something you said this evening annoyed me (assuming that i heard it correctly, which i'm not sure i did), and i wanted to explain a bit about why... not that i'll necessarily actually send this to you; i also want to explain it to myself, perhaps to help me remember about some of the things that go on...
i was describing this particular long story that i want to tell you, a long story about some math that i've been working on, long because i've been making a lot of progress recently without much of a chance to talk to you about it, and so there's a lot that you missed, making up a long story that i want to tell you about. but i thought that i heard you say something like... that the main reason that you were unsure about whether you'd ever hear the end of the story is because you didn't know whether i'd stay interested in my own story, or instead veer off in some other direction like (you apparently think) i always do...
i didn't respond to that, in part because i wasn't sure i heard you correctly. but if i did respond i'd probably say something like the following...
i stay interested in my own stories much more consistently than you seem to realize. the reason it seems otherwise to you is that you're so absent and uninvolved that you don't see the common thread that makes it still the same story when you come back a few weeks (or months or years) later. stories unfold and evolve (and also sometimes have quick cuts and dissolves and so forth) and sometimes you have to pay attention to follow them.
the stories that i pursue are way bigger and more ambitious than you realize. you just don't see the big picture because you're not paying enough attention. when you pay so little and so infrequent attention then all you can see is little fragments.
if you actually followed the ideas that i'm working on and understood their universal relevance you wouldn't feel such a need to seek some kind of pseudo-relevance in pseudo-"practical" work.
i remember you once expressing dissatisfaction with my work by saying that "it didn't go anywhere" but i wasn't sure about exactly what that criticism was supposed to mean. i think that i'm getting a better idea now that what it meant is that you're just not paying enough attention to follow what i'm doing.
i can't find it now... i looked for it in the n-category cafe thread that jonathan woolf posted to around 2006, but didn't find it there... i'm pretty sure it's somewhere thuogh... where you described some of our work on fundamental n-categories of some kind of "stratified" spaces... and you said something like how this was something you worked on when you were younger, and now you weren't so young anymore, and now it was time to hand it over to those who are young now... i remember being struck when i read that... you showed no understanding that this is a project that i've never abandoned, that i've continued to work on, with pretty slow progress because i can't get you to meaningfully participate in it even if i beg for it...a project that has evolved into other projects that i'm currently deeply involved in, but still recognizably the same project if you'd been paying attention... and it's different for me than for you: you've made your career in significant part off of my work, but you've never been willing to help me in any meaningful way with my career... it's true that i have no desire to retire and hand off the work to the next generation, but i couldn't do that even if i wanted to because i have no career to retire from because you buy into the conventional wisdom that the kind of work that i do isn't worth rewarding...
while i was looking for the post where i remember you saying that, i also happened across this:
|Thanks! As so often the case, this grandiose vision was developed
|jointly by James Dolan and me, but he's not to blame for my
|description of it.
this sounds to me like your attempt to pay lip service to something i once asked from you. i asked that you stop talking about me, stop attributing any ideas to me unless you also make it clear to people that if they want to find out my actual ideas then they'll have to talk to me personally. that's completely different from a formulaic assumption of responsibility for something you wrote. i asked for what i asked for because i want the opportunity to communicate my own ideas to people in my own way, not with the distortions introduced by your inadequacies as an expositor, but with the distortions introduced by my own inadequacies as an expositor. i've repeatedly heard from people that they thought that i preferred for you to speak for me, and shock when i told them that nothing could be farther from the truth.
i guess that you just don't get it... it would be funny if you actually did the things that you do out of malice, but i really don't see the evidence for that.
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