Hypotyposis on a Good Day

Let's throw out a list....

Lloyd put out a call for lists:

So, who would like to share a list of something on a weblog entry? Come on, you've got a list stashed somewhere. I know it. ;-) Naturally, I'll list all responses here.

I was particularly struck by Lloyd's list of periodicals that he has subscribed to at one point or another: Let me put in bold ones I also subscribed to at one point or another.

• Atlantic Monthly
• Brill's Content
• Commentary
• Dissent
• The Economist
• Elysian Fields Quarterly
• Far Eastern Economic Review
• Foreign Affairs
• Granta
• Harper's Magazine
• In These Times
• Macworld
• MacWeek
• Mother Jones
• The Nation
• National Geographic
• The New Republic
• New Scientist
• The New York Review of Books
• The New York Times
• The New Yorker
• Newsweek
• The Progressive
• Psychology Today
• Red Herring
• The San Francisco Chronicle
• Scientific American
• Sports Illustrated
• Threepenny Review
• Tikkun
• TIME
• The Times Literary Supplement
• US News and World Report
• Utne Reader
• Vanity Fair
• Washington Monthly
• Weekly Standard
• WebTechniques
• Wilson Quarterly
• WIRED

I'll throw in two lists of my own:

• My amazon wishlist -- which I add to through my wireless phone when I'm browsing at a bookstore and see a book that intrigues me. I just type a search on amazon and drop it on the list,
• My current RSS subscription list in OPML (XML) format.

Not terribly inspired but I'm sure revealing, nevertheless.

Fluidity is a tough thing to accomplish at times

Laura wrote:

ugh, I need to start writing here more often, and at greater length, because I'm losing my fluidity and my sense of my own voice. I want to follow up on Raymond's wonderful piece on the presentation by Neil Brand, which he and friends Ildi and Peter and I attended on Saturday night. I'm having so much trouble composing that I've been making notes in MS word and shuffling them around, the way I used to when I was on deadline. One thing I like about blogging is that I don't usually have to do that--so I'd better get back into practice.

I sympathize....I find that blogging is a game of inertia -- though not exactly of the Newtonian type. A body in motion stays in motion; a body at rest stays at rest. I know how fluid Laura's writing can be -- so I look forward to the return of words to her blog!

Neil Brand at the PFA

Last night my friends Ildi, Peter, Laura, and I attended a special PFA event featuring Neil Brand:

WHERE DOES THE MUSIC COME FROM?

Lecture and Piano Accompaniment by Neil Brand

Gain a new perspective on film, music, and the creative process in this special evening with Neil Brand, one of the best-known silent film accompanists working today. Brand will lead the audience through the creation of an improvised score, playing piano accompaniment to excerpts from Pandora's Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929), South (Frank Hurley, 1919), and Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, Robert Siodmak, 1930)—as well as one clip from the PFA Collection that will be a surprise to both the audience and Brand himself—and discussing ideas of emotional color and narrative structure in a presentation that promises to be funny, self-revealing, and provocative. This talk is adapted from a lecture first delivered at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in memory of New Zealand's Jonathan Dennis, a tireless archivist, champion of silent film, and dear friend of PFA who passed away in 2002.

I must say that the lecture/demonstration exceeded my already high expectations for the evening. Granted, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. Though I was intrigued by the prospect of hearing about how a piano player might create a "sound track" for a silent film, I could see why a lot of my friends couldn't care for it; how relevant is silent film today?

Plenty relevant, I learned from Neil Brand. First of all, he pointed out how much we expect music to be part of the films we see. But isn't that a bit odd? Why do we want a rousing orchestral accompaniment to big dramatic events like a plane crash or an invasion in our movies? That's pretty far from reality. Hence, the way that music is created for silent films provides a wonderful window into how music is created for today's movies. We might not think too hard about the soundtracks of today's films since we take them for granted. Having Neil Brand create that music for a film that was made years ago -- something we don't experience very often -- helps unsettle what we take for granted.

