Notes from Undergrad

Senior year is a bookend, a fast deadline that guides growth like a trellis, a meridian that divides adolescence and adulthood. It’s a time perfectly appropriate for that morbid heaviness felt when contemplating life and death, one’s plans for life, or one’s lack of plans. Or when contemplating that there may be no perfect plans or right answers—even the best of runners cross the finish line spent and near collapse.

I don’t know if others feel this heaviness in the air but I believe that, as seniors, we begin to feel the burden of our future years sliding on our shoulders even as early as in August. I remember feeling the beginning of this pressure in that month, at the end of that month, when I heard that Seamus Heaney died.

Books in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Nowadays it’s difficult to survive an undergraduate education in the humanities without coming across Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The Harvard University Press has released a new book on Benjamin, in case we are in danger of forgetting all those elevated, multisyllabic germanic thoughts we should be thinking when we look at, say, a coffee table art book or a poster of a painting by Klimt, Da Vinci, or Munch.

Charivari Harvardiana

History concentrators of a certain generation—we who took the former version of History 97—are intimately familiar with Parisian cat massacres, baby-eating dingoes, and the charivari. Charivari, which has sojourned from Greek to Latin and then to French, and loosely translates as “rough music,” began its life as a folk custom during the Middle Ages. A ritualized community event involving loud and discordant music, revelry, and role reversal between feudal classes, the charivari was the ancestor of protest.

Death of the Poet

Beginning today in Washington D.C., a group of poets have assembled for a weekend devoted to the performance and celebration of socially engaged works.  Hosted by Split This Rock, “Poems of Provocation and Witness” is a four-day national festival held every two years. Poets and activists will converge from across the country to read and recite; attend panels and workshops; and network with writers, community organizers, and youth organizations. Their goals are “to speak out for justice” and “to demand that our government stop spying on us.”

A Messy Love Triangle

James Patterson—bestselling author, savior of literature? Perhaps. Patterson leads Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s top-earning authors and pledged this February to donate $1 million to the country’s independent bookstores. His words, as reported in the New York Times, were: “Our bookstores in America are at risk. Publishing and publishers as we’ve known them are at stake. To some extent the future of American literature is at stake.”