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I have taught in MFA programs for many years now, and I begin my first class of each semester by looking around the workshop table at my students’ eager faces and then telling them they are pursuing a degree that will entitle them to nothing. I don’t do this to be sadistic or because I want to be an unpopular professor; I tell them this because it’s the truth. They are embarking on a life in which apprenticeship doesn’t mean a cushy summer internship in an air-conditioned office but rather a solitary, poverty-inducing, soul-scorching voyage whose destination is unknown and unknowable.
If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they’d become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt.
Mattthomas: “Graduate school in the humanities is a trap”: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/
austinkleon: all 3 of those articles have been fantastic and absolutely devastating
Mattthomas: Agreed. Yet I bet no one in my program, faculty or grad student has read them.
austinkleon: I have been greeted w/ outright hostility for forwarding them!
Mattthomas: I am reminded of this image from PLANET OF THE APES
austinkleon: LOL
Fun little video showcasing some of Austin’s great food trailers. Pay attention, those of you visiting for SXSW. (Also: I drew the picture on the nametags.)
Great documentary. A beautiful portrait of a couple who decided what was important to them, and made it work with what they had. From the NYTimes review:
Once upon a time, a postal clerk with an enthusiasm for art history married an open-minded librarian. From the outside, little distinguished Herb and Dorothy Vogel from any other middle-class couple in midcentury New York. But by the early 1960s, if you were to squeeze inside their modest Manhattan apartment, dodging the cats and turtle tanks, you would bump into the most astonishing company: the work of Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Richard Tuttle, Robert Mangold, Lynda Benglis and dozens of other artists who would come to represent the crème de la crème of Minimalist and Conceptual art.
The story of how this collection — a large portion of which now resides at the National Gallery of Art in Washington — came to be is the subject of Megumi Sasaki’s modest, touching documentary, “Herb & Dorothy.”
My guess is that this will make her seem even hotter to her natural audience.
FINALLY a Wii game comes out that I give a shit about. How in the hell did I not know this was out? I loved the first one. Gotta get this.
Newspaper + Marker = Poetry. Pre-order it now for $10 on Amazon.com
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