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Blogging in Plague Time: For My Students

When I take students to Vienna, we always begin our visit with a quick walking tour of the city, partly to orient ourselves, and partly to keep everyone awake on that first afternoon.  Among the sights we see is the Plague Column , pictured above in a 1742 engraving by Georg Christoph Kriegl.  This remarkable piece of Baroque sculpture, which employs trinitarian motifs to unite political and religious imagery, was erected after one of the last great waves of the plague swept through Vienna in 1679.  Emperor Leopold I commissioned it to remember the epidemic and give thanks for the city's salvation. This seemed like an appropriate image for the first post of this new blog, which I am starting for my students at Houghton College as they have all left to go home in the wake of our own current epidemic.  I hope that you students will find this a helpful way to maintain a sense of connection to me and to Houghton during the weeks ahead, when our relationship will be online rather t
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500!!!

A new accomplishment: Today I reached a streak of 500 consecutive days in Duolingo!  Sometimes it is only 10-15 minutes a day, but still that is about a year and a half now of slowly plugging away at (mostly) French. "Chapeau!," if I do say so myself.
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Neuer Berner Kalender

I have read much of Jeremias Gotthelf's writings--all of the novels, many of the novellas and short stories.  But I had never read his "Kalender" before.  Until now. For six years, from 1839 to 1845, Gotthelf edited the Neuer Berner Kalender , the "New Bernese Almanac."  "Kalender" looks like "calendar," but in fact it is what we would probably call an almanac, in the sense of the Old Farmer's Almanac  that you may have seen in grocery stores or magazines racks each year.  The almanac was some of the primary reading material for rural households, many of which might have contained only two things to read: a Bible, and an almanac. For these yearly almanacs, Gotthelf wrote a motley assortment of texts: month-by-month accounts of the weather and news from the previous year, reflections on different Christian virtues that sound more like sermons, political and social satires, short stories, even shorter anecdotes of one sort or a
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All of Bach

I have praised The New Criterion  here before.  It is a superb publication on the arts and public life.  I have had a subscription for many years.  In one of their regular weekly e-mails today, they tipped me off to a fantastic online resource: All of Bach . This is a project of the Netherlands Bach Society to make available all of Bach's compositions--every last one, and there are a lot--in live recordings, available online to everyone, for free.  What a great undertaking.  Take a look.
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Tired After a Full Week

I am recovering after a week of seminar discussions about Dietrich von Hildebrand.  They were quite interesting but made for a long week.  I generally had about an hour to read some Gotthelf or answer e-mail in the mornings, then a few hours of seminar until 1pm, with 2-3 more hours after lunch.  Then in the evenings I would catch up on my reading for the next day's sessions and grade some exams for my online classes.  There is something about spending that many hours a day in computer Zoom sessions--especially with the weather as hot and muggy as it was last week--that makes you tired, even without grading exams late into the night. I did manage to make it through Hildebrand's book on The Heart , so I got to add that to my list of books read this summer.  Yesterday and today I also read a short book by Peter Handke, Lucie im Wald mit den Dingsda  ( Lucy in the Forest with Some Thingummies ).  I'll have to post about Handke sometime, because I'm working on a paper
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Freedom of Speech

Free speech is under fire these days.  So it was good to see an impressive group of academics and public intellectuals publish an open letter in defense of free speech the other day.  They come from a range of fields and political viewpoints, more on the left than on the right, but we especially need folks on the left to speak up in defense of free speech at present.  The letter, which is very short, was published in Harper's .  You can--and should--read it here .
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The Heart: Seminar with the Hildebrand Project

This week I am participating in an online seminar--today was day one--on " The Heart ."  It is sponsored by the Hildebrand Project , which is dedicated to promoting the works and legacy of Dietrich von Hildebrand , a German Catholic philosopher who advocated a phenomenological form of personalism.  He also had a rather inspiring life story, since he was a critic of National Socialism and had to flee the Nazis, first from Germany, then from Austrian, making several stops before finally ending up in the United States. The topic of the seminar deals with von Hildebrand's theory that alongside the intellect and the will, the "heart" constitutes a third fundamental aspect of the human soul.  It is the seat of our emotions, the capacity we have for being moved by things around us--events, actions, things, persons, art, God--that appropriately call for particular responses on our part (joy, sorrow, admiration, and so on).  Von Hildebrand outlined these ideas in va
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E-mail Wit on a Lazy Sunday Afternoon

It seems as though practically every business where I've ever bought anything in the past decade sends me e-mails about their products, specials, deal-of-the-week, etc.  Normally I delete them immediately, without a second glance. But one this afternoon made me hesitate.  I received a "Walgreens Weekly Ad" e-mail.  Its subject line read as follows: "We can't stop lowering prices." So instead of hitting "delete," I sent a quick reply: "In that case, I think I'll wait and shop next week." I have no idea whether or not that reply will go to a real e-mail address and be read by an actual human being.  But I hope so.
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Flags and Statues

No time for a long post this evening, and I don't quite feel like getting back to Gotthelf quite yet.  So a pair of quick links for those interested in thinking about matters troubling our nation these days.  First Things , which has turned a bit too far in a national populist direction for my taste, published a pair of nice columns this week.  One is by my dad, on the meaning of the flag as a symbol of what unites Americans in spite of their differences; the other is by Wilfred McClay, on the problematic demand for moral purity that underlies the calls to tear down statues of various public figures from the past.  Both worth a read.
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Paolo Cognetti

In the last couple of weeks I read a pair of books by Paolo Cognetti , a contemporary Italian author.  The first was called The Eight Mountains  and the second was a recent memoir called The Wild Boy .  They were closely related, and reading the second right after the first showed how much of Cognetti's own experience had gone into the novel. I bought the first a year ago, while I was teaching in London.  I don't even remember now where I came across it initially, but something had made me think I would enjoy it.  And in London--this would not have happened in Houghton!--I happened across both it and its Italian original, Le Otto Montagne , so I bought them both, thinking it might help me try to read a little Italian, though in fact I don't have time for that. The novel, which won a prize in Italy and has now been widely translated, is a story about nature and friendship, as the narrator relates his experiences growing up in the mountains and then returning as an adu
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Chinese Painting

The Wall Street Journal  has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic.  Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing.  (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting."  I thought they were quite interesting.  The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before.  Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen
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