Mary Catherine Bateson was a close friend of mine. She and Gregory (her father) worked closely together. She and I once shared a long train ride where she talked about her life in relationship to not one, but two (Margaret Mead) famous parents. Before Covid, in 2019, she invited me for a long weekend to her get-away house in the New Hampshire woods. I interviewed her about the early days of systems thinking, cybernetics and the Macy conferences. It was mid-March, and I drove her to a wee public house nearby to hear some St. Patrick's day music. We lifted a pint and exchanged stories about the Irish for whom we shared a special regard. Mary Catherine died last year. I miss her still.
M -Thanks for this personal anecdote... the biographical sketch I am reading is Noel Charlton's "Understanding Gregory Bateson"...
I'm glad you got a "last pint" in with her. My Mary is just now reading (finished actually) Harold Blume's collection of "Last Poems" ("'til I end my Song") by poets from 16c to 2002. Not always their very last poem or even ones contemplating mortality but those also. A finely curated collection IMO.
Here in Weesp, borrowing Jenny's house, her books, and even her friends, I met someone who I think you have to meet. By coincidence (or not) he was just in Sweden meeting with our mutual colleague Anders Varger there... Stephen and I know Anders through Hubville, but their work together involves bringing the very young and the very old together to cogitate/ideate about the future (the former have a lot of energy and a big stake, the latter have some perspective and limited stake)... I don't know if the work comes through well in the translations, it sounds more meaningful when Hank (Kune... educore.nl) speaks about it in-person. I haven't checked in with Anders yet.
https://en.framtidensroster.org/ - S
On Sat, Jun 11, 2022 at 8:00 AM Tom Johnson <jtjohnson...@gmail.com> wrote:I'm reading John Markoff's biography of Stuart Brand, who was heavily influenced by Bateson. ======================= Tom Johnson Inst. for Analytic Journalism Santa Fe, New Mexico 505-577-6482 ======================= On Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 6:57 AM Frank Wimberly <wimber...@gmail.com> wrote: In 1978 as I was about to leave Pittsburgh for a job at Bell Labs my wife and I were staying with with Scott and Penny Fahlman since our furniture was on a moving van. Scott was an AI hotshot who had recently arrived at Carnegie Mellon. I was typing the final revision of my numerical analysis dissertation on my Smith Corona when Scott said, "Frank, that will be the last computer science dissertation ever written on a typewriter." --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Sat, Jun 11, 2022, 5:20 AM Steve Smith <sasm...@swcp.com> wrote: Holy Moley! The references to Kissenger et. al.'s "The Age of AI: and our Human Future" here lead me to find his 1950 Senior Thesis at Harvard (scanned copy of the typewritten original <https://ia903000.us.archive.org/23/items/HenryAKissingerTheMeaningOfHistoryReflectionsOnSpenglerToynbeeAndKant/Henry%20A%20Kissinger%20-%20The%20Meaning%20of%20History_%20Reflections%20on%20Spengler%2C%20Toynbee%2C%20and%20Kant.pdf>). https://ia903000.us.archive.org/23/items/HenryAKissingerTheMeaningOfHistoryReflectionsOnSpenglerToynbeeAndKant/Henry%20A%20Kissinger%20-%20The%20Meaning%20of%20History_%20Reflections%20on%20Spengler%2C%20Toynbee%2C%20and%20Kant.pdf I am only 20 something pages into this 400 page tome and definitely over my head in several ways. His language reads a little *overly* flowery and technically specific, and yet that may just be a result of the *era* and it's topic as an analysis of three writer's take on history itself (Spengler, Toynbee, Kant). I have tried resolving several obscure terms such as "genus Culture", references to which I can only find in archaic botanical texts? I have not read Spengler and only skimmed Toynbee and the Kant I read is now 40 years past, so of course I don't have much more than an effing clue of what he is effing on about here, yet it is fascinating nevertheless. Even reading the typewritten type carries a sort of spectre of the time and place this was generated. It adds significance that I gifted my last working typewriter (at times I have had as many as 5 or 6 which could be made to work with a little care in use) to one of our house-sitters while we travel. She may well be typing on it as I type this. The unevenness of a manual typewriter, the waviness of the line and the uneveness of the impression reflects in some way the mechanical device but also the operator. My instinct is that Kissinger did not type this final manuscript himself if in fact he even typed any of it. It has the evenness (relative, given the limits of the type of device) of an accomplished typist, typing in a workman-like way. The digital copy (pdf) appears to be a scan of a photocopy to boot, adding contrast enhancement and some subsequent elision of bits by thresholding. I was tempted to cut-n-paste a few choice lines (images, not txt) and comment on them, but realize that perhaps nobody else here cares and it would just be a manual exercise for myself to no point otherwise. OCR is good enough these days to make it possible to render it as txt, etc. but since I am bogged down in the text itself and distracted by trying to graze through Jenny's library here in Weesp, while quaffing the entireity of one of her favorite tomes (a biography of Gregory Bateson), I will leave it now and see if anyone else delves deep enough into the source material to spark a conversation here that I can join or simply enjoy. So many books, so little time! 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