Personal Safety First

This Mother’s Day, I called my folks at the annual brunch after I finished a women’s self-defense course. The Assistant Dean’s Office and the Polity Council jointly funded the five-hour IMPACT course. IMPACT is a worldwide organization that focuses on self-defense with an important training element: the aggressor instructor wears a full body suit and helmet so that students strike with full force every time. I was one of about fifteen women, as no men had expressed interest; I was also one of four seniors. I was surprised and pleased with the course’s structure: we spent equal time on learning a physical drill for a frontal attack and practising verbal skills to defuse a situation before it escalated to a physical level. I am not a confrontational person, but it is satisfying to know that I have a better idea of how to take care of myself in a number of uncomfortable situations. We also discussed the boundaries and subtleties of abuse in all environments (i.e. platonic/romantic, work, family). This is the first time any course of this kind has been offered here, and I hope things work out so that more people can take the course next semester. It would be great to do a co-ed course in the future, and I will be sure to investigate their twenty-hour extended course when I am back in Santa Fe.

Check It Out: The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

The worst returns to laughter

This weekend we put up King Lear for the annual Shakespeare play. I only worked on costumes---normally I would involve myself much more in a production, but I wrote my senior essay on this play and didn’t want my interpretation to clash with the director or my enjoyment of the show. It was staged outside for the first two nights and indoors for the matinee. I was very pleased with the show, especially with the amount of effects we managed to put in. Our theatre group is entirely student-run, and we have a very small budget, no particular performance space and few resources. Nonetheless, they did an excellent job at portraying the violence that is at the heart of this tragedy. We even had goat eyes for the eye-gouging scene! That was a pleasant surprise. Our King Lear was a tutor, as no one our age could do justice to this role. It was an excellent production to finish my time with the theatre group, and I am very proud of everyone who participated.

Check It Out: Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt

How Nerdy Can We Be?

Unsurprisingly, St. John’s is packed with people who understand and revel in obscurity. That was a very inflated sentence in reference to the marvellous number of nerds that are here. I had no experience with video games, role-playing or anything other than music and movies before coming here. However, I have slowly been slipping into these hobbies and having an enormously good time. This year, I’m helping out with a friend’s role-playing campaign and exploring various computer games. I have also gotten far deeper into movies and comic books than I ever thought was possible. My favorite part of listening to lunch gaming conversations is the staggering levels of intelligence and humor. It is very heartening that all this counterculture, which is rumoured to be brain-damaging, truly requires advanced thinking. I am constantly surprised by who I can happily jabber to about photoshopp’d comic book covers and the latest fantasy series satire. Naturally, a haven for book people would be a haven for comics, games, movies and good old social interaction. I can’t wait until the next session!

Check It Out: Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
The Starro picture should be credited to mightygodking.com, it's his photoshop cover.

Processions of Grandeur

This past week was my senior oral. It was extremely fun and rather successful, in that it was an excellent conversation and I passed. Hurray! The senior essay and oral examination is the culmination of the program and drives many people up the wall. We’re given a month off to write our essays, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief when we turn them in. Orals begin after the Registrar frantically assembles a schedule between everyone’s conflicting schedules, and students and tutors alike both begin to fray at the edges. The oral committee is composed of the Chair, who directs the conversation and asks the opening question; the Presenter, who announces the senior to the Chairperson; and the Member, who acts as another questioning presence. Everyone processes in and sits in formal regalia, and the conversation begins. I had a ball talking about King Lear for an hour with extremely intelligent people. My presenter asked a very intriguing question about the nature of parenting and how it deepens the pathos of the play. This is not an experience that I have access to, so I was quite pleased to have the opportunity to view the play through an entirely different lens. I wish everyone else luck for their orals and look forward to more fascinating conversations.

