residential advising

MOSKOWITZ | Personal

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The most visited art museum in the world is the Louvre; it amassed 9.3 million visitors in 2014. Among other European museums, such as the Orsay, Prado, British museums and even the Vatican, it is best known as a center of Western art and culture. These museums are often seen as emblems of European identity, central to defining art as a part of culture in Europe. Of course, most of these museums house art from around the world, which, especially with concerns about repatriation, becomes a complicated issue. Just a couple of days ago, Spain and Argentina agreed to give Ecuador hundreds of works from colonial and indigenous periods.

Blogs

MOSKOWITZ | Versace

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By HUNTER MOSKOWITZ

All day long, traversing up the endless hills of Cornell, talking with people over a meal, reading pages of some book whose title I will forget, I hear these words: “Versace, Versace, Versace.” They are the words of some song. It’s a stupid song, I think. Maybe it’s not; it’s hard to be sure. Sometimes when you hear a song that meant nothing to you before, it can rejuvenate itself. Tones which felt clashing and cliché now seem moving and building.

Life

THE E’ER INSCRUTABLE | The Weeping Meister: Stefan George and the Death of Maximilien Kronberger

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By GRIFFIN SMITH-NICHOLS

In a photo dated 1904, the German poet, translator par excellence of Shakespeare and Baudelaire and consummate “aesthetic fundamentalist” Stefan George poses with glowering magnetism in the midst of a spindly crop of German youths, as he was wont to do. This was an early incarnation of the later-dubbed “George-Kreis,” an inner circle of Philhellenists, Renaissance men and introspective esthetes which included the von Stauffenberg brothers, the future would-be assassins of Hitler and which fascinated and perplexed some of the highest names in German literature: Rilke, Thomas Mann and others all met (and occasionally sparred) with George and his acolytes. Like the central figure of a latter-day Pythagorean cult, obsessed with Hellenic and medieval pageantry, George dons a flowing, laurel-wreathed Dante costume; a fellow Kreis-member dressed as Homer stands beside him, and George himself has his arm wrapped tenderly about the shoulders of a pale-cheeked, milky-eyed youth in the garb of a Florentine squire, his hands gripped nervously at his hips. He was an unsuspecting München youth named Maximilian Kronberger, and he would die of meningitis a mere few months later. George was crushed; one passage from the Lieder included in Der Siebente Ring, published in 1907, reads:

“Nun muss ich gar

Um dein aug und haar

Alle tage

Im sehnen leben.”

George had first caught sight of Maximilian in 1902, and swiftly wormed a place for himself in the then 13-year-old boy’s family life.

Blogs

MOSKOWITZ | Reconnection

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By HUNTER MOSKOWITZ

The first week of school this year, my laptop broke. Without it, I found myself spending an extraordinary time using my smartphone. While I might start by checking my email or looking up an assignment, I quickly delved into social media or the flood of messages that arrive in sporadic bursts. I pounded the screen with each click and smudged the glass surface with my scrolling. Smart phones seem to fill Cornell’s campus.