Eugen Kullmann (1915-2002) (pt.2)

(Part One)

Part Two

In that first meeting of ours (9/7/86?), Kullmann impressed upon me several things about religion. "God is the silent answer to the last question," he stated, leaving me to wonder what the last question might be. He listed for me his five criteria for religion, which included attitudes towards slavery, women, the poor, animals and man's place in the cosmos. He pointed to Jonah as an example of the concern for animals "And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” "And so much cattle," he repeated to me with a soft smile. Then he pointed to another verse:

"Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain (Deuteronomy 5:24) and how the early Christians failed this criterion: "For it is written in the Law of Moses: "Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain." Is it about oxen that God is concerned?" Surely he says this for us, doesn't he? Yes, this was written for us, because when the plowman plows and the thresher threshes, they ought to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest." (1 Corinthians 9:9-10) In this case, the early Christians failed to meet the criterion.

Kullmann recommended to me Cassirer, the second volume of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which is devoted to myth and religion and other sources which I did not read (I did make mutliple attempts to read Cassirer's Essay on Man, learning that we are not only thinking animals but symbolic animals in Cassirer's view, but maybe subsequent science has determined that other animals engage in symbols, I don't know.) "Everything with religion, nothing out of religion" he quoted from Schleirmacher. Similarly, he mentioned one of Job's friends saying: "If you are righteous, what do you give to him? Or what does he receive from your hand?" "We do the right thing not because religion tells us," he stressed to me; "we do it because it is right." He did not like the translation I was using (the New Oxford Bible, Revised Standard Version) and advised me to look at other translations, giving me one of his own of a famous passage: "I know that my ransomer lives, and that he stands upon the earth, and if my flesh should be torn from my bones I shall still take my refuge in God." (Job 19: 24-25) (Later he quoted Terence "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.") And then he stopped and said "Now, we have some ice cream," and then "Can you eat a banana," he asked eagerly. "Where are you now in your Latin," I was quizzed and then he sent me home in the end of the warm sunny afternoon thinking I would read Job in full when actually we were due to start the Pentateuch.

Temps perdu

Kullmann: You young people with your Rock and Roll and your rolling rock. Trying to kill time, but time is going to kill you.


Kullmann: " A minute wasted is lost for all eternity" Prior to his lecture on Maimonides, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, April 1985.

c.f. Baudelaire, L'Horloge

"Driving around, I will waste more time." : Robert Bly

"How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you different." Kurt Vonnegut

Time takes its crazy toll. Sonic Youth, the Diamond Sea

Time

Messiaen - Quartet for the End of Time - (1941)

record

hope deferred

"Hope deferred maketh the something sick -- who said that?" Waiting for Godot

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 13: 12


"How do you give hope to people who have no hope?" Eugen Kullmann

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11: 1

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

T.S. Eliot, the Hollow Men

What happens to a dream deferred? - Langston Hughes

"melancholy people have two reasons for being so: the don't know or they hope. Don Juan knows and does not hope." Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"hope not being hope / until all ground for hope has / vanished" - Marianne Moore, "The Hero"


Ya gotta give 'em hope - Harvey Milk

only connect

The phrase Only connect was made famous by Forster in Howard's End (not that I've actually read it, but see What the Bee Knows by P. L. Travers for a wonderful discussion of it. Forster's sense of it, evidently, was cosmic, that we connect not only to each other but also our history as a species, our myths, across time and generations. My main interest in using social networks is like what

Kippe and Kopper said, “Recognize that what sustains most information technologies is people’s desire to connect with one another.”

Twitter has become my main source of new information, with Bloglines and email not far behind. I joined Twitter just to lurk and soon found hundreds of other users with similar interests, both professional and personal. One can manage the Twitter stream with Twitter lists (links to Twitter users sharing common information and support.)

What is a social network? Wikipedia discusses this with emphasis on physical and biological relationships such as family and kinship. Here, I consider the context of our online research environment and cyberinfrastructure such that, Social media are web tools that facilitate information exchange and social interactions.

