orthogonality and good craic

i read an article about the santa fe institute that has me once again, in fits of longing for intellectual company. founded back in the 80s, they have created an intellectual environment par excellence. they have a number of scientists, researchers and humanists in residence at all times and every conversation that takes place must be an interesting one. their founding premise is "that intellectual vitality arises from people interacting across a wide range of disciplines." they have even coined a term for it: orthogonality.

i think i have long known the value of orthogonality and even used it in my work - there is great value in bringing together people who don't look on the surface like they have much in common and seeing what kind of sparks fly. i've had quite a lot of workshops where people were skeptical of the group i brought together - from ship captains to cartoonists to flash developers to learning specialists to gospel singers - but sparks always flew and magic ALWAYS happened. so there IS something to orthogonality.

in the article, novelist cormac mccarthy, who spends a lot of time at the SFI, says he does so because of the "good craic." that's another thing i'm craving - good craic. craic is a gaelic word meaning lively chat or conversation. husband and i have great conversations on a daily basis, but it would be nice to have some others, some fresh blood, so to speak. let's face it, after 15 years of knowing one another and having these discussions, husband and i are pretty much on the same page.

a friend sent me an email about a conversation group she started - it features wine (always a plus) and meets approximately monthly. each member submits an article that the other members read and then they get together and discuss over a glass or two of wine - sort of like a book club. hers is more career/business-oriented, whereas i think i'm looking for something quite philosophical. it doesn't need to be a formal think tank or have fellowships and high-powered macarthur grant recipients like they have in santa fe - i just need intellectual stimulation and input. good craic.

just another surreal evening with the brainiacs

husband's aunt is about to publish a dictionary. it's a swedish-danish dictionary. and thus far has 25,000+ entries. she's been working on it for ten years. and it's being released online. and she's in her late 70s. i think that's all pretty cool. she had a dinner party last evening to celebrate its impending release.

to say this aunt is eccentric is a major understatement, but it is in the most charming, wonderful way. the family stories of strange meals they've been served by her are the stuff of legend. odd sauces made with eggs, pasta fried in a pan (without boiling first), so i didn't really know what to expect.  what we got were landgangsbrød sandwiches.

it's a slice of bread cut the long way of the loaf. there were lots of different toppings to put on it...shrimp and avocado, swedish leverpostej (much more flavorful than danish--sorry danes), a mix involving salmon caviar and something creamy and i think onions, some kind of sardine mixture (you can tell i really went for that one) and cheese. you then are supposed to pick it up and eat it from one end to the other. apparently down at husband's end of the table, the creamy caviar dish was mixed with a black caviar, which colored off rather purple on the creamy bit. i didn't try, nor even see that one.

she lives in a strangely laid-out apartment in a really fabulous neighborhood in copenhagen--really in the center, right between nyhavn and the royal theatre. the location couldn't be better. it appeared, however, that she needed to cross the common hallway which leads to the other apartments in order to get to her bedroom, but i didn't explore THAT closely.

the woman i sat next to at dinner was quite amusing. she'd been a language teacher for years and we were speaking danish for the first hour or so of the party. then she turned to me and said, "like many foreign speakers of danish, you have trouble with the vowels." well, duh. we don't have ø æ å in english and we generally like our vowels not to sound like we have a hairball or major amounts of phlegm caught in our throats. tell me something i don't know.

soon after that, because the swedish guy on the other side of me joined our conversation, we switched to english. i'm sorry, i just can't understand swedish (or norwegian). i know it disappoints swedes and norwegians and probably danes, but i can't just understand because i know danish. that's how it is. at least for me.

the woman beside me was even more precise in her pronunciation and english vocabulary and rather haughtily told me at one point that the english taught in danish schools is british english, not american. i pointed out that that was all well and good, but the majority of english everyone in denmark is exposed to via t.v. and movies is american english. so there.

but it was actually a really nice evening. to sit around a table in a room lined from floor to ceiling with books on the two major walls is never a bad thing. the people were interesting and i had tons of interesting conversations on topics as diverse as:

• hull coatings (there's been a lot of that this week)
• the historical nature of fame vs. the nature of fame today
• danish sculptor torvaldsen
• elaborate funerals in the 19th century
• how much enjoyment one can get from tattoos
• cold ironing (it's not forgetting to turn on the iron, it's plugging a ship into shore-based power while it's in port in order to reduce emissions while moored in populated urban areas)
• my late father-in-law (several of the older ladies there had apparently been quite smitten with him over the years)
• the danish television series sommer
• babies and the proper spelling of thomas
• upcoming productions at various theatres
• the gang from the old days in nivå (i wasn't there, but now i feel like i was)
• norwegians who sail into the swedish archipelago and drink too much and make noise all summer long 

husband was down at the other end of the table and had a long conversation with a woman who was apparently associated with a mental hospital. it was only towards the end of the conversation that it began to dawn on him that she didn't work there, but was apparently a patient there, who had been released for the party. 

and we only went home after sabin had played so hard with this little boy that he fell asleep on the floor.

in all a lovely way to spend a friday evening. 

now if i could just find my rock. it seems to have gone missing. it's got to be here somewhere, i just don't quite know where.