Join us as we celebrate food, the dinner table, and quite likely empires, cannibals and magic fish bones!
“ What sort of people live about here ?” “In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “ lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they ’re both mad.” “ But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice … Continue reading “We’re All Mad Here.”
For thousands of years, the land (Troy) was the ancestral territory of the Anishinaabe peoples (Ottawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi). Following The Treaty of Detroit (1807) the land was forcibly ceded to the United States. Thereafter, primarily farm land for wheat, corn, fruits, etc. The particular farm of Henry Blount with its tree cover and natural wildlife … Continue reading I Was Raised In A Place There and Not-There
Introspection. That’s a tricky one. When I sat in my bedroom in my parent’s house on a street called Winchester in a subdivision named Sylvan Glen in a suburb named Troy in southeastern Michigan, a suburb which fashioned itself as the “City of Tomorrow . . . Today,” in the year nineteen-hundred and seventy-nine did … Continue reading Wait . . . What? . . . Make Mathematics Introspective?
Mental gymnastics first thing in the morning keeps the doctor away . . . well, at least those obsessive familial loops. What do I mean by “obsessive familial loops?” Oh, you know. Waking out of deep slumber and a dream where I couldn’t remember someone’s name standing right next to me as we watched a … Continue reading How To Wake Up With Gödel, Escher and Bach
I Am Alice. Possibly strange for a sixty-three-year-old man to write that he’s a seven-and-a-half-year-old girl. But not really. Alice replies to the Caterpillar’s question of identity with, I–I hardly know, sir, just at present –at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been … Continue reading “Drinking With Alice”
1. In “Consilience For Acrobats And Tumblers,” I wrote “My grandmother did her best to school me in playing the piano, and though practicing never took hold of me, I did love playing Bach’s Minuet in G Major, so I decided this was my choice and my bemused grandparents dutifully bought it for me.” This … Continue reading Notes Toward Tumbling / Mental Gymnastics for Beginners.
Introspection. That’s a tricky one. When I sat in my bedroom in my parent’s house on a street called Winchester in a subdivision named Sylvan Glen in a suburb named Troy in southeastern Michigan, a suburb which fashioned itself as the “City of Tomorrow . . . Today,” in the year nineteen-hundred and seventy-nine did … Continue reading Wait . . . What? . . . Make Mathematics Introspective?
In 1979 or was it 1980, my grandparents took me out for a monthly trip to the local bookstore where they would purchase a tome of my choosing. Maybe B. Dalton’s booksellers or Waldenbooks. Either at Oakland Mall or Somerset Mall in Troy, Michigan. This particular day I saw Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden … Continue reading Strange Loops and A Philosopher of Mathematical Infinity
A four-mile walk from Nacka to Kungsträdgården, brings me face to face with Joachim Beuckelaer’s Kitchen Scene With Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (1565) in the Nationalmuseum. Words are exchanged between us and a conversation about the metaphysics of food ensues. Examining the fundamental nature of reality, the relationship between mind and … Continue reading The Metaphysics of Food: Kitchen Scenes With Spinoza, Brillat-Savarin And Def Leppard.
I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed … Continue reading Cosmic Horror, Jim Crow, And “The Thing In The White House” Just Won’t Go: Victor LaValle’s “The Ballad Of Black Tom.”
