Microcosm

Tuesday: Appended an appendix (with sample)



Occasion: honoring philosopher / historian / Grass-Valley-native-turned-Harvard-Man Josiah Royce at his place of birth, now the Grass Valley (Royce) Library; four interlopers from the halls of academe descended upon Grass Valley to speak on various aspects of and relations to Royce's thoughts and writings.

Audience:

• To my left: Bruce Conklin, riffing off Royce's mother Sarah with Mary Hallock Foote and Julia Morgan.
  
• To my right: George Rebane, aiming to clarify the Absolute.
  
• In between: self, wondering (incoherently) where to get the most interesting information the easiest way.
  
• Before self: strawberries, which nobody passed around.
  
• Recording for posterity: NCTV
  
• Unnatural constraint on communication: a microphone which needed to be brought to each would-be questioner in turn. (the utterances were not pre-moderated however)
  

Speakers' themes: recursion / metonymy / synecdoche / epitome

Gist: there are no unrelated topics

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For context: past NCFocus posts on North Star House controversy (full Oct 2004 archive), another Julia Morgan house
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Appendix:

If you're curious about the nature of Saturday's discourse, here's a sample* from one of the speakers:

...a moment ago I realized that, if I had understood precisely what [Josef] was trying to get at when he pointed out that for Hegel the Absolute is "social," I could have improvised a contribution that might have been truly helpful in articulating the stakes of theorizing California as a polity through the lens of German Idealism.

Got it?

It never hurts to know what the individual words mean, so I looked up polity.

It doesn't always help to know what the individual words mean.