Forty-Four
Dinnae run, slept late. Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, coffee and toast, lunch, and soon off to sit with one of the world’s greatest little girls, then to anniversary time with Margaret.
Month: June 2026
Every Other
Looks as though I’ve fallen into the pattern of blogging alternate days, which I’ll try to ramp up tomorrow and Saturday. In the meantime, I ran both mornings (before the rain started) to mediocre times. Yesterday I cooked a hot breakfast; this morning, coffee and fruit. After Wednesday’s Morning Prayer, I came home for a bit, then returned to church for the weekly staff meeting. Then I spent the afternoon working on an outline, and handouts, for the teaching day at Church House (Oxford) (more precisely, Kidlington) on ‘Freedom and Liberation in Romans’.
This morning, Morning Prayer went by very quickly, and I had dreams to hopping onto the 9:40 X3 through Abingdon and coasting into Oxford with time galore to go back over the points I wanted to emphasise in a morning revision with my first-years. Thames Travel and Oxford Buses had different ideas, though, and sent no bus through until after 10:00, and didn’t get me to Oxford till unnervingly close to my 11:00 revision. Came home, worked on one of the topics I discussed with the first-years (Western non-interpolations, about which I didn’t remember as much as I thought I did), and kept up with correspondence.
And I’ll try to blog tomorrow, even if it’s just my running and breakfast reports.
Whoops! Almost Missed Two
I didn’t run yesterday morning because of rain. Morning Prayer, public office hours at R&R, and later the funeral for our parishioner Peter Cannon-Brookes.
Ran this morning, slightly improving Sunday morning’s time. Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, then off to Oxford to talk with my former student Matthew Eddy, whose daughter is doing her undergraduate degree at Oxford. Then back home to Margaret.
All of which is overshadowed by the deaths on Sunday of Margaret’s Aunt Jan, on her father’s side, and Monday of her Uncle Roy, on her father’s side. It has been a hard, heavy summer so far.
Harriet Tuttle Noyes
Harriet Tuttle Noyes
(May 18, 1933 – March 21, 2026)
Obituary, written by Isabelle Buchanan
Harriet Tuttle Noyes died at home surrounded by family on March 21, 2026, at the age of 92. She took her last breath while her husband of 65 years, Bob Noyes, sat next to her telling the story of a camping trip they took down Havasu Canyon as newlyweds. On one trek, when heavy rains and flooding threatened to trap them on the wrong side of a river they had crossed, he emerged onto the bank to see her leading both of their horses through the rushing high waters, already halfway across. This story was for Bob an illustration of a core truth about Harriet:
“she had spunk.”
Harriet was born in 1933 in New Haven, Connecticut, to Isabelle Hollister Tuttle, a painter, and Henry Emerson Tuttle, a printmaker and Master of Davenport College at Yale University. She spent her childhood with her three sisters on Yale’s campus during wartime, as her parents hosted students, Navy recruits, and a rotating cast of distinguished visitors. She delighted in regaling those gathered around her dinner table with the story of an occasion when the poet Stephen Vincent Benét discovered that the guest room suite was missing its towels only after he emerged from the bath. As she told it, “He dried himself with Kleenex, leaving a scene which my father said looked as if a large white bird had molted its feathers.” The Tuttle family spent summers on Nantucket Island, where Harriet learned to sail by crewing for her older sister Grace. Harriet grew into a master skipper herself, earning pennants in races with their 12 foot catboat, “Good Humor,” and then larger boats, and enjoying the freedom that sailing brought her.
After attending Radcliffe College, where she studied English, Harriet received her Master of Arts in Teaching from Yale University, and taught English at North Haven High School in Connecticut. During a summer spent in Colorado, where she went to earn an additional credit for her teaching certificate, she met Bob Noyes, who was working that summer at the Bureau of Standards, and on weekends earning a little extra money by offering car-transport and guide services for hikes in the Colorado mountains. They married in 1960, and moved to Pasadena California, where Harriet taught at Westridge School, and Bob finished his PhD in Astrophysics.
In 1964 they settled in a home on the edge of Spy Pond, in Arlington, Massachusetts, where they would spend more than 60 years. It was a home filled with stacks of bird books, and a pair of binoculars placed next to each window that looked out over the pond—evidence of a love of birds inherited from her father.
