Dork: noun, Loyal: adjective

Normally the adjective describes the noun, but here it could go either way. Let me explain:

Monday is the universal day of blah in any city, so my search for creative novelty in Chicago online and in the papers was turning up nada last night. On a whim, I checked the Northwestern University site calendar, and found a guest lecture posted for today at 4:30- "The Network is the Actor on the Stage of History." I'm pretty sure that this is the lecture I saw, as it sort of fits the title, but more on that in a moment. I took the purple express train north to the edge of the Northwestern campus, and from there relied on dead reckoning to find the right building on the right street. The campus is nice- not Kenyon nice, but pretty good. The front door of the humanities lecture hall had a stern warning to trespassers, and while this may not have applied to me entirely, I couldn't help but feel that I was crashing the lecture. Hence the title of this post.

The lecture was about social networks of geniuses in history and the following generations. The lecturer, Dr. Randall Collins, used ancient Greek philosophers and German philosophers as his examples, and while I know nearly nothing about either, I got the gist of it. Essentially, a great mind like Socrates is remembered as being in the center of a great movement, when in reality he was one of many intellectuals working on developing what came to be the foundation of modern philosophy. He then gained importance in philosophy as an individual when future generations singled him out as being most important, as they measured ideas against his. This phenomena is visible in other creative networks in history as well.

He also talked about strong ties and weak ties in social networks. Creative intellectual networks are often, in Dr. Collins's words, "hermetically cultish." Strongly tied individuals work well together, but the network can get rather redundant. Weak ties to acquaintances offer access to other networks. I've seen this at Ball State, with some departments opening up to the idea of interdisciplinary learning while others think the idea is absurd.

I'm starting to look for good blues bars now. The conveniently named House of Blues downtown might have something, but I wonder if it might be a little too commercial for what I'm looking for. Any venue not located in a historic neighborhood may not be what I'm looking for. I'm also waiting for an excuse to go back to the Hothouse- it seems like it would get good unique music.