beware, there be spoilers: Le Mort d’Arthur volume 1 by Thomas Malory

•22 April 2021 • 1 Comment

We are getting rather deep into 2021 and I am still working through the first book of the 2021 reading project. I’ll admit that Malory is (a bit) longer than I’d thought, but it’s an interesting journey so far (and there is still volume 2 ahead of me).

We have encountered some of the main characters of the Arthurian mythos. This includes the many knights of the Round Table, though I’ll admit that I hadn’t realized (or remembered) that Sir Tristram was such a major character; but then, one of the reasons for this reading is to back, read and fill in those gaps in my knowledge. We have encountered, though only very briefly, the Questing Beast, and Merlin has been imprisoned in his cave.

There is a lot of jousting. Every time two knights meet, it seems that there is an obligatory joust, followed by a sword fight on foot, since of course the knight who remains on their horse after the joust must then meet his dehorsed opponent on foot, in the spirit of knightly fairness.

There is so far remarkably little magic. Arthur has Excalibur, but another aspect of Excalibur that I think is less known, is that whoever holds the scabbard of Excalibur does not bleed. Given the jousting and sword fighting, this is a remarkably handy property for a scabbard to have.

One of the things that struck me early, and continued to strike me (like a jousting spear into my carried shield) throughout volume 1 is the economic madness of a society which seems to exist only to support knight who seem only to wish to joust and fight, fight and joust, and occasionally rescue the fair damsel imprisoned by the evil knight.

I know that this isn’t the point of Le Mort. We see here the exploration of knights and perhaps the creation of the culture of chivalry. But for me, this reflects a sensibility that is so embedded in modern fiction, including much science fiction, that has become part of what I enjoy in my reading.

I like the worlds of stories to make sense in themselves, and I like the stories to make sense in their worlds. With Le Mort, it makes sense in its world, but its world doesn’t make sense, however much we might like a joust.

So I’ll keep reading. I’m curious to see whether this relatively early (I haven’t done the research to know if this for instance is whether the Arthurian mythos begins) telling of Arthur contains in volume 2 the quest for the Holy Grail, which has become the canonical Arthurian story.

And in the back of my mind, I’m wondering; am I misremembering or did Monty Python neglect poor Sir Tristram?

Posted in bizarre and random things

the glorious interconnectedness of all things 2

•18 April 2021 • 4 Comments

I am currently working on both a mathematical paper (and to be fair, I’ve been working on it for longer than I want to admit) and a story (built around the same basic idea of my second published story). Both are still in progress, and I thought it would be interesting to (very occasionally) compare and contrast my thoughts as I go through the process of finishing both.

The math paper keeps growing. The original paper was relatively short and focused on one theorem, which is a question that had been kicking around my head for twenty years. It’s a question that I gave to a PhD student, who decided to focus their attention in a different direction and never focused their attention on this question. And so I have an idea, and I went back to it, and I was able to push the idea through.

There is still some work to be done in the details of the proof of that theorem, but I’m confident that I’ll be able to make them work. One of the interesting things about a math theorem, a math paper, at least for me, is that until I actually work through all of the details, in their full detail, there is always the ghost of a nagging doubt that I’ve missed something that will come back and haunt me.

There is an aspect of this ghost in crafting a story, in that there are the continuity errors. If I want something to happen later in the story, the early part of the story can’t then set up something that precludes that which needs to come later. In the math paper, though, the ghost can be something we can’t get around. If only I can do this thing that unfortunately isn’t true, is something that I suspect most mathematicians have said to themselves, and the art and craft then comes in finding the true steps to the true end result.

For me, and for these two projects, the interesting thing is that I can see the ending to the math paper much more clearly than I can see the ending to the story. For the math paper, I know all of the results that I want to be part of the final work, whether I can push them through and make them part of this paper or whether they will require more thought and be part of a future paper. I have a very clear picture in my head of what I believe should be true.

For the story, I have no idea how it ends. Reflecting on the stories I’ve half-written but haven’t yet brought to a final version, I have a problem with the endings. And I can see what I’m doing. I have an idea, I craft a story around that idea, and I lose my energy and end up with something that I don’t find satisfying at the end.

I read a lot of short stories, science fiction and fantasy and neither, and there are some spectacular stories out there. I don’t like to think about how some of those authors would handle my ideas, because they’re (for the time being at least) my ideas, and I want to see what I can do with them. (And it can also be remarkably intimidating.) The same thought also lurks in the back of my mind with the math paper, but both have the common feature that once we send those ideas out into the world, others will be able to read them and start doing their jazz with the ideas.

