There were professors
from all over the planet, representing the traditional academic disciplines, along
with a chapter of Hell’s Angels, whose colors on their vests announced that
they were from Manchester. It appeared that because perhaps 20% of their group had
no winged skull embossed on the back their vests, that some of them had not yet
earned the colors, and I think that perhaps this was either some kind of
training or an award for being good acolytes. I don’t know exactly how many of
the Hell’s Angels cadre and acolytes were in attendance, but their numbers were
enough to take up considerable space in the bar. The Manchester group also was attended
by the company of four or five ladies, who distinguished themselves by their astonishingly
high heel shoes and skintight jeans, worn both in the bar and at the fabulous
breakfasts. The scholars and the bikers got along by ignoring each other, both
groups likely flattering themselves by thinking they had absolutely nothing in
common.
The conference
itself was representative of how various traditional liberal arts disciples are
following a new but now much practiced procedure that is leading to the
transforming of conference papers into journal articles. This is the new
‘scientific’ way most journal literature today is created both for the internet
and for library hard-copies. This is just another example of how our technology
– especially our electronic technology - is transforming all that is done
today. Perhaps in future I will be able to send a cloned copy of myself to
conferences, the my double fashioned by a 3 D printer into which my
consciousness will be down-loaded from a super M.R.I, while I stay home and
read Plato, have a glass of wine with my wife and friends or just go fly
fishing.
I heard some good
presentations, most notably the findings of a study by an Indian anthropologist
from the University of Mangalore who had followed aged immigrants from India to
the West, especially to America and to Canada. The findings were that even with
support from families, the aged immigrants almost never adapted and could have just
as well be living on another planet in a different age. This was a sad but not
too surprising finding, and probably tells us much about how we as part of the
‘native’ population rarely consider such. This is surely the case of ‘too late
to assimilate’ in the increasingly ‘Universal and Homogeneous State’, that is
becoming our planet.
And then there was
the excellent paper given by, Ann Dunn, a Shakespeare scholar from the
University of North Carolina in Ashville, a study of Shakespeare’s ‘Roman
Plays’. My wife and I became friends with Ann who also is the director of the
Ashville Ballet.
Malta is about
sixty nautical miles from Sicily to its East and equidistant from Tunisia to
the West and South. Malta really is at the cross roads of the Mediterranean.
Many have crossed, conquered and ruled what is now the tiny Maltese state:
Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Venetians, and, of course, the British, who
let go of their former colony only in 1964. As a result of this long British
rule, Malta has a definite British stamp.
