My loosely knit study group is looking at Chicago more. I should probe Mercado Group for leads; those are my retired librarians, good on fiction especially, but also non-fiction of various genres. With Chicago, the focus is two institutions, roughly contemporaneous: Hull House established by Jane Addams and friends, and Hobo College.
A theme in both cases is spreading the fruits of education beyond the cloistered high tuition walls of a formal university, often by means of curriculum variants, meaning the content is not cloned from elsewhere, but home-brewed locally, from multiple sources.
Cascadian Synergetics aims to trod a similar path, this time encompassing the world of seniors, people looking back on choices made, vistas mastered, starring roles, in whatever walks of life. That’s a pool of experience going forward, often accompanied by a reawakened sense of curiosity, especially about roads not taken. Why not take them now, at least in gist?
Jane Addams is a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), of which my mother was a member, as I am today, as was Linus Pauling’s wife Ava Helen, not what our family knew theirs.
Urners overlapped the Paulings in a different way: the nonprofit think tank for which my wife and I performed technical services, authorized our engineering and public policy meetups in Linus Pauling’s boyhood home, just blocks from my Asylum District house.
Hobo College comes to me a lot through the writings of one Trevor Blake, someone I’ve always looked up to as conversant with a lot of esoterica. He used to be just blocks from me too, when he was busy curating a Bucky Fuller archive, later sent on to OSU. He introduced me to the Subgenius Church, itself a portal into many subcultures (ethnicities, namespaces, tribes), and well-armed against the kinds of pulpit subterfuge many flocks have to put up with.