With both, there is the temptation to keep going. I’ve accepted that fiction needs editing, and editing, and a bit more editing, constantly refining, and removing everything that doesn’t advance the story. With the math paper, there is more of a temptation to include all of the associated and related results, not being as concerned about removing everything that doesn’t advance the story of the paper, and perhaps this is something to reconsider.

I can see that I’ve always adopted the Columbo protocol with math papers – just one more thing, and so an exercise I’ll add to my list of exercises is to read math papers with the same eye I use when reading and critiquing the stories I read. I’m curious to see what happens.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

the glorious interconnectedness of all things 1

•10 April 2021 • 3 Comments

Poker players, to be successful, must not only study the structure of the game itself, but also must become aware of the leaks in their game. A leak for a poker player is a a hole in their game though which they leak chips or money; it’s an area of their game in which they are making suboptimal decisions.

The key here is perspicacity. Poker players need to be aware of their own leaks, as well as the leaks in the games of the folks with whom they’re playing. I’ve given some thought to the leaks I have in my own poker game, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t set them out here. If I were to decide to move from recreational player to a more serious player, I would find a coach, someone who I would ask to watch my game and give me their perspective on my play.

Leaks are a much broader phenomenon than just poker. What are the leaks in my writing practice? What are the leaks in my mathematical work? What are the leaks in my aikido practice? What are the leaks in my administrative work? And it is this wider applicability of these ideas from one area to other areas that reflects this glorious interconnectedness, or at least one aspect of this glorious interconnectedness.

Though not in these terms, I’ve written before about the leaks in my writing practice, particularly the leak of not finishing. I don’t like rewriting and I don’t like editing, and it’s always a more attractive prospect to start a new story than to fix an old story, one that’s almost but not quite completed. And so this is the leak I’m currently working to fix. And I’m aware of other leaks as well, but that’s for another day.

I’m pondering the leaks in my aikido practice, and this is difficult. We haven’t been able to hold a typical aikido session for more than a year, and so it’s been a long time since someone has grabbed me with intent. We’ve been keeping ourselves going with regular zoom classes, of necessity focusing on aspects of solo practice.

And so, not only will any extant leaks that had been in place a year ago still be present, they will be larger, due to the lack of practice, and I’m sure there will be a host of new leaks as well. We will all for instance need to be a bit cautious as we work our way back into regular practice, given our time away and our lack of practice in falling down.

The leaks in my administrative work is a fascinating area of ponderation, and one that I’ll come back to at another time.

But I find pondering this interconnectedness, applying the terminology of one area to another, to be illuminating, and inordinately so at times. As much as anything, I find it useful to have as many ways of interrogating my own practice as possible.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life, poker and other games

in and out of the line of sight

•21 March 2021 • 3 Comments

I had an interesting experience last week. I’ve been doing a lot of management training courses recently, in part because it’s available but mostly because I’m putting in some work to cement the skills I’ve been acquiring through experience.

During the discussions, I bring up some of the things I’d read about at some point in the past, those that stuck with me. One of the first popular management books I remember reading was the Peter Principle, which is basically that people in an organization are promoted to their level of incompetence. That is, being good opens doors to promotion and then no longer being good closes those doors.

The interesting experience last week was bringing up the Peter Principle and having to explain it, because the others hadn’t heard of it. This led me to start thinking and my thoughts went down several different roads.

The first is wondering whether these references I’m pulling out of my past are outdated or have been superseded. My reading wasn’t from the academic literature but rather was from books written more for the popular audience. I haven’t gone back and checked what research has been done for instance on the validity of the Peter Principle. I’m hesitant to add this to the near-infinite list of projects, but perhaps a conversation with one of my colleagues in the Business School might be in order.

Another road, and one that is common to many academic endeavours, is that the literature continues to grow. Humans are curious, about ourselves and the world around us. We keep exploring and we keep publishing what we have found.

As glorious as this is, the issue for each of us is that it becomes harder and harder to keep up; it becomes harder and harder to keep track of what remains true and what becomes superseded by new research. And with an idea like the Peter Principle, it is easy to see how more research, more data and a closer examination of that data, could lead to that verification. It may be that this has been done, and that’s what I want to find out.

Yet another road is that my examination of the literature is somewhat haphazard. I would like to believe that I’m good at keeping track of what’s going on in my area of mathematics, what questions remain open and what is the direction of work being done.

