Academia Aesthetics By University Major

academia aesthetics by university major

Literature

Losing yourself in whimsy, drifting somewhere parallel to reality. Passionate, frenzied writing in the heart of the night. Drinking the moonlight. Love letters lost between moments. Birdsong. Quiet looks, filled with meaning. Opinions you don’t speak out loud. Chopin’s Nocturnes.

Classics

A glint in the eye, like they know something you don’t. Books in different languages, scattered across every surface. Red wine, and blood, and secrets. Spirits stirred by the glorious weight of eras past, tongue heavy with the words of dead men. Marble busts of Greek philosophers. Reality dulling against the music of myth.

Philosophy

Milky tea and introspective mornings. Sun filtering gently into a quiet room. Reading in nature, sinking into the sound of the wind, birds or water. Margins filled with annotations. Long, grand hallways and the echo of footsteps. Conversations that last for hours, but feel like minutes.

Sciences

Notebooks filled with scattered calculations, terms, and theories, partnered with small pieces of flora and miscellaneous clippings. ‘Eureka’ moments. Wild eyes and chewed lips. Lying awake all night, your head buzzing with ideas. Piles of meticulous notes. Hunching over desks in dim lamplight. The feeling of puzzle pieces fitting together. The smallness of humanity, and the vastness of existance.

Fine Art/Art History

Huge, baroque ballrooms with renaissance paintings on the ceilings. Staring up at them until the real world dissolves and the images spin around you. Early spring. Foxes in the snow. Classical music. Vintage teacups, and slow blinks. Laughter covered by fingers. Dancing where no-one can see you.

Political Science

Fast strides and black coffee. Enthusiastic debates with peers, and discussions with your professor. Pages and pages of notes, scrawled so hastily they’re almost illegible. Running through the night, laughing with friends and going places you shouldn’t. A cunning smile from across a room.

History

Grand old buildings, shadowed with age and brimming with secrets. Old, rusty daggers. Tentative hands and determined eyes. Fingers stained with nicotine and ink. Old books and letters, shrouded in dust, that no-one’s read in a hundred years. Touching the pages, and understanding what it was to be alive in another time, seeing what they saw and feeling what they felt.

(dm to request a major for part two)

Women In History

I grew up believing that women had contributed nothing to the world until the 1960′s. So once I became a feminist I started collecting information on women in history, and here’s my collection so far, in no particular order.

Lepa Svetozara Radić (1925–1943) was a partisan executed at the age of 17 for shooting at German soldiers during WW2. As her captors tied the noose around her neck, they offered her a way out of the gallows by revealing her comrades and leaders identities. She responded that she was not a traitor to her people and they would reveal themselves when they avenged her death. She was the youngest winner of the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia, awarded in 1951

23 year old Phyllis Latour Doyle was British spy who parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944 on a reconnaissance mission in preparation for D-day. She relayed 135 secret messages before France was finally liberated.

Catherine Leroy, War Photographer starting with the Vietnam war. She was taken a prisoner of war. When released she continued to be a war photographer until her death in 2006.

Lieutenant Pavlichenko was a Ukrainian sniper in WWII, with a total of 309 kills, including 36 enemy snipers. After being wounded, she toured the US to promote friendship between the two countries, and was called ‘fat’ by one of her interviewers, which she found rather amusing.

Johanna Hannie “Jannetje” Schaft was born in Haarlem. She studied in Amsterdam had many Jewish friends. During WWII she aided many people who were hiding from the Germans and began working in resistance movements. She helped to assassinate two nazis. She was later captured and executed. Her last words were “I shoot better than you.”.

Nancy wake was a resistance spy in WWII, and was so hated by the Germans that at one point she was their most wanted person with a price of 5 million francs on her head. During one of her missions, while parachuting into occupied France, her parachute became tangled in a tree. A french agent commented that he wished that all trees would bear such beautiful fruit, to which she replied “Don’t give me any of that French shit!”, and later that evening she killed a German sentry with her bare hands.

After her husband was killed in WWII, Violette Szabo began working for the resistance. In her work, she helped to sabotage a railroad and passed along secret information. She was captured and executed at a concentration camp at age 23.

