Posted on Apr 19, 2002

Schaffer Library will have a book sale on Tuesday, April
23, from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Hardcovers are $2, paperbacks
$1. As if those prices aren't reasonable enough, books will be
half price on Wednesday, April 24, from 1:30 to 4 p.m.

Posted on Apr 19, 2002

Reappointment review committees have been formed
for nine assistant professors.

Members of the campus community may offer written
or oral testimony to committee members.

For Charles Batson, French, members are: Pilar
Moyano, committee chair (modern languages); Suzanne Benack
(psychology); Ruth Stevenson (English).

For Michelle Chilcoat, French: Victoria Martinez,
chair (modern languages); Barbara Danowski (biology);
Sharon Gmelch (anthropology).

For Quynh Chu-Lagraff, biology: Stephen Horton,
chair (biology); Jill Salvo (biology); Robert Olberg (biology).

For Megan Ferry, Chinese: Sigrid Kellenter, chair
(modern languages); Linda Patrik (philosophy); Steve Leavitt (anthropology).

For Andrea Foroughi, history: Teresa Meade, chair
(history); Andrew Feffer (history); Steven Sargent (history).

For Robert Hislope, political science: Byron Nichols,
chair (political science); Terry Weiner (political science); Erik
Hansen (history).

For Kathryn Lesh, mathematics: Julius Barbanel, chair
(mathematics); Brenda Johnson (mathematics); William
Fairchild (mathematics).

For Daniel Mosquera, Spanish: William Garcia,
chair (modern languages); Martha Huggins (sociology);
Leo Fleishman (biology).

For Mehmet Sener, economics: Therese McCarty,
chair (economics); Hal Fried (economics); J. Douglass Klein
(economics); Suthathip Yaisawarng (economics).

For Rebecca Surman, physics: Jay Newman, chair (physics);
Janet Anderson (chemistry); Seyfollah Maleki (physics); Gary
Reich (physics)

Posted on Apr 19, 2002

William Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize and National Book
Critics Circle Award winner for Ironweed, will speak on
“Roscoe and Me” on Wednesday, April 24, at 7:30 p.m. in the
Nott Memorial.

His talk, free and open to the public, is part of
the College's “Perspectives at the Nott” lecture series.

The Albany native and author of best-selling
fiction, non-fiction and screenplays, will talk about his new novel
Roscoe, and about the development of his “Albany Cycle” of
novels, which now numbers seven.

A reception will follow.

Posted on Apr 19, 2002

Nature writer and anthropologist Richard Nelson,
whose latest book Heart and Blood explores the often
controversial relationships between people and deer, will speak on
Thursday, April 25, at 4:45 p.m. in the Reamer Campus Center
Auditorium.

Nelson is a nature writer and cultural anthropologist who
spent many years studying relationships to the environment
among Iñupiaq Indians and Athabaskan Indians in Alaska. Based on
these experiences, he wrote Hunters of the Northern Ice, Shadow of
the Hunter, Hunters of the Northern Forest, Make Prayers to the
Raven (which became a PBS TV series), and
The Athabaskans.

His book, The Island Within, a personal journey into
the natural world around his home on the southeastern
Alaskan coast, won the John Burroughs Award for nature writing. He
also received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and
the Lannan Literary Award for creative non-fiction writing.

Heart and Blood: Living With Deer in America
received the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. In 1999, he was
named Alaska State Writer.

Besides writing, Nelson's life centers on watching
wildlife, surfing, hiking, kayaking, subsistence hunting and
fishing, and camping with his partner Nita Couchman.

He is also a volunteer conservation activist, working
for protection of old-growth rainforest in the Tongass
National Forest.

Posted on Apr 19, 2002

Listen, you upstate hillsides
Which I have loved
So loyally, your woodlots
And trailers and old farmhouses,
Your satellite dishes –

– From “Money Musk” by Jordan Smith

So begins a poem by Smith that practically scolds the
local landscape for refusing to reveal its history.

“I always had the sense that landscape involved history
and the history was mostly gone because the landscape had been
so transformed,” says Smith, explaining the poem that is
part of a recent collection titled Three Grange Halls.

The chapbook was co-winner of the 2002 Swan Scythe
Press Chapbook competition. A full-length collection (including
some of the poems from the chapbook) received first prize in the
Tampa Review poetry competition. It will be published in the fall by
the University of Tampa Press.

The title poem refers to Grange halls in Grooms
Corners, Brunswick Center and Malta. Like others in the collection, it
is peppered with references to landmarks that retain a sense
of the area's history – rural roads, boarded-up taverns,
overgrown family cemeteries, dilapidated buildings.

Smith, a Rochester native, recalls a childhood bicycle trip
to an 1800s communal farmstead: “I was fascinated by the feeling I
got from being around those old buildings. There was a sense
of the past persisting in the present. The past had a lot more
character to me.”

Smith says he prefers the hardscrabble upstate
landscape to, say, the quaint villages of New England or the sprawling
mid-west farms. “They're more scrubby and rundown,” he says
of the local landmarks. “I find that more picturesque, more
interesting.”

Smith does acknowledge, however, that he may be
adhering to the creative writing theory that a good poem or story depends
on something being amiss. “If everything's right, there's
no mystery. We have to have some level of tension to have
the impulse for writing.”

If landscape influences Smith's poetry, so does
traditional music.

Smith grew up on The Band and Bob Dylan. And his
father was a fan of Charles Ives, a composer who worked folk
tunes into his pieces to remind the listener of voices from
another time, Smith says.

“You have that sense of musical history and of
cultural reference that went back beyond the present,” he says. “A lot of
my impulses to write poetry came from liking American music
and hanging around with the musicians and not really being
a traditional musician myself.”

But Smith would become a musician, a fiddler, when his
son began violin lessons a decade ago.

“Music and poetry are analogous experiences,”
Smith says. “When you're playing music, you're really involved in
the moment. It's not just the notes. It's where you're sitting,
who you're playing with, what's going on in the atmosphere
around you.

“The experience you're trying to capture when you're writing
a poem has that kind of complexity,” he says. “One of the things
I say to students is that any moment that you're in – even if
it seems ordinary – is a really complex moment.”