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I was diagnosed with a mental illness during my Freshman year at St. John’s College. Throughout the next three and a half years, my life—personal and academic—was

colored by depression and instability. I know this is not uncommon. St. John’s is an intense and di(cult college and individual problems are magnified by academic demands. My time as a student was di(cult and I would love for others to have an easier time. I don’t know how helpful I can be, but I need to at least try. With that in mind, I would like to share some personal advice. This advice is not exclusive to students with diagnosable mental illnesses, though there may be some information specific to them. One doesn’t need to have a disorder to have a hard time.

In my experience, treatment for my illness was extremely helpful. Therapy is always your decision, as is medication. Neither helps everybody, but it helped me. Therapy and medication are not for everyone. Still, I need to stress that treatment is an option and it can be e)ective. Unfortunately, therapy and medicine aren’t magic. Treatment was only able to help me if I took care of myself. That’s not easy. If you are not seeking treatment because of financial reasons, keep in mind that the school will pay for three hours with a psychiatrist per semester. If you can’t get there, the school has an arrangement with Diamond Taxi to charge cab fare with the money you pay to the school each semester. There is also an option to meet with psychiatrists in the Health Center.

A professional is not the only person that can help you, however. The person that can help you most is yourself. There were long periods of time when my sleep patterns, eating habits, and, most importantly, ability to consistently prepare for or attend class went out the window. The amount of sheer willpower needed merely to take care of oneself can be extremely di(cult to muster up when you feel awful. I understand that. Despite the di(culties, however, YOU NEED TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. Sometimes it can feel impossible, but if you just get yourself out of bed, eat some food, and do your Greek, it makes a huge di)erence. In fact, the mere feeling of exercising that will power can make you feel better. Incentivize yourself. Set alarms and reminders on your phone. Push yourself to do what you need to do. I know this can feel impossible but it helps. It helps more than I can say.

If your state of mind is a)ecting you academically, don’t isolate yourself. Let your tutors know if your problems in class are due to medical or personal circumstances. Talk to the Assistant Dean if you need. Make it clear to the College that you aren’t lazy or uninterested.

This next part is very personal, and may be touchy. I feel the need to share my own experiences with how my mental and emotional di(culties a)ected my personal relationships. I ended up creating a vicious cycle: I would have di(culties and look to friends for support; they would not know what to do, which overwhelmed them. I’m not saying that your friends will resent you if you go to them for support. It is extremely important to have a support network, and it is wonderful to have someone you can trust. My point is that friends aren’t professionals, and that can be an easy dynamic to stumble into. Communicate with your friends and understand what is healthy for both of you.

I have one last thing to say. To anyone struggling: You are strong. You are brave. You are at a demanding college and you are fighting against the current to do well. Don’t give up. I have faith in you. Have faith in yourself. You can do it.

This is all that I can give. I hope it helps. !

It’s been awhile, Johnnies, so welcome back to the pages of

the Gadfly! We remain in a period of transition, but we are pleased to present the first issue of the spring semester, and we look forward to printing a few more before our seniors walk the stage.

If you are interested in helping out, please contact sjca.gadfly@gmail.com, and don’t miss our next meeting, Sunday, March 23. The next issue will be out March 25, so get writing!

— The New & Improved Gadfly Team

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Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the stu-dent newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and sta) of the An-napolis campus.Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gad-fly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way neces-sary to publish a professional, informa-tive, and thought-provoking newsmaga-zine.The next Gadfly will appear March 25, 2014. Submissions are due by Friday, March 21. The next meeting will take place Sunday, March 23, at 7 PM on the first lower level of the BBC.Articles can continue to be sent to sjca.gadfly@gmail.com.

Nathan GoldmanIan Tuttle

Hayden Pendergrass

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Eva BrannLucinda Dukes Edinberg

Formaggio ElettricoLeslie May Howard

Patricia LockeEsa Sclafani

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Esa Sclafani A’12

“To anyone struggling: You are strong. You are brave. Don’t give up. Have faith in yourself. You can do it.

