New Offices

 "it is our job now, to make it through the day

and get along-

at the end, once we have weathered this reboot

we wonder, how will the world be remade”

    George Bodmer, from “Quarantine Poem”

illustration by Brooke Uporsky

The sixteenth annual IU Northwest Arts and Sciences two-day research conference took place as scheduled, only it was completely on-line, with participants in “new offices” at home rather than at the university.  Thanks to Aaron Pigors and his Instructional Media Center staff, it went, for the most part, with only minor hitches.  I was disappointed at the dearth of History sessions but impressed with the high quality of most student presenters.  In fact, thanks to the computer hookup, I could understand what folks were saying better than in previous years.  In fact, the students felt more comfortable in front of computers than standing before a live audience.

I was particularly impressed by Niko Pino’s discussion of existential analysis. Apparently speaking from a few notes rather than merely reading an article, Pino, who studied under Professor Gianluca Dimuzio, summarized the beliefs of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and French writer Albert Camus and then explored the theories of Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl, whose book “Man’s Search for Meaning” is considered one of the most influential of the twentieth-century. Frankl evidently defined three main core values as experiential, creative, and attitudinal and believed (if I understood Pino correctly) that those who had found a why to live next needed to learn to cope with the how.

I was excited to see that Fine Arts student Christopher Hartz was on the program, being familiar with his work.  Introduced by Jennifer Greenburg as a postmodernist whose art contain elements of irony, skepticism, and blasphemy, Hartz poked fun at inspirational sayings and juxtaposed soothing words such a feeling and caring with “dirty” words such as fellatio and cunt. He paired “Fore Shin” with two butterflies and drew an illustration almost identical to Kurt Vonnegut’s “asshole” in “Breakfast of Champions” and titled it “asterisk.”  An old-fashioned historian wary of the postmodernist belief that truth is relative and illusory, I still chuckled at some of Hartz’s silkscreens.

Spencer Cortwright, whose boundless enthusiasm is always contagious, chaired a session that included fascinating papers by Erin Cassidy (“Dungeons and Dragons: The Gendered Allure of Fantasy”) and Heather Harwood (“Tattoos of Us”). Since its appearance in the 1970s, the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons until recently was considered to be the exclusive province of young male nerds, but in the past couple decades its appeal has broadened.  Since a chat room allowed for questions, I wondered if various participants played G, PG, R and even X-rated versions.  Erin, 27, who started playing in college, answered that while some characters took on queer personas, her friends played what she considered a PG version, albeit with plenty of violence.

Heather Harwood provided examples of tattoos from all over the world and gave a fascinating account of how they differ according to culture and gender.  Men’s tattoos tend to be macho, tribal, and family-based while women’s more personal and spontaneous, thus more likely to be regretted in retrospect.  Queer women often opt for tattoos with a rainbow motif or the date they first came out.  On chat I mentioned that Glen Park was once home to a famous tattoo artist, Roy Boy, who counted Cher among his clients. Roy Boy and his wife, who stripped down to a bikini to show off her tattoos, were once speakers at one of Garrett Cope’s Glen Park Conversations.  They were a huge hit.

Almost all day two presentations were science-related.  Dean Mark Hoyert, unfailingly witty, welcomed everyone, adding that the day before he understood all talks but one but was not so confidant about most upcoming papers, such as “Screening transposon mutant library of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus for mutants with altered sensitivity toward four antimicrobial agents.”  He added that he was especially looking forward to a session about catnip.  My thoughts exactly.  Again, most students did an excellent job, and I learned from Jerome Wyrobek that horseback riding is good therapy for those with MS and from Laila Nawab and Jeffrey Dykstra details about hydroponics, growing methods where plants receive nutrients from water solutions rather than dirt. While Dykstra noted that cats go crazy over catnip, I’m still in the dark over the nature of the “high.”  I’ll never forget our cat Marvin discovering catnip in our backyard garden and acting like he’d died and gone to heaven.

Among those mentioned for special thanks was former English professor George Bodmer, who designed an illustration commemorating IU’s two hundredth anniversary and IUN’s first virtual COAS conference.  Unfortunately, the drawing was nowhere in evidence.  I assume it was meant for programs that would have been distributed at the site, but nobody evidently thought to use it on the online version of the program. In

          It would be the time to fix it

       to build a new world

           but in our wounded shock, we are hardly in the best shape

           to reconstruct it soundly

In a recently discovered chapter of “A Fistful of Fig Newtons” entitled “The Barbi Doll Celebrates New Year’s” Jean Shepherd returns to the Region after three years in the army:

    Out of the street I pulled my collar up against my old enemy, the Indiana wind.  I sniffed the air, the familiar, fragrant, sickening aromatic air of home, redolent of blast furnace fumes, the noxious gases of innumerable refineries, the pungent yet titillating overtones of the Grasselli Chemical Works, subtly blended with the exhalations of Lake Michigan, its frozen, clammy, detergent-laden waters.  I breathed in deeply the rich compost of life-giving poisonous vapor and trudged on into the night.

    My eyes were watery from the cold.  I battled on past laundries and bowling alleys, past the little candy store where as a loose-limbed stripling I had bought a sinister top.  I tacked into the wind and around a bleak corner and there before me lay the Warren G. Harding School.  In the blackness of the playground I almost saw the dark, moving shadows of Farkas and Grover Dill, of Schwartz and Flick, of me playing a ghostly game of softball.

He arrived home, knocked and identified himself to his mother, and after undoing chains, latches, and locks, she was unable to open the door.  Shepherd wrote: “Nothing had changed.  That door had been sticking since before I was born, and I knew exactly what to do.  I gave a swift kick at the lower left corner, at the same time hurling my right shoulder forward and simultaneously giving it a blow with my left knee. It never failed.  The door swung open.”  Immediately he was engulfed in familiar smells: “meatloaf, red cabbage, the old daybed, moldy tires from the basement, my mother’s red chenille bathrobe, which faintly breathed out the myriad aromatics of countless breakfasts past.”