Grace Hopper was a computer scientist who invented the first ever compiler. Her invention makes every single computer program you use possible.

Mona Louise Parsons was a member of an informal resistance group in the Netherlands during WWII. After her resistance network was infiltrated, she was captured and was the first Canadian woman to be imprisoned by the Nazis. She was originally sentenced to death by firing squad, but the sentence was lowered to hard lard labor in a prison camp. She escaped.

Simone Segouin was a Parisian rebel who killed an unknown number of Germans and captured 25 with the aid of her submachine gun. She was present at the liberation of Paris and was later awarded the ‘croix de guerre’.

Mary Edwards Walker is the only woman to have ever won an American Medal of Honor. She earned it for her work as a surgeon during the Civil War. It was revoked in 1917, but she wore it until hear death two years later. It was restored posthumously.

Italian neuroscientist won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor. She died aged 103.

EDIT

jinxedinks added: Her name was Rita Levi-Montalcini. She was jewish, and so from 1938 until the end of the fascist regime in Italy she was forbidden from working at university. She set up a makeshift lab in her bedroom and continued with her research throughout the war.

A snapshot of the women of color in the woman’s army corps on Staten Island

This is an ongoing project of mine, and I’ll update this as much as I can (It’s not all WWII stuff, I’ve got separate folders for separate achievements).

File this under: The History I Wish I’d Been Taught As A Little Girl

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artsyflex

4 years ago

The Signs as Beautiful Words

Aries - Phosphenes

(n) The light and colors produced by rubbing your eyes

Taurus - Sonder

(n) The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own

Gemini - Epiphany

(n) A moment of sudden revelation

Cancer - Divine

(adj) Like God or a god / very good or pleasing

Leo - Aurora

(n) The dawn in the early morning

Virgo - Mellifluous

(adj) Sweet or musical; pleasant to hear

Libra - Opulent

(adj) Ostentatiously rich and luxurious or lavish

Scorpio - Alluring

(adj) Powerfully and mysteriously attractive or fascinating; seductive

Sagittarius - Euphoria

(n) A feeling or state of intense excitement and happiness

Capricorn - Serendipity

(n) the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way

Aquarius- Iridescent

(adj) Producing a display of rainbow-like colors

Pisces - Ethereal

(adj) Extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world

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artsyflex

4 years ago

“The ‘60s Are Gone, Dope Will Never Be As Cheap, Sex Never As Free, And The Rock And Roll Never As

“The ‘60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great.” - Abbie Hoffman.

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artsyflex

4 years ago

oh my god this is something out of life experience

For my wife, after a near-death experience on the eve of our anniversary

When I tell you I believe in love at first at sight, I mean that every time I look you are a different person. I mean that looking’s not the same as seeing—we’re not static. It’s an hypothesis the sun will rise tomorrow. Every day I see it, and worry is the thief of so much joy, but not of this— that I don’t take it for granted. And when I say “I love you” every time you take the car, I mean not only that we almost hit a moose the other day. I mean it’s easier to write a sex scene than a make-out session. I mean I can’t describe your breath into another mouth, it’s so familiar— and the passion that could make it last forever came from novelty or desperation. So I think about meteors when we kiss. I think of supernovas, blackholes, gamma ray bursts and all the things in space that could vaporize us— every mass extinction event except the Anthropocene because that’s too depressing. I think about there being no god and no heaven and no higher purpose when I look into your eyes and I don’t need them, I just need time to slow down. I’m sorry I haven’t written you more poems, my love, they’re not marketable I think. People like to read themselves into these things and, well you know I like to write them there. But it’s not for me to say— this ‘you’ is only yours. I’ve put nothing on a pedestal that wasn’t my own. And when I ask if you can take a sick day while the kid’s at school, I mean not only that I want to ravish you in every room; I mean it doesn’t matter if we hit those moose or not— I mean that I don’t want us to grow old together, I want to be there when that meteor hits, stopping time forever— I won’t go into that light without you. And when I say “I love you” and “sleep well”, I mean I hope to see you in the morning for the first time. I mean that I would walk a thousand miles in the night to toss a pebble at your bedroom window, lift a boombox and shout: I’ve known you for a century; let me in your life. * * * Written Novemeber 2020.

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artsyflex

4 years ago