Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

duomo obrigado

Well, I finished my first full week of teaching at USF, and I made a couple of fun discoveries yesterday in between classes: the Ricci Institute and the Fromm Institute. I was searching online for books on Japanese etymology, because I was trying to determine if Japanese arigatou was a loanword from Portuguese obrigado as somebody had suggested in a forum. (For the record and off the cuff, I didn’t think so.) Anyway, the library catalog showed a result that said the book was in the Chinese Library. I asked my TA, who’s from Shanghai, if there was a Chinese library on campus, but she didn’t think so. Hmm, looked around on the USF website, and bingo!, came up with the Ricci Institute. Haven’t had a chance to walk up to the Lonely Mountain Campus to see it yet, but am looking forward to it. Matteo Ricci was an interesting fellow who tried to teach the Chinese to use the European ars memorativa to help in learning their characters. The Fromm Institute discovery came about more slowly: I had noticed since day one last week, that mixed in with the usual undergraduates was a whole passel of retired folks roaming around the campus in hoardes. They all seemed to know one another and were just as happy and rambunctious as the younger students. But why? Finally, in the cafeteria, I sat at a table and heard three older guys talking about Nabokov’s Lolita (as well as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books) in a way that said to me that they’d just come from a lecture they’d rather enjoyed. Talked to one of them and discovered that their was a whole ’nother college on campus for and by retired folks. Nice.