This morning I will go on another Senior Living Community tour. This one will be Smith Village, in the Beverly neighborhood of Chicago.
Arranged via Julianne Rizzo of Oasis Senior Advisors, which is good and bad. Too complicated to explain right now, I have to finish my morning routine and get ready.
Haven’t completely decided whether to drive myself or take a Lyft.
OK, many people when doing a video interview will show their bookshelves. And not so often, but still entirely a plus, the piano (depending on whether this is a musical personality’s it may be de rigueur, but different for political or scholarly).
But isn’t it kinda charming that he shows us his kitchen, with open cabinet and dishwasher?
not quite as old as the 300-year-old woman!
(I’ve already put this in a comment but wanted to see if making it a top-level Post would do more interesting formatting, such as embedding the pages at the end of the links)
Here were the other “literary” oriented classes I was considering:
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
But this would be just manufacturing interest, not totally sincere
A First Experience with Finnegans Wake Part One
Of course the issue of my book-removal process would be, if anything, even more acute than with the Nabokov. There is really only one edition and pagination, and I had it in a firm and trusty hardcover that already had lots of notes. Ah well.
The Black American Novel
I really enjoyed instructor Paul Cato’s class a while back on Ellison’s Invisible Man, and almost took his class on James Baldwin
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
This is a book I’ve heard good things about for a long time.
Probably I’m overdoing it, but after perusing the summer course offerings from Graham, I signed up for two more. I was already signed up for the online music class with John Gibbons, but added the in-person Saturday one-day session with John on American music.
And after looking into three or four literature classes, I signed up for one on Nabokov. This will be online, Tuesday evenings ; John’s ongoing music class is Tuesday mornings, so I may start to feel overloaded with these. But time will tell.
My “Nabokov collection” of physical books — about 35 volumes by or about him — has already been packed up and taken by Open Books. So looking at the readings for this class gave me some pangs. But all my books were pretty old, and might not have been the right editions – to find and discuss passages you need everybody to have consistent page numbers. These e-books (I use Kindle app on iPad and sometimes on my desktop, not a Kindle device) have a “locations” system with display-pages that have little to do with the pagination in the solid book. But if derived from the same edition the Kindle display can show what the original page number is for the location you are at. And if people can be convinced to always mention a couple words from the beginning of the passage they want to discuss, it can work out okay.
The books will be:
The Defense (but now bearing the full title The Luzhin Defense)
The Gift
Bend Sinister
Pale Fire
I was on the verge of sleep, but wanted to take a moment to peek into the Kindle edition of Andrew Doyle’sThe End of Woke, which I had just bought. I started from the cover (the give that option, or the beginning of the real text), and on the verso of the title page I went thru the copyright notices and credits. I was intrigued by this mention of Mervyn Peake, whom I think of as a writer and not a graphics artist.
I couldn’t find it, and blamed the way Kindle “locations” may not match published pages. But in fact my error was from not catching on to the format in that copyrights blob and seeking page 218 when it should have been 194.
But the iPad Kindle app (which I am using rather than a dedicated Kindle device) does provide search so I searched for… “Auschwitz”. Um, oops! Correcting it to “Belsen” I found not only the drawing, but Peake’s poem reprinted, and Doyle’s passage discussing them.
(This unfortunately wipes out the lineation, but you are invited to restore it mentally)
Or here it is:
It’s been a while since I read the Titus books. (And at the time, there were only four books in what was still styled “The Titus Trilogy” — there are now some five or six, don’t ask how.) And certainly Titus Alone felt like a painful shifting of gears. So it is interesting to hear about this era of the writer’s life and the experiences that may have colored the writings.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-theory/
Category theory has come to occupy a central position in contemporary mathematics and theoretical computer science, and is also applied to mathematical physics. Roughly, it is a general mathematical theory of structures and of systems of structures. As category theory is still evolving, its functions are correspondingly developing, expanding and multiplying. At minimum, it is a powerful language, or conceptual framework, allowing us to see the universal components of a family of structures of a given kind, and how structures of different kinds are interrelated. Category theory is both an interesting object of philosophical study, and a potentially powerful formal tool for philosophical investigations of concepts such as space, system, and even truth. It can be applied to the study of logical systems in which case category theory is called “categorical doctrines” at the syntactic, proof-theoretic, and semantic levels. Category theory even leads to a different theoretical conception of set and, as such, to a possible alternative to the standard set theoretical foundation for mathematics. As such, it raises many issues about mathematical ontology and epistemology. Category theory thus affords philosophers and logicians much to use and reflect upon.
When I started this, was thinking of doing a dream journal, but so far haven’t been remembering clearly enough nor finding words to capture/convey the emotional tones correctly.
This one, towards morning last night, did have the pattern of waking and turning over (and adjusting the cats!) and trying to resume, but this time that was mostly positive – wanting to continue the story, because it was sort of going well and I wanted to continue that; unlike often where something is wrong and I want to get back to it in the hope of correcting something. [Thus, “work on what has been spoiled”]
This one had some familiar elements of student life, wandering around unsure if I had a class schedule or not, and worry about missing something. There were some swirling crowds, like at a popular restaurant at breakfast time. Like Daley’s on 63rd near Cottage.
And it turned out people were claiming spots in an oversubscribed class, by pulling up a chair to this restaurant meeting, like other work groups or classes there.
I was there an sort of participating as a elder statesman type advisor. The convener was sometimes apparently @ShazRasul, but not exclusively. At first it was like a programming class, but doing a group project. This meeting was on the first day and sort of a brainstorming session.
The project seemed to be to solve the problems of how social media worked. From what people were saying, it seemed the base we were criticizing and needed to improve upon was a lot like Usenet. The model we were heading towards sounded like Google Groups.
I jumped in at one point, and in a tone like I was a guest or alum of the group from before, throwing in comments to help get the conversation going, but not for my own grade or whatever ; though it felt like I was going to come off as intruding or pompous. I asked if what we were looking to create would have the role of “interrupteur”, said with an insecure but pretending French accent.
An attractive woman grad student said no, she wouldn’t, nor even simply an “interrupter”. But maybe an “interpreter”, said jovially, even sweetly.
Outlined that role, much like moderator in actual current social media.
By now, Ada Palmer was leading the class — an intrusion of proximal reality, as I am signed up for her Graham School book talk on Zoom this Friday.
Shaz/Ada called on a bearded nonbinary student, who said they were hesitant about the military or policing adjacent role. Everybody was hesitant to reply, as we were not going to be mid-2020 raging anti-police, but everybody had an uneasy time with authority.
I explained that some participants would need to be officially enrolled as auxiliary traffic police, since we needed to be safe stepping into the street and improving the traffic flow, holding up signboard with lanes and arrows to follow.
This was to solve the tie-ups that sometimes happen with right-turners at a particular 5- or 6-way intersection I often pass thru on the way home from a shopping trip on the North Side — where Elston hits Ashland, by the Chicago Actors Studio building. The rightmost lane on Elston, a turn-only, leads to another turn-only, which gets backed up. If you want to go to the second or third lanes of Ashland (the thru lanes southbound) you can do it from that right lane of Elston but may be stuck among the vehicles looking to immediately turn right again onto Armitage. So what we need to communicate to that specific set of drivers is that they should swing out left to get in a thru lane of Ashland. Or should be in the left lane of Elston, not the right — even though it feels dangerous because of contention from drivers on the right.
Indulged in upsetting food for dinner last night, and feeling it badly this morning.
Work on what has been spoiled (Decay) 