New Things

Tonight is my last night in the hostel. I'm looking forward to moving into my new digs tomorrow- just in time, in fact, to have a pint (or several) with my predecessor Cassie Ballert. She's in London for the weekend and it'll be good to have an infusion of Michigan into my European adventures.

In other news I've also got a preliminary class schedule going. It's looking like I'll be in the following classes.

Fall:
 - London's Times of Destruction and (Re)Construction
 - The Chapel in Italy, c. 1300-1500: Form, Function, and Decoration
 - Green Futures (taken in The Bartlett School of Planning)
 - History & Theory of Architecture (taken in The Bartlett School of Architecture)

Spring:
 - Skin and Bones: Medeival Bodies in London Museums and Galleries
 - Methodologies of Art History
 - American Geographies: Figuring the West, 1848-1914
 - Modernity Through the Lens: the European Avant-Garde, Utopia, Technology, and Mass Culture

In the interest of full disclosure, I tried to sneak an Architecture studio course in there despite it not being a Humanities course, but I wasn't allowed by UCL. I am, however, very excited to take my Planning and Architecture courses. The latter will focus on a favorite architect of mine, Rem Koolhaas, pictured below with my brother and sister.

Note: Rem Koolhaas is not a member of the Connors family.

In less navel-gazey news, I've been getting a better sense of the interface between America and Europe (or at least their respective sensibilites). American issues with obesity are pretty well known here, well enough at least for a guy I met in a design gallery to inform me that Herman Miller was now making a wider version of the iconic Eames Lounge (have I mentioned that the London Design Festival is this week?) for American markets.

He also told me that upon his visits to US cities he was surprised by how close "posh" (upscale) areas were to more depressed ones. Given this set of charts I saw this week, it's a rather astute observation; it seems that segregation is alive and well in the US, it's just not institutionalized. Obviously race and economics are their own issues, but the wealth gap (chasm?) in the US does often align itself along racial lines. Not that the UK is without its own socioeconomic challenges, but so far it seems that the level of diversity here is much higher (of course, neither Boston nor U of M are known for being terribly diverse- how much of this is culture shock I'm unsure).

Less depressingly, he mentioned that a common trip to the US for Europeans included flying to the east coast and driving to California or Las Vegas. It's interesting, not only because it throws into focus how spacious and geographically varied our country is, but also because this is a trip not many Americans get to do (at least as far as I've been able to observe). Every person to whom I've mentioned driving cross-country has either told me that it was one of the best things they ever did or that it was something they'd always wanted to do. It makes me want to rent a car and drive out into the country here, just for contrast. I don't know if that's legal. More on this later. I should also recommend James Reeves' excellent The Road to Somewhere: an American Memoir here for anyone interested in reading about the nooks and crannies of the US you find when you just get out and drive. After all, isn't that the American dream?

Monuments

Some photos from Week 1

Cities

This week, I've been trying to find myself an apartment to live in, checking out various flats. I've been freaked out, I've thought I've had it figured out, and I've slept in the daytime. Since it seems this song has been right about everything so far, it'll all work out.

Rest Assured This Will Not Last

(Musical accompaniment to this post.)*

I usually avoid talking to strangers when I go to the airport; perhaps it’s a sign of the changes I’m in for in the following year that within minutes of embarking for London I met one to whom I spent at least an hour talking, and that we hugged when I got up to board my flight.

Kathy admittedly did most of the legwork; she initiated the conversation and kept it going beyond the early stalls. While I’d been mildly reluctant at first, I soon found myself thoroughly enjoying her company.

She’s a former teacher and current interfaith chaplain on a pilgrimage to a German spa town to meet with a group of other spiritually-inclined people and to discuss their faiths (and presumably their doubts). We began by talking about our respective travel plans and by the time the announcement came that we are now ready to start boarding Flight VS12 to London Heathrow she had told me what she wants to ask God when she dies.

One of my fears concerning this adventure is that my propensity for shyness might preclude me from taking full advantage of all that will surround me in London. With this as my reminder to connect with more people, think I’ll be okay. 

*Special thanks to Steven Hyden and Charlie Pierce for turning me onto R.E.M. and for the idea for the aforementioned accompaniment, respectively.

About This Blog

I alluded in my last post to the fact that I’ve yet to find a definite direction I want my life to take, and to be honest I hope that this experience helps point me in one.  Thus I will approach this blog as a series of dispatches from a second adolescence, of sorts – height-marks on the Roger M. Jones moulding, hopefully getting taller the longer I've been here. Of course, it's a lot to expect to be transformed by something and almost certainly wrong to plan to be, so I'll also make a concerted effort to let it be what it is.

Before we start, I’ll warn the reader that I’ll be borrowing pretty heavily from two bloggers whose work I read religiously. Charlie Pierce is the first, he a legendary sports and politics writer and fellow Saint John’s High alum. The second, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is a blogger at The Atlantic whose posts this summer about his experience as an ex-pat in France were particularly instructive for me. If in any post in this space I can achieve a fraction of their daily insight I’ll consider myself to have grown tremendously as a writer.

This brings me to another heads-up: I’m going to take this blog seriously. I have often found myself wishing I spent more energy on writing, and I’m tired of not doing it. I hope that this will help me become better. If you've got feedback, hit me. 

Hope you enjoy it.

An Introduction

Hi, I'm Dan.

I'm the lucky recipient of the 2013-14 Roger M. Jones Fellowship, and I'll be studying History of Art at University College London starting in a few weeks. I'm very excited.

I'd like to thank Cassie for her well-wishes and for her excellent stewardship of this blog over the past year- I've enjoyed keeping tabs on her European experience, and have used it as something of a model for my own. (I should mention that the extent of my international travel is a 3-day stay in Quebec in 1999, so I've appreciated the guidance.)

I graduated from UofM in December 2012 after majoring in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and minoring in Art & Design. Like Cassie, I hope to incorporate what I learn as the Jones fellow into my career but haven't yet settled on what that career will be. I do, however, have a strong interest in Product and/or Industrial Design, and I hope to be able to contribute something worthwhile to those fields (or maybe another, as the case may be in 5-10 years) by my combining engineering and art.

I'm looking forward to keeping this blog- I haven't committed to blogging before but I do compulsively write things down in the margins of notebooks and on napkins etc., and will relish the opportunity to attempt to synthesize them into something. I'll have another post before I leave with my intentions and aspirations for this space.

Alright, that's me. Who's reading this?