“Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist’s need for systematic reflection demands it.” -C. Wright Mills

Congrats go out to Shane, who has successfully defended his dissertation…without telling anyone he was going to!

And regrets go out to the family and friends of Jane Jacobs, who passed away yesterday at 89. I saw her speak a couple of years ago at CUNY on her last book, I guess, Dark Age Ahead. She was not optimistic, but as always challenging.

And in the fullness of life, I saw an Anselm Kiefer retrospective called Himmel-Erde (Heaven and Earth) at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. It was outstanding and cause for serious reflection on my part. I “accidentally” went into the end of the exhibit first, where all my favorite paintings wound up being and where I read one plaque explaining his effort to bring Heaven and Earth into a philosophical unity along the lines of Robert Fludd, who claimed that every star in Heaven was paralleled on Earth. For me it thus was about a lifelong effort to resolve our symbolic understandings of life with with the concrete events and scientific analysis of our world. And much of it was simply insanely beautiful.