Sectioned classes supported by invited speakers and performers, a film series, and L&T Coding—an introduction to the power of code as language.
L&T 2019 Theme
What needs to be the case for things to be otherwise?
Throughout our work together in August, we will find this question emerging (and changing) across texts, disciplines, conversations, genres, and art forms. We will read Gertrude Stein on how both war and the arts became otherwise during World War I, and Aristotle on how citizens need to live for cities to be noble. We will hear James Baldwin, Etel Adnan, and Ursula Le Guin make the case for migration and exile, and we will argue about revolutions (and their preludes) with Thomas Kuhn, Edmund Burke, Euripides, Karl Marx, and Layli Long Soldier.
What needs to be the case for things to be otherwise?
Our work will take us to poetry readings, film screenings, dance workshops, and philosophy lectures. We will gather around the jagged rocks of the parliament of reality and upon the wooded trails of Tivoli Bays. We will write about all of this as well—sometimes alone, sometimes together, and always in conversation. Please read the program director’s Welcome Letter for suggestions on preparing to examine this year’s question.
Professor Christopher Lindner gives L&T students an introduction to Bard Archaeology at the historic Germantown Parsonage.
Rostrum Series
The Rostrum Series invites speakers, artists, and performers from many fields—including literature and poetics, philosophy, politics, biology, agriculture, theater, dance, education, visual art and others—to present their work and to converse with Bard students. The series introduces students to the intellectual, artistic, and civic life of the College, and to the College’s vibrant tradition of welcoming guests from the wider world to engage with the Bard community.
Rostrum Series
Underground Campus Journey through Eight Millennia Let’s go to ancient sites on campus, several near each other, with College archaeologist, Professor Christophe Lindner, and a dedicated 4th-year Anthropology student, Cheyenne Cutter. We can interpret the 2,100-year-old Forest site as a place of pilgrimage and healing. A short distance away is the 1836 Gardener’s Lodge at Blithewood where—despite the disappearance early in the last century of its Gothic Revival house (the first in America)—the shape and contents of the ground still support a visionary landscape treatment that endures on the campus today. Remarkably, excavation indicates human activity as long ago as 8,000 years. Along with storytelling and scenery visioning as our key tools of imagination, we’ll also find out about the first workers in the Bard area, people from the central Rhineland and western Africa. Centrally positioned between the Forest site and the Gardener’s Lodge, we’ll experiment with the way that material objects can be used to tell stories, about our journeys to the places of discovery and retrieval, which can be given to others to carry on. These stories will be written and presented, by both sound and image, through performance and the Internet, to convey a sense of each pilgrim group. Wednesday, August 14, 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Dig Germantown Journey through Three Centuries A shuttle ride through Tivoli takes us, via the historic Clermont manor house on the river, to the old parsonage in Germantown. It’s a German minister’s house from 250 years past, where lived African Americans for well over a century, starting in the late 1700s. We interpret art and ritual deposits in its cellar hearth as a shrine to ancestral spirits. This symbolic configuration is rare on this continent although elements of it have been discovered at a dozen-some African American sites from Texas to Connecticut. At the Parsonage the various symbols have been excavated close to each other by Bardians and community high school students. The yard also contains ritual deposits at significant places. What further distinguishes the site is the relationship of the African American family with the German American family who lived there simultaneously for 70 years. This contextual research has run for a decade, as a civic engagement project of Anthropology Professor Christophe Lindner, the College’s archaeologist in residence. Co-presenters are two Bardians writing theses for their senior projects on the Parsonage site, Ethan Dickerman and Cheyenne Cutter (as two others have done before, who then went to Boston for graduate degrees, at UMass and Harvard). Wednesday, August 21, 9:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
What Needs to Be the Case for You to Be Sustainable at Bard? “Waste equals food” – John Todd (Biologist, President of Ocean Arks Investing) “Waste is matter with no place to go” – Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (Anthropologist, Bard College) “Water is Life / Mní Wičoní” – Standing Rock Sioux Tribe / Oceti Ŝakowiŋ
