Up 8:30. Coffee/breakfast. Bridge work about 9-1. Worked on the 2 grafs from yesterday, improved them a lot (but didn’t shorten by much), inserted in chapter draft. Lunch, took it easy until 3; yet another PA court completely rejected Trump voter fraud case, but so what — the point of the exercise has been to get to SCOTUS. Ordered bottled water for Bree since our monthly delivery is delayed.
Made more coffee, Listened to a short podcast w/ Rita Felski about her book Hooked, which I’d like to read. Read about 40 p. of Wyatt bio, did a few minutes of ear training, paid a bill online (w/ annoying set-up I thought I’d already done. Co-ordinated w/ carpenter who’s coming to fix our ceiling tomorrow, and with upstairs neighbors; some other small home tasks. Read 10 p. Carnap, Logical Syntax of Language. Even if he’s not really a phenomenalist or a physicalist/reductionist in the most canonical sense, I think it’s sentences like this that put people off of “construcivist” analytic philosophy: “In such and such a place is a horse” means “Such and such a space-time domain has such and such a property.” Or, worse: “the society of such and such a people is an economy based on a monetary system” means: “In such and such a space-time domain, such and such processes occur.”
Played through a couple of my dad’s old Christmas songs; Bree and I want to record one for a family-only video “card.” Did the rest of my piano practice, and played a few choruses of Monk’s “Ask Me Now” w/ a metronome.
Ripped the audio from some uploads of Wyatt rarities on YouTube, read this and that online to close some windows. E.g., predictable but bracing critique of bourgeois electoralism: “Fascism is a socio-economic and political project that began the moment Europeans first made contact with African shores….[R]acial terror, violence, and genocide, is and always has been [sic] the point of the Western (and American) project. It is built into the fabric of the of the West—it is all Euro-American’s have ever known, culturally and politically. And they will, as we have seen, continue their terror and violence because the political economy is sustained on such; until the entire project is brought to a halt.”
Also a semi-popular but accurate/non-bullshit piece on “Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems” I followed half of and will go back to - it’s been a while, and the proof technique is recapitulated in Carnap. Quote from Nagel and Newman sums up G’s central insight that “typographical properties of long chains of symbols can be talked about in an indirect but perfectly accurate manner by instead talking about the properties of prime factorizations of large integers.”
Watched a video about Bill Evans’ chord voicings. Short walk around 10:15. Read a section of the Wyatt bio on the Meltdown festival he curated in the early 2000s, and one short Ashbery poem. “High bleachers shut off/a section of downtown…Ok, let’s cope.” Lights out 11:30.