Dava Sobel
Bill writes: OK, here's something I can describe without photos. We went to Gresham College to hear Dava Sobel, the author of "Galileo's Daughter" and "Longitude" give a lecture on her latest book, "The Planets." Gresham College is an old college with no students. (Now there's a concept to warm the heart of professors everywhere.) Established by charter of Queen Elizabeth (the first one), Gresham College has a staff of several professors who basically are hired for a year or so. While there, their duties are to deliver free lectures to the public at lunch or in the evening.
The college is located in Barnard's Inn, which is mentioned in Dickens "Great Expectations." (You'd appreciate this, Linda!) We were really looking forward to the talk by Ms. Sobel, but it was actually a bit of a letdown. The talks are typically 45 minutes with 15 minutes for questions and answers afterward. The author spent the first 15 minutes reading chapter one of her book. She spent the next 30 minutes describing a series of interpretive art on the nine planets. These were new-age illustrations that she'd designed with the artist. Now, Dava Sobel is a science writer, but she spent 30 minutes explaining things like why in the illustration of Venus the planet was shown as growing on top of a flower in a garden, what the butterflies represented, why there were angels floating overhead, what the cat in the corner meant, and the importance of the rainbow. Seriously. At the end someone asked her if the illustrator was selling any of this original art from the book. She replied that none of the illustrations she'd just shown us were in the book. So she spent two-thirds of her talk discussing her personal new age symbology that had nothing to do with the science or history of the planets and that did not even appear in her book. Yikes, that went over like a lead balloon. Well, at least there was plenty of wine at the book signing afterward.
Thinking back on it, I realize Dava Sobel's talk ought to have been constructed exactly like our MLA colloquia. Yet she broke every rule of how to put together a successful colloquium, and the result was exactly what the head of our program, Linda, had warned us about. It certainly made me wish it had been one of our fellow MLA students talking instead.
The college is located in Barnard's Inn, which is mentioned in Dickens "Great Expectations." (You'd appreciate this, Linda!) We were really looking forward to the talk by Ms. Sobel, but it was actually a bit of a letdown. The talks are typically 45 minutes with 15 minutes for questions and answers afterward. The author spent the first 15 minutes reading chapter one of her book. She spent the next 30 minutes describing a series of interpretive art on the nine planets. These were new-age illustrations that she'd designed with the artist. Now, Dava Sobel is a science writer, but she spent 30 minutes explaining things like why in the illustration of Venus the planet was shown as growing on top of a flower in a garden, what the butterflies represented, why there were angels floating overhead, what the cat in the corner meant, and the importance of the rainbow. Seriously. At the end someone asked her if the illustrator was selling any of this original art from the book. She replied that none of the illustrations she'd just shown us were in the book. So she spent two-thirds of her talk discussing her personal new age symbology that had nothing to do with the science or history of the planets and that did not even appear in her book. Yikes, that went over like a lead balloon. Well, at least there was plenty of wine at the book signing afterward.
Thinking back on it, I realize Dava Sobel's talk ought to have been constructed exactly like our MLA colloquia. Yet she broke every rule of how to put together a successful colloquium, and the result was exactly what the head of our program, Linda, had warned us about. It certainly made me wish it had been one of our fellow MLA students talking instead.
posted by Bill | 6:16 PM
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