Check It Out: Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber

Elise Kutsunai

April Is The Cruellest Month

Everyone is now back from Spring Break, and I was certainly amused by my return to Santa Fe. Luckily it hasn’t snowed since Friday, but the weather is rather frigid. Most people are shocked or resigned that we have essentially returned to winter, as opposed to spring moving into summer. Fortunately, Santa Fe is notoriously changeable and will inevitably warm up soon. We can’t have softball season without warm weather! Every year after Spring Break, classes have the option of challenging each other to softball games instead of holding class. Challenges should be suitably dramatic and impressive, but we are not competitive about the game itself. The point of Johnnie softball is, like classes and the program, to enjoy ourselves in excellent company. I personally cannot play to save my life, but thankfully there are no strikeouts. I may also have someone else hit for me, or run for another person who can’t make it around the basepath. Once the weather stops dragging its feet, I am confident that we will have many games. What could be better than fresh air, sunshine, and watching friends hitting homeruns?

Elise Akie Kutsunai

Check It Out: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson

Mysterious E Factor

In senior lab this semester, we tackle with the Modern Synthesis (Darwin and Mendel’s theories of biology). We have been splitting time between readings on evolution and cells and practica on breeding Drosophila melanogaster, or common fruit flies. They are particularly attractive for genetics work because they breed true traits very quickly and require little care. We have also been studying slides of cells of various organisms in many stages of development. I took A.P. Biology as a high school senior and have done most of these experiments before, but they never fail to take my breath away. Our latest conundrum is about the cell itself. If cells are analogous to atoms as the unit or building block of life, how are they different? Every example of cells’ capabilities that my lab class could supply was matched by a counter-example of the same process in non-living organisms. The most obvious (and most troubling) is the idea that cells reproduce copies of themselves in a ordered fashion. Crystals do exactly the same thing! Unfortunately, however much I wish it were so, snowflakes are not alive. We have circled back to the elusive “E factor” from freshman lab, the élan vital that supplies the spark of life. We have no idea what this is, and neither do the authors we are currently reading. I am confident that we will progress and develop a better understanding, but life itself is such an intrinsically mysterious thing. Someday a scientist will pin it down, but then we’ll all rush forward with questions about the soul, and everything will start from the beginning. Oh, discovery!

Elise Akie Kutsunai

Check It Out: 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle (movie)

Look On My Works, Ye Mighty, And Despair!

Last week was the midnight opening of Watchmen. After pondering for a bit, I have decided that I like this movie. It was a riot to be at the opening, mostly because there were at least fifty Johnnies. Everyone had high expectations for the movie, especially since Alan Moore’s Watchmen is perhaps the most Johnnie piece of literature that I have ever read. It is stuffed with references and many moments of meta-thinking that demand a lot from the reader. The movie couldn’t be as seminal as the graphic novel, mostly because the graphic novel exploited and tested the boundaries of its art form to a masterful extent. The movie also left out the intervening segments between the graphic novel’s chapters (press releases, articles, essays, etc) for the sake of clarity. Many people were of course disappointed, but I am pleased nonetheless. The movie attempted to be as literally faithful to the graphic novel as possible (and thus of course missed many of the myriad subplots and subtleties of the original), and it succeeded admirably. There were people in costume and the trailers were particularly exciting. I am hopeful about the new Terminator and Star Trek movies that will open in May! Thankfully, Angels and Demons was met with extreme scepticism. At the very least, I am surrounded by people who are dubious about Dan Brown’s literary skill.

Elise Akie Kutsunai

Check It Out: Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Comedy of Manners and Errors

There were lots of exciting things outside of class this past week, so I will be bouncy about them and make it up next week. I’ve been involved with some aspect of performing arts since I was four, and here at St. John’s, I’ve been eaten by student theatre. Our organization is called Chrysostomos, or “silver-tongued” in Greek. It is entirely student-run; directors, technical staff and actors all come from the various levels of the college community. I’ve come a long way from knowing nothing about drama (except that everyone has a tenuous grip on sanity) and our last production went very well indeed. I was the assistant director for Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, with a mixed cast of undergraduates and graduate students. We had an excellent audience for each night, with a surprisingly number of Santa Fe residents as well. We’ve started doing more comedies this year, and I’m very pleased to see that we can properly put them on and that people really like them! Serious drama is marvellous (I’m a particular fan of tragedies myself), but sometimes lighter fare is just perfect—this show certainly came close.

