Across Talk

Across Talk (dia-lectic): Talk Across
the Curriculum

“I have wasted my life.”
Lecture title by Tim Cook, in
the current MFA series.

Exactly.



Which is the REAL Ben Feinberg?
antho-apologist or studio scholar?




“They are both right,” Susan Kask reports, on her
polar bear trip home from Antarctica: John Showalter,
whose economic savvy asserts
Sustainable Development is a Redundancy
and her science colleagues who insist:
no no no.

Dialectic is something like this. Turn up the
opposition. Put it in play. Expect revelation:
“they are both right!” &
1 Ben + 1` Ben = One
A triad. .

Cross Talk is something like martial arts:
opposition is invited, encouraged, cultivated,
maintained, sustained—entertained. Like any
sport or art: one gets better and good by
playing (and being played)

Practice: bunch of old-time musicians back-
porch fiddling with the same old fiddle tunes:
koans, riddles, parables, Gordian naughts &
conundrummers: tap, tap.. let’s try a little
Nature & Nurture…bit of Order & Random
…Individual & the Collectives, Idiocy & the
Common Sense, Pro Life & Pro Choice:
Whiskey Before Breakfast Over the Waterfall
St Anne’s Real Republicans & Democrats: the
ONE and the Many, Unilateralism & Reciprocation
Thought & Action, Highs & Lows, Self and Not
Self—you think these are different tunes?

Variations on a single progression.
Sames & Differences:
Tune of tunes.
.
Dissolve one: dissolve all. At least logically.
Not necessarily affectively or emotionally:
courses of another color.

Nothing is wasted when all of it is.

How wonderful that we have met
with a paradox. Now we have some
hope of making progress. Niels Bohr:
Physicist & EngMajor