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T+*'#1$1,' S$*--Sebastián AbellaSebastian Barajas

Noé JimenezAllison Tretina

What is your current job?I am President and CEO of Panagora Group, a business I founded in January 2011 to create a new platform for global health and development consulting. It was fun reaching back into my St. John’s Greek to come up with the name, now ex-plained in my byline as: “Pan means all, agora is the city cen-ter. Panagora! An inclusive space where ideas bubble and the best thrive and spread.” I’ve been working in this field now for thirty some years which takes me all over the world. For more on Panagora, visit our website, www.panagoragroup.net. Pan-agora’s mission is to make the world a better place for good. Did you attend other schools after St. John’s?I got my masters at the School of International A!airs and the Division of Urban Planning at Columbia University in New York City, in a program called “Planning in Developing Coun-tries.”

Did you know what you wanted to do while at St. John’s? I figured it out in a gap year between sophomore and junior year, during which I studied in Greece for one semester. For the first time, I saw real poverty and realized that I wanted to dedicate my life to poverty alleviation.

Did St. John’s help prepare you for work in the field?St. John’s prepared me in so many ways! I am always grateful for the training I received there before I specialized. St. John’s helped me cultivate the most invaluable skills for success in work by teaching me to listen, to probe, to read carefully, to think logically, to communicate carefully, and to work well in groups. I could not have wished for more relevant prepara-tion. It takes getting into the workplace to realize how valu-able these skills are. Employers are always on the lookout for them. There’s no better education than St. John’s for devel-oping these fundamental building blocks for success in the workplace. I was thrilled when one of my children selected St. John’s and graduated from the Santa Fe campus just a little over a year ago.

How did you feel you compared, in graduate school or ear-ly jobs, to people from di!erent educational backgrounds, particularly those with field-related degrees?I worried a lot about this when I went to Columbia, especial-ly in taking courses in subjects like economics. But it didn’t take too long to realize that I could be equally competitive in courses with subject matter that was new to me. I have always felt that this is due in large part to the fact that at St. John’s

we learned that we could tackle any subject or text through careful reading, thinking, and discussion. This has served me very well in work where I have been responsible for managing people and programs in very diverse technical subjects and geographical areas.

Can you describe a general track someone from St. John’s might take to get into a career in this fieldThere are many tracks: agriculture, health, democracy/gover-nance, business, environment, finance, education, and more. The common thread for international development (also often called “foreign assistance”) is the international aspect. This requires going to the graduate schools with international pro-grams that also have strong programs in the specialized area of your choice—for example, a school of public health, edu-cation, business, etc. Knowing a foreign language is also very important.

Any general advice, especially for an upperclassman who is interested in this field but is not quite sure what to do?My advice would be to network with Johnnies in the field (a growing number of us!) and professional associations like the Society for International Development (SID) that are oriented to nurturing young professionals in our space. I also advise getting overseas field experience, which will make the gradu-ate school experience much more worthwhile and will mean a lot to employers who want to see an understanding of the real context in which our work takes place. Peace Corps is most often cited for this purpose, but there are other, shorter routes to similar experience. Internships are also key ways to get the experience and contacts needed to get the best jobs.

How did you market yourself with a St. John’s degree?Very much in terms I mentioned above: that we had an oppor-tunity to study the evolution of Western thought with approx-imately equal weight to all the subjects, including some very hard ones like math and science, and in the process refined our ability to penetrate challenging material, think logically, communicate clearly, listen carefully, and work well in teams.

How would you characterize your field as a whole? Is it accessible to newcomers or di"cult to enter? Stable or fluid? Etc.The international development field is relatively stable and growing because, especially following 9/11, there is a clear re-alization among policy-makers, legislators, and the public that

!"#$%&!'$$'()&*+,-!"#$%&'()*+",-A summer trip to Greece changed Annapolis alumna Betsy Bassan’s life by bringing her face-to-face with true poverty. Several decades later, as founder and president of Panagora Group, Bassan is bringing help to impoverished persons across the globe.

Continued on Pg. 4

T"# G$%&'( 03

When I sat down to watch the silent film, East Side, West Side (1927), I naturally expected it to be filled with

laughable anachronisms: lots of moustache twirling, fisticu!s, and captions reading, “Hey pal what’s the big idea?” More than that, I imagined it would be amateurish from inexperi-ence with the (at that time) new visual medium.