At the same time as different companies with different clients contend for hegemony, the ones I use (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Bloglines, Blogger, Diigo) all serve different purpose and i interact with different groups on each for different purposes. Munger, noting that not one channel dominates and reflecting on a virtual science conference from 2009, remarks: "the intersection between the online and the real, in science and in all other spheres of life, is likely to get even murkier in the future."

Is our conversation limited to 140 characters? While announcing the 140 character science paper competition, Richard Grant looks sceptically at social media's (such as Twitter's) use for disseminating scientific results.

Adoption of SM tools by libraries has gained some interest; for example, A survey of library users concludes that some 50% use social networks, photo editing tools and online video provided by their local library. Meanwhile our young digital natives know what they want from their library.

This is a huge topic about how to facilitate interactions between people, using these tools, businesses talking with their customers, sharing info rather than hoardnig it. Many are concerned about privacy and safety (and $.) Gordhamer suggests some good guidelines, such as brevity, not putting too much investment into getting an immediate response and using your counterpart's preferred communication channel. He emphasizes connecting with others for a shared, mutual interest. Tamsen also shares some tips for successful social media participation.

Further sources:

Richard Simon posted The Complete History (spanning some 30 yrs) of Social Networking on his blog.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Matthew Fraser's Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom are both good starting points on social media and consequences.

I don't mean to be a knol-it-all. ;) Garrett

All and everything 0

All and Everything 0/0

February 12, 2009

Happy Valentine's Day

xo :)

"Eternity is in love with the productions of time." William Blake



GKEN

The Global Knowledge Exchange Network relaunched this week. From the efforts of Mary Lee Kennedy and Gosia Stergios of Baker Library, Harvard Business School, in collaboration with colleagues from Copenhagen, this online community furthers the discussion of scholarly communication issues, disruptive technology and new paradigms in information. Knols serve as bodies of knowledge and jumping off points for conversation. Speakers and webcasts to follow. It is an openly accessible community. Congratulations to Mary Lee and Gosia!




E-Library Economics

Two forthcoming CLR studies on the cost of self space and electronic content delivery are considered.

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(From ResourceShelf on patents)
patents searching: http://digbig.com/5bbbrk India: http://digbig.com/5bbbrj patents +Scirus http://digbig.com/5bbbrm
Wikipedia citations in patents up 59 percent http://digbig.com/5bbbrh #Wikipedia #patents #citations #resourceshelf


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Use and Abuse of Power



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Harvard launches innovation contest for type 1 diabetes


What digital natives want from their library

Da future

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Stop selling scarcity

(Source: Nahum Gershon)



Ramona Islam's Library Thing Bookshelf

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At the Zoo
Zebras are reactionaries, Antelopes are missionaries


God's plan is best - MW

:)

Xo

Shh

My teacher Eugen Kullmann (1915-2002)

Eugen Kullmann was well known at Kenyon by many students I was friendly with when I arrived at Kenyon College in the Fall of 1983. His archives from his teaching career are housed online at Middlebury. Prof. William McCulloh, in his remarks at Kullmann's memorial in 2003, and many (except the students and colleagues of his) probably felt the same way. (I wasn't at the symposium in 2003, a memorial. Haven't been back to Kenyon since I graduated and many faculty I studied with are there, including a lady Kullmann called "my successor", Miriam Dean-Otting, a highly gifted-teacher for whom I wrote two excellent papers and one lousy one in our Senior Seminar.

I heard stories before I met Prof. Kullmann from older students that he knew classical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, taught courses on the Psalms, the Hebrew Bible and the Holocaust. Students ured me to go see him and study with him, but I was reluctant. I remember Bill Marchl, a friend who was a year ahead of me, showing off a wonderful paper about Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, which the professor had regarded highly. I remember friends telling me of a conversation in class he had with a student, comparing the scriptures to a big department store, from which you could take some of what was useful and leave the rest. Another told me of Kullmann's wrath as rock music echoed throughout the campus in the spring. I heard of Prof K saying, "you young people, with your rock and roll and your rolling rock, trying to kill time. But sooner or later time is going to kill you."