Waste. Energy. Materials. Resources. Food. Life. All of these terms appear in sustainability literatures, theories, and practices. The term “sustainability” conjures images of solar arrays, wind turbines, reusable bags, bamboo products, and zero-waste practices—our list could continue. But what does it mean or what would it take for you—our newest Bardians—to be sustainable at Bard? Through mapping, walking and learning about some of Bard’s sustainability practices, features, and goals, this rostrum seeks to help ground students in this place and to develop a sense of how to connect larger sustainability goals (like the UN goals) to more local ones (Ulster/Dutchess counties) and even more local goals (Bard’s goal/personal goals). As we walk through campus, we’ll explore how sustainable practices emerge in a place, how they are sustained, and how they contribute to achieve goals at multiple scales. We’ll begin the rostrum in the RKC and students can join one of three discrete walks, each with a different focus: water systems, food systems, waste systems. Throughout the rostrum, we’ll compose maps (no prior experience required), discuss sustainable practices, and reflect on connections from Darwin, Kolbert and other Anthology writers as we begin to unpack the question: what needs to be the case for you to be sustainable at Bard? The rostrum will be led by Laurie Husted and Kaet Heupel. Wednesday, August 21, 11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Imprisoned—A Film Screening and Discussion with Writer and Director Paul Kampf Imprisoned is a unique story set in Puerto Rico and centers on the themes of love, redemption, revenge and forgiveness. It stars Laurence Fishburne, Juan Pablo Raba, Juana Acosta, Jon Huertas, Esai Morals, Edward James Olmos, and John Heard. The film was written and directed by Paul Kampf and produced by Equitas Entertainment Partners, whose mission is to make a social impact, give a voice to the under-served while closing the gender pay gap in front of and behind the camera. Paul Kampf will lead a discussion of the film after the screening. We hope to have members of the cast joining us as well. Wednesday, August 21, 7:00–9:00 p.m. Sosnoff Theater.
Smash the State: Models for Stateless Narrative Design—A Lecture and Discussion with Anna Anthropy One of the most fundamental tropes of digital game design is state-tracking: The player picks up the Blue Key, so they are now able to open the Blue Door. This is endemic to games’ emphasis on Progress, of a colonialist mastery of the world and mastery of game systems. How does digital storytelling transform when you take away or limit the author’s ability to track state, as with a tool like Twine or Bitsy? What other models of stateless interactive literature exist? What does this all have to do with queerness and nonlinear time? Let’s dismantle the state as a tool for hegemonic game design. Anna Anthropy is a transgender American video game designer whose works include Mighty Jill Off and Dys4ia. She is the game designer in residence at the DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media. Thursday, August 22, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. RKC 103.
Charles Darwin’s Botanical Voyaging in the Galápagos: A Lecture and Discussion with Michele Dominy Darwin’s 1835 expeditions on the Galápagos Archipelago have been celebrated for his discoveries of giant tortoises, differentiated finch beaks and marine iguanas, and their implications for his theory of evolution. Darwin also observed the distinctive flora on the Galápagos and realized the importance of island biogeography for plant dispersal, species diversification and extinction. As part of Kew Gardens vast “botanical imperium,” Darwin’s plant specimens moved across the empire to natural history museums and herbariums, signaling the development of natural history as a science and the colonization of nature. Bard Anthropology Professor Michele Dominy will relate Darwin’s Galapagos observations to contemporary efforts in plant conservation and the cultural fight against “plant blindness,” while also illustrating new approaches to understand human/nonhuman interactions in the environmental humanities. Thursday, August 22, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Weis Cinema, Campus Center.
Who Counts? Who Belongs? A Talk by Erica Hunt Using a writers’ notebook approach, "Who Counts? Who Belongs?" is a talk featuring data, writing prompts, and selections from contemporary writing to deepen our critical understanding of migration, citizenship, and belonging. We will take a quick look at the politics of census- taking and how it shapes narratives of national identity and othering, breaking the people who live in the same space into "we" and "them." Friday, August 23, 2:00–3:30 p.m. Olin Auditorium.
