Ann Kirschner

When my blog went AWOL

Thanks to my colleague Joe Ugoretz, some of my content is back….but a lot still missing. I am debating the effort to reconstruct v. start all over again.

While I continue to dither, here’s something that delighted me: Sala’s Gift is a top library book in Brattleboro, Vermont. I have never been there, but hey, I’m giving a big shout out to readers there. Halllllloooo, Brattleboro!

Hey, I had lunch here today! 3 stars@La Grenouille

I was lucky enough to be a guest at La Grenouille on the day it won three stars…quite well deserved.

Delicious soup to begin with, and a frisee salad with smoked salmon and poached egg. And I tasted my host’s quenelle, which were ever bit as good as the review suggests.

Alas, no wine, had to go back to work. Can’t wait to return when I have more time and no computer beckoning.

Restaurant Review – At La Grenouille, Small Rich Pleasures From the Past – NYTimes.com.

Blog-o-disaster!

I do love end of the world movies. In fact, I saw 2012 today, which was bad enough to be campy, so you know I have a serious lack of dystopic standards.

But little did I know when I clicked on the “upgrade!” link on Word Press, a disaster of a different kind would follow.

The white screen of death!

Nada, absolutemente nada. Every post is gone. Every bit of formatting is gone. Worst of all, my painstakingly created list of press and presentations is gone. My Word Press guru, Joe, tells me that it is all here somewhere. It may be, but it is way beyond my technical ability to reconstruct it.

So I guess this is the new day. Sigh. A blank blog to ring in the New Year.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

are you jealous?

Enjoy the break!

Hope the holiday brings you lots of time for friends and family, good books, good movies, good food, and time to relax.? For Macaulay students studying abroad, keep blogging and let us enjoy vicariously through your travels!

Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
oh, but there is SO MUCH of it! I don’t normally kvetch about long books, but this one just will not end. I am listening to it as an audio book, but also switching off to the hard copy, and both are making me wish someone took a sharp pencil to this novel. Yes, yes, well written! yes, yes, fascinating characters. But its stately procession through history is making me, yawn, very tired.

SNAPSHOT 2009

Class of 2012 is in the house today.? What’s it like to see your photograph catagorized and hung by someone else?? Maybe your photograph screamed ETHNIC to you but it was put with PORTRAITS, or you saw NATURE and the curators saw HOME?? Makes me think of that Freud quote I always liked:? “A work grows as it will, and confronts its author as an independent, even an alien creation.”

Then the class breaks up into small groups to take videos with their flip cams, re-curating the exhibit anew through their eyes and imagination.? I saw one video that was a newscast; students interviewed each other, then cut to one of the photographs for illustration. Very cool; iMovie makes it look easy, but the creativity is the hard part.

Snapshot started a few years back as a singular and static exercise and now has morphed into a collaborative and interactive one.? Congrats to Sylvia Tomasch and Joe Ugoretz and the Instructional Technology Fellows for making this such a wonderful signature Macaulay project.

Check out the videos on the Macaulay channel for Snapshot 2009.? Should be up on YouTube soon!

Seeking a co-pilot

Isn’t it pathetic?? Because I let too much time go by between postings, I never get fully comfortable with Word Press.? And then I let even more time go by.? Nothing worse than stale blog.? Worse than leftover salad.

For instance,? one friend complained that I spent a lot of time writing about my son’s illness – but then almost nothing about his restored health.? That says something about the relative levels of motivation inspired by dread and fear vs. the delight that “everything is back to normal,” which is just not the stuff of great writing.? Not for me, anyway.

So I’m recruiting a co-editor.? In this week’s Macaulay Monday, our weekly email to students, I’m lobbing in a request for a student co-editor to help me keep this blog fresh and interesting.? Having never collaborated as a writer, I’m sure that I will find this a learning process.

I’m looking for someone who writes well — and understands that writing online is different.? Who will raise his/her eyebrows at Word Press requirements and blow past all the silly stuff that stymies me.? Who will help me think about my radically different audiences — students, friends, family, readers of Sala’s Gift, people who are interested in things that are interesting to me — and figure out how to balance our postings.? Who can keep his/her ear to the Macaulay ground and make sure we celebrate all the fabulous achievements of our students.? Who also finds technology fascinating, especially where it converges with literature and learning.

This will be a rotating position, probably for a month or two.? The student will be named, i.e., no ghost writer.? I figure that we’ll meet once in a while, email a lot (phone is my least favorite way to communicate), especially in the beginning.

I’m asking for interested students to send me an email with a sample blog posting, and also to include a link to their blog or eportfolio.? I figure the kind of student I’m looking for has a blog AND an eportfolio.

It’s quite possible that nobody will be respond.? I’ll be sad.? And then I’ll go back to leftover-salad-blogging.

Forget Bookmark

I should have known better than to get too excited too fast.? Bookmark takes all the fun out of the iPhone audiobook experience….well, not all of it, but a lot.? No longer can you be listening happily and also take a quick peek at email, or answer a phone call, or do anything at all.? So I hope I didn’t intrigue you enough to download this annoying attempt to improve on audiobook settings.? Phooey!

Attention audiobook lovers!

There are more important things to talk about, I’m sure, but I must immediately note the teensy but welcome enhancement for quotidian life with the arrival of the great app BOOKMARK. As I am deeply engrossed with Steeg Larson’s Girl who Played With Fire, read by the great Simon Vance, I am grateful not to keep losing my place when a) it’s my turn to pay at the supermarket; b) the dentist wants to know if I’m still alive; c) the taxi driver is going the wrong way!

Hooray for Bookmark!