Snow is Falling

We were graced today with the lightest dusting of snow, about two hours after the sun slunk behind the alps. The ground looks like a weather-affected version of toast, when the butter melts and sinks into the bread, and the stairs to my penthouse have become slick enough to think twice about skipping the even ones. Two movie nights in a row have accented very long work days. Another two assignments today, to go along with an extremely long list of biographies for visiting schools, professors, and academics who will arrive in early January for ISP 29. I am also in charge of organizing some documents, reading through reviews of past sessions, assimilating the common data that the schools have reported on, and sifting it into an accessible document in order to improve the effective and efficiency of an upcoming ISP session. One of my on-going, probably interminable projects is to research past session lecturers and attendees, discern missing information in their biographies, verify and update contact information, professional progress, and publications made in the interim. The void in our record goes back about 40 years, so this project will be my Everest.

As a de facto timeline for my two-ish readers, I will be preparing for and facilitating the winter festival until the end of December, two International Student Panels in January, the Institute for Historic Justice and Reconciliation in February, and one final session in early March, just before I leave for Dublin.

One other bit of news that is worth noting: today at lunch, the topic of zombies came up. Apparently, there are no less than four people here, all male, who are pretty into zombies, both in pop-culture references and in classical mythology. We tossed around a few thoughts on the matter, and I mentioned to my colleague Daniel--a man who, by the way, had recently ordered ten books on zombies from Amazon, arrival pending shortly--that we might want to come up with some common identity traits that all zombies seem to share. I have assigned this set a preliminary name: the Unified Selenti Theory (thesis concerning all of the dead). He and I discussed many, many different variables, parameters, and pitfalls to this potential theory, including the ways in which it accesses present and past iterations of the zombie, verses other undead and otherwise horror field archetypes. It occurs to me that philosophy must somehow be connected to this subject, as it generally is to all things both critical and trivial, and for my part, I will do some work playing around with this connection. A website on the subject will be launched soon, as a way to pass our time creatively, and surprisingly, several various publication mediums, even this early in our thought process, are currently being pursued. This is a fantastic success for day two, and one certainly befitting the stirring minds that occupy the intern office at the SGS.