However, I was surprised to find—not only that the silence wasn’t distracting—but that the film had a perfectly intelligible storyline, taste-fully adorned with quips and one-liners. Why, I wondered, shouldn’t everyone watch movies like this? After all, the characters’ problems were much the same as those of today’s charac-ters: love triangles, problems at work, and wor-ries about the future. Many similar movies are released every year, and the only changes are in the details: the phones the characters use, the cars they drive, the clothes they wear, and per-haps one or two words or expressions. If it’s the story and the characters that matter, why do we care about details?

Unlike other goods we consume, movies do not have to be fresh. Food, for example, must be continually made, because we cannot eat food that was prepared 87 years ago. To a lesser extent, our clothes and appliances must also be new (that is to say, new enough to perform their basic functions). Movies have no similar expiration date, and unlike books or other art forms, they require massive budgets in order to be produced. So why should we make new ones when we already have a century’s worth of work to get through?

That’s not to wonder why artists create new things, for this is obvious. All artists have the drive to create, and I despise how the phrase, “There is nothing new under the sun,” is used to debase their e!orts. Likewise, we might say nothing “new” has happened since the beginning of time, since the universe is still filled with the same matter. What’s more, the act of be-ing human and eating food is hardly an original one. Absolute novelty is a standard that no one could or should aspire to.

Nor when I ask, “Why do we fund new movies?” am I intro-ducing a debate about the ethics of piracy and the detrimen-tal e!ects of lost revenue, or anything of that sort. The fact is that new movies are funded. Billions of dollars each year

are spent on new projects, and movie studios are not charities. Somehow, money is being contributed by viewers to fund new projects. Why? Why is the newness of movies so important, when we could so easily cut costs by watching ones that have already been made?

There is no sense in the argument that the actual experience of going to the theater is why people enjoy new movies, for it has little to do with the movies themselves, and more to do with the culture and aesthetic pleasure. How often, for example, does this conversa-tion take place:

“Hey, you wanna go see a movie?”“Sure. Which one?”“I dunno. Let’s see what’s playing.”It seems that one could replace all new the-

atrical releases with titles from ten or twenty years ago and hardly anyone would complain. Even if someone had already seen the most popular movies of, say, 1994 (The Lion King, The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump),

thousands of other movies were made that year. In fact, no hu-man being can see every movie that comes out every year (and no sane human being would want to).

Similarly, we cannot accept the improvement of special e!ects as the sole reason new projects are funded. Plenty of movies are released each year that do not require especially modern technology in order to be executed well. Films like The King’s Speech and Juno illustrate this point. The same holds true for such recently accepted cinematic tools such as nudity and explicit violence, neither of which is particularly necessary for e!ective visuals.

We might more reasonably say that the appeal of new mov-ies is that they are specially tailored to our culture and appe-tites, whereas an older movie might fit us, but less well. At first it might seem absurd to spend so much money for such a small amount of extra comfort, but it’s hardly abnormal, especially in America. In addition to the obvious suit analogy, this love of tiny amounts of luxury is what makes us pay $150 for first class tickets on a 20-minute flight, or $35 to eat Domino’s in bed rather than swipe into the dining hall 45 feet away.

“Movies have no expiration date [and] require massive bud-gets. So why should we make new ones when we already have a century’s worth of work to get through?

buttress the mor-

al and economic argument for foreign assistance.

I think this field is penetrable, but having interlocutors to help illuminate the way in and open a few doors is im-portant. There are many di!erent paths to take within the field of international development—many di!erent subject areas, di!erent platforms (donor, busi-

ness, non-profit, etc.), the possibility of working overseas or in a headquar-ters, policy versus practitioner, and so on. Each person has to sort that out for themselves and identify which strand fits them best.

