I’m teaching a course in the Philosophy Department at San Jose State in Fall, 2005.

Here’s a link with more information. Philosophy 115: Computers and Philosophy, Fall 2005. If you feel like it, print this handy one-page announcement and post in a suitable location as a reminder.

In short, the class meets once a week, 4:00 – 6:45 PM on Thursdays. I'd like to have as many people as possible enjoy this class, so even if you're not a fulltime SJSU student, consider taking the course through the SJSU Open University. Maybe you can get off work a little early on Thursdays this fall! And I know it overlaps with suppertime, so feel free to bring a sandwich.

In this course we'll discuss the philosophical meaning of computers. The presentations will be non-technical. We'll use in-class lectures and demos, and about a third of each meeting will be devoted to group discussion.

I’ll be using my upcoming book The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul as the textbook.

***

There was an article in the New York Times about R. Crumb, hero of my youth. He did a public interview with the art critic Robert Hughes, who’s compared Crumb to Bruegel. Crumb modestly demurs.

[Picture from the recent book,The R. Crumb Handbook, by R. Crumb and Peter Poplaski (MQ Publications Ltd.)]

I’ve often thought of the Crumb/Bruegel connection;if you look at Bruegel’s few remaining sketches from life (admittedly the attributions of these are shaky), they look for all the world like Crumb drawings. I mailed Crumb my Bruegel novel As Above, So Below a couple of years back.

Our neighbor and dear friend Elena Vialo died peacefully this morning after a short illness. Rest in Peace.

These are some pictures from when she and her husband Gunnar came over for Christmas.

Yesterday, we were visiting with her. Near the bed was a book of poems she liked, The Essential Rumi, by the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi. One of us read the last poem in the book to her.

***

Say I am You, by Jelaluddin Rumi

I am dust particles in sunlight,

I am the round sun.

To the bits of dust I say, Stay.

To the sun, Keep moving.

I am morning mist,

and the breathing of evening.

I am wind in the top of a grove,

and surf on the cliff.

Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,

I am also the coral reef they founder on.

I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.

Silence, thought, and voice.

The musical air coming through a flute,

a spark of stone, a flickering

in metal. Both candle,

and the moth crazy around it.

Rose, and the nightingale

lost in the fragrance.

I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,

the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,

and the falling away. What is,

and what isn't. You who know

Jelaluddin, You the one

in all, say who

I am. Say I

am You.

***

We'll miss you, Elena. It was a joy and an honor to know you.

TPM, or The Philosophers' Magazine has an interesting page of interactive philosophical games.

[This is a picture of Rudy Jr. beating me at Go. He's been able to beat me at every known board game since he was five or six. Up till then he was a good chess partner for me!]

The idea is that you answer a series of questions, and the game chides you if your answers aren't consistent with each other, and praises you if they are. I tried “Staying Alive” and “Battleground God.”

I've started looking at protozoa in my microscope again. There's a nice pond of them at the top of this hill.

My novel Master of Space and Time is back in print from Thunder’s Mouth Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing being edited by John Oakes, formerly of Four Walls Eight Windows.

This is the book that Michel Gondry is interested in filming with Jack Black in a starring role. At least that was the news in Variety in May, 2004. I haven’t heard anything new on this front, other than that Midi Minuit recently renewed the option with me, which is of course a favorable sign.

Yesterday I went into San Jose and saw Ishmael Reed give a presentation at the King Library (the new joint library of San Jose State University and the city of San Jose). It’s always exciting to meet a legend of literature. Lately he’s mostly been writing non-fiction, the latest being Blues City, a book about Oakland. I picked up a reprint copy of his funny, wild Mumbo Jumbo of 1974, which I haven’t reread in a long time.

I was talking to him and he said he’d been reading about parallel universes and “spring theory,” which is a great twist on the usual term. I told him he should write a science-fiction story. He was a little concerned about getting the science right. I was like, “Just pick up some buzz words and use mumbo jumbo!” By the way, Mumbo Jumbo explains that this phrase comes from the African language Mandingo (ma-ma + gyo + mbo) = (grandmother + trouble + depart) = magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.