When I stepped into The Blossom Shop in downtown Hillsdale, I had no idea that I was entering a war zone in the global economy. It hardly seemed like embattled territory. I learned that tulips are a dollar a stem. They’re shy in the cold, but once you take them from the refrigerator and set them on your kitchen table, they’ll open right up. They … Continue reading The Flower Industry
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. —Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray The video opens with a typical vlog set-up: A woman sits centered in front of the camera, her pristine background out of focus. The Scandinavian minimalist aesthetic is enough to make any 22-year-old vaguely covetous. Her platinum blonde hair … Continue reading The Rage of Caliban: Millennials and the New Aestheticism
When the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt spoke to a group of Hillsdale students about her time teaching poetic composition to the actor James Franco at the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program, she mentioned a poem they had studied, a cinematic oddity by American poet Robert Lowell titled “Skunk Hour.” In the poem, a speaker climbs a hill and views parked cars (“love cars” as … Continue reading A Backward Leap
My great-uncle’s full name was Verdon Ganger, but everyone called him Bud. By the time I knew him, Bud was a soft-spoken widower in his 80s, who kept an immaculate garden and took a keen interest in the birds that nested in his backyard. As a little girl, I never bothered to think of him in terms beyond that. Like all the others who … Continue reading These Worlds We Hold: Memory and the Role of Storytelling
In general, we are people who have cared little for beauty as spectacle. It takes a good deal of persuading to make us go look at a sunset…We like our beauty to be inherent in our way of life, not something we must make a special trip for…The beauty glimpsed between bursts of the labor that justified our joy in it was the beauty that … Continue reading Beauty As Spectacle
What if I were a catfish, mama? I said, swimmin’ deep down in, deep blue sea Have these gals now, sweet mama, settin’ out Settin’ out hooks for, for me, settin’ out hook for, for me “Catfish Blues” (1941) Robert Petway Brightly colored fishing piers dot the shore of the man-made ponds at Lewis Emery park where, on bright summer days, locals bring their rods, … Continue reading Whiskers in the Water
It’s been nearly a year since my trip to Israel, and I am still trying to process it. Maybe it’s because the trip was wedged between two hectic and difficult semesters. Maybe it’s because I had no idea what to expect, especially since the only knowledge of Israel I had to bring with me on the trip came from the Bible. Or maybe it’s because … Continue reading The Bedrock of Israel: Churches and Sacred Places in Israel
Hillsdale is not the real world–but it can teach us how to live there. By Madeline Johnson The trip from home to college or back is a sort of trauma, the trauma of dying in one world and being born into another. In the portal between the worlds, that single moment of death and birth, you are utterly alone, the unaccountable soul that counts as … Continue reading There and Back Again: A Student’s Tale
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