What is your favorite Program book?Oh dear, so many books that I have loved in di!erent ways. Just thinking of an an-swer takes me down many wonderful

pathways, thinking of the many books and how they present di!erently over one’s life. But I don’t land on just one fa-vorite! Do you find that you lead a philosoph-ical life?Of course. I can’t imagine a Johnnie that doesn’t continue to question, inquire, examine, and try to discern meaning in life. !

Continued from Pg. 3

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T"# G$%&'(04

Continued on Pg. 6

Many are called to twist day into night, to argue, “all is permitted,” including unlimited amounts of co!ee and

other ca!einated drinks to guarantee heart palpitations." No washing of clothes and hair, no orderly regime at all." In search of intense experience, we seek the unhealthy spiral into dark-ness, into genius." Never mind that Nietzsche himself wrote for several hours in the morning, had a decent lunch, and then went for a long afternoon walk before returning to his desk to write down his reflections." Emily Dickinson favored baking as a time to let her writing develop on the back burner, so to speak." What does one do with all the time NOT writing?" Ought we feel guilty that we are not writing?" Ought we plunge into panic or paralysis?" Ought we to work more hours, so as not to waste time?" Ought we play pool or seek other diversions from being alone in our rooms?" Are bodily suf-fering and mental anguish necessary for a suc-cessful essay?"

To explore this question, start small." Divide it into two sections: bodily su!ering followed by mental anguish." Perhaps one will find that body and mind are inextricably intertwined and that it is quite simple to make oneself mis-erable—hence, more interesting, intelligent and deep." (Sophomores: Does this conclusion stand?)

Bodily su!ering:" Is this a sprint, or long-distance running?" If the former, aban-don all personal health practices and fully immerse oneself in the writing process, as one who is “mourante et qui cherche à mourir.”" By interrupting sleep patterns alone, one will have the illusion of profundity and can move in incredibly slow mo-tion." Add disruptions to exercise, diet, and other good habits, and one can be disoriented in both time and space." But isn’t being human su!ering enough?" Do we need to deliberately make ourselves su!er from neglect in order to feel intellectual-ly alive?" Perhaps the drama of the starving artist/melancholic philosopher is a stereotype we ought to abandon as too cliché for those who seek to examine our cultural presuppositions.

If writing period is more akin to a long distance race, or per-haps a practice run towards the goal of arranging one’s life over the long haul, one has to carbo load, strength train, and so on." So mindful meals and physical exercise sustain the long-term e!ort." The capacity to give attention to the cultivation of the mind and spirit rests upon these mundane grounds.

By and large, we are very good at collaborative learning at the board and at the seminar table." We aren’t as skilled in the articulation of our ideas in an extended way in writing—all by our lonesomes." So my current thought is that we need to build bridges from what we do well to what we want to do well." Feeling like one is connected to others physically proxi-mate in the writing experience helps ramp up the intensity. We might follow a designated block of writing time alone with the

pleasure of reporting in with friends." "Though we are writing about di!erent books, surely saying out loud and even argu-ing about one’s ideas’ relations to one’s colleagues’ work is also exciting, and perhaps helpful. Channeling Nietzsche, we might don black garments and take brisk walks alone—or together."

Mental anguish: In my solitary cell, it crosses my mind to compare myself to Kant. Hence, my ideas are shallow and not worth writing down." Or, if I write something down, I polish its hubcaps to a fine sheen before I move on to paragraph #2." Other people have

many more pages than I have at this point. . . . You know the script." What if I cut my-self some slack; say, two hours o! from personal harassment, and let my ideas run free?" What if I could pretend to be a tight-rope walker, who is JOYOUSLY walking across the rope suspended over a large pit?" What if the high stakes of my main question really ARE high (Does God exist? Can people actually be in contact with one another?" Is the world coherent?? What about death??? Mr. Darcy*?*?)? Then I could feel excited and glad to be wrestling with them." Time o! from mental anguish

could yield deep pleasure, or at least clarity of mind." Fretting and anxiety clog the mental pores, causing a buildup of sooty vapors that get in the way of thinking clearly about the issues at stake." If we could take a mental-anguish break, more might get written that is meaningful to writer and reader alike.

