I hitchhiked (hitchhook?) through Glasgow in 1971. Now I’m back and just spent a few hours wandering around down town. I am thus quite the expert.

I do love having these found afternoons when I can walk around in a city I don’t know. I think 80% of what we learn of a place we learn in the first half hour, although a serious part of the next 20% is undoing what we thought we’d learned in the first 80%.

I went to the Cathedral and had my usual dumb reaction. The stacking of the stones that must have seemed as close as human effort gets to miracles strikes me as cold and dark. I have to think my way into cathedrals, and, as a Jew, I lack some (a lot?) of the supporting structure. My appreciation, which is real, is abstract.

Then I wandered around the city center for a couple of hours. I had a veggie burger that was a deepfried patty of corn, peas and batter. I bought some books. (I seem to have been in a 17th-18th century science/philosophy mood these days.) I went into an “Everything for a Pound” store and resisted asking “How much is this?” It rained, it stopped, it rained, it stopped.

Now I’m at the SECC, a conference center, where exhibitors are hot-gluing together booths that are in every way possible the opposite of cathedrals.

Tomorrow I keynote the Scottish Learning Festival — 150 sessions, 800 session attendees and 6,000 people walking through the exhibit hall.I’m on immediately after the minister of education. I’m going to talk about the changes in authority and knowledge in this crazy, mixed-up ol’ world. And, given how much trouble I’m having understanding the Scots, I’m going to try to speak slowly on the principle of Symmetrical Unintelligibility of Accents.

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Congratulations, mazel tov, and a smooshy kiss to the folks of Global Voices for winning a Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism:

The Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism spotlight news and information that is more than multimedia journalism. They reward novel efforts to involve citizens actively in public issues, to invite their participation and create entry points that stir their imagination and engagement.

Sounds about right to me. (Here are the other winners. Congratualtions to them, too.) [Tags: global_voices gv media journalism]

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For the past couple of weeks, I’ve done little except revise my book. All day, every day. Well, I’ve had a couple of events I’d committed to, including a keynote at the Scottish Learning Festival that I leave for tonight—I was supposed to be done with my revising by now—but basically I’ve been head-down in my book.

Which means I haven’t had time to read other people’s blogs.

The blogosphere and its local eddies are often thought of as bubbles, little hermetic worlds unaware that there’s a bigger world with bigger ideas beyond them. But not reading blogs now feels to me like being in a bubble. I’m cut off. I don’t know what’s going on, what people are talking about, who’s on a high, who’s on a roll, who’s just keeping on.

The truth is that we humans always live in bubbles. While our ideas and ideals may strive for the universal, we are embodied locally. So, living in a bubble isn’t an objection; it is our condition. The question is whether we seek to expand our ideas and—more important—our sympathy or we think our local bubble is the one that’s figured it all out (as per Mel Brooks’ immortal caveman anthem: “Let ’em all go to Hell, except Cave Seven”). Even the best intentioned of us still live locally—damn bodies!—so we’re talking here about trying, about a dialectic, about a failed awareness. But, that failure keeps our bubbles honest.

I look forward to breaking out of my bubble of self-involvement pretty soon now. I hear it’s been a mild September. [Tags: bubble blogosphere mel_brooks]

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