egg bungle boy (slight return)

[dubdobdee]

i spent so much time writing about dad on radio free narnia that i just hard-boiled my eggs for 35 minutes: they didn't explode (for a wonder) but they did rather taste of my bamboo steamer bowls :(

Comments

We're both taxonomists

[koganbot]

Would your father have shown much interest in Chuck's Accidental Evolution Of Rock 'N' Roll? That is, would he have been fascinated by social taxonomies and that they tend to transmute, and refuse either order or disorder?

Re: We're both taxonomists

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Good question -- and I don't really know the answer. He loved Borges, creator of the Chinese encyclopaedia: "In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies."

But in a way he and I tended not to encroach on each other's areas of expertise at all: I know little about plants ("I ca always ask dad") and he, while he liked the music he liked -- mostly from his youth -- didn't ever follow it. He had a good ear, and asked shrewd questions now and then about classical music -- he could sing well once upon a time, though he never played an instrument. He found the mutability of the internet alarming, he said -- though he'd only read about it, never accessed it.

I think he'd have found the actual weight of information in Chuck's daunting and a bit offputting: his specific innovations were an almost-mathematical elegance of representation of taxonomic information, a system of "lateral keys", as he termed them, widely adopted within botany but rarely (so one of his professional obituarists said) traced to him.