But my casual reading remains casual; reading what catches my eye and my attention. And I want to keep it that way. And so a piece of work to do, is to think through how I can reasonably keep track of some of these other areas, outside of my own mathematical patch. And there are always things to do.

Posted in bizarre and random things, education and university life

the glorious interconnectedness of all things 3

•16 March 2021 • 2 Comments

Somehow, I think I managed to delete this and so have reloaded it. Not quite sure what I’ve done, but I’ll try not to do it again.

In the first of this loosely connected series of posts, I wrote about leaks, exploring how a poker concept can be illuminating elsewhere in other aspects of my life. In the second, I explored some similarities between writing a math paper and writing a story. Here, I would like to start digging into connection in a bit more generality.

In my Book of Many Lists, I have written down the phrase administrative connection. This phrase came into my head uninvited during a recent meeting (one of many), when I was hit by the nagging feeling that however interesting was our conversation (and it was interesting), I couldn’t see the path between our conversation and the implementation of the change we were talking about.

This struck me as a different aspect of this general idea of connection that I’d written about some long time ago, namely about how the idea of connection we use in aikido, and specifically working within the grasp, is so much more widely applicable. In aikido, we have an advantage, as often being grasped is a tangible, physical thing, whereas in other contexts, the grasp is much more of an ephemeral concept. But nonetheless, there are still the constraints that we have to recognize and within which we must work, in the administrative setting as well as in the dojo.

In my aikido thinking and practice, there is a clear path (or rather, many clear paths) between the initiation of the movement, even before the grasp itself, and the end of the movement, with uke thrown or pinned. But in the administrative sphere, I find it easy sometimes to be captivated by the end goal, and not to spend enough time thinking through, working through the details of getting from beginning to end.

There is a different aspect of administrative connection as well, and one that goes back to yet a different thing I’ve written about before. This is the notion of distance. When teaching, be it math or aikido, I have worked hard to build into my teaching practice this observation that as I teach and practice, my understanding deepens, whereas my students always start as beginners, and so the distance between me as teacher and the beginner can only increase over time, and requires work to bridge.

The relationship of this to connection is that the greater the distance, the greater the difficulty in creating and cultivating and maintaining the connection. To overcome this inevitable and unavoidable difficulty requires care and attention, and practice.

In ways I’ve (unaccountably) only started thinking about, the same applies to the administrative sphere. Practice and exposure increase distance, and increasing distance makes connection more difficult, and so creates the expectation and the need for those with the practice and experience to actively work to bridge this distance and to constantly cultivate this connection.

At the risk of making a bit of a right turn into the weeds, this brings to mind an analogy of the administrative and governance of any organization. Governance is like unto an iceberg, where only a small piece of the processes of governance are generally visible. This is both inevitable and necessary, I think, because proper governance is complicated and multifaceted; it’s both formal and informal, and it takes time and energy to keep track of everything going on.

I haven’t yet through just how appropriate this analogy actually is, but I think it has some life to it. Of course, part of having an analogy is an aid to understanding, and this one clearly needs some refinement, but perhaps that’s for another day.

There are other aspects to connection and interconnectedness that I’ll keep working my way through; for me, each time I write, I feel I’m climbing a bit higher up the mountain, and the view I get, clouds notwithstanding, is that little broader. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for taking this journey with me.

Posted in bizarre and random things, mathematics, writing ephemera

when it’s easy, I’m not learning

•14 March 2021 • Leave a Comment

As I work through the backblog, I come across phrases or suggestions to future Jim that I wrote sometimes a long time ago. For most of them, I can remember the underlying thought that sparked the backblog entry.

One of those underlying thoughts arises from conversations I’ve had around aikido and my development as an aikidoka. It has admittedly been a year since I’ve been in the dojo, though we have been keeping ourselves going via zoom and (distancing requirements allowing) meetings in the Common. One thing the absence from the dojo has done for me (to me?) is that I’ve been reflecting on my progression as an aikido practitioner.

The first few days back in the dojo, when they come, will be strange but I’m looking forward to them. But one thing I’ll be gauging in those first days back is, where is my aikido. I expect that the first weeks, perhaps months, will be difficult. But I don’t mind the difficulty.

One thing those conversations about aikido showed me, revealed to me, is that learning involves struggle. I don’t mean this in a negative or pessimistic way. Rather, if I’m working through things I do not yet understand, which is a key part of learning, then I can’t expect what I’m doing to be smooth.

