Daily Archives: March 30, 2018

Writing

Here Comes the Book

Leave a comment

Spring                                                                    New Shoulder Moon

“A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.”  -Daniel Dennett, philosopher, writer, and professor (b. 28 Mar 1942)    found by friend Tom Crane

DIGITAL CAMERA

I love this quote. As I wrote back to Tom, it reminds me of an example B.F. Skinner used to talk about creativity within his straight-jacketed behavorist psychology. Think, Skinner suggested, of a chicken as an egg’s way of making more eggs.

chicken2Those of us who love libraries and those of us who have ones of our own take up their content like chicken scratching around in a farmyard. We poke, peck, pick up a few rocks to grind the ideas against the gizzard of our memory and our own mind, wait awhile, then, out pops words. Sometimes enough words come out to fill a book. And, voila, more library.

Well, gotta to get back to digging my little clawed feet, formerly of dinosaur size remember, into the shelves here. Till later.

General

Race/Class/Gender Curvature in Society

Leave a comment

Spring                                                           New Shoulder Moon

spacetimeA bit out of left field, more like right field where I played my entire (short) little league career, but occasioned by Tara’s visit yesterday with her son Vincent. Vincent had been explaining his understanding of general and special relativity to Tara and the conversation resumed at our table. He was explaining the difference between light and gravity, light is fast, but gravity is instant and I threw space-time curvature out there.

Anyhow, later on I read an article about a long standing argument on the left, which is more central, race or class. I’ve always been a class is more central guy, but I read an interesting article in the NYT about the sons of wealthy African-Americans. Seems, unlike their white peers, that they often fall through the cracks of our economy, reverting to a lower socio-economic position than their family of origin. Would seem to put race firmly above class.

raceclassgender
2-D, which loses power compared to the 3-D above

As I was going to sleep last night, this image jumped into mind, that race and class are analogous to space-time. That is, they constitute an interwoven web of influences always acting on us, all of us; but, like gravity, when an individual interacts with larger bodies, think the moon and the earth, or the earth and the sun, then the curvature of race-class draws them in. So any one son in the instance of African-Americans has the smaller bodies of his wealthy family and their peers arrayed against the much larger bodies of institutional racism reinforced by white privilege (class) and shot through with bias against black males.

Wanted to write this down before it disappeared. So there it is.