The amazing thing about "piano players" like Neil Brand (he never said "pianists") is that they often improvise the scores to films! So he is providing real time commentary to the film that must bring out key elements while not being overbearing. And he has to do it when he doesn't even know what the film will be about ahead of time. Rather amazing how many things piano accompanists would have to keep track of, all the while spinning out music suitable for the film.

Another key insight I got last night: silent films are far from dead. Why? Because there are a lot of amateur videographers -- parents, for instances, with videocams who are essentially making silent films. OK -- the films of little Johnny or Joanne have some meaningful audio. By and large, however, these videos are just crying out to have a soundtrack. The vast majority of us are not in the creative position that Neil Brand is. While we reach out for the CD of some music that we particularly like and think might fit as background music for our little masterpieces, Brand can write and improvise his own scores. So far from being relic of dead art -- Neil Brand has the gifts and skills that I'd love to have for my own media work. Would it be great for me to film aspects of life around me and sit down at the piano to improvise a score for it?

It seems that there is a chance that Neil Brand will be back at the PFA next year. Don't miss him the next time around!

Who is Silvio Berlusconi?

After reading The New York Review of Books: Italy: The Family Business, I'm amazed that a corrupt leader of a modern western country like Italy can stay in power -- regardless of how rich he is. (Boy, that was a naive statement!) If you don't know much about modern Italy, I highly recommend the essay. A quote that caught my eye was:

It would be a mistake to dismiss Berlusconi as a vaguely comical product of an Italian subculture. Italy has a remarkable record in the twentieth century as a kind of laboratory of bad ideas that have then spread to other parts of the world. Fascism was invented in Italy, so was the mafia; and left-wing terrorism went further in Italy than in any other European country. All three were byproducts of a weak democracy with few checks and balances. As a country that was late to unify and industrialize, Italy is a place where all the strains and problems of modern life are present, but with few of the safeguards that exist in older, more stable nations; ideas get taken to their logical extreme. The increasingly close relations between big money, politics, and television are important everywhere, but in Italy, thanks to Berlusconi's domination of the networks and the press, they have achieved a kind of apotheosis. He has now introduced a law that will make it legal for him to own newspapers as well.

After reading the essay, I typed Berlusconi into google and got a lesson in modern media. One of the top entries is a "Cool man of the week" profile of Berlusconi from AskMen. As you can imagine, a different perspective from the NYRB. An illustrative quote:

He has a beautiful wife, but don't kid yourselves, he is well aware of his charm and his magnetism with the fairer sex.

Power and money have historically been aphrodisiacs for women, and Berlusconi has both. In a country with beauties such as Maria Grazia Cucinotta and Monica Bellucci, that could be a very good thing.

Michael Moore responds

Though I've heard many good things about Michael Moore's sometimes over-the-top documentaries, I still haven't seen any. Nonetheless, I know that there is much controversy around them. (I remember seeing a website claiming to debunk Moore's Bowling for Collumbine.) In case I do end up seeing this film, I'll read his response to critics [kuro5hin.org]

Some tidbits

I tend to oscillate between two types of blogging: 1) writing an entry that has little to do with what might be happening this day and is therefore not terribly topical and 2) passing along news stories and tidbits I find interesting. I've started to use SharpReader, a RSS aggregator to help gather news for me. I'm also able to quickly piece together the items I gather to form an entry. This mode is definitely of type #2. Some tidbits I found today:

Harvard Medical School is setting up a new department, the school's first in two decades, devoted to the emerging field of systems biology. [New York Times: Education]

Canada is a country where compromise, consensus and civility are the most cherished political values. [New York Times: International]

In taking the helm of the Emmy-winning show, John Wells has the task of making the series more politically relevant. [New York Times: Arts]

Inpsired by Quicksilver, his giant doorstop of a new novel, Neal Stephenson has put up a wiki where his readers can collaboratively annotate the ideas in the book: [Boing Boing Blog]

Monster miscreant database now in state hands [The Register]

Must I be further deflated?

