Cardinal Chronicle / weekly campus column
Michael Pena
BY MICHAEL PENA
EVEN WITH THE ALL-DAY AVALANCHE OF orientation packets and benefits information distributed during Stanford 101, summer has been a perfect time to settle into campus life. Call it the calm before Convocation when you can obtain ID cards, transit passes and Southwestern chicken salad without more than three people ahead of you in line. My third day here I studied my retirement-plan options behind Tresidder Union while listening to live jazz at lunch. And last week, ANNA KOSTER, public relations manager of the Cantor Arts Center, gave me an informal tour of the museum. It was closed to the public that day, and we had a candid conversation about how even a newcomer like me can avoid art overload. "People think they have to absorb every last thing when they go to a museum. But if I had to stand in front of one painting and take it all in, and then stand in front of the next painting and take it all in, I would be asleep on my feet." Her solution? At a new museum, she does a quick walk through all the galleries, followed by a much slower second lap to stop at pieces that caught her eye the first time around. "People should stop and appreciate what they are interested in," she said, "instead of trying to take it all in at once." The same could be said for this campus, which must be appreciated one program and one person at a time.
IF YOU CAN'T MAKE THE TREK TO THE Asian Art Museum of San Francisco's exhibit on Japan's fabled musical maidens, fret not. Stanford Staffers has invited a docent to present a free noontime slide show that coincides with the museum's exhibit, "Geisha: Beyond the Painted Smile," on Aug. 25 in the Durand Building, Room 450. The museum exhibit runs through Sept. 26; admission is $10.
HOW MANY POUNDS OF SPAM CAN YOU stomach? If you'd rather not see all those telltale pound signs that Stanford's current spam filter uses, MARK BRANOM will show you how to keep unwanted e-mail out of your inbox altogether. On Thursday, Aug. 19, Branom will lead the next lecture in the Summer Tech Express series at noon in the Language Corner of the Main Quad, Pigott Hall, Room 113. The lecture also will address pop-up ads, computer viruses, spyware and adware. ITSS Technology Training Services is hosting this brown-bag session with seating for 44, plus drinks and cookies, so arrive early.
A FEW WEEKS AGO, WORKERS AT ONE of Palo Alto's post offices stumbled across a set of rubber cancellation stamps used to mark processed mail commemorating the 1991 Stanford Centennial. The set comprised four stamps, each one bearing a day from Sept. 28 to Oct. 1. Official postal protocol requires they be mailed to headquarters in Washington, D.C., after their imprinted date. Instead, the items were thrown into a drawer and forgotten, until earlier this month. At Stanford's request, the stamps are now on their way to university archivist MARGARET KIMBALL, who is sure to give them better accommodations.
THE AURORA FORUM SET THE TONE FOR last Saturday's symposium, "Waging Peace: Practical Approaches to a Violent World," with an informal dinner the evening before on the shaded lawn beside Cypress Hall D. The dinner featured a conversation between two men who seek to give the nonviolence movement new life: Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, and Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi. Also a director of a university institute devoted to nonviolence, Gandhi said that wars can be as instructive as they are destructive. "If this is not the time, then when do we speak of peace?" Gandhi rhetorically asked the audience. He was joined the next day by fellow symposium speakers James Gilligan, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Pennsylvania; Michael Nagler, co-founder of UC-Berkeley's Peace and Conflict Studies Program; and Frances Moore Lappé, whose books and public-speaking engagements address hunger, sustainability, the environment and human rights.
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