As the title suggests admin, pen-pushing, form-filling, contract signing and brushing up on international tax law, is what I’ve spent most of my first week here at Duke doing. The sunshine has made these tasks much more bearable, though everyone here appears to believe that regular midday temperatures of 24º and clear blue skies constitute poor weather?!?
As anyone who’s moved continent knows the first week is a mayhem of sorting out. Everything from immigration, employment, accommodation and finance to groceries and finding your way around, pulls you in a hundred different directions at once. But despite the bureaucracy, getting lost twice (once in the grump-inducing heat of the midday sun and one adrenaline-packed dusk-drawing-in-and-I-have-no-idea-where-I’m-going run) and discovering that even when I get my long-overdue pay cheque there’s no way I can afford to shop at Wholefoods, I have really enjoyed my first week here, thanks in no small part to the hospitality of my new colleagues and the general good humour of the city.
I’ve been surprised at how striking Durham is. Full of industrial architecture that some might consider ugly, it reminds me of the northern mill towns – Manchester in particular, as the vernacular here is also red brick. The scale, precision and practicality of these buildings speaks to me in a way that the faux-Gothic grandeur of campus cannot. Like its English counterparts, Durham no longer revolves round its once prosperous tobacco industry, with some mills given over to trendy apartments, artists’ studios, cafes and the like. Part of this wave of renovation & rejuvenation is the Smith building on campus where I have one of my offices. As you can see from the picture, the drizzle is especially evocative of the north west of England!
Work-wise I have mostly been preparing for my introductory lecture to the Wired! group tomorrow and setting up the next phase of my research project with Exmoor National Park. Some might see being the only archaeologist for 15 miles (there’s a dept. at nearby UNC Chapel Hill) as daunting, but I am genuinely excited about the opportunities to work with and learn from colleagues in other disciplines.
My enlightenment of the week regards Kandinsky’s theories of spirituality through art and was thanks to Sarah Goetz. The idea that through object and colour you can drive how people look at an image, leading them on a spiritual journey from one part of the image to the next is fascinating to me. When I was about 13 our school art project was to recreate Kandinsky’s “In Blue” for the wall of a local youth centre. I enjoyed the project but I can’t help but feel that I would have been fascinated by the theories behind the painting even then if only they’d been mentioned. Instead until this week, I associated this artist with nothing more than abstract, interestingly coloured and at times frustratingly hard to mimic shapes.
What I like the most is the reminder that there is so much more to learn: from people, from images, from life. So for now at least I am once again a happy little academic geek.