I am packing my things for vacation. I am planning to follow the example of poet Wallace Stevens and study calculus by graphing the patterns of haystacks in rural Pennsylvania. Well, not quite, but I do expect to go to central Pennsylvania and find beautiful landscapes to photograph and draw and paint. I'll be wandering around there and also in central Maryland for about ten days, and hope to return on August 20.

I have been doing limit problems, without too much difficulty. I will be taking a vacation from doing math as well, but I will take my calculus lecture DVD's along in case I have a moment to watch a program. I'll have Internet connectivity for at least some of my journey, but I don't know whether I will post an entry to this Electron or not. I don't have any specific plans after the first couple of days.

Things have been kind of suspended for me anyway regarding art and math in the last few days, because I've been involved in reading "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," the sixth book in J.K. Rowling's compelling series about the boy wizard. This was a thrilling tale even at over 600 pages, full of intrigue, romance, comedy, and tragedy. It's not just a kids' story any more, Rowling has now made this series worthwhile for people of all ages. It's not High Literature but it has the elements of it nevertheless, with genuine moral and emotional conflicts and the familiar neo-Zoroastrian background of the Great Battle between Good and Evil. If you read carefully, there are only lightly concealed references to current political and global realities in the tale as well. I love the magical world that Rowling has made up, which is much less pretentious than Tolkien's. And even though I am not much of a fiction reader, this fiction kept me turning pages when I should really have been doing something else, like calculus or art. Book 7, the last of the series, will appear next year.

I'm off, if all goes well, on Thursday August tenth, hoping for pastoral peace and green meadows, soft breezes and forested hills, and a vacation from limits.

Posted at 2:09 am | link