A Brooklyn Kind of Day

Before I start – a special birthday salute to Dave! He's in Ann Arbor, and I'm in New York, and I guess that's just the way it happens in long-distance marriages. But I sure am glad he was born!

Today I met up with a new friend who is also a first-year tenure-track professor in the humanities. She had the brilliant idea of meeting up with friends on Friday (when few people teach) to do work, and then rewarding herself by doing something interesting. Today, we met up at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library to grade final papers:

The exterior is beautiful and imposing, while the interior feels a little worn out. But we found a quiet table by a big window and set to work. I'm not used to seeing this kind of message posted on library walls, though:

Sad! I hadn't wanted to write on stairwell walls, but after I read the notice, I was a little tempted <shhhhh!>.

After our grading (read: complaining) party, we headed over to the Brooklyn Museum to check out the new "Ai Weiwei: According to What?" exhibit. I was too exhausted to be fully open to the experience, but I did really enjoy it. These two pieces were my favorite:

 This piece is called "Straight," and it's made out of 73 tons of straightened rebar. The rebar came from crumpled homes destroyed in the Sichuan earthquake that killed so many schoolchildren.

This is "Moon Chest," part of a series of beautiful quince wood chests lined up parallel to each other, but with a circular hole cut in the center of each. They are aligned so that when you look through the hole, you get a sense of the changing phases of the moon.

It was raining, I had to take the train, umbrellas in my face, blah blah blah; but overall, it was a good Brooklyn day. (Just don't ask me about those papers I was grading.)