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Currently at Toronto Pearson: -8. High today: -8. La Niña, doncha know.
Some years ago, a couple of guys from Out West were talking in the TA room at York about Life in Toronto, and one of them said something like, "Have you noticed how, in Toronto, when you're walking down the sidewalk and someone's coming the other way, they walk toward you?" And the other one said something like, "Yes I have noticed that! What the hell is up with that?"
Now that the sidewalks are shrunken in Toronto, this is one of my minor obsessions. There seem to be a lot of people--actually I'm not sure if it's in Toronto in general or just at the universities, or if it's more pronounced at the universities--who walk around intent on throwing shoulder checks on people passing by.
Another one of my minor obsessions at the moment is people laughing in the libraries. They especially laugh when they've been quiet for a while. Usually they start whispering, and then they laugh. (In a manner for which I wish there was a less unfortunate word than "hysterical".) Often it escalates from there.
This is the thing: after they've been doing whatever they're supposed to be doing, if they've been doing it at all, they talk to someone. If they don't have a familiar person handy, they call them on their cellphones. (A couple of years ago, here, I remarked on a guy talking on his cellphone on walkie-talkie setting in the library. That's not remarkable anymore. Just like, a few years ago, I would sometimes ask people to be quiet in the library, and now I wouldn't think of doing that.) And soon, they laugh. I wonder if it was always like this, and cellphones have just made it evident: people carry around with them a desperate need to talk to someone, anyone; they can barely keep to anything else, so great is their need to talk to someone. (And then when they talk on their cellphones, so often it seems like they're performing for the people around them!) And then to laugh. Bursting.
(For some years, I've vaguely thought that, someday, I would write something about humour, something to do with the humour of Plato, something to do with Sartre's "spirit of seriousness", something to do with errors of interpretation that result from (often uncharitable) humourlessness (beginning with the apparent blockheadedness of Aristotle, talking about Plato). Something to do with a relationship between humour and truth: humour is founded on changing perspectives. Humour can be a removal of blinkers. Humour can unlock you from not just narrow but bad ways of looking at things, bad ways of relating to things and people. But it is also so often just a cheap escape from a frame of reference you don't like. And it is mocking, and it is scorn ... and humour can be a weapon wielded in the spirit of seriousness; it can be a way to keep oneself, self-deceptively, from a charitable perspective. (I might write something about laughter, and about tears, and their relation. It is something hard to understand: why do I begin to cry when something is beautiful? (Which is to say: when something shines forth, in the sudden happening of truth?) What is that beginning to cry?))
Which reminds me that I must retract my statement that the Trinity library is "deathly, deliriously quiet". It was starting to annoy me so much there for a while that I forgot how much worse, how incredibly atrocious, York is, until I went up there one day last week. The York library makes me want to punch myself in the brain. (This is something that I often imagine doing when I am very unhappy. I imagine uppercutting myself in the middle of the forehead, and my fist going through my skull and into my brain.) The Trinity library is just chronically aggravating--it isn't big enough and densely peopled enough for the endemic virulent contagion of noise that York's library has, which is what allows for the periodic illusion that there is actually a difference in culture.
What successful academics do, these days, I guess, is they just buy all the books they want to read, and they read them at home. Looked at this way, the death of the library is the death of the public institution of reading--Reading Alone.
Why should one go to the library to read? Well, I like getting out of the house. I like that it takes about 45 minutes to walk there; I'm not sure what I'd do if a suitable library was next door. If we all buy the books, it's a lot more trees, and a lot more money. At the library, one thing can lead to another in minutes; you don't have to wait two weeks for the next link in the web to arrive from Amazon. But there is also that reading in the library is, or was, a collective activity, a shared experience, like watching a movie in a theatre or going to a game instead of watching it on television. There is--there was--a solidarity to it.
It's kind of a strange thing: whispered conversations in the library bothers me so much more than loud banter in the cafeteria. I can read much more easily against the loud banter in the cafeteria; it's not ideal, the noise presses in and keeps me from expanding, but it doesn't bring me to a stop. (I don't like the constant loud banter either, though. And it's not because, amid the banter, I don't pick out anything in particular that anyone is saying. In the library, whispered conversations in Chinese bother me just as much as whispered conversations in English. What bothers me is that it's insulting to the library. It's offensive: it's an offense. It's a statement against the library and against anyone who is with the library.
Also, today, I went to the worst talk I've been to in ages, and I finished reading a lousy book (which was published by the company which I've contracted my dissertation to, which doesn't really help with my feeling that these people are publishing any damn thing these days. You'd like to think that, if you can get something between hard covers, it's an accomplishment you can be proud of.) Some indications of the lousiness of this book include that it has a different title in different places, that there are sometimes scanning errors in the text such that, e.g., "and" in one place becomes "arid" (and, in French, "soi" becomes "sai"), and that, in a couple of places, nobody bothered to replace "this thesis" with "this book". When I have to read lousy books is when I most wish that I could read faster.
And now I've wasted all this time complaining about things instead of writing something worthwhile, so that's just a perfect end to my day.
