Faculty Remarks:
Cathy,
The best compliment I can pay you is to quote from your own work. It’s hard to pick just one passage, so I’ll select something at random. Here is one, from the imaginary diary of Claude Débussy you wrote last year in the seminar on modernism; channeling Débussy’s musical sensibility, you place yourself in Camille Pissarro’s painting Boulevard Montmartre on a Winter Morning:
“Pissarro has scattered the images of people on the road in such a way that each person embodies their own sort of rhythm –a rhythm that stays true to no one but its own individual self… like the bells that do not follow the tempo of others but toll unaffected and alone.” For this insight alone, which illustrates how a painting can be vibrant with humanity in a way similar to music, but also highly specific to itself, I would have been glad to have had you in class.
But page after page in your assignments, comment after comment in class discussions, you cast a fresh light or had an original take on pretty much everything we touched upon: you imagined vividly Charlie Chaplin chuckling at scenes he would create in his films; skillfully dissected Prufrock’s brain (while expressing hope, in Débussy’s voice, that “Eliot is all right in the head”), and taught me about Duke music performances that I am glad to have discovered thanks to you.
By the way, great job conducting the marching band: the tremendous energy you’ve given the musicians and the rest of us on that stadium made a dispiriting loss by the women’s basketball team much easier to bear. We are all very proud not only of your accomplishments, but also to have had you as a major in the English Department. Very best of luck as you skillfully bring the world in attunement with your baton!
– Corina Stan