In the spring of 1985 I met him, first when Bill Marchl introduced me to him at his talk on Maimonides Guide to the Perplexed. I knew nothing about it when I heard him speak, still don't, but I remember the doctor said before he began "A minute wasted is lost for all eternity." when my good friend Andrew Black took me to visit him at his house on the Kokosing River in Gambier, Ohio. I was on the fence about joining the department at that time. Kullman had retired in the spring of 1984, receiving an honorary degree. Andrew and I were buds and he told me much about the old gentleman, that he liked Big Bear supermarkets. When I met the man, he seemed old world, a European classical scholar. His house was mystical, with fading light, dust, cats, clocks and many books. Andrew knew him well. I made up that I was a religion major and couldn't communicate well with the Professor, but he liked that I knew about Bergman's The Seventh Seal. He was kind and asked me to come back, but in the Fall of 1985 I dropped out to waste time and work menial tasks and go to jazz shows in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After a year of nonsense, which wasn't entirely a waste because I did some reading and writing, I was welcomed back to Kenyon as a junior in the Fall of 1986. I learned from Andrew Stein, an old friend and soon to become Kullmann's favorite student that he and others were studying w/ the professor. The second Monday of school I made a call to Prof. Kullmann's house ( I still hadn't chosen a department or an advisor.) "What would you like to study, sir?" the old gentleman asked me. "The Old Testament, professor," I answered. I was then corrected (about my little bible reading.) He informed me that the Hebrew scriptures (Hebrew Bible: pentateuch, wisdom, propehetic writings, apocrypha) were grafted onto the gospels and Christian letters and revelation for what the West called the bible (but he meant the Hebrew bible.) (In the Antichrist, which Kullmann did not mention, Nietzsche railed against the merging of the two as a great literary offense against the spirit. Blake, too, (also not discussed) said in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell that now everyone worships the Jewish God -- I think he had the prophet Ezekiel say it.)

So I brought my Oxford bible, down the hill in Gambier and the professor met me halfway. "Doctor Gary," he called me and shook my hand. I started taking notes at his house right away and he discouraged me "Let what sticks stick, " he said. "knowledge is what you have after all the notebooks have been burned!" The other thing that stuck with me that day was what the professor said "God is the silent answer to the last question."

Prof. Kullmann quickly determined that he liked me and that I had no religious upbring, so "nothing to unlearn," he said. He was pleased that I was taking Latin and Historical Thought and the Gospels but not pleased about my other religion selection. He told me many things that early, sunny September afternoon, one that I remember about the Iliad, (7th book.) Ajax taunts the Trojan Glaukos and The Trojan replies "Very like leaves are the generations of men." He said that was meant for Toynbee, Spengler and Valery but I never read any of these. (But later that year I read Homer with McCulloh and it suddenly made sense.)

(To be continued. 2/11/10)

Update on job situation

Met with Lynne Schmelz at Harvard's Cabot Library today (undergraduate science library). Our meeting was cordial and our conversation was direct. She presented several options for me and I like them all. I will work there four days a week starting in February, and one day a week at Rowland. Especially intriguing was the possibility of developing current awareness services and employing social media such as Twitter for the library. I'm there, and planning on starting a new blog. Among the other assignments are support for courses (developing modules of resources), instructional support and reference desk work, while continuing to be the go-to library person for Rowland scientists. It's a relief to know what I will be doing after several weeks of uncertainty (we had to cancel our meeting twice before.) I was welcomed warmly by the Cabot staff (Ellie Clement showed me around and Reed Lowrie, with whom I will be sharing an office, said that he was sorry about my library's closing, but that he was glad I had a place to land.)

This is a good thing while I explore options and could be an opportunity to create a permanent situation for myself at Harvard. Maybe. It's good to have clarity. I let the Rowland folks know of these changes in a tersely-worded email which was cathartic to write. Change is change and I know today that there's often an upside which I would never have looked for in years past. Feeling free.

Some have said I wouldn't like working with undergraduates. The kids are alright, as far as I'm concerned. They are how they are, smarter than people like me, while I know more. They are at an exciting time in their lives and it is a digital generation which I'm told does not necessarily come to the library to seek help - perhaps they are craving community. I know I can be equal to every relation today.

Forward to the future, instead of past to the back (paraphrasing an ex-vp of the USA).