I claim that you can write a thoughtful and interesting essay without exaggerated su!ering." You may be stymied from time to time, unsure of which direction to turn in the writer’s laby-rinth, but you have comrades with whom to sort things out." You have a genuine question and desire. Just log the writing hours, take breaks, let the pages pile up. Write the first draft for yourself, but remember the reader in your later ones. Don’t forget to spell check and include page numbers! I leave you, Gentle Readers, with Emily Dickinson’s guaranteed way to be popular and productive, when faced with a (transitory) writ-er’s block. . . .

!"##"$%&'()&!$**+(*%%&Patricia Locke Tutor

“Time o! from mental anguish could yield deep pleasure or at least clarity of mind. . . . You can write a thoughtful and inter-esting essay without exaggerated su!er-ing.

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Snow on the ground can mean only one thing—it’s a good time to make soup! Soup is the perfect comfort food,

transforming an evening from frosty and cruel to warm and heartening. It’s also not nearly as daunting to make as it might seem. Check out gastrokitty.blogspot.com this week for simple and scrumptious recipes, fun facts, and tantaliz-ing photos of soup!

— “Formaggio Elettrico”

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Continued on Pg. 6

T#$ G%&'() 05

But I think there’s also some-thing more fundamental fuel-

ing our desire to see new movies: our collective fear of being cut o!. We spend hours a day reading the news and checking our five di!erent social media accounts, unable to stand the idea that something big and important might happen while we’re not paying attention. And new movies certainly seem to “happen” in a way old movies no longer can. Even if the mov-ies themselves are timeless, they are shrouded in a kind of ar-tificially created timeliness. For example, we can enjoy watch-ing The Lord of the Rings anytime, but only upon its release do the people parade in its honor.

Perhaps there is no one account for why we fund new movies. I myself could not justify why I spent $12 to watch The Desolation of Smaug, knowing perfectly well how awful it would be. This happens often. Is the en-tertainment industry some-how exempt from—or at least highly resistant to—human logic? Or are our decisions as consumers no less rational

about movies than about cars, food, political candidates, fur-niture, and knickknacks no reasonable person would ever buy, like beer funnels? We’re willing to pay upwards of four dol-lars for a tiny amount of terrible co!ee. We routinely shop for cars—not based on each model’s performance or utility—but based on how we will be perceived as its owner. Every year, we spend billions of dollars on dieting programs and health prod-ucts because we can’t figure out how to eat less food. Clearly, what is reasonable and prudent does not especially concern us.

Yet perhaps it is not a bad thing that, against reason, we continue to fund new movies. Otherwise our greatest minds in film would have no way to realize their visions. More impor-tantly, each decade of this past century has had a distinctive

style that has been preserved in cinematic history. If new films were not made, that cultural record would be discontinued and our decade would be left out. Think about decades like the 60s or the 80s, and the marks they left on the world of film. I’m glad to think that in 50 years society might similarly be able to recognize our decade by its work.

But this ever-increasing reservoir of human achievement also bears with it a kind of cost. For as time goes by, it be-comes more di"cult for the intellectual to fulfill his three traditional roles: to study the past, to experience the pres-ent, and to build, that he might influence the future. Each day more history is cre-ated that must be studied. The present grows bigger and louder as social media expands. To create anything noteworthy

amidst such a torrent is a task both Herculean and Machia-vellian. Yet the would-be intellectual must fight this battle on every front. In the time it took for me to watch East Side, West Side, I could have seen any of the twenty or so new releases I still haven’t gotten around to watching. In the time it’s taken me to write this article, I could have finally read The Catcher in the Rye, or watched Donnie Darko, or learned something about Indonesia, or filled any number of other gaps in my education. Which is noblest? Which is most worthy of choice?

East Side, West Side was silent on these matters. It contained only a dance of characters and circumstances. Perhaps every field of human interest is merely such a dance: every film, ev-ery book, every math problem, and every science experiment. They are for us, and they are infinite. !

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O! to have a bag that fits!That never slides and never slips!My garbage rots beneath your sags:You are despised, ill-fitting bags.The CETs we cannot blame;No matter what, t’would be the same.Despite the corner-knot I tied,This blasted bag does slip and slide.And though I’ve tried and tried and tried,Ill-fitting bags will not abideInside my trash can (well, inside—Collapsed, not neatly ‘round applied).

