My Dinner With Crispin Wright

Today Crispin Wright gave a talk on higher order vagueness. Since I know the readers of this blog are not too well-versed in semantics or fuzzy logic (nor am I, honestly) I will gloss over the content of his talk and say merely that it was very interesting. I wasn't able to understand it completely, but that's probably all right - I understood more than at last year's logic lecture at Smith, where I understood more than the previous year, and so on. In other words, I'm learning, and though progress is slow, I can tell it's happening. I'm getting there.

Afterwards there was a brief reception, and one of the professors had brought a lovely selection of noshes - including baklava, apple cider, dates stuffed with cheese, and fresh guacamole. Very delicious. The Horse tried to use baklava as props to show us where the dinner afterwards was to be held, but it made little sense to me and when the time came we just all walked over together.

The dinner was at a very nice Afghani restaurant I'd never been to before. I'd never had Afghani food, either, so it was a novel experience. The emphasis on cilantro and dill was not to my liking, but the Horse gave me some of his Cornish game hen, which was delicious, and we had a very nice baba ganouj and I had some nice vegetable dumplings.

The Horse was there, and his wife JW (who is my logic teacher and mentor), and my philosophy of language teacher GE, and two other grad students: my roommate K and a boy called Tim who is, K and I always think, very standard. The bulk of the dinner-table talk was philosophical - in particular, philosophy of logic. I was fascinated and tried desperately to hang on. There were some other topics where I was able to contribute more conversationally; I did my best to represent, as I doubt we were invited along to sit mutely. The Horse was very amusing as usual, and I utterly adore JW and GE, and Crispin Wright was awfully smart and personable. It was all in all a wonderful dinner from soup to nuts, and the sort of thing that makes me so happy I'm in academia. There will be many such dinners in my life.

One More Thing!

I get to have dinner with Crispin Wright on Friday. Whenever there's a speaker, three grad students get to go and have their dinners paid for by the department, and this week I pounced on it because hey! A logician! Passing through Indiana! And so I whipped off an email to the chair saying I wanted in, and he wrote back: "You're the last lucky winner." This filled me with glee.

Darn those pesky tsetse flies!

As usual on Mondays, I am barely conscious, owing to a weekend of staying out late and waking up early, since you're supposed to sleep best if you wake up at the same time every morning and I like to get my weekend chores - marketing and bread baking - done by noon. Normally I have class on Monday afternoons, but today I did not, since my prof is out of town, and so I napped all through the time I would've had class. I did, however, go into the office this morning (what a grownup turn of phrase! And it's true: I went into my very own office, despite the presence of The Werewolf, my scary officemate) and turn out another draft of my analyticity paper. It is now in a form which could be turned in, should I slip into a coma until Wednesday afternoon, and this is comforting, though I will diligently continue to tweak it until the buzzer sounds.

Perhaps I should elaborate on that allusion to The Werewolf. He's writing a dissertation on Kierkegaard (amazingly the Blogger spellcheck has no problem with "Kierkegaard" so maybe someday when I'm a famous philosopher it will stop telling me my last name is "Neutered" or perhaps I meant "Neuterers" which is a new one) and is in the office ALL THE TIME, and never says a word, and every time I go in there I want to announce, "My name is on the door!" because I feel like I'm intruding. But it is silly and babyish to be afraid of my own office, so I'm sucking it up.

Oh, and I call him the Werewolf because he kind of looks like a blend of Oz-from-Buffy combined with my mental image of a young Remus Lupin (i.e. not like this). Plus he's just kind of lupine. (His girlfriend Kari is very cool and gave me a ride once.)

Um. Where was I? I just finished The Orange Tree, by Mildred Walker, which was pretty good - it is apparently kind of a modernization of Chekhov's Three Sisters and it's published by Nebraska University Press, which perhaps partially explains its occasionally jarringly bad editing. To be fair, the editor was trying to reconcile several different versions, as Walker apparently kept fiddling with it for years and years after it was rejected, but since this editor didn't feel any compunctions about inserting references to an orange tree so the title would make sense, you'd think she could've somehow smoothed some of those scene changes. I was constantly thinking I'd skipped a page.

And it's Columbus Day, which, despite its dubious political correctness, I kind of love, because when I was little, my grandparents would take me and Floss and our cousins on an outing every Columbus Day. We'd go to an orchard and each pick one apple, have lunch at a hotdog stand, go to this beach with lots of neat rocks and interesting driftwood and debris, and then on the way home stop at the Dollar Store, where we were each allowed to choose any item to buy. It was super great. (I've just dashed off a letter to them, since this made me think of it, so no need to tell me.)

The Bacon Digression

I absolutely adore my epistemology professor, the Horse. The Horse is perhaps the handsomest man I have seen so far here in the Hoosier State (and he is from Montreal) and he is simply hilarious - he never seems to be listening to a word anyone says, but just sort of rolls his head around and pulls on his lower lip and gazes into nowhere when spoken to. The Horse almost never finishes a sentence, which makes it very hard to take notes in his class.

Today I was in the lounge drinking a cup of tea and the Horse came in. "I'm worried that you'll peak too soon," he said, apropos of nothing, in his delightful rumbling, scratchy, nasal voice. "I mean, you'll peak really early and then ... and we want you to kind of -" he made a gradual swooping motion with his hand - "what's that you're drinking? Is that tea? Well, that's okay then. I was ... I was being facetious ... I guess you can't tell, okay, see you later." Then he trotted off.

Today in class he was talking about Descartes' requirement that we must rule out the possibility that we're dreaming before we can truly say we know things about the world around us. He said, "Of course in everyday life we're perfectly justified in saying that we know where the nearest hospital is, or who we are, or where you can get a flatbread with what R.J. Apple referred to as 'the Beluga of bacon' ... 'the Beluga of bacon,'" he repeated, almost dreamily. "It's this bacon called 'nueske's' and you can get it at a place called 'Trulli's' which is on ... is it 10th and 3rd? No - it's - it's 10th and the overpass - Trulli's - " and he wrote "Trulli's" and "nueske's" on the board. "Or you can get it at a place called the Butcher's Block. It is the caviar of bacons.

"Once," he went on, "we were in Memphis - I think it was Memphis - walking down the street and we were suddenly - beguiled by this smell of bacon and it drew us in to this little hole in the wall where we had this bacon, and you can actually get it here in Bloomington. Where was I?"

"You were talking about the Cartesian requirement," I prompted him. And he was off again, galloping away in another direction.