Just when I'm getting used to the idea that I'm not as smart as I think I am, I learn from Harold Bloom's Hamlet: Poem Unlimited that I'm also less intelligent than a fictional character:

• "Vastly intelligent, far beyond us--if we are not, say, Freud or Wittgenstein--Hamlet cannot believe that the proper use of his capability and godlike reason is to perform a revenge killing." (p. 70)
• "Don't condescend to the Prince of Denmark: he is more intelligent than you are, whoever you are." (p. 86)
• "If Hamlet perishes of the truth, such truth is barely external. Hamlet is the truth, insofar as any hero of consciousness can be." (p. 94)

I went to an artist's talk tonight

I heard Carol Aust speak tonight about her work at a New College Berkeley seminar. Some of her paintings are currently hanging in the sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church, Berkeley. I was curious about how she would talk about her work. The talk was well-attended and warmly received.

On my bookshelf

In over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life

Why do you care?

"So where are you from?" asked the elderly (white) lady facing me.

"I'm from Canada," I responded.

"Where are you really from?" insisted the woman.

"I'm from Timmins, Ontario."

She was furious. "You know what I mean!"

I did. I answered, "My parents are from China."

The exact scene is no longer clear in my mind. Was it in a church somewhere or some other public gathering? The words are probably different from what I recall. But the emotional dynamic is something I recall clearly to this day. I was probably being a bit mean in baiting her. I knew what she was after -- and I wasn't going to let her know right away -- at least until she would admit what she was asking. Something in her first question tipped me off that she wanted to know my ethnic/racial heritage. Was I Chinese? Japanese? Korean? Filipino? But I was from Canada. I've never been to China, my parents' homeland. If she wanted to know my ethnicity, she could have asked straightforwardly. And if she chose not to, why should I tell her? I resented the implicit assumption -- that I was not reallyfrom Canada, where I was born.

Believe it or not, Miss Manners is the inspiration for today's entry. Before this morning, I had little idea that my experience is that of many others. She wrote:

But the next thing Miss Manners knew, a version of "Where are you from?" was back. Only this time it is not as bland as before. Geography is no longer the issue; the inquiry has to do with race and ethnicity. People who answer as carelessly as before, stating their hometowns, are further interrogated as if they are being disingenuous:

"No, where are you really from? Where are you from originally? Where were your parents from?"

This is particularly galling to homegrown Americans whose looks or names strike the descendants of other immigrants as somehow more "foreign" than their own. The presumption that there is a particular American look or nomenclature is not borne out by the census figures.

A test from w.bloggar

I'm blogging from w.bloggar -- does this work?

The blaze of glory

Hail Galileo --

A job well done
And you've earned your rest

Though you end your days
Far from your native soil,
You go out on a blaze of glory.

All the things that you've seen
All the miles that you've traveled
Have been observed and noted.
You have been immortalized.

Thanks for the memories.

Cheers for self-serving service to others

I spent this morning making phone calls for the TeleCare program, something I've been doing once a month for almost four years now. When I began as a volunteer, I was told as by the director of the program that one of the benefits for me is that I would feel wonderful about myself whenever I make these calls. I remember dismissing the comment, saying that feeling good about myself was not the reason I was going to volunteer.

Now, I see how arrogant my reaction was. This morning I arrived at TeleCare rather down again. However, as I talked to dozens of resilient, mostly elderly folks who were cheerful, courageous, funny, and vibrant -- in spite of the very real physical pain or emotional isolation they may experience day in and day out. My job was to check in on them, make sure they are ok, and bring a bit of warmth and care into their lives. But in reaching out, wasn't I also being ministered to as well? Of course.

