Posted on Apr 15, 2005

Twelve Tibetan monks from the Gaden Jangtse Monastery in India were putting the finishing touches on the “Sand Mandala of Wisdom” in the Nott Memorial after hundreds of visitors – schoolchildren to seniors – checked in on their progress this week. Many watched the progress live via the College's website at http://www.union.edu/monkcam/.

The monks will dismantle the mandala during a colorful closing ceremony on Friday, April 15, 4 p.m. that will include chanting, music and elaborate costumes. They will travel to Union's boathouse pier on the Mohawk River to release the sand. Buses will be available for those who would like to accompany the monks.

Their visit also included the construction of a butter sculpture, talks on politics in Tibet, a philosophical debate, meditation lessons and a multi-tonal chanting concert.

The original Gaden Jangtse Monastery was established in 1409, and at one point was India's second largest monastery with 7,000 monks. Little of the original monastery remains after the 1959 Communist invasion of Tibet. The monastery was re-established in South India, and now serves about 3,000 monks.

The monks' visit to Union is funded through a Freeman Foundation grant of the East Asian Studies Department.

Posted on Apr 15, 2005

Anthropologist and author Denis Foley (Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill: The Forensic Story of a Multiple Personality Serial Killer, 2003) will examine questions about evil in a department talk on Friday, April 15, at noon in Social Sciences 110.

Foley, who teaches at the College, has interviewed perpetrators and victims of many crimes to answer questions such as: What it was like dealing with and defining evil? How do we conceive of evil?  How is it dealt with and depicted in our culture?

The talk is sponsored by the Anthropology Department. For more information, contact Kathy DeLorenzo at ext. 6715.

Posted on Apr 15, 2005

Michael Ondaatje, best known for his landmark novel, The English Patient, will speak and read from his work on Tuesday, May 3, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.

The talk, part of Union's Perspectives at the Nott lecture series, is free and open to the public.

The English Patient won the 1992 Booker Prize and then became an Academy Award-winning movie. The author of five novels, Ondaatje also writes memoirs, film scripts and poetry.

Born in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), he lives in Toronto and teaches at York University. Along with top Canadian writers Leonard Cohen and Margaret Atwood, he is one of the most interesting and important living contemporary writers.

He began publishing lyric poems in the late 1960's. His work quickly morphed into a unique and complex mesh of poetry and prose, historical fact, photos, interviews, and (often avant- garde, even hallucinatory) images and fiction. He has written books set in places as diverse as the 19th-century Australian Outback, Billy the Kid's American West, the turn-of-the-20th-century jazz world of New Orleans, immigrant workers' communities in Toronto ca. 1930s, World War II Europe and North Africa, contemporary rural Ontario, and contemporary Sri Lanka.

Using his own mesh of genre and approach, he has imagined the 20th century, its roots and trajectories, in a unique, multi-cultural way. He has made three films of his own and recently published a book-length interview with famed Hollywood film editor Edward Murch.

Ondaatje also will visit Prof. Ed Pavlic's seminar, “Pictures Fly Without Target”: the Prose-Poetics of Michael Ondaatje's Writing. His visit marks the third consecutive year an internationally-acclaimed author has visited with English / Africana Studies classes. Previous visitors have included Yusef Komunyakaa and Adrienne Rich.

Posted on Apr 15, 2005

John Todd, a global leader in sustainability and ecological water purification, will speak on “Sustainability Through Ecological Design” on Thursday, April 14, at 7 p.m. in Olin 115.

His talk, part of the “Sustainable Development” series sponsored by Union's Environmental Studies program, is free and open to the public. (His talk was postponed from an earlier date due to weather.)

Todd is a global leader in the field of ecological water purification. Ocean Arks International, founded by Todd in 1981 in response to natural resource exploitation and depletion, disseminates ideas and practices of ecological sustainability throughout the world.

He is author of over 200 technical and popular articles on biology and planetary stewardship. A professor at the University of Vermont, he was assistant professor of ethology at San Diego State University, and assistant scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

In 1969 he co-founded the New Alchemy Institute to create a science and practice based on ecological precepts. He also co-founded Living Technologies Inc., an ecological design, engineering, and construction firm in Burlington, Vt., and Living Technologies in Findhorn, Scotland. He sits on a number of environmental and technical boards.

Todd is a leader in the field of ecological design. He has described his work in a series of books: The Village as Solar Ecology (1980), Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address (1980), Reinhabiting Cities & Towns: Designing for Sustainability (1981) and Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design (1984). This last book has been revised and published as From Eco-cities to Living Machines (1994).

Todd has received numerous accolades for his work. He was profiled in Inventing Modern America, a publication of the Lemelson-MIT Program for Invention and Innovation, which features the development of his signature ecological waste treatment systems. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Green Mountain College in 2000, and received the Bioneers Lifetime Achievement Award two years previous. Also in 1998, he and Nancy Jack Todd received the Lindbergh Award in recognition of their work in technology and the environment.

Posted on Apr 15, 2005

Charles Batson, assistant professor of French, recently was guest artist at the University of Illinois-Champaign, where he performed at Festival Dance at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. He worked with choreographer Cynthia Pipkin-Doyle to dance in  “L'Apparence,” a  piece involving Baroque and modern movement and French declamation. While in Champaign, he gave a talk sponsored by the Department of French, the Department of Comparative Literatures, and the School of Music, titled “Panique celtique, or Fest-noz in Paname: Manau, Celtic Rap, and Breton Cultural Expression.”