Plenary Session II: Odysseys—A Voyage through the First-Year Experience at Bard As part of your immersive introduction to the undergraduate experience at Bard College, these panel conversations aim to create dialogue across some of the core components of the First-Year Experience at Bard. Nicole Caso and Erica Kaufman, faculty at Bard and in the Language and Thinking Program, will join First-Year Seminar Codirectors Omar Cheta, Lauren Curtis, and Daniel Mendelsohn, for a discussion that takes Professor Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic as a starting point through which to explore broader themes of education, self- discovery, and the role that writing and reading play in one’s individual trajectory—a trajectory mapped in many of our L&T and FYSEM texts, not least The Odyssey itself, with which FYSEM will conclude in May. These panels will also speak to the relationship between Language and Thinking and First-Year Seminar, the commonalities and differences between the two, and the kinds of habits of mind both aim to cultivate. Panel 1: Tuesday, August 27, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. Panel 2: Tuesday, August 27, 2:00–3:30 p.m.
Film Series
The Language and Thinking Film Series allows students to view a variety of films from around the world that will complement the classroom work and reading they will be doing during the August program.
Film Series
I Am Not Your Negro Day: Tuesday, August 13 Time: 7pm Location: Olin Hall Using the original words of Baldwin from his unfinished book Remember This House, this documentary puts race in America under the microscope. Weaving past and present, I Am Not Your Negro confronts black representation, as well as the connections between the lives and assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. Directed by Raoul Peck. Runtime: 94 minutes.
Grizzly Man Day: Tuesday, August 13 Time: 9pm Location: Olin Hall Grizzly Man tells the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, an amateur grizzly bear expert and wildlife preservationist, who lived among grizzly bears for 13 summers. Directed by Warner Herzog. Runtime: 104 minutes.
The Seventh Seal Day: Wednesday, August 14 Time: 7pm Location: Weis Cinema Accompanied by exhaustion and disillusionment, a knight of the Crusades challenges Death to a game of chess. The Seventh Seal has been imitated, studied, parodied, but has yet to be surpassed. An allegory of man’s eternal search for meaning, the film was a benchmark import in the 1950’s, pushing boundaries and igniting a new era of moviegoing. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Runtime: 97 minutes.
Woman Demon Human Day: Wednesday, August 14 Time: 9pm Location: Weis Cinema A young girl born into opera pursues her dreams of becoming a professional actress. Fully immersing herself in her stagecraft, she begins to pursue major “male” roles. An example of “New Chinese Cinema” blended with Chinese “opera film,” Woman Demon Human possesses flair and allegorical wit. Directed by Huang Shuqin.
The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975 Day: Tuesday, August 2 Time: 7pm Location: Olin Auditorium Having been granted incredible access to prominent Black Power leaders like Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Stokely Carmichael, Swedish Television journalists were able to document the cultural revolution unfolding in America in the ’60s and ’70s. After more than 30 years in storage, the footage spanning nearly 10 years is finally available. With modern commentary, this time capsule of American history offers a different narrative than the typical American media of the time. Directed by Goran Hugo Olsson. Runtime: 96 minutes.
Paris Is Burning Day: Tuesday, August 20 Time: 9pm Location: Olin Auditorium An intimate look at the New Yorkers who created “voguing” and drag balls, transforming celebration into an expression of personal pride. In this urban community, where desire, ambitions, and yearnings compose a microcosm of America itself, the allure of fashion, wealth and status become an assertion of acceptance and love. Directed by Jennie Livingston. Runtime: 76 minutes.
Beau Travail Day: Wednesday, August 21 Time: 7pm Location: Olin Auditorium Capturing the essence of a poem or ballad, Beau Travail is a provocative tale of French Legionnaires on a small outpost in Djibouti. Each day exudes male eroticism, as the troupe engage in hypnotic routines of chores, drills, mock battles and exercise. At the center of the film is Sergeant Galop, who’s jealousy for a new recruit threatens the balance of his life. Directed by Claire Denis. Runtime: 90 minutes.
The Pearl Button Day: Wednesday, August 21 Time: 9pm Location: Olin Auditorium Documentarian Patricio Guzman explores the historical and cultural significance of water in Chile by examining the tribes of the western Patagonian waterways, as well as the tragic story of Jemmy Button, who was purchased by the English Navy. Connecting colonialism to the Pinochet dictatorship of the late 20th century, The Pearl Button is an indispensable exploration of Chile’s history and present day. Directed by Patricio Guzman. Runtime: 81 minutes.
The 2019 L&T coding tutors. Photo by Keith O'Hara
L&T Coding
Bard has introduced a computing component into the Language and Thinking Program. The component exposes all first-year students to the power of code as language and computational thinking. We’re excited to be offering this coding component again in 2019.