Now I'm thankful to be doing volunteer work that is both useful and emotionally rewarding. Such a combination enables me to sustain my participation in the program these last four years. TeleCare is one of my favorite organizations. Don't be surprised if I get a lump in my throat if you ask me to tell you about it. Indeed, our volunteers love the program so much that they generally keep volunteering until they move away or pass away. (Our longest serving volunteer has been faithfully making calls for over thirty years!)

So true

A cartoon from the Sept 22, 2003 issue of The New Yorker made me laugh. A man says to a woman who is looking at his bookcase:

"I've had those books for years. They represent the person I once aspired to be."

Little politics on my blog lately

I used to write about politics or at least quote some of the latest political stories on my blog. I've fallen silent because I don't know what to say these days. It's certainly not that I think things are going so well that there's nothing to comment on or nothing to advocate for. Rather, of the many, many issues out there, I don't know which of the few I should focus on. Hence the current silence. Maybe I should stay silent and listen instead.

(I will say, however, that when the latest issue of The New York Review arrived in my mailbox, I read Mark Danner's Iraq: The New War and thought of the debate between Danner and Christopher Hitchens staged on campus those many months ago.)

I'm back (sorta)

Well, I'm back (sorta). Did you miss me? Those of you who follow my blog closely will have noticed that I wrote an entry on the 12th reflecting my sadness and then promptly stopped writing. A lot of things had been bubbling in me -- and all of a sudden, they came together to utterly drain me of my usual hope and optimism. Various flaws that I saw in myself became damning comdemnations. The loneliness that I often felt but would normally shake off transformed itself into a dreaded suspicion that I was indeed unworthy of love, let alone simple affection. Waking up on Saturday morning with a cold and a sore throat did not help the situation, though the physical discomfort in some way did take my mind off what ailed my heart.

I suspected that the dark fog would eventually lift and that while it was painful to experience such sorrow, I had much to learn from it. (I knew that trying to rationally account for all that I had to be thankful for as a way of slapping some sense into me -- and there is so much to be thankful for; I have little to complain about in the grand scheme of things -- wasn't going to work.) I deeply appreciated all of you who read my blog, wondered whether there was something wrong, and checked in with me, invited me to hang out, listened closely to me, and sympathized with me. I love you all. Part of me feels ashamed that I used my blog entry from Friday as an indirect cry for help and attention. I could have just said, "Help me! I need my friends to pamper me a bit." Will you forgive me? Teach me how to ask for help? Thank you for indulging me.

Some I'm back (sorta). I'm thrilled to have the energy and desire to write once more.

When sadness descends like the fog

I wish that I could write you a happy story, a fond remembrance from childhood. I have plenty of those left to recount. But today, I am just sad. It is not a rational sadness with which I tussle -- on the cosmic scale, I have no reason to be sad. Yet it's the little things that disappoint, and sting, and deflate, and demoralize, isn't it?

I have little doubt that some sleep -- a lot of sleep -- will help me recover a sense of normalcy. And after I awake to a newer world, maybe then will I regale you with tales of snow, love, and simple wonder.

I fell asleep watching TV last night

I didn't blog last night because after cooking dinner and cleaning up, I decided to watch Art:21, which Chris had mentioned. Unfortunately, I was so tired that I fell asleep on the couch while the TV was on. My doing so says more about me than about the series which seems to be really quite worth watching. (I hope to tune in tonight for parts 3 and 4). But when my body isn't properly engaged, I conk out. (I remember feeling awful about falling asleep in the middle of a performance of The Goldberg Variations in Hertz Hall. How could I fall asleep on Bach? Maybe it's true that Bach had written the Goldbergs to cure someone's insomnia....)

A quote about Wallace Shawn

Wallace Shawn fascinates me. He played Vanya in Vanya on 42nd Street -- but I first saw him as Vizzini (Mr. "Inconceivable") in The Princess Bride. There is a lot to say about Wallace Shawn, darling of radical theatre by day/Hollywood actor by night -- but a description of his childhood in Fintan O'Tool's essay about Shawn, The Masked Avenger, (from The New York Review of Books ) resonates with me. (A description of exactly why will have to wait until another day.)

