As plain as the nose on your face

I learned through a mutual acquaintance that O’Cinnéide, that great embryologist, had died, so I attended his funeral mass at St. Vincent DePaul’s in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.  He had recently turned sixty, and had died according to the note I got from O’Neill “in distressing circumstances.”  O’Neill added that he would appreciate advice on a matter of O’Cinnéide’s legacy.  Along with a few of the regular morning mass-goers and some heavily aromatic homeless men sleeping in the pews at the back of the church, there were no more than a handful of us there that remembered him.  These were mainly his former university colleagues.  O’Cinnéide took an early retirement after which he severed contact with most of us.  After condolences had been offered to his wife, a handsome, doleful and seemingly capable woman who had, in fact, seen little of him in his last months as he had been under the constant care of his doctors, a few of us retreated to the Local Option a block away on Webster Avenue.  It was a crisp April morning, certainly not so warm that a person would have overcome his resentment at harsh treatment from another miserable Chicago winter; certainly not so warm that one had yet forgotten, as a Chicagoan typically does during the summer months, one’s resolve to flee.  We settled into the back of the bar, ordered our pints and toasted the dead man.  “A great Irish genius”, one of us said.  And the rest of us mumbled into our pints, “Aye; that he was.”  Read on here

Ghost story teaser....

O’Cinnéide’s descent at the end was rapid and it dominated the last few years of his life.  This apparition had, after all, been the observation of a lifetime, one that he now imagined he had foolishly overlooked.  He had captured an event, as improbable and perhaps as significance as the Higgs boson, using that most primitive and complex of apparatuses: the human eye.  Not a direct view, but a sidelong glance, an eye modified like a microscope with phase contrast.  He was now determined to investigate with the vigor the situation demanded.  He retired and went to Florida; not to rest but to replicate.  Florida ranch houses became his cyclotron.  

I'll link this up to the piece on 3quarksdaily tomorrow, if you care to read it.

Writing fiction: turns out it's hard to do

Generally when I write for 3quarks I prefer to wait until the week or so before the column is due to get started.  I enjoy writing these pieces, but I don't want it to dig too much into my other writing commitments.  And though these columns are not masterpieces (thought I confess to having a soft spot for my post on my surgery experience (here), and for the first of my bodily fluids pieces (here)) nevertheless I typically get them finished, and they are generally not horrifyingly bad.

This month though I made the poor decision to try to write a piece of fiction - a ghost story of all things.  Now, I have written plenty of fiction over the years but never with a view to publication, online or anywhere else.  Like most Irishmen I have a half written novel manuscript on my hard drive, But I had forgotten just how difficult it is to write a satisfying story.  It seems that in writing fiction it is difficult to rehabilitate the writing once it has gone offtrack.  In writing a scientific manuscript, or an essay, or even a poem, I am typically able to redirect the ship once if it goes off course.  But a story when it decides to head for the shallow waters of mediocrity is determined, apparently, to wreck itself on the shoals.  Why is this, I wonder?

So I have an outline, a few hundred words of text, and about a day to get this sucker finished.  It's beginning to look awkward.  So do I exhume an older writing and get it ready for posting on Monday or do I knuckle down and see if by dint of the sweat of my brow and a dollop of writerly will get this fictional baby into some sort of shape, and post whatever emerges? Anyway here's a couple of lines of the story so far.  It's in the voice of a tediously loquacious Irishman living in Chicago (I suppose that would be me...):

“Our friend is now out of pain, and his was a pain of great immensity – ultimate, substantial pain – immense precisely because it was so seemingly trifling a thing.  A man might recover from being flattened by a truck only to take a nibble from a toadstool and perish in an instant.  The notebooks [the story is constructed from reading lab notebooks!], and there are hundreds of them, go back to his early adulthood, and as I gathered from reading them, so does the origin of his most peculiar problem, a problem so seemingly insignificant, that his death seems not only to come out of the shadows but the shadows might be said to have been the lethal instrument.” 

Anyway, I suppose I should be writing a story.

Sneek a Peek at DeepMap Lincoln Park

A Small Sample of the Lincoln Park Tree Map

We are still in the early days of preparing our tree map of Chicago's Lincoln Park  DePaul undergraduates Core Cote, Jake Hartle, and Erin Weber worked on this over the last couple of years.  We have most of the trees in the park mapped, species identified, sized, and the condition evaluated. 

