So, a last-minute call to dinner, X-Men 3, and drinks and talk at Caffrey's from Tony yesterday, and spending the whole day today at Dan and Amy's, with Mike and Donna, Crip Stephenson (minus Lisa who is visiting family), and Barnes. I loaned Barnes all the Green Lantern material he wanted, and threw in Identity Crisis because he should read it. We all received copies of a Battlestar Galactica teaser comic from him as something of a gag gift, and also received a couple of tuition-free hours of instruction on the state of contemporary systematic theology and its relation to the state of metaphysics. This just made me feel dismally sub-educated. At one point, where a joke was made about recording things, I reached into my bag and slapped my digital recorder on the patio table and started recording that part of the conversation. I don't know if he really believed or understood that's what I was doing. So maybe I'll post that 50-minute file here later on.
So. Fireworks or gunshots? I wonder sometimes at what's going on out my window. Okay, no screams.... And 2am: I suppose everyone's just leaving the bars? Are they open tonight, with the holiday and all? I'm not sure. Still, we raised a glass to John Adams somewhere during the course of the evening.
So. Again. I just got an email from Barnes with a copy of a paper he's been working on for a decade – "Burn Before Reading" the file instructs – that I've been nagging him for for a couple of years now. He's been working on a metaphysical critique (among other things, if I understand correctly) about contemporary Catholic systematics, and while we've gotten some of this as sidebars in his historical theology seminars, I've never felt that I was understanding the core of what he was saying, at least in parts regarding things like Geist metaphysics. So after dealing with this material again today in long conversation, with a small party of us interested as he's actively working on it again, he sent this out to us and I'm arranging a conference room in the Raynor Library for Friday for us to gather and discuss it after we've all had a chance to read it. It might be appropriate to the Modernity conference at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture that I've touted before, so I'm sending him the call for papers on that. Okay. I'm wiped. Off to bed.
Oh, and Over The Rhine is going to be playing here tomorrow at Summerfest. They weren't on the list earlier: I only just saw them listed a few days ago. Ecstasy. This husband-and-wife team write the most beautiful – and I mean that word exactly – songs of anyone I know today. I've not seen them since my disasterous "I just crawled out of the hospital and shouldn't even be standing" trip to see them on a cold Madison night with
beyondthewell two years ago, for which I'm still clearly mortified at what awful company I was: and that was my first "meet an LJ friend in real life for the first time" moment! So, since Over The Rhine's label is based here in town, I've been dismayed that they've not passed through in my years here. Mike Harris is a fan, and so he got permission from Donna tonight to go, so that should be a blast. It looks like it's going to be a gorgeous night for music under the stars. 