One week to my Chicago trip with Beth, starting with a train journey to Brighton next Wednesday, then Heathrow Thursday. Resurrected big red quilted coat yesterday and bought 2 thermal T-shirts today. Ed says the red coat will help Beth and the Chicago PD to locate me when I get lost.
Ed’s colleague Prof. John Hassard has given a paper today on the Hawthorne factory at Cicero outside Chicago and the experiments there in 1924. The museum is only open for tours by appointment. The Museum website claims, ‘”The company subsequently invented the loudspeaker, public address systems, radar, brought sound to motion pictures, and most importantly, the transistor for which Bell Labs researchers won the Nobel Prize.” Radar, indeed! And we understand that the Industrial Revolution started on the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America too (tourist in Manchester UK). Just got diverted for half an hour to read a brilliant article titled The Hawthorne Studies – a fable for our times? by E. A. M. Gale in a medical journal.
Anyway, a big sunny day today in several ways; the literature class on Maupin’s Tales of the City and sexual / female liberation in general proved very interesting in the group of 12 women and 4 men; Rosie visited in the afternoon; I got some work done on my Faulkner paper; two good salad-based meals; the anti-TNF injections B is having seem to be having a beneficial effect; students marched with lecturers on Millgate and “violence broke out”; as Ed has said on FB, “The BBC is talking about how the student violence in London might distract from ‘sensible debate’ on tuition fees; would this be the sensible debate where the Tories go “we’re doing it” and then they do it?” and I won £25 on ERNIE – Premium Bonds.