Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Negligible Pep

My title is a direct riff on Pepboys, specifically the store on Erie Blvd. where I arrived with the Element yesterday morning at 7:56 a.m., small-nail-in-tire. I joined the three others waiting for the service door to open so could enter. It's a stand-by kind of shop; I planned to wait on the repair, even after I learned that it might take up most of the morning--"should be no more than three hours...had an incident on the 690 on-ramp yesterday...twenty tire repairs ahead of yours." No problem, I thought. There's a Bruegger's Bagels within walking distance (close enough despite the other bad wheel--a jacked up knee), and I brought along four articles from Cybercartography and excerpts for 712 from Susan Langer's Philosophy in a New Key and Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. At least three hour's worth, given that I also intended to enjoy an everything bagel or two, make a morning of it.

Bruegger's was all I expected it to be. I found a quiet corner table and worked steadily through the four geography articles, which included Michael Peterson's "Elements of Multimedia Cartography," a surprisingly polemical article on the shortcomings of paper maps, and Mark Harrower's "A Look at the History and Future of Animated Maps," a solid overview of motion in "geovisualization." I was assigned to discussion-leading for Peterson's article for class this morning. Harrower's piece covers the brief history of animation as it converges with mapping--first done by Walt Disney artists to present invasion animations in 1940 (35). I finished the bagels and hot tea, wrapped up the readings for geography (more about specifics from them in another entry) and move on, taking up Langer around 11:00 a.m. I was reading

Now, I do not believe that "there is a world which is not physical, or not in space-time," but I do believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolic schema other than discursive language. And to demonstrate the possibility of such a non-discursive pattern one needs only to review the logical requirements for any symbolic structure whatever. Language is by no means our only articulate product. (89)

when the speaker volume was inched up just a bit. It was a slow late-morning hour in Brueggers, prime for GNR's "Paradise City." Only that reading Langer with "Paradise City" all around...I packed up and walked back over to Pepboys where they told me it'd be another hour and a half. I continued with Langer, finishing the excerpt from _Philosophy_ and reading through pieces of the chapter from _Feeling_ on "Prescientific Knowledge," and the Monday edition of the Daily Standard before wandering around the store looking at seat covers and air fresheners.

The tire was never repaired. After looking at it they decided that it was too close to the wall to risk repairing. And they didn't have the replacement tire in stock, but they were kind enough to refer me to the Goodyear location down the street. And so the much-too-long wait ended; I drove toward the grocery store with the same small nail lodged in the same tire, feeling unlucky except that I'd managed a satisfying amount of reading.

Bookmark and Share Posted by at February 21, 2006 7:35 PM to Under a Bushel
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