Richard Rorty, 1931-2007
According to reports, American philosopher and pragmatist Richard Rorty died yesterday, June 8.
Category: Academics
Classes and coursework.
nightswimming deserves a quiet night
Two years ago, through sheer random chance and sorting, a beautiful, perky, sarcastic, brilliant girl was assigned to my group of students. She quickly became more than my star student. She became my star student, mentee and protégé, drinking buddy, eventually flipped the tables and let me be her star writer, and most importantly, became one of my dearest friends.
Nightswimming, remembering that night
September’s coming soon
I’m pining for the moon
And what if there were two
Side by side in orbit
Around the fairest sun?
That bright, tight forever drum
Could not describe nightswimming
I don’t remember the conversation around it, but I do remember she once told me that the R.E.M. song “nightswimming” made her think of me. I downloaded the song, fell in love with it, and now every time I hear it, I smile and think of her.
I’ve been smiling and thinking of her a lot lately, as she graduates yesterday/today/tomorrow from Communications/CHID and the UW as a whole. She is at the top of both her classes, she has been commencement speaker for one of them, and very shortly she’s running off to spend the summer in China. And I sit here, on the other side of the country, so proud of her I could just burst; so tickled that I played even a small part in her shining as strongly as she has.
This is one to watch – she’s going to change the world.
Congratulations, MoMo.
Modernity at Large
At some point, I wrote a short review of Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large for Amazon. I stumbled across it this evening, editing my account:
The great strength behind Appadurai’s book Modernity at Large is that he breaks out of the binary thinking that many new historians engage in. Instead, he offers what he coins landscapes, five different threads that weave together and influence one another to form our communities, imagined or otherwise. His ideas of how the imagination and imagined communities affect us build on the established works of others, especially Benedict Anderson, but his approach is very down to earth and accessible without pandering to a lowest common denominator. The book is dense, and not something to absorb in one sitting; it savours like a fine wine.
An excellent book, especially for students wanting to research deterritorialization and the transnational public sphere but are intimidated or frustrated with assigned texts.
I don’t remember writing it, but it’s quite obviously something that I did write. I read the words, and feel no remembrance or familiarity, but do feel longing to write that intelligently again. It doesn’t matter if you read, if you don’t write. It doesn’t matter if you write, if you don’t discuss. I’ve slacked off long enough – it’s time to kick myself back into gear, in all areas. I know I can write well, and comprehensively, about complex issues, and I am shortchanging myself by not doing so.
Porphyric Polyhemed Bunnies
I spent much too much time last night, thanks to an episode of CSI that I was watching to relax and unwind, not get wound up to the point of staying up til nearly dawn, reading both about porphyria and Polyheme, trying to figure out if Polyheme (or another heme or full blood substitute) would actually work as a treatment for porphyria.
I get caught up in the strangest sidetracks and deviations.
place the the “peace” sign pointing horizontally at your throat
I’ve got several large projects on my plate – larger than usual, anyhow, and on top of the normal chaos that has been my life these last couple of months. Since they all revolve around the written word, this is quite naturally the point at which I get slammed with severe writer’s block, so bad I actually feel like I’m spiraling into a black depression. While intellectually I realize it’s not that bad, the timing really does suck, and I rather dislike feeling so impotent, when words are normally one of my strongest assets.
So I’m working on the one project that doesn’t require me to be eloquent, or verbose, and in the project came across a post that still makes me grin, just because it’s the most delicious example of movie-style foreshadowing that never exists in real life, except it does. (I realize I have a lot of new readers since the last time I mentioned this, so I’ll just note that last year, I taught a symposium-style class on applied ethics and Stargate, and that would indeed be my comment edited in. Although it now makes no sense, since the image being used to illustrate the post is gone, but hey, that’s life on the internet.)