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Culture Shock
Jun. 13th, 2003 02:24 pmAfter a two day class in how software ought to be developed, I am back in my cube in the real world sipping an iced latte with the Bruckner seventh in my cupholder, I mean CD ROM drive.
Last night I got all excited that Adam Ferguson has made it on to the Web, and posted the first paragraph that jumped out at me into my LJ. I remember AF from my first year in graduate school, when I took history of higher education with Douglas Sloan, author of an outstanding study of the Scottish Enlightenment and the American college, and now a prominent Anthroposophist. It was a few months later that another professor of mine, the notorious Maxine Greene, referred to me as "one of the great minds of the Eighteenth Century," which she characteristically took to be an insult. "Eleventh!" I snarled back, meaning, I suppose, the Twelfth, or even the Thirteenth.
From my perch at the software factory across the river from where my grandfather was born, the Morningside Heights of the early '70s seems as remote as any tavern frequented by Sam Johnson or his illustrious parliamentarian friend or the Paris of Aquinas and Bonaventura. It seems fitting, in these twilight days of our former Republic, and particularly for a former Republican, to take the broader views of a minister of the Kirk attached to a Highland regiment, as I believe Ferguson to have been, or perhaps of an impovrished mystical Russian exile in the Paris of the 1920s or the sort whose legacy shaped the clergyfolk I am in most frequent contact with these days.
I do not seem to be a happy camper, in spite of this being Friday the Thirteenth, a holiday named for the movie filmed at my father's Boy Scout camp.
Last night I got all excited that Adam Ferguson has made it on to the Web, and posted the first paragraph that jumped out at me into my LJ. I remember AF from my first year in graduate school, when I took history of higher education with Douglas Sloan, author of an outstanding study of the Scottish Enlightenment and the American college, and now a prominent Anthroposophist. It was a few months later that another professor of mine, the notorious Maxine Greene, referred to me as "one of the great minds of the Eighteenth Century," which she characteristically took to be an insult. "Eleventh!" I snarled back, meaning, I suppose, the Twelfth, or even the Thirteenth.
From my perch at the software factory across the river from where my grandfather was born, the Morningside Heights of the early '70s seems as remote as any tavern frequented by Sam Johnson or his illustrious parliamentarian friend or the Paris of Aquinas and Bonaventura. It seems fitting, in these twilight days of our former Republic, and particularly for a former Republican, to take the broader views of a minister of the Kirk attached to a Highland regiment, as I believe Ferguson to have been, or perhaps of an impovrished mystical Russian exile in the Paris of the 1920s or the sort whose legacy shaped the clergyfolk I am in most frequent contact with these days.
I do not seem to be a happy camper, in spite of this being Friday the Thirteenth, a holiday named for the movie filmed at my father's Boy Scout camp.