We'll always have Paris

Back from a week in Paris! The ambiance, the food, the transportation, all fine. The cyber 'round the block: not good enough. I was seriously web-lagged on return. How can I be expected to have new experiences if I don't get to archive them here?

I found myself wishing I were in the discussions of faith and culture and politics, and I found myself practicing arguments from the reading I'm doing in political Islam.

Bryan's doing a fine job keeping me intrigued by the MetaCortex saga. Looks like Aquapolis was the first "matrix" city: you didn't actually go there, you just suited up and felt like you were there, seeing/hearing/feeling, doing, those things.

Now, though, I need to get back to my class notes, and my student projects.

I wondered again yesterday, as I saw these diary entries taking shape, where this project is headed. If this story -- this semi-autobiographical memoir in the form of the complexly structured blog, intertwingled with many personal web pages -- is to be comprehensible by anyone else I need some rhetorical voice within the text as I move from author to administrator, say, of my memex.
Is that Doug, d2, the dragon ... ?

Could the reader be dropped into a day of average complexity and discover gradually how tangled the second or third level links out from each mundane annotation become? Yes, if I were James Joyce, or even Nicholson Baker. Unless we assume the novelist's gift it's not clear that most personal narratives are interesting to other people, except these people have a personal interest in the author.

BTW, this Paris visit at 60 for NITLE echoed that at 55 for Spring Break, as we hiked and Metroed and dined. Then there's 1968, after "Les Evenements"; and 1966 alone; and the way it seemed in novels and films. There were Piaf posters everywhere, and the IMA is showing "De Delacroix à Renoir: l’Algérie des peintres," and we passed "La Pérouse" in the rainy taxi drive along the Quai des Grands Augustins, on our way to dinner in the 16th...

Comments

[d2]

Seems to me I (or someone linking to me) need to write a short discursive account of Freud the self-analytic dream-recorder in the late '90s, perhaps comparing this with the various pictures we have of him as a correspondent/reporter on his daily routine.
Recall also my brief, 1993, attempt to imagine some flesh on the bones of Freud's end-of-life "Kürzeste chronik": www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/f_diary.html