So

we went to the poetry reading last night - and it was good - and Susan read well and it was nice to meet everybody but of course I didn't have time to talk to anyone enough and I just started conversations in different directions and Pat Michaelson was there with her husband and I didn't get her talked to either - there is so much I want to say to her and ask her and we have not yet built the sort of relationship where that happens smoothly. Oh well. There is respect, and that will do for now.

Today is reading - reading - reading.

I have to find out about cubist history!

James asked me

a) why are these women interesting as anything other than exceptions -the problem lies in the question. If we attempt to find the majority position and use that as an ideal type, even knowing that that is a model and not the terrain itself, we miss something vitally important - which is the RANGE of possible positions. I want to explore the boundaries of the conceptual landscape and to do that I have to find the edges, where the inside THIS pushes up against the outside THAT.
I am looking for the edge pieces.

Saying that someone or something is an exception and leaving it at that is not good enough - not all kinds of exceptions are possible, so we need to understand what kinds of exceptions are possible and perhaps even expected and what role they served and yadi yadi yadi.

b) why I need to do more than one woman, since I am not going to have enough to do something representative anyway. Apart from the constraints of reality (time, energy, bla bla) that keep me from the representative, I still think four are better than one, because four might indicate patterns versus just a simple axis. If they all use the same kind of strategy then the range is possibly two dimensional, a matter of degree. If there are more than one strategy, the complexity of the field increases and we will have to keep going a ways before we can know how the edge pieces relate to each other ...