Happy New Year, everyone.

Twenty-seven months and 286 entries ago I began this blog with a very personal objective in mind: to review what I had set out to do in 2006 and revisit the evolution of the Agincourt Project since then. Google Analytics lets me know that there have been many visitors to the site, but only a few have left more than footprints. 

Two thousand thirteen will be another banner year—like 2007—since a second Agincourt exhibit is on the calendar for September at the Plains Art Museum, hopefully around the time of Hoomecoming at NDSU so that department graduates might find time to visit. Indeed “Homecoming” will be the theme of the show, building on the many-layered meanings of that much-abused word “home”:

• “Home is the nicest word there is”—Laura Ingalls Wilder
• “There is no place like home”—L. Frank Baum
• Home is where the heart is.
• Home for the holidays
• East, West, Hame’s best. (courtesy of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts)
• “You can’t go home again”—Thomas Wolfe
• Keep the home fires burning.
• Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
• Home base / Home plate / Home run
• “The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Homeland (and Homeland Security)
• Going home (to Jesus), i.e., dying
  
  

In the Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of “a memory / as if what one is pursuing now was once / nearer, truer, and joined to us / with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, / there it was breath. Compared to the first home / the second one seems ambiguous and uncertain.” Despite what I’ve implied or said outright about my youth, the memory of that home now seems clear and certain—especially so, now that we’re in freefall beneath the fiscal cliff.

In the mind’s eye, I can see this exhibit—though the line between vision and hallucination isn’t always a fine one.

And then comes 2014, the centenniel year of architectural education at NDSU. I mention it here only because the department has been my home for forty-one years—with apologies to those who may object to me having made it so.

And then comes 2015 and the six hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. Do you suppose anyone will notice?