Saturday, June 03, 2006

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.
at

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous6/05/2006 1:35 PM

    "There are no unrelated topics." Hmmm... seems like I've heard that somewhere before...

    www.xark.typepad.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anna Haynes6/06/2006 12:34 AM

    Indeed. :-)

    Daniel, I wish you could have been there, it was transcendant - the relativity was so thick you could've cut it with a knife.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anna Haynes6/06/2006 12:38 AM

    and not just any knife; it was a veritable Gordian knot of relativity.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anna Haynes6/06/2006 8:41 AM

    memo to self: the lameness of lexical leaps that appeared amusing in the dead of night becomes all too clear in the light of the following day.

    ReplyDelete

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