Yesterday was the Kluge Prize ceremony - it's kind of like the Nobel Prize, but with less publicity. To my Polish friends - did you know Leszek Kołakowski was awarded the prize in 2003? See? And yet, it's highly prestigious, by which I mean, they give you a million dollars. Well, not you. They gave a million each to Romila Thapar and Peter Brown, both historians, both in their seventies.
We were invited to the ceremony, of course (but not the dinner - there are limits). There were velvet curtains, fanfares, a string quartet, goat cheese tartlets. and lectures from the winners. The speeches were interesting, I'm sure, but I found myself defaulting to my trapped-at-a-lecture-reading-presentation-or-any-speech-really mode, which I first came up with when I was about eight, and had to sit through never-ending sermons at church. It consists of me trying to figure out how I would go about climbing all the way up to the ceiling of the space I'm in, swinging on chandeliers and scaling columns on the way. I got halfway to the glass ceiling of the Jefferson Building's Main Hall before Romila Thapar's talk finished, but then I got to a tricky overhang which seemed impossible to negotiate safely, so I split my time between looking for an alternative route and observing Peter Brown's glasses as he talked. They were engaged in what can only be described as a reverse-Sisyphus manoeuvre, sliding down the bridge of his nose and getting tantalizingly close to the tip, only to be pushed back a the very last moment by a seemingly oblivious Brown. Hypnotizing.
Tuesday, I note here out of my sense of duty as a chronicler, was the day of my first featured spoken word performance in the US, at the TerPoets open mic night in College Park, Maryland. I had great fun, and it is always exhilarating to perform in front of a roaring crowd of what may have well been more than two dozen people. Good times.
We were invited to the ceremony, of course (but not the dinner - there are limits). There were velvet curtains, fanfares, a string quartet, goat cheese tartlets. and lectures from the winners. The speeches were interesting, I'm sure, but I found myself defaulting to my trapped-at-a-lecture-reading-presentation-or-any-speech-really mode, which I first came up with when I was about eight, and had to sit through never-ending sermons at church. It consists of me trying to figure out how I would go about climbing all the way up to the ceiling of the space I'm in, swinging on chandeliers and scaling columns on the way. I got halfway to the glass ceiling of the Jefferson Building's Main Hall before Romila Thapar's talk finished, but then I got to a tricky overhang which seemed impossible to negotiate safely, so I split my time between looking for an alternative route and observing Peter Brown's glasses as he talked. They were engaged in what can only be described as a reverse-Sisyphus manoeuvre, sliding down the bridge of his nose and getting tantalizingly close to the tip, only to be pushed back a the very last moment by a seemingly oblivious Brown. Hypnotizing.
Tuesday, I note here out of my sense of duty as a chronicler, was the day of my first featured spoken word performance in the US, at the TerPoets open mic night in College Park, Maryland. I had great fun, and it is always exhilarating to perform in front of a roaring crowd of what may have well been more than two dozen people. Good times.
