the whirlwind

I haven't posted in quite a while. I have all these great ideas and events to share, but I'm too busy participating in them, it seems, to do them all justice in the blog-form. So I'll try to bring everyone up to date with the happenings.

• reading (on audio and otherwise): the Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers. Very lucid, excellent thoughts on the creative process and how we reflect our triune Creator with our own works. Also I'm listening to the Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper. I confess that I am not as riveted as I would like to be. It's violent, for one, but also so ponderously written that I wish he would just come out and plainly speak, instead of beating about the bush and using what Mark Twain called "second cousins of the right word." --I must say how relieved I was to read Twain's criticism of Cooper. I thought I was just not used to a more archaic writing style, but now I find it's just bad writing that sounds so unfamiliar to me. Thank God for that. I am also a bit disgusted that Cooper only refers to women as "the females," like we are wholly other specimens, vastly inferior to his rugged mountain men. It seems that Cooper can't make up his mind whether he hates, loves, loathes, or reverences the Indians, because they are described with such revulsion sometimes, then he is awestruck at their ingenuity in others. I saw the movie ages ago, and would like to see it again (if nothing else but to drool over Daniel Day Lewis), but I am not super-excited about finishing the last quarter of the book.
• visited: Dafi Alpaca farm a few minutes north of hunt valley. Check out lella's blog for more details, and these pictures below (of a baby alpaca, the Anatolian Shepherd dog that was enormous and lovable, and an extreme closeup of an alpaca nose):
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• I also visited the 2007 Maryland Institute commencement exhibition. I was really excited about the MAT offerings, the fun graphic design pieces (below, re-packaging yarn and other incidentals in a better way), and also some pieces I'm considering buying, as they are right up my alley. The artist uses childhood craft supplies to make some really fun and sophisticated pieces. My friend whose expertise is intelligence ethics (! what a field!) thought the googly-eye explosion could be a comment on the surveillance culture, which I really think is intriguing. I just liked the pieces because they look amazing and fun. And I bet if you shake them they sound like a rain stick... I was a bit disappointed with the paintings, though. If they weren't purely abstract, they were either exploitative images of women by women, obsessive-compulsive detail pieces like you see on t-shirts all over, or littered with body parts and ominous soldiers. I didn't see the entire show, I think--maybe 7/8 of the campus-wide extravaganza, but I confess I was pretty sad to see not a whole lot of really interesting figurative pieces. It's not like they don't have amazing faculty to bring that about.
• saw spiderman 3. Loved it. Guilty pleasure at seeing Toby McGuire all goth and trying to act suave. The scene where the sandman emerges is pure beauty.
  
• remember my post about A Thousand Resurrections? Well, ever since I read the book I have wanted to help in some way there. Once again, there is no such thing as a coincidence, because a representative from their school came to talk at my church about 2 weeks after I read the book. I went, told him I used to teach art, and they were like "ART?? Really???" and had been itching to have an art teacher come. I visited the school and was so happy with what I saw, and the potential for doing something good and giving these kids an outlet for their creativity. It felt so much like the school I went to as a child, which was very comforting too. So this summer I'll be teaching a little art twice a week, and perhaps doing more in the fall with the faculty or the kids, not sure which. It was such a funny, seamless thing, with all the marks of God's orchestration. Now I need to write some lesson plans for the first time in years. Whew, I've gotten to be a lazy teacher lately.
  

There's tons more to share, but I must go to bed now. Here's a parting shot of my boys in yellow: