|
|
|||||
|
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 1992 21:00:54 EDT Dear Tim, Your new message on Gravity reveals to me why I didn't decode references
to it earlier: it's a word from a language I use rarely, and then
only in a pidgin version -- the strange new tongue I call Computerbabble
when annoyed, Compu-speak when I feel less irritated by it. Of course
you majored in computer science at Lehigh, so you are undoubtedly
fluent. Consequently you may not know I have a sneaking suspicion that there isn't much I can contribute to such a discourse, except as a kind of Luddite. I am thinking of going back to the quill pen, in fact. Computers have actually made my own creative enterprises infinitely more difficult than they once were, as my own relationship with the computer (even as merely a fancy typewriter) is pathological. I cannot stop revising because of some insane perfectionism that used to be safely held in check by laziness about re-typing. Now it is an open-ended process, with endless revisions--unless I am mercifully up against a deadline that puts an arbitrary stop to the whole crazy business. As a result I write and publish less than I did in the days when I would do one revision and then hand the danged MS to our secretary to copy and send after a single careful proofing. Change of subject: I never assigned this to my utopians, but have you perchance read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? In case you haven't you should. It's the sort of book you might have written, had you been born at the right time and gone to the University of Chicago when Pirsig did. Back to the previous subject: I won't ask you to take me off your e-mailing list (though you might want to after I insulted your native tongue and expressed my Luddish distaste for computers). It will be fun to listen in and try to guess What It All Means. However, I expect to be a rather minimal-participation member of the group since, as I've already said, I really don't speak the language. Come to think of it, it is only from your perspective that we on your mailing list consitute a "group" in any ordinary sense of the word. From our several perspectives we are like the spokes on a wheel with no rim, whereas you are at the hub. I do, however, know the names of three other spoke-folks: Bob Barnes, Steve Goldman, and Frank Harvey, all of whom I know fairly well, as things go on a faculty. I have sat in many Philosophy faculty seminars with the first two, and the third took my methods course last spring to learn, of all things, about Participant-Observation. . . (He is more broad-minded about learning what I do than I am about learning what he does in Hyperspace with his Hypermedia, although I was mightily impressed when our whole class visited his lab at the end of the semester!) His student, Adam Nelson, is someone you might enjoy. This was more than two screens-worth, but I agree with Frank Harvey cheers, |
|||||
 |
|||||
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|