Cheers,
Elise Akie Kutsunai

Check It Out: The Importance of Being Earnest (2002 film), Judi Dench, Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Reese Witherspoon

Spring Weather Again

Surprise! I woke up with a delightful dusting of snow outside and am quite pleased with the world. I’ve yet to get over the novelty of seasons in general, and snow in particular has always been terribly exciting. We normally get bits of snow (which sadly melt the next day), but occasionally in the middle of winter we will get more than a few inches. I am less than happy about what this does to the roads and drivers in town, but on campus everything looks straight out of a picture book. When there’s a substantial snowfall that does stick around, we have epic snowball fights after seminar that range over the entire campus. There are also the requisite Johnnie snowmen that appear in courtyards with shades, a walkman and a cigarette—we have a disproportionate number of smokers on campus. My favorite part about this entire business is the opportunity to wear absurd clothes. Winter clothing is a riot! I’ve almost got the layers figured out, but somehow I’m too warm when I go back indoors. Central heating is going to remain as one of life’s mysteries for a while longer. Especially since outdoors is far too beautiful to not stomp around, leaving footprints and many happy thoughts.

Check It Out: The Snowman, Raymond Briggs

Spring is coming (I think)

I had a delightful experience in my lab class recently. We were having our final discussion on Darwin and ventured outside to sit by the fishpond. I had never had class outside, but it was a marvellous experience. The weather is flirting with the idea of spring (this weeks is expected to be in the 60s), and to sit in the sun and discuss the ramifications of evolution as opposed to creationism, with the waterfall and the wind making a racket in the background, was lovely. I adore the desert, particularly the high desert in Santa Fe, and there are times when the beauty of our campus takes me completely by surprise. I am convinced that we have the best sunsets and thunderstorms, but those are not subtle statements of beauty. To share an invigorating discussion in the sunshine is one of my more contented moments here. To be fair, anyone suffering from the slightest allergies is currently miserable. We have a lot of pollen here, with the additional burden of hulking juniper bushes all over campus (it takes time to develop an allergy to juniper; many upperclassmen are unhappy). I am fortunate to not be allergic to anything, and everyone who is currently taking Claritin has my sympathies, but I hope this inconvenience doesn’t get in the way of revelling in a fine spring day. The grassy knoll and the fishpond encourage contemplation, especially in the sunshine!

Check it out: A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

If Music be the food of love, play on!

One of our seminars last week was on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, an opera that we study at the end of sophomore music. We have two seminars on musical works: Mozart’s Don Giovanni for junior year, and Tristan for senior year. I have been very lucky with my experiences with the music program and thus have had a ball with both seminars, but I thought this would be a nice opportunity to ramble a bit about why we study music. Many people are confused why we spend sophomore year abruptly studying music theory and the bare bones of composition. One of the more unfortunate aspects of the program is that we have so much ground to cover that some things inevitably get left behind—for example, the now defunct visual arts tutorial. However, the wide compass of the program is one of my favorite things about being a student here. If I had gone to a traditional college for a B.A. in English, I would not have had the opportunity to spend a year studying music theory and would have missed out on the majesty of Beethoven and the overwhelming emotion of Wagner. I was in choir and concert band before entering the music tutorial and was familiar with music, but I had no idea about chord analysis or transposition. Now I am able to enjoy music from aesthetic and technical perspectives. It was very satisfying to discuss both the lyrics and the excruciating suspensions in Tristan, and I am happy with a good seminar.

