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 than in person. The posts are likely to be fairly random, and I claim no great significance for them. I will write about whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment. So don't expect much! But it will help us keep in touch.

It seemed appropriate that the psalm in church this morning--which of course I had to hear via livestream--was the 23rd: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

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Dursli

Back to Gotthelf! I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink. Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ). This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor. But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution. Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

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...

Alias, or Real Life

I mentioned yesterday that I'd managed to read several things over the past week. And believe it or not, not all of them were by Gotthelf! On Saturday I decided I should give myself a break and read something else for a change, so that morning I decided to finish off a book I'd been in the middle of for a while, Alias, oder Das wahre leben ( Alias, or Real Life ), by Felix Philipp Ingold . Ingold is a Swiss author, editor, translator, and journalist; there isn't much about him in English, and I don't think any of his books have been translated, but you can read a one-paragraph summary of him here . It was an interesting book, partly because of the premise. It purports to tell the life story of one Kirill Beregow, alias Carl Berger, a Volga Russian of German descent. The hook is that Beregow/Berger is a real person, an acquaintance of Ingold's, and the book is supposedly based upon conversations with him and papers that he left behind, fictionaliz...

Plague Time

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