Sunday, October 11, 2009

Blogging in extremis, or is that Cleveland?

This post is destined to be more perfunctory than most. I spent all of yesterday on a flight from Paris to Cleveland, with a tense connection in Newark that might have given me a few more gray hairs had not that job not been taken care of long ago by anxieties past. On the Paris-Newark flight my seat-mate was a most interesting Chinese-American musician, a former member of the Curtis faculty, who is now pursuing a musical career in Paris. But as he was better at sleeping in a cramped Continental seat that I am, we only really got into conversation somewhere around Newfoundland. I am further constrained by the fact that I am traveling without computer, and I shall be dependent upon the generosity of new-found friends at the Computer Center on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. My first stop was Glidden House, my three-night home-away-from home, a classy hotel on the edge of the CWRU campus.





This may be the first blog posting ever sent from the "business" computer at the Glidden House sign-in desk. I am going to spend most of today the Hawken School, and talking with the students there about the Humanities. (The capital letter is about all the respect they get these days.)


The principal purpose of my visit is to give a lecture sponsored by the Art History department at Case Western in conjunction with the fabulous Cleveland Art Museum itself. That will be tomorrow, and I shall try to add an addendum concerning it.