vocation

Within a university, staff/administration reconcile the "opposites" of faculty <=> students.

My job is essentially to facilitate the process of "teaching-learning", which sometimes requires me to learn, or upload information, sometimes to teach, or download it, but usually to do something different from both with little resemblance to either.

autocatalysis

Can't sleep. Reading Anthony Blake.

Twitter, anyone?

Number Six:

No, FCE sucks big floppy donkey dicks. So much so that its acronym should be changed from FCE to BFDD. It's impossibly complicated and fussy, and the learning curve is prohibitive. Tannis Anyone was made with iMovie.

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Thanks, Wendy. Welcome.

i (Phone) once was lost, but now i (Phone) am found.

My iPhone went missing for a few hours this morning. All good now.

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Listening to Cheat the Gallows by Bigelf.

And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!

The front lawn of the Nunnery:


Two articles in the New York Times recently looked at the relationship between academia (my vocation/charity of choice) and the real world. The current economic situation is wreaking havoc on the college admissions process. Some quotes:

It's like the dot-com bubble burst for higher ed ... We've been in this growth mode for a period of time. Now there's a real leveling going on.

It's a consumer confidence issue ... families are feeling like they can't afford it even if they're in the same financial position they were three months ago.

And job prospects, even for those with higher or terminal degrees, are scarce:

... the system producing graduate students [is] increasingly out of sync with the system hiring them.

[Applicants with] Ph.D.s are stacked up ... like planes hovering over La Guardia.

Another article this week, also in the Times, focuses on the plight of the large public research university, citing Arizona State University as a reference point. For some reason Michael Crow, the university's president, made it his goal to expand ASU to 100,000 students by 2020. Are there really people to whom this sounds like a good idea?

Cui bono when a student attends a dinosaur of an institution? Education of value is a priori an individual experience. And large institutions have difficulty adapting to the shifting needs of the moment, not to mention the lapses in judgment which can arise while trying to negotiate conflicts of interest among a significant number of stakeholders. Plus, google news keeps telling me that transparency has a hard time thriving in large, complex organizations, much to the detriment of you and me.

Auditions, etc.

Auditions went well. This was the largest audition day of the year, with well over 100 applicants doing their thing. I've been managing auditions for eleven years now and I'm still surprised when someone shows up who cannot play their instrument. Like, at all.

My own definition of "being able to play your instrument" is different from the music school's definition, and is both broader and simpler. For instance, I've never fallen for the package-deal fallacy which claims that in order to play your instrument you must needs also be able to read music (a skill of questionable 21st-century value at any rate). But I do expect you to be musical, which is relatively rare. And being musical has nothing whatever to do with being able to play something difficult. Please, dear God, no showboating. Being "impressive" = musical onanism.

I would also like to request that you possess the ability to play well with others, which requires you to listen to the musicians around you. Which again, rare. We tend to assume that if two or more people are playing music together that they must be listening to each other. Yeah, no.

This will not surprise anyone who has engaged in conversation with their fellow human beings. We've all had the experience of conversationalizing with others who apparently don't have enough attention to follow along, yes? In my job, I speak with many people over the course of a day. I would say that about 30% of them (a generously low estimate) are otherwise intelligent people who have never learned to listen. Their minds wander when they stop speaking, and sometimes they flatly and cluelessly interrupt. I have less patience for this sort of social backwardness as I get older.

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In more colorful news, here's a photo I took on audition day morning of a painting hanging in the lobby of the Rialto Theater.

Bedlam Without Tears

According to TripAdvisor, the building I work in - the Haas-Howell Building - is the 148th most popular attraction in Atlanta. To put this in perspective, the Telephone Museum comes in at a respectable #130. The Institute of Paper and Science Technology is #67.

Before you get too excited, let me say that I believe this to be less a statement about the overall awesomeness of my building in particular and more a testament to the lack of true blue places-of-interest in Bedlam in general. Though L humorously suggests that tourists do in fact flock to the Haas-Howell Building, if only to tell friends back home they've been to the spot where Sabitathica, music school admissions and enrollment manager extraordinaire, volunteers.

And for those of you keeping score, the Haas-Howell Building was designed in late Beaux-Arts style by Neel Reid, who studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Mr. Reid also designed Emory University Hospital.

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In other news, a book by Jean Vaysse which made an impression on me in 1993 is back in print.

Some assorted photographs from the last two weeks, arranged for your viewing pleasure.

This is Minnie, Candler Park's favorite scavenger cat, reposing in one of the Nunnery's flowerpots.


Currently reading the Canterbury Tales (with iced espresso).


Candler Park with the sun setting.


A close look at the picture below (of me and Ellie drinking margaritas) will reveal that my straw was pinched, or sealed at one end, which led me to wonder whether it was the final drinking straw of its batch to roll off the production line. Which led me to look sternly at Ellie and say "Elizabeth, this is the last straw!"


The tree in the front yard of the Nunnery which blooms for two weeks each year and may or may not be a Paulownia:


Again:


The park (Centennial Olympic) near music school:

Always something there to remind me.

Skipped lunch today and went to the park to watch kids play in the fountains.


My office:


My assistant (Miss America) playing with my slinky (ahem) in the stairwell.

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Back to work...

A dark video

An interesting musical opportunity is in my near future.

Architexture

Candler Park:

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Spring break

That snowstorm? Yeah, it hit here too.

The back porch of the Nunnery:

Candler Park

Some more photographs from a walk L and I took around the outskirts of the Nunnery.

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