Check it out: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

Masquerade! Every Face a Different Shade

This past Saturday was the Masquerade Ball! Which was mostly fun and very, very pretty. The official parties here at St. John’s are thrown by the Waltz Committee, Reality and the Student Events and Alumni Offices. I have been a part of Waltz Committee since freshman year, when I discovered the marvels of swing dancing and the terrors of organizing parties. All parties are split between swing dance and pop/hip-hop music and take place in the Great Hall, our multi-use lecture hall/performance space/dance and movie hall. This particular party was a Reality fundraiser, which meant a change from the usual ‘come on in!’ with an entry fee. Masks were provided with admission and I am certainly keeping mine. The decorations in the Great Hall were very impressive and perfectly complimented the dress code of formal black and white. The first hour was swing music and the dance floor was full! It is difficult to dance in a mask, since your peripheral vision completely disappears, but everyone managed quite well. There were delicious refreshments in the Common Room, including champagne for those of age who were so inclined, and plenty of chairs for people to sit and chat. The best part about this dance was seeing everyone dressed to the nines with outrageous masks. I have decided that my new goal in life is to become so cool that I too may wear a white suit and a white top hat, following the example of one particularly dapper guest. The next party will be color-themed as well and promises to be just as spectacular.

Family, Faulkner and Other Things from French

Hello, my name is Elise Akie Kutsunai. I’ve been having a ball with senior language, which was formerly French but is now Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and modern literature (Woolf, Eliot). This past class we finished discussing “The Fire and the Hearth” and discovered the overwhelming importance of family. People can and often do become different in college, but family and blood kin are always present. In Faulkner’s story, the McCaslin bloodline diverges, with the white Edmonds landowners and the black slaves/sharecroppers both tracing their lineage to Carothers McCaslin. Inevitable conflict arises when assorted characters confront their heritage and the demands of societal position. I was very pleased that no one in my class brought up their personal conflicts with family, but the discussion also reminded me of my favorite aspect of college, especially at St. Johns: friends become your family. I have kept in touch with my folks and my friends from high school, but my best friends are the people I have discovered here at St. John’s. They are all individuals in every sense of the word: intelligent, humorous and rather quaint (to put it mildly). I will always have a strong sense of identity from my family name, but my ‘found family’ of friends have helped me become certain in my beliefs and my goals in life. We argue at the dinner table about Kant versus Hegel, precisely how crazy Newton was, and how virtue is possible when Hobbes and La Rouchefacauld are dead-on about human nature. I would not trade my post-seminar conversations in the stairwell for anything—except perhaps a long phone conversation with an alumna who still has questions about “Hurrah for Karamazov!” Hurrah for families of every kind, blood or friendship nonwithstanding.

Check It Out: A Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

I’m such a Fool

My junior year began with most hectic schedule. Not only did I have 3 jobs but I also decided to involve myself with St. John’s theater club Chrysostomos. For I had decided to direct a play, Moliere’s Les Femmes Savantes, a satire on academic pretension, which was quite a success around here, not to say we are all inflated scholars, but Moliere is good for us as Swift is good for us, sorry, I tend to be incredibly digressive as a writer sometimes. I must say though, the beginning of last semester was about the perfect time to carry out such a time-consuming task. Junior year gets progressively harder, in a challenging and rewarding sort of way. Nowadays trying to derive Maxwell’s equations and to understand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason take most of my time. So given these present circumstances, I have no idea why I auditioned for the traditional Shakespeare play that shows at the end of the semester. But how could I resist auditioning for King Lear? Only a fool would do such a thing.