Everyone in Harriet’s orbit was grounded by her warm presence and her wise counsel. As a valuable member of groups, her skillful questions and careful listening helped move people forward toward consensus and action. In the second half of her career, she returned to school and received her Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology from Lesley College in 1987. Outside of her work as a therapist, she contributed her time to community projects that she cared about, including helping to establish the first hospice care organization in Massachusetts and facilitating support groups with Parents Helping Parents, guiding parents who experienced abuse and neglect as children as they navigated parenthood themselves.
As the child of artists, she found her own creative home in photography and writing. She took pleasure in capturing people in their natural state. She had a brown boxy Rolleiflex camera which she could rest in her lap, looking down into its large viewfinder without having to bring it up to her eye to frame her shot. This gave her the opportunity to surreptitiously snap a picture of someone’s expression, unspoiled by the stiffening effects of having a camera lens in one’s face. She set up a darkroom in the basement which the family affectionately nicknamed “Harri’s black hole.” The sign on the door read, “HARRI X-1” (a play on Cygnus X-1, the first black hole to be discovered by astronomers). Aloud and on paper, Harriet was a wonderful storyteller. With twinkling eyes, she transformed people long gone into vivid and present members of the family.
Harriet leaves behind her husband Robert Noyes, daughters Alison Noyes Buchanan (J Michael Buchanan) and Rebecca Noyes Gorrell (Greg Gorrell) and three grandchildren, Isabelle Buchanan, Rosie Buchanan and Val Gorrell.
The Westridge School yearbook dedicated to Harriet in 1962 reads, “To the one who has given generously of her friendship, guidance, and spirit; to the one who has shared with us her wisdom; to the one who is a ‘terrible tease…’”
To Harriet, we will miss you.
(to be continued)
Starting Back
Slept long (for me) and woke with barely enough time to take my morning run, shower off, and go to the 8:00 service, which is my favourite for Sundays on which I’m not on duty. The run was all right, not good and not bad, and I didn’t have time for coffee before. I was still, ahem, glowing when I got to church. Home for coffee and toast, for email errands (do they ever abate?) and time to let the muscles in my back and shoulders relax….
Another Recap
Another thread from last week’s BlueSky:
In the AI/anti-AI discourse, I haven’t seen enough treatment of the problem of ‘feeling’. A silicon-based ‘intelligence’ can’t feel as a human does: it can simulate touch, but not experience touch; it can calculate a response to visual stimuli, but it can’t see. And above all, it can’t have what in humans we call ‘feelings’. At best, it can call up a response that it has learned would be most probable if humans were to encounter particular circumstances — a break-up, death in the family, a favourable job offer — but there’s nothing internal (as it were) to the electronics that produces the thing a human feels. Nor, all the more, mixed feelings.
Now, I don’t put any stock in a feeling-mysticism that treats art objects as if imbued with wooooo ‘authentic feelings’ — but it seems vital to me that we distinguish the algorithmic processes that display a probable response similar to what a vast, fine-grained database implies a human would feel, from the human feelings themselves. You can’t surprise a computer. You can’t charm a computer. You can only submit input that you calculate will induce AI to guess at a human-seeming response.
To which Ryan Turnbull responded: ‘If an AI could speak, we couldn’t understand it.
– Wittgenstein, probably’.
Also, my most-frequently-played musicians for May:
1 Echo & the Bunnymen 7 scrobbles
2 Iron & Wine 7
3 The Beatles 7
4 The Who 7
5 Bruce Springsteen 6
6 Elvis Costello 6
7 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds 6
8 The Rolling Stones 6
9 Van Morrison 6
10 The Clash 5
As always, I omit the Mountain Goats because they’d end up at or near the top every month. That’s partly because I am a big fan, but also because of the vast catalogue they’ve produced and the number of concert recordings I’ve retrieved.
Maybe It Will Be True
No run this morning; it was raining, with warnings of continuing rain, and I opted to stay home with hot coffee rather than run through chilly drizzle. My inclination was confirmed by the possibility that I’ll modulate to a more gentle schedule for running, perhaps running only alternate days.
Then hot breakfast, Morning Prayer, and catching up on email and general internet errands.
The title above refers to the fact that I’m not rota-ed to serve at any of Sunday’s services, so that I may be able actually just to recharge this weekend. I’m not counting on anything, but it’s possible.
Exorcise It, And I Will Advertise It
Earlier this week I responded to Cory Doctorow’s daily post about AI, art, intention, Brian Eno, and everything (you know, the usual). Here is what posted on BlueSky in response:
Peter Sagal has already brought some pressure onto Cory’s reliance on ‘intention’ as a conceptual lever. I’m with Peter on this — Cory can carry his point forcefully without invoking ‘intention’, almost always a hostage to fortune.
