Tomorrow morning, Susie and I leave once more for Paris -- Southwest to Boston, Air France to Charles de Gaulle. We shall be there for three weeks, returning Christmas Eve. Sunday evening, our first night there, we shall dine at the Brasserie Balzar, on rue des Ecoles, around the corner from the Sorbonne and across the street from the Musee Cluny. As is our custom, we shall attend several free concerts of early music in outlying arrondissements, but I have also taken the plunge and bought two 35 Euro tickets [$46 a piece] for a performace of Bach's Christmas Oratorio at l'eglise de la Madeleine. This coming Thursday, we shall attend a reading at the Village Voice Bookstore by the South African expatriate writer Denis Hirson. Naturally, I shall be doing a good deal of cooking -- quail, duck, rabbit, dorade royale [a fish], coquilles St. Jacques, and the like. But mostly, we will sit in Le Metro, our local cafe, drinking wine or coffee and watching the world go by.
I shall be blogging from Paris, of course. I still have not fixed upon a text for my next mini-tutorial, so any suggestions are welcome.
On another personal note, my diet is now officially over. I managed to lose 19 pounds in the nine and a half weeks that I dieted. I figure I am good for another four or five years, by which time I shall be in my early eighties.
If any of you pay attention to the counter on this blog that totals up visits, you may have noticed a spike in the past several days. I usually get about 500-600 visits a day [at least from those folks who come directly to the blog rather than accessing it in some other way], but two days ago I had 6000, yesterday perhaps half that, and today already more than I usually log in a day. Why? Because my post on Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation attracted the attention of Bruce Leiter and Andrew Sullivan, both of whom mentioned it on their vastly more popular blogs, and a whole bunch of people clicked over. Welcome to all the new visitors. I hope some of you stick around.
Now, some last minute preparations and we are off to Paris.
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6 comments:
I know I'm going to be sticking around. After reading the Newt piece I got hooked into your series on Marx and am looking forward to checking out some of the other ones.
If I remember correctly, you had mentioned the possibility of a Durkheim mini-tutorial. That would get my vote for the next one.
I'm sticking around and glad to be here. I taught some of your materials the very first class I taught as a grad student, years back. I'm retired now but still interested.
A minitutorial on Durkheim would be very helpful. I think also that an analysis of Erving Goffman's work on public ritual and the public presentation of the self would be instructive in these times of a degraded public sphere.
I was just thinking about your remark about One-Dimensional Man, "Those of you who are analytic philosophers by training and profession can read the book, gnashing your teeth at what you will undoubtedly consider his willful misunderstanding of your chosen intellectual style. My copy has marginal notes dating from the sixties filled with outraged defenses of my own teachers, Quine among them. But I am convinced that if you will read the text with a certain generosity of spirit, you will find both enlightenment and inspiration." So, it seems that you changed your mind about analytic philosophy, but it also seems that it was a somewhat personal change. Care to tell us what happened? That is, how you came to change your mind? And, the more exact character of the change? Maybe I have the seeming wrong here, but if not, what is this about?
Yup, there goes the diet.
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