Here's my Class Report entry, formatted as I meant it to be:
Start anywhere
It all connects
and the trick is to choose
among branching paths
or perhaps it's to
unwind the thread
as you sally forth
so as to be able
to reconstruct
your wanderingsThat reconstruction is a tale
a narrative of Tolkien proportions
though without the necessity
of any end to the hero's quest
and indeed with no heroes
or deus ex machina
just the progress of discoveryAnd what does the Argonaut seek?
Not fleeces or immured maidens
gloriously slain foes
or vanquished enemiesIt's the link, the nexus,
the skein of allusion
the journey and not
the destination;
the joys of finding and telling
It has been my habit to construct web page augmentations of my Report submissions, opening the possibility of linking to more enthusiasms and projects than can fit into a page of the Class Report. See links at http://oook.info to enter the Labyrinth.
(12xi24 version, via oook.info/60th/)
The challenge of writing a Class Report entry puts one through changes, as we used to say. It's an exercise in self-presentation, with a far-flung audience ...or perhaps no audience at all. The writer tries to lay out what seems personally to matter in the quinquennium just ended. For some, it's Accomplishments; for some it's Adventures; for some, Commentary on the often-jaundiced view of the Present ...and so on. Most of us know (and knew) only a handful of classmates, but recognize names and sometimes faces, dimly. So what IS it that we share beyond 4 years long ago in the same incubator? We all have the lives lived beyond Cambridge, and whatever fragments of Harvard we cling to... but surely our lives have been deeply influenced by what we actually DID in those 4 years, and the choices we made, and the callownesses we only copped to later, and the habits of mind we had equipped ourselves with. In my anthropologist guise, I ought to look back upon those Class Reports as a pool of DATA to be explored for what they might tell us of our lives, and of the outside world as we encountered it. I'm not sure that I want to put time into that, but it could be a worthy project in sociocultural reconstruction.
For the last 30 years I've used html as a tool for writing, thus making my projects and discovery process distributable. I have (mostly) eschewed (ewww,,,) the glossy packaging and intrusive entanglements of social media services, though I use Flickr to archive and display photographic work. The hyperlinked rabbit holes at oook.info aspire to be the sort of Lifebox articulated by Rudy Rucker: a personal archive and repository. The primary user is myself, but all are welcome to visit and wander the stacks. The links to Convivium posts 2020-2024 exemplify the method and the madness.
It's verging on 20 years since I retired, and that's longer than either of my careers (as professor and as librarian) and continues both. I see those 20 as the self-directed development of the "independent scholarship" I imagined for myself 60 years ago, which has and seeks no audience or other public effect. But it keeps me learning, and is a great pleasure to be engaged with.
In these last 20 years I've been rediscovering my anthropologist and geographer identities, and continuing to explore the edges of the musical (note especially various plucked-string instruments), and enjoying idiosyncratic views of the world via photography... and grooming the roadsides of 20-odd miles of roads on the St George peninsula... and pursuing inventive cooking. All very inner-directed and indulging of self, with little outward exposure. Seeking to enact a blameless life of curiosities pursued and serial enthusiasms explored.
At least 40 of those 60 years have been lived in silico, exploring the possibilities of the personal computer along lines first foreseen by Vannevar Bush's MEMEX... the Scholar's Workstation made flesh with html (30+ years ago for me) and the World Wide Web.
The COVID years kept us mostly close to home, after the flurry of travels of the late 20teens, though we're planning another transcontinental driving adventure for March and April 2025, hoping to visit far-flung still-extant friends in various places along the way, and seeking out interesting places to photograph.
The Harvard of the early 1960s seems very very far away in the rear-view mirror, and the Harvard of the present seems utterly foreign. I look back to the fledgling awkwardness of my own undergraduate years, a bit ruefully, but also note my progress over the years since 1965. My recent reading of Joe Boyd's White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s and And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music encourages me to realize how different were the Harvards we encountered, and were formed by. What's amazing is that it still matters, 60+ years later. The underworld of the Harvard Square folk music years is more familiar to me via books (Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, and Boyd's reminiscences) and records than because I was a participant in that world. My Harvard of the early 60s was an unstable amalgam of anthropology and photography, with a side of GSD. It's all so much a matter of who you knew and what you encountered —which is just like real life. I missed a lot...
Betsy and I celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary in September 2024.
❧ ❧
Observations for 12 November 2024
Everything changes
and you're in a new world that you deeply deplore
and won't cooperate with
BUT you're irrelevant anyway.
"Go outside and play"
is good advice.
Stay out of sausage factories and theatres of cruelty,
and don't attract the attention of brown shirts.
And don't bother to pine for
The Good Old Days
when everything seemed to make sense
and now nothing much does anymore.
Mutter amongst yourselves
Watch Monty Python
and don't skimp on the paté