pursuit of perishable things | brooke here

Being a bit of a techie and a humanist who has a thing for folklore and narrative in all its various guises, I am connected to a bunch of “digital storytelling” folks on Twitter. In fact, they started to find me just after the moment all the transcription services found me…
Anyways, I have been pondering [...]

Jo Guldi writing for Absent Magazine, Issue 3: The Surprising Death of the Public Intellectual and a Manifesto for its Restoration:
The issue here is the loss, for the public, of a certain kind of memory: the memory of cultural, social, and political history of human timescales, the memory that not so long ago things worked [...]

“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, [...]

Anyone who has the impression that sewing is for old ladies is crazy.
Dangers abound: broken needle parts that fly at your face, that adrenaline rush that only being stuck by a pin unawares can bring. And last, but certainly not least, the ever lurking potential of sewing one’s fingers to the project.
I lucked out [...]

Look! Look!
My first piece to Etsy!
I don’t know why I have procrastinated so long, but this is the day. Soon, I will have more items posted for purchase, including a boys 4/5 T reversible Quilted Jacket, a simple baby quilt…

I have found a current favorite in the stack, “More Work for Mother” by Ruth Schwartz Cowan. This little book packs a tight punch, and is essentially a history of the technology of the home. The author’s hypothesis is, very briefly, that the home was only partially industrialized in the Twentieth Century, and that the [...]

McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge.” Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
I was very excited and somewhat saddened to find this book. Excited, because it seems to be in the vein of thought that I am searching for; and saddened because, original contribution being a thing [...]

Humanities Research Methods is a class that leads students through the research process that, eventually, leads to a senior project. Since I am further away from my senior project than many who take this class, I am in a good position to look deeply into a topic that may (or may not) become my topic [...]

Institutions crumble
under the big foot of man
But when he sits; rests, too long
he builds them tall by hand

I am concerned with ways that community’s can reclaim what is “news.” I think this is the future.

It occurs to me that I haven’t really defined ways to consider perishable things; what is perishable in Plato’s mind is not what is perishable in my mind. For starters, I would never lose my stories or my sentiment.
No republic, no cave; rocking the foundations of antiquated copyright ought to be a fairly simple [...]

The last workbook of Greek and Roman Culture asked us to write an essay on some of the most influential ideologies that we had encountered while journeying through ancient Greece and into the Roman Empire. We were asked to “pluck a bouquet” of insights that we found applicable today.
I usually have a zero tolerance policy [...]

If there is one thing I have learned from the first two quarters of the World Classics Program it is that a) our sense of decline precedes us, and b) that human societies can be seen to cycle through periods of prosperity and growth and periods of decline and stagnation. While this is a simple [...]

I chose to take the Classics program knowing full well that it would be suffering.
Suffering is one thing, but I did not expect to see such a beautifully conceived program so… manhandled. A really intense education is one thing, but a program which depreciates its own mission is another. Like the ouroboros that eats itself, [...]