TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "syllabus"
Join Cartoonist Lynda Barry for a University-Level Course on Doodling and Neuroscience
Can I just stop you for a minute and note how fucking amazing it is that one of our greatest living cartoonists is not only teaching this class, but she’s letting us all follow along? Incredible.
Poster for Lynda Barry’s class, “The Unthinkable Mind”, Spring 2013 at The University of Wisconsin-Madison
Filed under: Lynda Barry
(via ayjay)
I like this proposal for a college “Where the New Liberal Arts Meet the Old.”
Foundational courses will include:
- Memorization and Recitation.
- Reading: Natural and Formal Languages.
- Composition: Natural and Formal Languages.
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
- Mathematical Reasoning and Rhetoric
- Care of Plants and Animals.
I went to an interdisciplinary college in which we took some standard courses in-house and then were encouraged to take courses from all over the university to cobble together our own self-designed major, and I actually loved that model, but I always wished that the curriculum was less postmodern and more like a great books program instead. (In the old days, for example, I heard a whole semester was spent on Moby-Dick, talking about religion, America, the ocean, the whaling industry, etc.)
They got rid of that program, so sign me up for this one.
There is something common to everything we call the arts. What is it?
It’s not aesthetics. I’ve seen a squatting guy at a Minnesota ‘Renaissance Faire’ perform Romeo and Juliet using just a cigarette butt and a bottle cap for the actors, and I’ve seen Romeo and Juliet performed by Shakespearean actors in full period costume, and both times this ‘it’ I’m talking about was there.
This ancient ‘it’ has been around at least as long as we have had hands. It’s something I call ‘an image’ and this class is about using our hands — the original digital devices —- to understand the location, function, creation and use of images.
…
When we are kids we might call this interaction with an image ‘playing’ and when we are adults we might call it ‘creative concentration’ but it seems that there are similarities in the state of mind that comes about during the creation of and interaction with an image.
This state of mind is not plain old thinking. Its existence is tied to manipulating something in the external world, usually with our bodies, our hands or voices – a piece of cloth, a series of musical notes, a drawing, a written piece of dialog- The route to creating images seems to be more physical than thinkable. A reliable way to understand and experience images is to make things in series, which is what we’ll be doing in all of our writing and picture making sessions.
If you missed the NYTimes writeup of Lynda’s workshop, go read it.
The syllabus to an English class at Rutgers. If I was a professor, I would do shit like this all the time.
Yes.
Love his reading list:
Don’t let any potential lightweightish-looking qualities of the texts delude you into thinking that this will be a blow-off-type class. These “popular” texts will end up being harder than more conventionally “literary” works to unpack and read critically. You’ll end up doing more work in here than in other sections of 102, probably.
The Silence Of The Lambs is a terrific read, and I just started Lonesome Dove last night.
