Is This a Joke?!

So, my dept's secretary just sent out the following "job" listing:

BARD GRADUATE CENTER

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE POSITION

The Bard Graduate Center invites applications for a non-stipendiary Research Associate position. The BGC is a graduate research institute committed to studying the cultural history of the material world, drawing on methodologies and approaches from art and design history, economic and cultural history, history of technology, philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology. We especially welcome applications from scholars working on projects parallel to our own. The fellow will be given an office and access to subsidized accommodation and will be expected to participate in the intellectual life of the institution. For additional information about the BGC, see www.bgc.bard.edu. We will appoint either a single Research Associate for a year, or two semester-long Associates. Applications should include a cover letter, curriculum vitae, sample publication (SASE), and a list of three referees, and should be sent by 15 March to Chair, Fellowship Search Committee, Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, 18 W. 86th Street, New York, NY 10024. No electronic applications may be made.

Did you catch that? "Non-stipendiary." Is this a joke?

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for institutions building intellectual communities around similar interests. I guess I just wish they framed it that way: we're inviting people to come, do research, and hang out and talk about shared interests. Instead, they make it sound all jobby (position! search committee! appoint!) without it actually being a job. Well, guess what: "studying" takes more than an office and a subsidy to a bed. This is so depressing...

Let's Hear It for the Globalization of Pop

Gregory Warner's "For Which It Stands: Afghanistan, an accordion journey"

I don't know how to embed the player, but just go here to view the videotape. A cute story about speaking across the cultural divide through...pop culture. I especially like how this guy dresses the part.

A Featureless, Windswept, Icy Plateau

David Abbey Paige, Halo, Two Airplanes, Beacon, 1934

I wish I could take a bobsledding trip to Massachusetts to see this show at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. I'm very intrigued by the pastels of David Abbey Paige (1901-1979), an Anatolian-born Armenian artist, who came to Massachusetts at the age of 10. He seems to have worked as a commercial artist throughout his life, but caught the polar bug around the time of the first American expeditions to the Antactic in the late 1920s. After some persistent lobbying, he joined the Second Byrd Antarctic Expedition in 1933-35, and produced "100 pastels of various sizes; 300 pencil drawings of aurora australis, and eight portraits in charcoal of the men as they appeared through the Winter Night, with their picturesque beards." A bunch of these are now at the Ohio State University Archives along with the papers of Admiral Richard E. Byrd. Lots more pictures here.

I really like how blindingly colorful these are, as I imagine the light and the crazy expanses of sky and ice and water at the South Pole must be otherworldly. I also like the more intimate scale here. Unlike more famous painters of sublime landscapes, like Frederick Edwin Church, Paige isn't giving you staggering perspectives or mysticism. I get the sense that these colors are his best attempt to convey the light, which seems so strong as to destroy any perspective whatsoever. Anyway, let me know if you get to Salem and tell me what you think.

David Abbey Paige, Snowmobiles Leaving the Station Around Midnight, 1934

Queer Links?

What do the following two things have in common?

• an essay about footnotes ("i through xvii" by Christoph Boots, LTTR 4)
• a zine about pickling and cheesemaking ("Wild Fermentation: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Cultural Manipulation" by Sandor Ellix Katz)
  

I'm starting to forget why this makes sense, but I'm going to ponder while my cabbage¹ ferments.

¹Deviant cabbage!!!

By Dint of Sheer Strength and Meters of Carefully Perforated Netting

Wall of plants, clinging. CaixaForum, Madrid.
(Click to smell)

Here and here.