Stuff I like

A quick break from my paper writing (about corporate personhood and vampires!!) to give a shout-out to things I like. I figure I spend enough time on here being negative… might as well point out some things that spark my interest/enjoyment. Today I chose two: one old, one new. The new: this wonderful little capsular world from artist Thomas Doyle. He constructs miniature, emotionally-weighted worlds inside glass jars! He says he was obsessed by dioramas as a kid! I was too: I used to cull grass and moss and flowers from the yard and create miniature “gardens” inside shoe boxes, only to be tragically distraught when they inevitably died. And, seeing as how I  have such problems with much of modern art, and how a trip to the MoMa for me is generally like Dante’s trip through purgatory (fascinating, but not exactly enjoyable), it was thrilling to find myself so captivated by Doyle’s work.

Obama and the Age of Iconicity

For those of us who came out of school and into the “real” world this past year it has been a disheartening time, to say the least: with the economy in shambles, and entry-level jobs disappearing more rapidly than free beer at a college kegger, we’ve watched the seemingly sudden evisceration of the American workplace as we (or rather, our parents) knew it. Freshly endowed with our flashy diplomas and a skill-set supposedly primed to find us a place in the “new” knowledge economy, we instead found ourselves signing on for yearlong unpaid internships, taking jobs we’d turned down at seventeen (Starbucks, anyone?) or, like me, beating a hasty retreat towards the preserving walls of academia.