Some years ago, a couple of guys from Out West were talking in the TA room at York about Life in Toronto, and one of them said something like, "Have you noticed how, in Toronto, when you're walking down the sidewalk and someone's coming the other way, they walk toward you?" And the other one said something like, "Yes I have noticed that! What the hell is up with that?"
Now that the sidewalks are shrunken in Toronto, this is one of my minor obsessions. There seem to be a lot of people--actually I'm not sure if it's in Toronto in general or just at the universities, or if it's more pronounced at the universities--who walk around intent on throwing shoulder checks on people passing by.
Another one of my minor obsessions at the moment is people laughing in the libraries. They especially laugh when they've been quiet for a while. Usually they start whispering, and then they laugh. (In a manner for which I wish there was a less unfortunate word than "hysterical".) Often it escalates from there.
This is the thing: after they've been doing whatever they're supposed to be doing, if they've been doing it at all, they talk to someone. If they don't have a familiar person handy, they call them on their cellphones. (A couple of years ago, here, I remarked on a guy talking on his cellphone on walkie-talkie setting in the library. That's not remarkable anymore. Just like, a few years ago, I would sometimes ask people to be quiet in the library, and now I wouldn't think of doing that.) And soon, they laugh. I wonder if it was always like this, and cellphones have just made it evident: people carry around with them a desperate need to talk to someone, anyone; they can barely keep to anything else, so great is their need to talk to someone. (And then when they talk on their cellphones, so often it seems like they're performing for the people around them!) And then to laugh. Bursting.
(For some years, I've vaguely thought that, someday, I would write something about humour, something to do with the humour of Plato, something to do with Sartre's "spirit of seriousness", something to do with errors of interpretation that result from (often uncharitable) humourlessness (beginning with the apparent blockheadedness of Aristotle, talking about Plato). Something to do with a relationship between humour and truth: humour is founded on changing perspectives. Humour can be a removal of blinkers. Humour can unlock you from not just narrow but bad ways of looking at things, bad ways of relating to things and people. But it is also so often just a cheap escape from a frame of reference you don't like. And it is mocking, and it is scorn ... and humour can be a weapon wielded in the spirit of seriousness; it can be a way to keep oneself, self-deceptively, from a charitable perspective. (I might write something about laughter, and about tears, and their relation. It is something hard to understand: why do I begin to cry when something is beautiful? (Which is to say: when something shines forth, in the sudden happening of truth?) What is that beginning to cry?))
Which reminds me that I must retract my statement that the Trinity library is "deathly, deliriously quiet". It was starting to annoy me so much there for a while that I forgot how much worse, how incredibly atrocious, York is, until I went up there one day last week. The York library makes me want to punch myself in the brain. (This is something that I often imagine doing when I am very unhappy. I imagine uppercutting myself in the middle of the forehead, and my fist going through my skull and into my brain.) The Trinity library is just chronically aggravating--it isn't big enough and densely peopled enough for the endemic virulent contagion of noise that York's library has, which is what allows for the periodic illusion that there is actually a difference in culture.
What successful academics do, these days, I guess, is they just buy all the books they want to read, and they read them at home. Looked at this way, the death of the library is the death of the public institution of reading--Reading Alone.
Why should one go to the library to read? Well, I like getting out of the house. I like that it takes about 45 minutes to walk there; I'm not sure what I'd do if a suitable library was next door. If we all buy the books, it's a lot more trees, and a lot more money. At the library, one thing can lead to another in minutes; you don't have to wait two weeks for the next link in the web to arrive from Amazon. But there is also that reading in the library is, or was, a collective activity, a shared experience, like watching a movie in a theatre or going to a game instead of watching it on television. There is--there was--a solidarity to it.
It's kind of a strange thing: whispered conversations in the library bothers me so much more than loud banter in the cafeteria. I can read much more easily against the loud banter in the cafeteria; it's not ideal, the noise presses in and keeps me from expanding, but it doesn't bring me to a stop. (I don't like the constant loud banter either, though. And it's not because, amid the banter, I don't pick out anything in particular that anyone is saying. In the library, whispered conversations in Chinese bother me just as much as whispered conversations in English. What bothers me is that it's insulting to the library. It's offensive: it's an offense. It's a statement against the library and against anyone who is with the library.
Also, today, I went to the worst talk I've been to in ages, and I finished reading a lousy book (which was published by the company which I've contracted my dissertation to, which doesn't really help with my feeling that these people are publishing any damn thing these days. You'd like to think that, if you can get something between hard covers, it's an accomplishment you can be proud of.) Some indications of the lousiness of this book include that it has a different title in different places, that there are sometimes scanning errors in the text such that, e.g., "and" in one place becomes "arid" (and, in French, "soi" becomes "sai"), and that, in a couple of places, nobody bothered to replace "this thesis" with "this book". When I have to read lousy books is when I most wish that I could read faster.
And now I've wasted all this time complaining about things instead of writing something worthwhile, so that's just a perfect end to my day.
