The second of the classes we attended together was in Carpenter Hall, home of the badly denuded Philosophy department, and in fact in one of the classrooms that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had attended courses in. She couldn't be sure just which classes she'd had, but it was one of the regular ones. And just as in the day the instructor --- a Classics professor who (later on) would agree that Earlham was facing an existential threat but observed that it's been living on existential threats his half-century there --- had everyone arrange their desks in a circle. This was in one sense easy as the desks were actually mobile, wheeled seat-and-desk combinations easy to move just anywhere without the great dragging scrape of your normal legged student desk.
The problem was that his talk, reaching from Plato's notion of ``choosing a life'' to modern problems of how to govern and what a liberal-arts school is supposed to be, was incredibly popular. We got there with only one mobile seat left; I took one of the plain old chairs meant for instructors who preferred sitting. More people would keep coming in, swiping seats from adjacent classrooms until people got shy about that, and a good eight or so people ended up sitting on the floor. The professor also included a translation of a piece of the Republic --- his own translation, one he admitted to struggling over because he felt the complex grammar of the original meant the piece was supposed to show Socrates bubbling over with ideas forcing one another out of the way, and bunnyhugger hoped to find time to compare this to other translations she has --- and started by talking about what he was thinking about and transitioning into getting people to share their thoughts with a deft touch. I was interested in the underlying topic, of course, but also fascinated by just how he managed to make turning a lecture into a discussion so smoothly it never felt like a transition happened. If nothing else it taught me why bunnyhugger so loved the classes she had at Earlham and how disappointing it is every time her own classes can't be coaxed into saying a word. I don't know how the mathematics folks run things there but there is a magic in a class that feels like it's urging you to share an opinion.
We talked briefly with the professor after the session --- as expected he knew and respected the Classics professor that bunnyhugger had studied under --- and then went looking at what things from the Philosophy department were still hung in the walls and in office windows and all. The most curious of them was a little cardboard-backed 'pinbal' board --- you know, the kind made of cheap plastic where you shoot a ball bearing up into plastic C-shaped holes --- with a backing of philosophers. Aristotle was worth five points, Kant and Fichte ten points, Marx 50, Descartes and Confucius 20 points each, raising the question: huh?. Like, what was the decision tree that got Fichte on there and not, oh, anybody someone besides bunnyhugger's father cared about? But Marx was depicted with a caricature of Groucho so perhaps there was not strict rigor employed in the choice of philosophers for this novelty toy pinball. Still, c'mon, man, Aquinas? Spinoza? Bentham? Hegel? There's such better choices.
You know what's always a good choice? Enjoying my pictures of Little Amerricka. I left off on the monorail ride and we're going to reach something else here.
This area of Little Amerricka is more kiddie rides, but do you see the roller coaster there? No? We'll come back to it.
There's the Swiss Toboggan and the inflatable sabre-tooth tiger.
Back on the ground. So here's the kiddieland coaster, an Allan Herschell Little Dipper.
And what do you know but they let adults ride it! At least, they were willing to let us ride it one at a time! (They allowed a couple adults on at once and we were late to the seating.)
So here's bunnyhugger going up the hill to get her credit on a ride not as knee-bashing as we had feared.
See? Doesn't that look like fun was experienced?
Trivia: Until 1860, Paris, France, covered an area of only 3,402 hectares, not quite twice the size of Disneyland Paris. Source: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb.
Currently Reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G Kirschenbaum.