So learning involves bumps in the road. I don’t know the path I want to tread; I can take heart from the fact that in aikido, others have walked that path, and so I have the comfort of knowing that the path can be successfully walked.

With mathematics, there are some similarities and some differences. The road can be bumpy; I was going through an old notebook this evening, noting questions I still haven’t yet worked my way through; questions that I’ve solved since; and questions that others have solved since.

But one significant difference is that it isn’t always clear that the question can be resolved, or at least resolved by me. With aikido, I have some confidence that I can learn, to some extent, how to do each of the techniques. But with mathematics, I have to admit that there are questions that may well remain unresolved.

Remembering this basic point, that learning is a bumpy road, is an important point of reflection in my own teaching. The road will be bumpy for my students; they are encountering the material, the techniques, for the first time, and I may have been working through the material for years, or longer. This ties very directly back to a point I’ve made in earlier writings, about the increasing distance between teachers and the beginners they’re teaching.

There are depths to this thought that I’m confident remain to be explored, and I’ll keep digging.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things, mathematics

and this will be a bit random

•6 March 2021 • Leave a Comment

We each have the things from which we take comfort, and for each of us, they are different. Some may be structural – how we structure our days, the things we wish to have done, or expect ourselves to have done, between waking and going to sleeping. Some may be specific things to which we turn.

I like gladiatorial cooking shows. Hell’s Kitchen is a favourite, as is Top Chef. There are many others, all of the different variants of Masterchef for instance. I don’t know why these particular shows have such a hold on me, and alas, neither do those who are close to me.

There are other food shows as well. Hot Ones on YouTube, the show with hot questions and even hotter wings, is a neighbourhood whose streets through which I like to perambulate. I have to admit that I have some favourite episodes of Hot Ones – Gordon Ramsey (playing even as I type these words) is one that I like revisiting from time to time.

Most of us I suspect have movies or TV or books that we have to come back to. The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison, the Usual Suspects, and Airplane and its siblings are amongst mine, though there are others. (I’m about to embark on rereading both Dune and Moby Dick, as it’s been too long.)

My structural pieces include the daily journal, where I dust the cobwebs from the darker corners of my imagination some days and just babble other days, and the daily haiku, which I’ve written about before but which I’ll also admit that I didn’t expect to keep going for as long as it has, though I will admit to enjoying my exploration of the form.

So why this. We are living in extraordinary times, bizarre times, times that none of us expected to live through. And these extraordinary times, I suspect, are causing each of us to consider the things that we support us. The things that we turn to to support us. There may be the people in our lives, and for me this is critical. But we each also need our private space, the things we do just for us, and I also thing this is critical.

And in these times, we need to take care of each other and we need to take care of ourselves, and so I think we each need to embrace, and embrace unapologetically, those things that we each have as part of our personal care package. Because, after all, why not. So I’ll rewatch Police Squad soon, and I’ll reread Dune, yet again, amidst the new things. As should we all.

Posted in bizarre and random things

staring into the abyss of deep time

•28 February 2021 • Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking about time. Minutes and hours, days and weeks and months, years and decades, these are the time scales that we as humans tend to encounter in the course of our days, and they are the scales on which we’re comfortable measuring time.

On the longer end, even centuries can become problematic for human memory. Currently, we have writing, paper on which to write, stone into which to carve, but we’ve had these for only a few thousand years. Before that, we had the stories we told ourselves around the fires that kept away the dark, and oral histories can drift.

Were I to have a wish that I could spend on myself, rather than one to use to heal the world, I would want to know the first stories we told ourselves around those fires. After all, the human history with fire goes back an exceptionally long time, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, and perhaps our history with stories does as well. And when I say we, I mean us and our hominid cousins, Neanderthals and Denisovans and whichever told the first stories.

I’ll admit that one reason I’m curious is something that I’ve speculated on before. Namely, can we, and to what extent can we, still detect the echoes of those original stories in our current stories. How persistent have themes of our stories been over the longer time scales.

But we can go back further still. Back the tens of millions of years to the dinosaurs and their extinction, or the billions of years to the beginnings of our solar system. And I will admit that these timescales baffle my imagination. Here, we don’t have stories of the sort we’re used to telling each other, but we are getting better at deciphering the stories that the Earth tells us.

