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.

Comments

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.

Non capisco!

About once a week I get an e-mail from something called the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. I don't know why. I know nothing about them and have no idea how I got on their mailing list. But I generally take a quick look at the e-mail, because every now and then I see something interesting. The other day I got one of these and saw what appeared to be a potentially interesting lecture today. It was by a professor named Stefano Jossa, currently at Royal Holloway, the University of London. He was going to be speaking on his new book, in Italian, but the title of which in English would be The Most Beautiful in the World: Why Love the Italian Language . It sounded intriguing, it was free, all you had to do was register and get a Zoom link. So I did. It turned out that the lecture was actually being sponsored not by the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, but rather by the one in Montreal. But who cares, right? As long as it's not in French, which didn'

The Blessing and Curse of E-mail

I am, in fact, deeply grateful for e-mail. It allows me to be in ready contact with colleagues both in this country and abroad, and to pursue opportunities I would otherwise never be able to. But then there are days like today. My e-mail has been increasingly difficult to keep up with for the last year or so. But just before supper this evening, I looked at how many e-mails I had written and sent today. The total: exactly 100. By now, of course, it's a bit more than that. I spent much of the day trying to reschedule a student trip to Germany that was canceled due to the coronavirus crisis. We were going to travel over Easter; now we will try it next fall instead. Probably about half of the e-mails were related to that. I don't even want to know how many words I wrote today. If they were a book.... Now it's back to real work, reading the first half of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther so that I can put together a mini-lecture for my Humanities students

Plague Time

Search This Blog