Our friend L. came over for dinner last night before he left today for 10 weeks in China. He brought his schleffera so that I can abuse it.
It's ironic that such a plant aficionado as I am should be so inept at even keeping houseplants alive, much less nurturing them so that they thrive. Mostly I forget to water them, that's the first thing. Then: repotting, fertilizing, etc - way beyond my short attention span.
Anyway, L said that in China there is no bread. In the south they eat rice, but not so much in the north. I want to know more about this - I thought pretty much every culture had some version of bread. Does that simply reflect my unremitting Anglo-Eurocentrism?
Cold and rainy today: I whiled away the afternoon reading a kiss-and-tell book about censorship in academe starring, in less than flattering roles, several members of my department. The author has been accused of being a nutcase, and this might well be true. But he is saying some rather thought-provoking things about the nature of "scientific" inquiry, especially in geography.
I think his argument reflects the insecurity of the social sciences; they want oh so badly to be as scientific as the natural sciences. But the human mind and heart and body don't reduce to "facts" and stats so easily, and sometimes I wonder if social scientists are trying to force a mode of inquiry that really doesn't suit the knowledge being sought.
On the other hand, one would be well advised to avoid the sweeping poetical generalizations that he uses as examplars of what's wrong with some of the Big Names in cultural geography. On the third hand (it's a spidery sort of argument!) I question his reliance on talking to people as the primary means of gathering data. As anecdote such information can't reliably be generalized, and as statistic can you ever get a large enough sample to answer questions like "What is New Orleans like?"?
I've strenuously avoided my research job all day. I'll have to get up early to work on it before the meeting. Maybe I'll spend the extra dough and drive to school tomorrow to work on it - or maybe B will drop me off. We still haven't trucked the bikes over to get air in the tires.
Posted by otto0114 at June 10, 2004 10:22 PM