One of the writing projects I’m working on takes place, in its current version, over tens of thousands of years, and I’ll admit that working through the details of the story is part of where this pondering about time comes from. There are great stories that I’ve read that deal with these long time scales, and so let’s see if we can do this idea justice.

Posted in bizarre and random things, writing ephemera

the current me and the younger me

•15 February 2021 • Leave a Comment

Perhaps because of the circumstances and difficulties of the past year, I find myself from time to time thinking about the younger me. There are some very immediate reasons. Working with students, I can’t help but be reminded of my own student days, and in particular working through for the first time bits of math then encountered for the first time. There are other reasons as well; as part of the poetic science project, we’ve been asked to explore our own professional foundation myth, and create a poem from it.

I don’t remember starting aikido. Or rather, I remember that I started aikido (more than twenty years) and I have memories, flashes from those early days like snapshots, but I don’t remember the struggle of learning the mechanics of ikkyo for the first time, or kote gaeshi. My struggles these days are very different, working on refinements rather than basic mechanics.

It’s interesting trying to put myself, albeit figuratively, back into the skin of the younger me. Part of this I think is the old phenomenon is distance, the distance between teacher and student that I’ve written about elsewhere in these pages. The teacher continues to develop and deepen their understanding, whereas the new student always arrives fresh, ignorant for lack of a better term, perhaps knowing only the basics, if that. Thus, distance.

Here, though, that distance is between the current me and the younger me. The current me has continued to develop, to deepen my understanding, and this clouds the memory of the younger me. There are some things I’ve just been thinking about for a long time now. One thing that requires work is to find and appreciate the joy we feel at the new, at encountering for the first time. But it’s work that I’m willing to put in, that I like to put in.

The world has also changed. My much younger self didn’t have the Internet, for instance, and the Internet has wreaked some fundamental changes on how we live, how we communicate, how we access the information and knowledge gathered over the centuries by humanity. Different skills are required to navigate this current world.

And so, the old question. There is a trope in science fiction, going back in time and inhabiting our younger skin, reliving our lives, correcting our mistakes and taking different paths. This comes I suppose from our belief, our fear, that our younger selves would be somehow disappointed in our current self. Disappointed perhaps that we haven’t achieved all that we dreamed. Disappointed perhaps that we haven’t lived all of the adventures we planned. And as tempted as I am to hope that my younger self would look at me and be content, I’m also struck by how there’s no way of knowing. The distance is too great, the river of time too fast and too deep, And all we can do is to move forward from where we stand at the moment.

Posted in bizarre and random things

stories of Zen: a parable

•6 February 2021 • 1 Comment

Number 18 of the 101 Zen stories that form the first part of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled by Paul Reps, is a parable reputably due to the Buddha himself.

A monk running from a tiger climbs part way down a cliff. Below him, at the base of the cliff, is another tiger, looking up at him with hunger. Two mice start chewing the vine. The monk sees a wild strawberry growing nearby; he plucks it and eats it, savouring its sweetness.

People talk of mindfulness, of living in the moment, and this parable for me is very much a parable about the moment. The monk cannot climb up the cliff, because one tiger; cannot climb down, because of the other tiger; and cannot remain where he is, because of the mice. I’m ignoring for the moment whether tigers and mice would or wouldn’t behave this way, though this does fall into my wheelhouse of overthinking.

So. Watching the news, it’s easy to put names and faces to the tigers that are stalking me and the mice that are chewing my vine. But it’s harder, some days, to clearly identify my wild strawberry (or perhaps strawberries).

Reading is a strawberry; I love immersing myself in a book or a collection of stories, a biography or some popular science, exploring worlds existing and only imagined. But – and here comes the overthinking again – is exploring other worlds a sufficiently mindful activity? I think yes – replacing the tang of the strawberry with the sight of a sunset composed of streaks of red and orange.

Aikido is a strawberry. At present, we are only able to hold classes via Zoom, working on movement but not throwing each other or being thrown. But this regular focus on movement is an important part of my week.

But I also wonder. What are other readings of this parable, beyond this obvious one. I ask this, because I like to look for the non-obvious meanings, though looking for them is far far easier than finding them. Perhaps I need a map. Perhaps I need to learn how to take a left turn into an additional dimension. Or perhaps I’m looking for something that might not be there.

But as things stand, I have some strawberries. I see the green shoots and nascent beads of strawberries just sprouting. And as much as I can, I will try to give the tigers and mice no more attention than they deserve.

Posted in aikido, bizarre and random things

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »