shimerians

[shimerians]

podKats - GET IN ON THE GROUND FLOOR. Comedians answer questions. In this episode, the first question is “Dude, what were you doing with that puppet?”

#podcast #kat_burdick #comedy

[shimerians]

Over the course of a lifetime, I have come to understand that I cannot pursue ideas alone. Nor can I strive to change the world unless I engage others, whether those who spit on me or those with whom I share my life.

A College President, Drawn to Uncertainties - NYTimes.com

#shimer college #susan henking #ideas #great books

[shimerians]

Maybe if...

Maybe….maybe if every man who has ever hired a trans escort, if every boy who has ever beat off to trans porn, if all the guys I and thousands of others have hooked up with via Craig’s List, if the millions who fetishize our bodies, who enjoy us on our knees in bathrooms, who press us against hotel windows, who lay with us in our beds, if the men who adore me and my sisters, but only behind closed doors, would STAND THE FUCK UP AND SPEAK OUT…maybe 21 year old women just enjoying an evening out with friends wouldn’t be beat to death.

Maybe if all of you who read this, our allies and friends and colleagues and family, would call out when others make jokes at our expense, even when we’re not around, if you’d tell advertisers and producers and journalists and writers and comics that you’re not okay with them making trans women nothing but the punchline of jokes or tragic tossaways, that you know us, that we’re not disposable….maybe groups of people would stop feeling so free to harass me and my sisters, maybe crowds wouldn’t just laugh when a man spits at me, or just watch when two young men chase me down the street yelling “shemale”…maybe if you ALL stood up and said enough, maybe a young woman just being herself wouldn’t be beat to death in the streets of the supposedly best place on earth to just be yourself.

Maybe if all the gay men who act as if equality means marriage, if all the white feminists who only serve those that look like them, if all the queers who drop “TWOC” like a shibboleth but don’t know or talk to or walk beside any actual trans women of color…maybe if all of you saw what was happening here and how your actions allow it, how every moment of silence, of waiting for people of color to start the conversation about race …maybe this child could have enjoyed a few more years of being beautiful among us.

A 21 year old was beat to death in our streets. It happened because she is a woman, and of color, and transgender. It happened because our men won’t admit they love us, because our friends aren’t speaking out against the thousand little dehumanizing actions of others, because our own “LGBT” community isn’t comfortable talking about race and class.

This has to change. Now.

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130822/central-harlem/transgender-woman-dies-after-savage-beating-cops-say#video_modal_13772731841756

[shimerians]

Interested in learning more about the films of Stanley Kubrick or about the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher known for exploring the question of "being"?

Shimer College, a small undergraduate school in Chicago dedicated to a traditional liberal arts curriculum, is opening its courses for free to anyone at least 60 years old.

Senior citizens are welcome to join any class with an open seat. Registration will be Monday and Tuesday, and classes begin Wednesday.

#shimer college #chicago #education

[shimerians]

The Globe Kittens.

#cats #kittens #1902

[shimerians]

Abandoned Walmart is Now America’s Largest Library | WebUrbanist

#books #libraries #walmart

[shimerians]

