First week: done

September 03, 2010

I've completed my first week of classes and I could not be more thrilled! My Thesis professor is a woman whom I admire: MFA from Columbia, young and hip with a whole head of salt and pepper hair, slight accent (French Canadian/Spanish?), intelligence up the wazoo.. endless. I also have a teacher who will be Skyping (too Sci-Fi for me) with the class for the first 6 weeks because she's in some far off land exploring.

Then I have an old fart of a teacher who grew up in Baltimore and has a Baltimore accent who went to the army, was stationed in Virginia, would go to DC and spend hours in the National Gallery teaching himself "art history", worked as a paige in a library, decided to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a cowboy so went out West and worked on a farm, came back and went to Hopkins for philosophy, somewhere in there lived in France for a few years and knows EVERYTHING. The way he looks at paintings is amazing, with so much energy. More energy than anyone I've ever come across. How many professors do you know that pretend to be light and squiggle around in front of the class trying to bust into a paintings that have been scummbled as opposed to glazed? Amazing. Can speak all sorts of languages and is crude and says the F-word. Love it.

This is why going to a school that costs a bazillion dollars is worth every cent.

I leave you with this poem by William Butler Yeats titled Memory.

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.