2016 — 9 April: Saturday
The revelatory power of fiercely-angled sunshine this morning is depressingly remarkable at highlighting the dustier portions of my "workspace".
An overnight email...
... conveyed further revelations regarding my Dell — I won't bore anyone with the details; suffice to say it coincided neatly with an overnight experiment of mine. So far, all is well1 with all three PCs. And I don't have a crockpot to prepare, which makes a remarkably pleasant change, too.
"Bibeo ergo sum!"
The one figure Scruton treats who simply does not fit is Foucault. Scruton calls him an "anarchist," a view for which there is, as far as I know, no evidence, though he may have been a kind of libertarian. Foucault is hard to place on any political map because, as he himself frequently said, he was not interested in providing solutions to problems but rather a history of problems: his relentless emphasis on the failures of all schemes of liberation, their absorption into new forms of power — "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," as Pete Townshend of The Who wrote many years ago — has caused a good many leftists to insist that Foucault is actually a conservative.
Sorry! I cannot now read, or read about, Foucault without recalling Edmund White's anecdote in the "My Europe" chapter of "My Lives". Picture the situation. It's November 1980 and Raygun has just been elected President, a dismal fact that has sent Foucault into a panic as he fears a return to fascism:
Michael Denneny got a call at four in the morning... from Mark Blasius... [asking] did he still have some of those tranquilizers they had once used to come down from bad LSD trips? "Michel Foucault
is on a bad trip at Man's Country baths and we have to go down there to rescue him. He's forgotten all his English and the only thing he could remember was my phone number."
Mark and Michael taxied down to the East Village, checked in to the bath house, and went from room to room until they found a ball of naked French philosopher, crazed and hissing, in the corner of a cubicle.
The Grauniad has a piece on Violette Leduc. I tried to read La Bâtarde in the late 1960s, and found it hard work. It has not survived on my shelves, but then neither has Simone de Beauvoir. What is it about great French thinkers that makes them so essentially unreadable? (Link.)
I wonder...
... if this could turn out to be the understatement of all (human) time?
No argument...
... from me!
I am reading Pride And Prejudice again. It gets better every time...
The author, however, doesn't overdo Elizabeth's intelligence. For a crucial while, Elizabeth believes Wickham. She and Jane have a DMC on the subject. (I'm told that for the young ladies of our district, this is the new shorthand for a Deep Meaningful Chat.)
If today's (h/w) delivery...
... yields the intended result I, too, shall be having a DMC with a local guru or two. The other two deliveries are the last of my incoming Artmonsky books for a while. Here's a neat 1945 LT example from one of them:
And here's my little stash (says he, having just re-spun his Books-listing scripts as a post-prandial exercise):
Aside to Christa
I can't pretend the garden is all it could be, my love, but here's the first tulip of the year for you:
What...
... is one to make of this? Though I do like the idea!
I've now listened...
... to this marvellous Jocelyn Pook album at least half a dozen times since buying it. I stand by my original comments:
I still don't know what it's all about. It is still particularly eerie.
Today's h/w experiment...
I bought a neat little 2-port 4K-capable DisplayPort 1.2 switchbox, thereby hoping to establish, once and for all, exactly what is going on with my current 34" Dell inputs and the two PCs I wish to connect. By routing both PCs through one box upstream of the Dell I should remove any issues with Dell input switching as there would be none. Good theory? Well, I thought so.
- Connect BB Mk III's DisplayPort o/p to Input #1 of the new switch. Connect Output of said switch to the Dell's full-size DisplayPort input. Power on BB Mk III. Display is perfect. Login. All is OK. Shutdown.
- Connect Skylark's DisplayPort o/p to Input #2 of the new switch. Being a Cautious Cuthbert, leave Skylark switched off. And leave new switchbox on Input #1. What could go wrong?
- Power on BB Mk III. Display flickers a few times as booting proceeds. Get a login splash screen. Watch it disappear. Reappear. Disappear. Reappear. Power off without ever logging in.
- Think "I have now wasted enough time and effort on this". Remove the new switch.
- Re-connect BB Mk III as before by its DP o/p directly into the Dell.
- Re-connect Skylark (all this time still switched off) by its HDMI o/p directly into the Dell.
- Assume (probably wrongly) that all will now be as before.
- Write this list before I lose the will to live.
If you're reading this, BB Mk III came back up healthily and with the Dell working perfectly. I shall try Skylark in due course... Any bets?
It worked perfectly. That's it. I'm done.