Maligne Lake, Jasper Park (1924)

Roadside wisdom, outside Three Lakes, Michigan.

Wildflower garden at Blue Vista Farm, near Bayfield Wisconsin.

http://www.bluevistafarm.com/

Stormclouds gathering over Duluth

Dale Chihuly glass ball, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art

William Holman Hunt, "The Lady of Shalott," -- on display at an exhibition of his life and times at the MIA. Hunt (1827-1910) was an important 19th century British painter, associated with the colorful Pre-Raphaelite movement. In a shocking scandal of the 1870s, he eloped with his deceased wife's sister, and secretly married her in Switzerland, contravening English law at the time which prohibited such unions.

Sketch of Edith Holman Hunt, the artist's second wife (and former sister-in-law)

Even though a number of the Liverpool clubs proudly advertize that they stay open till 7 am, I didn't make a late night of it Saturday night. So I was feeling fresh and frisky Sunday morning for a little stroll up the hill to the cavernous Anglican Cathedral for morning services. Superlatives abound! It's reputed to be the largest Anglican Cathedral in England, if not the world. Of course, our rather sparse Sunday morning congregation of about 150 people probably could have fit into one of the toilets, but I'm sure the place does fill up on more formal, celebratory occasions. The place was designed by Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), the revivalist architect also responsible for the classic English phone booth. Scott won a competition to design the new Cathedral when he was only 22, in 1902; after two world wars, and economic depression, and the fatal collapse of Liverpool's shipping industry, it wasn't until 1978 that the Cathedral was finally completed.

The guest preacher at the Cathedral was an interesting bloke, Andrew White, who is the vicar at St. George's Anglican Church in Baghdad. And has been there since 2003. He had just left Iraq a few days earlier, visiting Merseyside for friends and connections. He seems to have a valuable perspective on a lot of things that have happened there, and a natural gift of communicating his ideas as well. I'm going to have to look out for his book; I had heard that it's worth reading. Sunday afternoon I museumed down at the Albert Docks, where the Tate has installed a Liverpool outlet in one of the restored warehouse buildings. The area reminded me of similar industrial conversions in 19th century cities elsewhere, like Manchester New Hampshire, or Hamburg Germany. The Tate's does a wonderful job of installing handsome galleries and filling them with choice bits of their unequaled collections. The current main exhibit at Tate Liverpool highlights scultpure and sculptural art. An Andy Warhol soup can overlooks one of Salvador Dali's lobster phones A beautiful Barbara Hepworth wooden sculpture, carved and highly polished from a single tree trunk An intriguing "disco floor sculpture hall," complete with dance floor and individual headsets playing 1970s anthems, intending to suggest that artists who work with the human figure intend their work to be perceived in movement, not static-ly.

I also paid a visit to the International Slavery Museum, which occupies a floor of the Mersey Maritime Museum. It's a great concept, and of course it is important to connect Liverpool with the sordid trade upon which so much of its wealth was based, but I wasn't impressed with some of the exhibits, and thought generally that the musuem attempted to do too much in too small a space. (The museum attempts to show African life and culture, AND the horrors of the middle passage, AND the lives of Africans in their diaspora, up to Lenny Henry and Barack Obama, all on one floor. With not enough resources!

Then, in the evening, after a little nap, I went back to the university neighborhood of Mout Pleasant to a nice little tavern called "The Grapes" which features live Latin Jazz on Sunday nights. It was a blast!

National Poetry Month continues unabated. As part of the celebration, the English Department is sponsoring a marathon reading of Milton's "Paradise Lost." The first six books today, the final six tomorrow. 2008 marked the quadricentennial of the blind poet's birth. Bravo John! I was able to go and listen for about an hour - interesting to hear the piece read aloud. So many alliterative and assonant consonants! Grave and great imagery too. Let's hear for the power of Milton's imagination - and William Blake's, too, while we're at it.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

I see that Vladimir Putin isn't just your average body-building former-KGB semi-dictatorial Russian leader. He's also an artist. One of his canvases was recently sold in a charity auction in St. Petersburg for 37 million rubles - the equivalent of well over $1 million.

Putin joins Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler on the list of paintbrush-wielding leaders. Some art critics have called the work "witty" and "stylish," and see in it traces of other Russian expressionists such as Marc Chagall or Natalie Goncharova. Others have suggested that Putin may have had some help on the canvas. Well, it's all for a good cause - cancer research.

Meanwhile, here in America's winter wonderland, I've just emerged from a six-hour department meeting. We met with an independent consultant today who helped us come up with a new "mission statement" and a "five-year plan." (The administration will be pleased.) Blah blah blah, but I'm glad to have it done, and I don't mind paying the consultant since we were able to get through our agenda completely. Really, I think that it makes sense sometimes to bring in a consultant, because generally people behave better when there's an outsider helping move things along.