I just completed another circuit, one I've navigated before: Smith Rock area, Santiam Pass, Hwy 126 down the mountains into the Springfield area. This was neither camping nor glamping. I stayed with peeps I know, may even be related to. Sydney, my old dog, came along.
On the curriculum front, I'm following Dr. Rorty's model in bridging to the Eurasian continent, in terms of readings, taking Cascadian Pragmatism back to its sources, through William James to Wittgenstein's critique thereof.
The phenomenology of spirituality aka psychological development, might be mapped in various ways, ala the M4W schemata. I tend to favor an Active Inference informed namespace, which has a thermodynamic flavor.
However, I don't need to exclusively follow the Logical Positivist thread back to the Vienna Circle of the early Wittgenstein (Schopenhauer et al). I've long embedded Mark Fisher in my School of Tomorrow matrix, and through him we get to an important node: the CCRU, a kind of think tank that interpreted developments in philosophy (e.g. Gilles Deleuze) since Freud and Hegel to an anglophonic BBC-informed audience, around the same time the personal computer was taking off.
We might think of the CCRU as a particle accelerator sending entangled particles every which way. We're not talking about uniformity of thought so much as polarities, counter spins. Mark "liminal spaces" Fisher did not take the same party line as Nick "capitalism is AI" Land (admittedly an anachronistic telling, as AI was but a gleam in Alan Turing's eye back in those days).
As recently as last night I was lolling about taking in comparisons of Mark "weird and eerie" Fisher with David Foster "Infinite Jest" Wallace. I'm still very much in the process of assembling the puzzle pieces, from a curriculum developer's point of view. How might one connect the dots in an efficient synergetic manner?
Speaking of curriculum developers and family relationships, my Springfield stop brought me in proximity to the Fitzgeralds of Great Gatsby fame, leading me to prompt Perplexity this morning regarding some gender studies questions I have.
I was happy to see Perplexity pushing back on what appeared to be my misconceptions:
(a) the Gilded Age (late 1800s) was not the Golden Age (early 1900s), which latter Perplexity prefers to call the Jazz Age and
(b) the Betty Boop stuff is only partially free of copyrights.
Why am I connecting to the CCRU in the first place? Recall Applewhite's tagline for Grunch of Giants: more subversive than anything since Karl Marx. He was clearly calling out the Marxists to check it out.
One might suggest I'm seeking to answer the question: why are the Marxists so slow to pick up on our narratives? But that'd simply be to privilege my own coordinate system versus keeping it all more realistically relativistic.
Subcultures abound (and partially overlap), and we each encounter the puzzle pieces in different orders and assemble different parts of the puzzle in our own good time. Rushed work tends to not hold up, as a shorter half life.
Certainly Infinite Jest is hard to read (I've only sampled it) and yet Hannah Smart said she'd read it nine times, wow. Shades of Finnegans Wake (in the sense of "hard reading" that is).