O! to have a bag that stays!That never rips or falls or frays!One time the bottom was a hole.I sense it’s out of my control,But is it too much to expectA garbage bag that isn’t wrecked?

I speak for all the polityWhen I proclaim this humble plee:Please give us bags that do not slip.Please give us garbage bags that fit.

! Leslie Howard, A’15

T#$ G%&'()06

“To create any-thing notewor-thy amidst the torrent of the present age is a task both Hercu-lean and Machia-vellian.

Continued from Pg. 4

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As transcribed in Emily Dickinson: Profile of the Poet as Cook from Dickinson’s original manuscript:

The editors of the book add the following: “Cream the butter and mix with lightly whipped cream. Sift dry ingre-dients together and combine with other ingredients. The dough is sti! and needs to be pressed into whatever pan you choose. A round or small square pan is suitable. The recipe also fits perfectly into a cast iron mu"n pan, if you happen to have one that makes oval cakes. Bake at 350°F for 20-25 minutes.

“Guides at the Emily Dickinson House, who experi-mented with the quantity of molasses, have generally agreed that a ‘cup or so’ is just about right.”

Bonne chance!!

Continued from Pg. 5

1 quart flour 1⁄2 cup butter 1⁄2 cup cream 1 tablespoon ginger

1 teaspoon soda1 teaspoon salt Make up with molasses

Kimo Mackey, Annapolis alumnus (1976) also father, broth-er, uncle to alumni, is a racing sailor, boat restorer, and

reader of the kind of book I love—books by and for sailors. (I used to sail a little sloop of my own, which now belongs to the college.) When he’s finished he sends me a copy. With this last one, he hit the spot, big time, and I want to tell about it, espe-cially since St. John’s is a rowing school.

It’s about the nine boys who won the gold medal for the main rowing event in Berlin at the Olympics that the Nazis mounted three years after they seized power. The book has so many resonances that I hardly know where to start. That’s in spite of the fact that competition plays a huge role in it – a pas-sion which leaves me ba!ed; at most, I’d go for “personal best.” (Decades ago I read a joke, probably in an old Reader’s Digest, that describes my state perfectly: Father takes little daughter to football game. Watching her first scrimmage, she asks, “Daddy, couldn’t we buy each team its own ball?”)

Except for that, it’s a book I took personally but also a book for us all. So first: I was born in Berlin, a German Jew in the Nazi era. For the Olympics, Göbbels’ propaganda ministry had cleaned up the city; the “Jews not welcome” signs displayed in most shops had been stored away. Now, the coxswain of the University of Washing-ton shell, the Husky Clipper, was the, later legendary, runt (that’s in the job description for coxswains, as for jockeys), Bobby Moch. The coxswain is the practical wisdom (ph-ronesis) incarnate of a row boat. He receives the strategy from the coach and tweaks, even scraps it, in execution. That is, he calls the strokes per minute, from a leisurely 28 to a flying 44. On the eve of the crew’s departure to Germany, Moch got a letter from his father revealing the family secret: They were Jewish. So when Moch stood on the podium to receive his gold, surrounded by swasti-kas, something was, unbeknownst to the world, being proved, an evil intention was being secretly nullified. Jesse Owens’ four golds in track were the more public counterpart, as was heavyweight Joe Louis’s defeat of Germany’s Max Schmeling a couple of years later. A Jew and two black men were under-mining the Nazi myth of Aryan racial superiority. “Whom the gods would destroy they first make blind” say the Greeks; a less deluded leadership would have read the omens: their nemesis was readying in the West. One of the excellences of Brown’s book is that, unlike some writers born in the later twentieth century, he is vividly aware of the ominousness of these Olym-pics and of that Germany, and so, of the service “the boys in boat” did to human decency.