The Future of Shimer's Best

"So, what do you think? What is most important about Shimer? What do you think we should preserve – that is what are the key elements of what you value about Shimer? Where do we need to improve, and how might we go about doing that? Where should we innovate, and why? In short, what is it that, in your opinion, matters most about Shimer, and especially about Shimer’s future?" What do I think? No. How do I think? How do I conceptualize the manifold sensation of what we intuit as Shimer as an act of will worthy of reasonably willing all rational beings to will? Shimer is us. Saints preserve us, they write great books and intercede for us with almighty questions to keep us thinking. Who are we? We read, and while we read the distinctions we discover take hold of manifold memories and sensations and gather them together in more or less coherent clusters of idea. We gather together at more or less regular intervals to share the ideas with which we've gathered what we've read and through our interactive dialog reopen those ideas, exchange and rearrange the memories and sensations gathered in them. In our interaction we begin to sense the form and function of our ideas and remember they reappear in highly varied contexts with quite diverse contents of memory and sensation. We begin to read our memories and sensations in concert with the books of saints and the conversation of our peers and to write our reasoned wills in our interaction with the world of sense and memory around us. How does any of this distinguish Shimer from any other gathering of literate scholars? The idea of Shimer as a specific location, however nomadic, contains a notion, through time, of who we are. Those specific times and places in which we gather to carry on the conversation in Shimer's name provide occasion for our preservation, but we distinguish ourselves by how we occupy those occasions. The books we read and their authors are read by others in other places at other times. The canons, too, by which we gather them for beatification according to their greatness are shared in common with others, as are forms and functions of ideas developed through our reading in which we comprehend manifold memories and sensations that we also share with others. I think what distinguishes us is how we question everything and everybody. We question everything as a whole and each thing's part in that whole through the curricular arrangement of the times of our readings of great books and our meetings to discuss them. We recognize in our experience questions concerned with the natural world that contains and constrains us, others that relate to the ways we contain and constrain one and other in our social institutions, and still more with respect to the contents of and constraints on the productions of our imaginations. We question also the forms and functions of the questions we ask. We question everybody in ourselves, in each other, in the saints whose relics we read as great books, in God who created this world and gods holding sway in it, and we regard our questions as the same as those confronting all of our fellow denizens of this planet. But here's the thing. Shimer's curriculum is a distillation of the fundamental core of explicitly Western Civilization. This combination of ideas and methods was concocted over the course of the first half of the Twentieth Century by great minds gathered at the University of Chicago for the purpose of training the best minds drawn from the American public to assume roles of leadership as citizens in business, government, the professions and academia. Given the time and place of its creation, it is not surprising that that curriculum would show signs of use as an instrument of oppression of the underprivileged, minorities and other peoples with exploitable resources. There is in the American offshoot of the British branch of the Western Tradition a continuing critique of the ruling of elites that showed up in William Rainey Harper's attempts to put the power of a college education within the reach of ordinary citizens. The affiliation of the University of Chicago with Frances Shimer's Academy in the middle of the last century was a product of this impulse. F.A.W. Shimer, of course, was all about putting the power of the intellectually elite into hands of an underprivileged class: women. Mrs. Shimer's endeavor was also forged as a community based on intimate personal relationships tightly woven into what she clearly considered her family. The marriage of Shimer's community with Hutchins' curriculum, freed from the centrifugal forces of divisions of advanced disciplines by Mount Carroll's rural isolation created a unique combination of intellectual rigor and intense interpersonal attachment. I have more to say about the urgent need for this particular institution to reach out beyond the elite tradition of modern globalization and read together with these, the works of saints of other traditions together with members of all underprivileged races, genders, classes and nationalities in order to gather ever more manifold memories and sensations into distinctions with which to truly question everything and everybody, but I have no more time.

#shimer college #shimer

[shimerians]

Why the salty language? - Imgur

[shimerians]

My mind is a herd of cats trying to run off in all directions… - Michael Lipsey

An interviewer asked David Mamet, “Where do you get your ideas?” He replied, “I think of them.”

#thinking

[shimerians]

June 29 was a day for newcomers, up-and-comers and comebacks. David Shiner, a Shimer College associate dean coming off a 10-year hiatus from rated chess, won first place in our preview open at the Illinois Institute of Technology, with a score of 3.5/4.

[shimerians]

A fellow ICAT volunteer and I posing with our posters at the end of the day. In addition to canvassing at various beaches over the summer, ICAT volunteers will also be present at the Chicago Pride Parade and the Dyke March, two awesome events happening during Pride weekend June 29th and 30th. I had a blast passing out condoms and getting signatures for our petition last year, and Pride is always a fun experience. Every pride parade I've been to has been a great time, and the attendees of the festival are often an eccentric crowd. From the sheer number of floats at Pride last year, it is clear that hundreds of communities are represented, and I'm excited to act as a representative for both Shimer and ICAT. (via blog.shimer: Beach Canvassing/Summer Festivities)

[shimerians]

Jason Blaesing '00, who will be a doctoral candidate at Cornell in the fall, has won won the 2013 Raymond Fogelson Prize for the best MAPSS M.A. thesis in the ethnological and historical sciences submitted in the previous academic year. The prize entails a $1000 award and will be listed in the Spring convocation program's "Award of Honors." Jason's thesis is entitled "The Hidden Geography of Healing: Ontologies of Number in Northern Peru and the Political Arithmetic of the Inka."

Shimer College - Alumnus Receives Award

[shimerians]

At a White House ceremony Wednesday, first lady Michelle Obama honored the Waukegan Public Library for setting goals more ambitious than providing a quiet building full of books. The north suburban...

#waukegan #libraries

[shimerians]

#shimer college #chicago

[shimerians]

#hutchins

[shimerians]

#alexander meiklejohn #great books #liberal education

[shimerians]

I have to admit that part of my sanguine attitude stems from the fact that Shimer’s pedagogy embodies what independent researchers have already demonstrated to be “best practices” in terms of discussion-centered, small classes — and so if we take the trouble to come up with a plausible way to measure what the program is doing for our students, I’m confident the results will be very strong. Despite that overall optimism, however, I’m also sure that there are some things that we’re doing that aren’t working as well as they could, but we have no way of really knowing that currently. We all have limited energy and time, and so anything that can help us make sure we’re devoting our energy to things that are actually beneficial seems all to the good.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2013/04/23/essay-how-professors-can-deal-assessment

#assessment #adam kotsko #shimer college