Sunday August 2

 Happy Birthday, Phil!   Really second your idea of joinging the UU's (as we call them here).  You will have a fine community to hang with,

find some chatter on a weekly basis, will give you that wee bit of contact each week that will help you moving forward into the continuum.

Our next door neighbor asked me to join the church here, Unitarians.  No one has ever asked that before.  He is about 87, one of about seven

or eight siblings all raised in Hyde Park, Chicago, at the Univ of Chicago Lab School, child of very famous (in the day) UChicago church historian

named Richard Grant.  A number of friends here go to this UU church.  One core element of the Democratic party in the state.  And Independents.

Maybe even some Libertarians?  

We went this morning to a heavily Irish-flavored wake for a friend who died last week.  Felt like a reunion of everyone we had known at the college.

Nice to see people, say hello, see how old we all now look, glad to be alive and waving greetings.  

Thanks for your nice  birthday wish for me, John,   I celebrated in a very unusual way for me.   On the advice of Peg’s brother, I attended a Sunday  service at a local Unitarian church.   I was impressed with the people and, despite being totally secular, may join the church just so I have some connection to local people.  Since Peg died, I have had almost no connection to local people…

Great to hear, Phil.  We've thought of doing the same but haven't yet come 'round. I hope you find it a congenial community.

Avanti!

let's see:  Annette and David, Dave Kent, Ken, George, Darlene, Pattie, George, Betty Jo, whose grandson, Liam Taffe a bright actor at USC, (Danny's son); Alma and Gloria, Gene.  We left after the speeches.  Took home some brownies.  Many other faces.  Barb's older sister recalled their high school days just like the movie.  Her dad bought them a white pontiac convertible, they drove endlessly around Geneva, NY. 

Our kids due any minute after a night at Mick's.  

Pacifico's short history of contemporary Italian literati politics very enjoyable.  He does not mention Handke, of course, but many Americans.  DeLillo and Pynchon and DFW hooray.  His explanation of Umberto Eco's success is delightful.  

17 "Every object is given weird personal significance, and the mystical power of insignificance is celebrated with unblinking candor."   "Moresco taps into something psychologically deep: the making of language as you go along discovering what life is and what it is trying to tell you. "

Maybe then this is when I should read Gary Lachman's newest Post.  "From Mythic to the Mental:  

"This was Thales, considered one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. With him the tradition of ‘rational inquiry’ that we associate with the West began. Rather than accept the traditional mythological accounts of how the world came into existence, the stories of why the gods made it one way rather than another, Thales asked a simple question: what is the world made of? What is the basic ‘stuff’ out of which everything else is made? As far as we know, no one before him asked this.

yet this earlier, more intuitive way of understanding remained and is with us still, occupying a kind of shadow realm on the fringes of rational consciousness. It is what we call “the imagination.” Yet this is not imagination as we usually understand it, having to do with “make believe.” This imagination “makes real.”

The other way is slightly fuzzy, imprecise, and unrepeatable – at least on demand – but it penetrates deeper into the world, and reveals elements of it that the method of quantification cannot. These are the meanings that come through in poetry, music, art and other forms of the imagination we acknowledge as something more than “make believe”. These are the “tacit”, “implicit” meanings that the philosopher Michael Polanyi said cannot be expressed “explicitly,” in the way that mathematical “meaning” can, but which are nevertheless felt. This is why the philosopher Wittgenstein said that the truly meaningful things in the world cannot be said, but only shown. The explicit knowledge that enables our probes to reach into the unthinkable depths of space can tell us nothing about the awe we feel looking at a starry sky. But a poem or passage of music can give us some idea and even evoke a similar awe within us.

in my book Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, I look at how different individuals throughout western history have recognised the need for bread and for that elusive something else that all the precision in the world cannot provide. Since the rise of the reign of quantity, this elusive something else has increasingly been seen to be a mirage, and the appetite for the “vague” an unfortunate hangover from less rational times. And our means of embracing it, the “imagination,” has been reduced to the daydreams of romantics not able to face facts. This outlook may seem  disheartening but it need not be so. Whatever pushed the mind out of its mythological mode and into our rational one, may be at work today, preparing us for its next shift. There’s no reason to believe it can’t be one in which the two permanent needs of our nature enjoy an equal say.

gary-lachman.com

Pacifico ends by invoking "Seinfeld" Moresco is the Cosmo Kramer of contemporary literature. Doesn't work for me, alas. But if Pacifico thinks it makes him cool with American readers, what can we do?

Dave and kids just arrived. Pacifico spent pages talking about Moresco's love of the word "shucked." just now dave talked about how he and Mick shucked oysters for the big dinner they had. And they Did! go see Phish!