I’m with Mr Sagal because ‘intention’ muddies the waters by ascribing it the status of a phantasmic feature of art with which an artist intentionally imbues the work. But where is it? What is it? Is it one of those ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ characteristics like ‘authenticity’?
Occam’s Razor would favour an explanation of what Cory‘s getting at, one that doesn’t rely on an invisible force, especially when it always comes attended by significant debates about what the alleged intention is. Save yourself the headaches, Cory! Skip over the ‘intention’ boobytrap.
Sure, there are aspects of the art interaction that resemble the ‘figuring out intention’ model Cory takes as paradigmatic. But that’s just one thing, one way we interact with art. One of the most precious aspects of art involves effects or interpretations that are manifestly not intentional — far more than just encoding a secret ‘intention’ message into oil paints or a bass clef or ceramic glaze. Indeed, the stronger the ‘intention’ behind a form of expression, the less art-like it will seem. That’s one basis for the historic resistance to allegory as a mode: It threatens to constrain the liberty of the reader’s imagination.
(For the record, I am a proponent of allegorical interpretation.)
An artist is a gambler. They take a shot at doing something, estimating based on how they suspect, or hope, an audience will react. The artist may have an inchoate notion of how they expect people will respond, but even if they want to imbue an expression, a chord, a brush stroke with intended meaning, there’s no way to ensure that it will come across. Except, perhaps, by writing out a statement that instructs people how to respond… (assuming that the instruction itself is interpreted correctly, according to the artist’s intention).
This connects to Eno’s talk and the intensity/fidelity grid — except that the whole ‘fidelity’ aspect presumes a fidelity to something, and here the phantasm of ‘meaning’ or ‘authenticity’ or ‘authorial intention’ returns to haunt us again.
Exorcise it, once and for all.
Just discuss art, or sunrises, or whatever you want, in terms of effects, reasons, connections, affects, intensities, and any other aspects of the observation/appreciation/interpretation complex. There are no invisible, secret reference points, no occult qualities. We’re all just responding to the world, and art, as best we can. And that’s amazing, it’s great. We’re positive engines of imagination, association, and signification. It’s our glory — don’t trammel us with the bogeys of ‘intent’.
Slow Friday
With leaden, achey legs, I ran my morning route more than a minute slower than Wednesday — but la, there we are, I still got the exercise. Coffee and fruit, a shower, Morning Prayer, a quick grocery stop, home to tackle some emailing, off to Oxford for the New Testament seminar and a book launch. The book launch, though, had taken place yesterday, so onward to home again. I arrived in time to help Margaret customise her new clothes for tonight’s Leavers’ Dinner at St Stephen’s House; I stayed home and made sure the ladies were not dissatisfied by life.
Thursday Again
No runs yesterday or today because of the intermittent heavy rain. Yesterday I had my hot breakfast, today coffee and fruit; Morning Prayer both days. Yesterday I celebrated the midweek Communion at St Helen’s (then bounced over to the staff meeting), today I will celebrate the Corpus Christi parish Mass at St Michael’s (didn’t/won’t preach at either). Keeping busy with emails and with preparing a holy card for Clement of Alexandria.
Last evening we tuned in to a videocast of the requiem for a beloved friend of ours. Margaret had decided not to fly out to attend in person, in part because we knew the service would be shown online. As matters fell out, the bishop’s portable microphone wasn’t connecting to the A/V device; since she had the primary role in the service and gave a eulogiacal homily from her own long acquaintance with our friend, we watched almost the entire service without hearing a syllable of what was going on. What we had hoped would be an occasion for releasing grief and binding our hearts with those of others turned into an hour of vexation.
I Remember Rain
No run this morning, because it was raining heavily. It hasn’t often been raining heavily during my running window; of course, it hasn’t been raining much at all in England, and I have run in light rain, but today stands out for having had honest-to-goodness rainy rain. Glad for our soil and plants, even if I’d have liked to stretch my legs.
Coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, some Clement of Alexandria.
June Already
I ran my morning miles at a surprisingly good time (I was surprised, anyway) despite feeling dead-legged and oxygen-starved. I seem to be getting back into a groove.
Coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, public office hours at R&R, home to the dogs, and this evening out to Oriel for a Chapel Dinner (I haven’t participated in chapel this year, though I may next year, but I’m delighted to have been invited).