As I trek toward the Great Unknown, as life’s struggles seem to intensify, some odd questions keep recurring.

Art — what is it again? Why does it matter? How does it matter? What does it mean to be “good” at it?

That last question, in particular, can cut like barbed wire — especially if you’ve been swimming all your life in a sense of mediocrity, having learned that the Temple of Art is the home of the blessed elite. There’s Mona Lisa, then there are scribbles and doodles: baby stuff. End of discussion. Your grade is C-minus. Welcome to consumer culture.

So why do I care about art? Indeed, why now? As I grow older (by which I mean “old”), I refuse, refuse, refuse to retire: to quit writing, to quit believing I’m doing something that matters . . . to quit believing that humanity is collective and, at the deepest levels of our being, we all participate in this collective. This is what I call art, even though I don’t know what I mean by that. Or at least I don’t mean something that’s simple and certain, or even particularly serious — at least not in an academic sense. Serious can be fun.

Part Two

Instead of actions that aid its too many, largely unadvised and unassisted students, several years ago, OSU changed the long-time traditional requirement that first year students live on campus in university-operated dormitories as part of their transition from home and socialization to college. With little advance notice and no responsible operational planning, one year became two years of mandatory on-campus housing and required university food contracts for all students who do not live with their families.

This was partly foreshadowed when OSU more than twenty years earlier removed full-time faculty from regular student advising. Only a handful of departments now assign new majors to faculty or have majors select their own advisors. For almost all students, as in first- and second-year general education, advising is conducted by full-time, non-teaching advisors. Many students, concentrating in certain colleges and departments, never or seldom speak to an advisor. Waiting time can be months not days or weeks and months.

On August 24, 2023, Ta'Kiya Young was murdered by the police. This fund is to help her family with burial and funeral expenses. 

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Harold Pinter was a prolific playwright and screenwriter. I enjoyed the 1960s films he’d written the screenplays for, The Servant and Accident, which were directed by that refugee from the Hollywood Blacklist, Joseph Losey. After being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter’s rather heroic, 2005 noble Nobel Lecture dared to challenge the prevailing pro-war propaganda, excoriating the Iraq War. Although he was too sick to travel to Scandinavia, the hospitalized 75-year-old British man of letters videotaped his 46-minute frontal assault on U.S. foreign policy that was screened at the Swedish Academy. (See: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture/.) Pinter did the best thing one can do with status, using it as a platform to be a scourge of the status quo, an implacable enemy of social injustice.

Earlier this year, at a Kroger on the far Southside, a store manager was undercover. And a customer, a middle-aged white woman wearing a pant suit, a COVID mask and a floppy hat, was about to the leave the store.

Suddenly the undercover store manager yelled “Drop It!” The white woman, who looked more Dublin than Southside, scoffed at first. But then spilled her plastic grocery bags’ contents onto the floor. Out came organic juices, dog bones, and makeup. Caught red-handed. She was marched by the manager to the customer service desk.

There, a security guard made her raise her right hand and sign a document. She said she would never shop in that store again and walked out a free woman. A Free Press reporter witnessed all of this firsthand.