Some Thoughts and Memories

Bill Readings was a brilliant young academic philosopher with a shining future. I met him back in 1994..I found him difficult though to tune into as my earlier post revealed in The "Great" and the "Good" It is no longer clear what role the University plays in society. The structure of the contemporary University is changing rapidly, and we have yet to understand what precisely these changes will mean. Is a new age dawning for the University, the renaissance of higher education under way? Or is the University in the twilight of its social function, the demise of higher education fast approaching?We can answer such questions only if we look carefully at the different roles the University has played historically and then imagine how it might be possible to live, and to think, amid the ruins of the University. Tracing the roots of the modern American University in German philosophy and in the work of British thinkers such as Newman and Arnold, Bill Readings argues that ...

  One evening I was lying on my bed and I heard an announcer on  BBC Radio 4 mention the name Andrew Weatherall. It was in connection with a radio programme called Last Word dealing with recent obits of famous people. The name instantly rang a bell in my head as it was so familiar.....and then I recalled Weatherall from the dim and distant past of the early 1970s. I knew him as a child and went to the same school in Windsor as him. We had a number of chats. I even had dinner with him in Old Windsor where I met his parents...and remember seeing a parrot in a cage too. But unfortunately I cannot recall anything much more about him...except that the last time I saw him he said that he was planning a revolution in music...and hey, presto he seem to have done something like that in later life...yet, I am not qualified to say how important and revolutionary his contribution is to modern music.  Andrew Weatherall / Guardian Newspaper with examples of his "best" work Google searc...