On this map (prepared by DePaul Geography major Alex Ulp) we display just a little taste of a large data set (this shows a fraction of the total tree population mapped). Ultimately, and hopefully before too long, we will complete the map.  I'll be recruiting more students to work on this in Spring.

I'll keep you posted.

A nice little Chicago Tribune piece on our work can be found here.  DePaul covered the story here.

It’s Mumford Time! Environmental Icarine Writers and the verification of spectacular claims

The case of the monastic clock and the invention of capitalism.

Fashioning an intellectual life is like unraveling a wooly sweater in reverse where instead of picking at a loose thread or two and witnessing the garment come asunder, one starts with sentence strands from a few books and knits these together to create from that growing ball of scholarly yarn, a suite of preoccupations and opinions that make up one’s worldview.  There was a short period of time when I was in college when I checked this process and was determined not to read and instead get my information exclusively from oral sources and directly from experience.  But the world was mute to me and my own thoughts were insufficiently intriguing so I broke down and became a voracious reader once again.  There are still direct connections between the books I read in youth and those that are still important to me now – books that led to others in the domino-heap of a reading lifetime.

Several of the strands that set me off along my scholarly way I picked up in volumes at a small local library near my home in Templeogue on the Dublin south side which I visited sometimes daily a teenager.  The work of Louis Mumford (1895 –1990) was one such significant discovery.  Mumford was one of those writers whose prose, it seems to me, works like Icarus falling back from the skies, their flight through air is so daring, the thrill of what they are attempting is so seductive, and yet the glint of the sun so brilliantly frames them that it is hard to tell if their wings are intact or not – is this, one wonders, flight or falling?  One rarely knows.  This display is quite unlike the writer who gains the high ground by laborious clambering from foothold to foothold – charting a slow methodical course up the rock-face, and whom we can, if we care to, follow behind and with whom, ultimately, we can share the vista from atop the peak.  The former Icarine writers eschew scholarly apparatuses, relying, as they do, upon the spectacle of the sky; the latter writers are replete with footnoted nooks and bibliographic crannies.  Icarine writers are especially delightful to the youth, and when I discovered Mumford I knew I had found a writer who would mark me.

A Diverse Atheistic Menagerie: Some of these White Guys have Beards

Now, I’m as much of an atheist as the next guy.  And I am skeptical for all the right reasons: a religious lad who went to university, read a lot of Darwin, and was troubled by its implications for belief in an external Deity who supervised the creation of living things and who stands in ultimate judgment of us all.  I amicably parted company with Catholicism at age 18 or so and more than a quarter of a century later I have not reconciled with my religious conviction.  There is more to say about my auto-religio-graphy, and when I can find an interesting way of reviewing it I will write some more on the matter. 

I should be a good candidate for enthusiastic support of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchins, Dennett, Harris and company) and though many of these writers delight me, I am nonetheless suspicious of them.  There is plenty to discuss here, and again this is something I’d like to revisit in the coming weeks, but the thing that’s on my mind right now is the chauvinism of the recommended reading published on Richard Dawkins website.  See here.  Oh there’s some real diversity there: some of these white men have beards, some unfashionably have long hair, a bald man or two graces the list.  But for the most part, the overwhelming part, they are white and male.

Now I certainly get the point that a diversity of styles of writing are represented – novelists, philosophers, linguists, evolutionary biologists and so forth.  And I also recognize that some of these perspectives have historically been male-dominated.  However, for Dawkins neither to have been influenced by, nor to recommend, writing by women and people of color (with very little exception) seems to be, shall we say… unfortunate.  What can possibly go wrong as this new priesthood whittles the old priesthood away?

In the old days we were told that we had a male only priesthood because Jesus had exclusively chosen male disciples and who after all could (or back in the day, dare) possibly assail that logic?  After all, didn't Jesus love the Mammy and He gave women a very special role in his Church?  No doubt Father Richard has his good reasons for choosing his prophets and acolytes in a manner reflected in these recommendations.  I am not sure what those reasons are, nor how to justify them.  Do you? 

For the time being I offer this prayer, paraphrasing St Augustine: Dear Lord, make me a New Atheist, but not yet.