Primary-school teachers, fractals, Finnegans Wake, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, Jorge Luis Borges

Last week, my third-grade teacher Katherine Terhune told me about a study of literature as fractals – especially James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake". I then remembered a  book about fractals I had around 1980, along with other books from then, such as Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel Escher Bach" and his book with Daniel Dennett, "The Mind's I", where I first read Jorge Luis Borges's "Borges and I", one of the texts I've recently been working on Spanish with. Then another retired primary-school teacher, Tom Deveson, posted that it's Daniel Dennett's birthday today. These "insignificant but touching" coincidences (Sebald) echo how linking John Ashbery and Friedrich Schiller made my life feel like a coherent whole. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 28 March 2021)

 

Nautilus shell image KT sent me.