Thanks for joining me! I’m setting out to record my responses to what I see, exhibitions, films, places, books, poems. Short pieces about other people’s work that I find of lasting interest. But who can be sure how long interest will last? Blogs raise that question almost at once–who wants to know about what happened last month or last year? That’s something I want to test.
As for me, I’m addicted to looking and thinking about buildings, paintings, books and places. I’ve been teaching for most of my adult life, but I like to think I was never defined by my job. Now that I write that, it sounds as if I think I was better than my various jobs, but I wasn’t and I didn’t have that strong a grip on any of them. My real attention was focused elsewhere, on trying to understand the world we’ve all been landed in.
I’ve spent a lot of my time writing about a wide range of subjects–architecture, literature, landscape and painting mainly–always hoping that I would find some key that would show that they are all part of one discourse, and happiest when I could dissolve the boundaries between these different territories. On another page of this site I will list the books I’ve written, which, if you had the time to read them, would leave you understanding what I am doing. Someday soon I will add notes explaining how these different books form a kind of whole. Someday soon after that, I will try to explain why anyone should care about any of this, which is a way of starting over from scratch as a teacher.
robert harbison's blog 