Eero Saarinen’s General Motors Technical Center

Photographs by Balthazar Korab via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. Check it out here, including more photos of the GM Technical Center and Saarinen’s other projects. Here’s the wikipedia page and a short article linking Saarinen to the rise of the corporate campus. Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Balthazar Korab Archive[…]

Notes from a Backwards Chair: The Life Lessons We Learned and How We Got Real

The following is the text of a lecture I gave on May 13th at North Central College’s Sigma Tau Delta (English Honor Society) induction ceremony.

Thank you for inviting me to speak this afternoon. I hope you don’t regret asking me. I’ve never spoken at an occult ceremony, so this is very special for me.

As many of you know, I’m leaving North Central College and it’s a real honor to be able to speak with you on this day of excellence—I say that sincerely, even though there’s a lot of sarcasm to wade through in the talk I’m about to give. There’s some sincerity here, too. I thank you, my audience, for listening to me. I appreciate and value every minute of my time at North Central, so I thank you for giving me this opportunity.

When I talk to former students after they’ve graduated and moved on with their lives, the first thing they usually tell me is how much, even though they didn’t know it then, they’ve come to value the times in the classroom where we gathered in a circle, flipped our chairs around, and got real. I call these sessions ‘rap sessions’ and during these rap sessions, we put our books away and take a good, hard look at ourselves. All of my current students know what I’m talking about.

Processing

Check out this simple program I built to learn the Processing language. The program randomly displays words from a concordance of my novel-in-progress.

Some links

The Craft of Verse: The Norton Lectures, 1967-68 (Borges) at UbuWeb Sound. Gertrude Stein reading Matisse and other stuff at UbuWeb Sound. William Blake Archive. Some live Captain Beefheart on the Youtube. Pere Ubu from Urgh! A Music War, also on the Youtube. Also, Klaus Nomi from the same film. And, here’s an article about[…]