And that’s the next point. It was the West of the West that

was representing the United States. All the boys belonged to the working class of the Northwest. Here again, there’s a per-sonal note: I spent a glorious year playing hooky from St. John’s, teaching at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washing-ton. There I fell in love with Northwestern scenic beauty and learned to respect just that Northwestern character depicted in the book. America was then, and still is, blessedly regional. It’s what you might call cultural philistinism with a descant of moral heroism and a continuo of plain decency. By “philis-tinism” I mean those good old tunes sung to a plunky banjo on weekdays plus Italian opera on Sundays; in other words, what I’m not so fond of.

Competitive rowing is physically excruciating—real pain, and morally extreme—real self-sacrifice. But there is a huge re-ward, called being in “the swing;” we’d say “in the zone.” It’s a sort of ecstatic concentration—being at once beyond and with-in oneself. And the boat becomes a living unit, an organism.

To my mind, our college is one—of several possible—model communities. Among the topics we are all, students and tutors, in a good place to reflect on, is this: What are the kinds of communion that may hold a com-munity together, of which “the swing” is one, beautifully delineated in this book?

That brings me to my last item. Extreme-ly well-researched detail, put into bated-breath order in visualizable language, is one of the virtues of Brown’s book. Of these, the element I liked best is the one that fills a lack

in our lives with the Program. We are, after all, devoted to the-ory and to amateurism—to living theory, to be sure, and to ama-teurism taken literally: “the lover’s way” (not to be confused with amateurishness, that is, cluelessness). So much the more do I like to read about the ways of craftsmanlike production, how it’s done when it’s done with expertise and love. The Boys in the Boat has a lot about building these slender marvels that accommodate very skinny behinds and very long bodies. One of the lovingly detailed heroes is George Yeoman Pocock, who built, with hand tools, these sleek shells, clad in paper-thin ce-dar shingles, and who was a fountain of rowing wisdom, from technical detail to transcendent insight. In his sayings you can smell the pungent sweetness of the wood.

A last delight: The Greek epigraph in front is from that most magical of sailors’ books, the Odyssey: actually from Book V, Lines 220, 223. And all the accents are correct. !

Eva Brann Tutor

“The element I liked best is the one that !lls a lack in our lives with the Program: craftsmanlike produc-tion, how it’s done when it’s done with expertise and love.

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Lucinda Dukes Edinberg

The Mitchell Gallery has opened Dialogues: Words and Images in Art, 1500-1924, an exhibition of 57 works that explore the rich and complex relationship of the

word/image symbiosis from the Renaissance to the aftermath of World War I. Some of these images are simple titles for works of art; some incorporate words directly into the image; some are visual illustrations of texts or literary descriptions of ob-jects (ekphrasis).

Johnnies are well acquainted with ekphrasis, in part from Plato’s Theory of Forms and, perhaps, through something Socrates says in the Phaedrus:

You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever.

Seen in this exhibition is Plato’s Cave (1604), an engraving by the Dutch artist Jan Pietersz Saenredam, while Aeneas’ escape from Troy is seen in Giorgio Ghisi’s 1545 print, The Fall of Troy and the Escape of Aeneas. John Boydell’s collection of scenes from Shakespeare plays, Dore’s interpretation of Don Quixote, and the iconic raven of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem are but a few of the works which explore the literary de-scription of objects. It is worth considering the number of visual artists who were also poets and writers, such as William Blake and his Book of Job, in addition to Hogarth’s social and satirical commentaries on society through A Harlot’s Progress (1731) and A Rake’s Progress (1735).

While this exhibition is not entirely devoted to ekphrasis, it does confront Hor-ace’s famous claim: “as is painting, so is poetry” (ut pictura poesis). Furthermore, the collection asks: How does the history of language relate to the history of art? What is the relationship of words and images through time, and how do we process this verbal and visual information?

Dialogues: Words and Images in Art, 1500-1924, which is on view through April 6, is curated by David Gar-i(, Ph.D., Senior Lectur-er at the National Gallery of Art. Lenders for this exhibition include the National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Georgetown Uni-versity Library Special Collections, Syracuse University Art Collec-tion, the Greenfield Li-brary, and several private collections. !

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Dialogues: Words and Images

Plato’s Cave, 1604; Jan Pietersz Saenredam (Dutch, 1565-1607)

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