For whom the bell tolls…

It seemed that Johnnies could care less about St. Valentine’s Day. Well, at least juniors and seniors could care less about the holiday of love and friendship. Maybe the freshmen had their own secret celebration, but the old seasoned Johnnies (maybe the real Johnnies) had other business in mind. Senior Essays, the highlight and summit of the St. John’s education, were due on February 14th. To speak precisely, they have until midnight of the 15th, but most of them try to get them in by 9:00 pm. The president offers the seniors a nice reception, so most of them dress for the occasion and have a good time. The night when senior essays are due is one of the noisiest nights of the year. To begin with, seniors get to ring the bell in the tower of Weigle Hall. Traditionally, seniors would get a ring per page, so a 37-page paper would equal 37 rings. Those were the good old times; back then, our hill was not as populated with retirees, monks and artists. Rumor, Virgil’s beast of many eyes and tongues, has informed some of us that many neighbors complained about the unending tolling of the bells (in actuality from 9-12am), thus, as a result, they only get to ring the bell five times.
However, there is more mayhem to come. As seniors triumphantly leave Weigle with an air of pride for their great accomplishment, the juniors are giving the ultimate touches to a skit that portrays most of the seniors in good-humor. Yes, we make fun of them! But things are not as unfair, for seniors on the other hand, who get to make fun of the tutors in what is known as senior skit. Junior skit lasted for about an hour and half last Saturday night (well, Sunday morning), so the whole thing probably ended about 2:00 am. With the seniors re-reediting their papers, and the Juniors rehearsing most of the day, maybe the January freshmen were the only Johnnies that cared to have a Valentine’s.

What does Aristotle have to do with Disney’s Little Mermaid?

This last week was hell week for all those who have summer ambitions. Let me clarify…those who have worldly ambitions of the internship kind. St. John’s offers a summer stipend, called ARIEL, for students who want to seek summer internships in any discipline. A tutor framed the acronym to mean “Award for Relating Intense Education to Life.” So when you go down to the Career Services Office you see the picture of the little mermaid posted on the door. Well, the common chatter these days is about the upcoming Ariel deadline. Last year, as a sophomore, one of my close friends secured himself an internship with the Kansas Symphony Orchestra; he transferred to the Annapolis campus, and I think he finally decided on studying music composition after St. John’s. Seeing my friends solidify their interests and future career plans not only gladdens me but also makes me somewhat nostalgic. I am reminded that people here at St. John’s have such diverse interests. ‘Kwak’ (the nickname I gave to my best friend) is applying for a summer internship reserved for Johnnies by an Alumnus who is now doing research in a biomedical lab, while my other good friend, Mr. Winget, or as I call him “Winget”, has decided to intern with our Director of Laboratories Bill Donahue. Winget is looking forward to earning a PhD in Mathematics, and he is currently working on a website that so far features breakthrough propositions of Euclid, Apollonius, Newton and Isaac Barrow. His project, still in progress, is way more ambitious and elaborate than my simplistic summary. I, for my part, applied for a summer fellowship that provides the resources for undergraduates to pursue research in the Humanities. I have received an offer from Princeton and Cornell, but still waiting on Yale. So it goes, juniors are all asking themselves the question that is comfortably delayed being here at St. John’s, that is: What am I going to do after these four years of intellectual indulgence? Well, cultivating the mind is an option, but Aristotle phrased this problem nicely at the end of the Nichomachean Ethics, contemplation can only be afforded by meeting all other worldly needs.

"Outside the door listening to our crazy singing"

Every Tuesday kids from Santa Fe come to me for Spanish and Latin tutoring, but by some anomalous grace they all cancelled on me. I was then able to play piano, joke around with my friends, watch the sunset, and talk Borges with my smoky friend Mr. McCracken. Yet I still had another Spanish class to teach at 9pm, my student not being from Santa Fe but from a far away land. His name is Han Qi and he comes from Nanjing, China. He also teaches kids from town his beautiful language. To make the long story short, we have both agreed to teach each other our respective native languages, that is, Spanish and Mandarin, by meeting everyday for an hour. Progress is being made, however we have now detected our particular problems. I cannot memorize the tones and tend to make more consonant sounds in my Mandarin, while he tends to copy my intonation and forget about the consonants. So to get his mind off the tones, which are irrelevant if one follows the Spanish accents, I decided to sing Mexican folk songs with him. The result was beautifully atrocious! What was supposed to be a private Spanish lesson became a loud and public display of our bad singing. As I was trying to accentuate the words, I became gradually louder and so did he, in a completely different pitch. So apparently our dorm buddies were all outside the door listening to our crazy singing, and my RA was wondering if I was having a party. I hope he doesn’t make me sing Chinese songs today.