If only tangentially sometimes, this is about living in Turkey, especially under the ongoing official state of emergency.
Aristotle, Marx & Engels, and Collingwood
A blog article on Medium recently struck me for its treatment of science. Dated October 3, the article is called “The Purpose Of Life Is Not Happiness: It’s Usefulness,” and its opening section is as follows.
After five years in Istanbul, we continue to learn how much there is still to discover here. Now we have been to the Asian borough of Beykoz. Much of what we saw there was rural, and the topography and flora reminded me of Appalachia. I have nothing to say about the poverty and ignorance that might be suggested by this term; for me, Appalachia was always a locus for holidays, mostly at my late uncle’s place in West Virginia, but also in the form of bicycle tours. Travelling now to Beykoz, “Country roads,” I could think, “take me home, to the place I belong!” We got there by public bus from our European borough of Şişli.
Polonezköy, Beykoz, 2016.08.14
Note added May 31, 2018: Here are some meditations on education from the summer of 2016, when Donald Trump was threatening to become President of the United States. Education cannot be forced on unwilling students. Neither need students know just what they are accepting; they may be enticed or beguiled into learning. Whether they have learned cannot be directly tested. I include some memories of racism (as an observer, not a victim) and of my own liberal education.
Note added May 22, 2023: I return to this post, precisely because of that assertion that testing does not show directly whether students have learned. As I have learned recently through a friend, Emily Bender said something similar on Medium last year, in response to Steven Johnson in “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” (New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2022):
First, large language models have been making steady improvements, year after year, on standardized reading comprehension tests.
Bender’s response is “On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed” (April 18, 2022):
just because the tests were designed to test for reading comprehension by people, and even if we assume that they do a good job of measuring that, doesn’t mean that comparable scores by machines on the same tests entail that machines are doing something comparable …
Bender goes on to talk about “construct validity.”
Would education solve the world’s problems? A meaningfully positive answer would imply that the appropriate education could actually be supplied to us, or enough of us; and yet education is not a drug that can be administered willy-nilly.
Tables for art entrance exam, MSGSÜ, 2016.08.02
This essay is written as a distraction from current events, though I make some reference to them. I am prompted by questions of analogy provoked by
The following notes about the Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis are from four emails that I wrote in the fall of 2015 (with some noted additions in the spring of 2020 and some additional editing on November 25, 2021). The emails rebut various objections to the Narnia books. I have put my emails here, because I noticed that a friend on Facebook was wondering whether her daughter was ready to read the Chronicles, or perhaps to be read to from them. I do not wish to write much on Facebook, for reasons detailed elsewhere in this blog; so I asked interested persons to read me here.
My explorations continue in “Return to Narnia.”
This essay – these notes for an essay, this draft of an essay – is inspired by Robert Pirsig’s first book. I have made sectional divisions where they seemed to occur naturally.
On June 7, 2016, I underwent surgical repair of an inguinal hernia. I did not know what to expect. I did not know that I did not know: I did not consider that there was anything in particular to be prepared for. But there was.
Clock tower of Şişli Etfal hospital
from the fourth floor
The surgery itself was not such a big deal. It was a fascinating experience, but not one that I found myself wishing I had known more about ahead of time. Recovery has turned out to be something else. If a medical website says of recovery, “You may experience some discomfort,” it is practically lying. Discomfort was what I experienced, waiting in a chair, or on a gurney, for the surgery to take place. What I experienced afterwards was searing pain, at least in getting out of bed, with the rather insistent help of a nurse.
Between the composing of parts 1 and 2 of this account came the death of Prince, whose work had inspired Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It. Between the composing of parts 2 and 3 came the release of the four Turkish peace activists, whose imprisonment had given poignancy to The Demons and The Music of Strangers. There is a certain absurdity associated with each event.
Nikkyô Niwano, Shakyamuni Buddha: A Narrative Biography
(Tokyo: Kôsei Publishing Co., 1980; fifth printing, 1989)
On the cover, a modern copy by Ryûsen Miyahara,
owned by Risshô Kôsei-kai, of
“The Nirvana of the Buddha,”
painted in 1086 and owned by temple Kongôbu-ji,
Wakayama Prefecture, Japan
Ayşe was teaching, but I was free to see a movie. The İstiklâl cinemas were twenty minutes by foot from our urban campus, or one subway stop, if you preferred. Our flat was one stop in the other direction. There was a festival cinema in Ortaköy, and another over on the Asian side; but without even considering these (which I have never visited), I had a Canadian, a Mexican, a Polish, and a Turkish film to choose from. I studied them on the festival website, though not too intently. You are not likely to go wrong with any festival film. Moreover, the catalogue synopses do not always provide an accurate sense. I chose the Canadian movie out of interest in this country as being both American and not. It is also where Ayşe and I met. Continue reading
After a preamble on freedom, this is an account of nine movies in three parts.
This part:
Thirst
Rain the Color of Blue With a Little Red in It
Fire at Sea
The Demons
The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
Florida
Interruption
Under the Sun
News from Planet Mars
In the summer of 1994, I was a graduate student at the University of Maryland, and I had lived in the state since 1989. My roommate in a suburban apartment complex was finishing her own degree and moving away. I decided to move across the border into the city of Washington, where I had already become involved in some bicycle activism. I found a congenial vegetarian group house. I would bicycle the nine miles to the College Park campus. But moving to the city raised a moral question: should I really give up my political right to a meaningful vote?
Polytropy 