Wallace Shawn, his father, and his grandfather could be the subject of a trilogy of novels, telling the story of America from the thrusting energy of the self-made man in the first generation to the absorption into the East Coast establishment in the next and finally to the rage, disgust, and disillusionment of the third. His grandfather, Benjamin Chon, known as Jackknife Ben, was an embodiment of the immigrant drive for material success. The child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he set up as a street peddler, sold knives and later jewelry in the Chicago stockyards, and made a small fortune. His children grew up in a house with servants and a billiard room, and were triumphantly assimilated into the American upper middle class. His son William, his surname safely Anglicized, became, as the revered, long-serving, and famously fastidious editor of The New Yorker, one of the presiding figures of the postwar liberal literary establishment. And then along comes his son Wallace, haunted by the conviction that to be born into American abundance is to have a soul marked with original sin. Guilt, not gratitude, is the keynote of Wallace Shawn's reflections on the luxury of his childhood. In his opening monologue in Louis Malle's film My Dinner with André, in which he plays himself in a long conversation with the director André Gregory, Shawn recalls his privileged childhood in Manhattan, where he was born in 1943:

I grew up on the Upper East Side, and when I was ten years old, I was rich, I was an aristocrat, riding around in taxis, surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music.

In his theatrical monologue The Fever (first performed by the author in a New York apartment in 1990) there is an indication that this recognition of privilege was accompanied by the uncomfortable awareness that he belonged to an elite. Shawn carefully avoids any indication of the age, sex, or nationality of the speaker in the play, and it would be crude to conclude from the fact that he performed it himself in the apartments of his friends that it is straightforwardly autobiographical. There are, nevertheless, clear parallels with his own life, and it is hard to mistake the crippling consciousness of having been both blessed and cursed by gratuitous advantage:

I was born into the mind. Lamplight. The warm living room. My father, in an armchair, reading about China. My mother with the newspaper on a long sofa. Orange juice on a table in a glass pitcher….

And my friends and I were the delicate, precious, breakable children, and we always knew it. We knew it because of the way we were wrapped-because of the soft underwear laid out on our beds, soft socks to protect our feet.

And I remember that my darling mother, my beautiful mother, my innocent mother, would say to me and my friends, when we were nine or ten, "Now be very careful, don't go near First Avenue. That's a bad neighborhood. There are tough kids there."

Uncle Vanya: An American Play?

This morning, in looking at the Fall Arts Preview (Part II) in the SF Chronicle this morning, I noticed that Uncle Vanya is being staged at SF State from Nov 20 - Dec 6. Wow, yet another performance. I've been surprised by the number of times that Uncle Vanya been been staged. Is the play being performed disproportionately often in the U.S. and Canada? Maybe it's because my obsession with the play makes me look out for it, making it only seem more popular than other plays.

I ponder this question as I wonder whether I'm the only one who is so into this play. Clearly there are people with a much more serious investment in the play, such as anyone who has participated in any production of Uncle Vanya. I'm thinking of folks like myself who come at the play as an amateur.

Today, I got the sense that no, I'm not the only person out there who has heard the play speak to them, when I found a new translation by Curt Columbus that was commissioned for the (apparently famous) Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Eureka was my reaction to the prefatory essay by Columbus. Let me quote a bit of it (p. 4):

Of what are considered to be Chekhov's "four major plays," Uncle Vanya is unique -- a lyrical, claustrophobic character study that takes place over a short period of months on the Serebryakov estate. Gone is the sweep of years that moves the plots of Seagull and Three Sisters. The issues of class and wealth that pervade the other plays have no importance in this drama. There are no grande dames of the stage here, no general's daughters, no wealthy landowners. This is a petty squabble over an inheritance, an issue of a few hundred rubles a month. These are a handful of little people--a country doctor, a simple farmer and his niece, a retired professor and his too-young wife--who are trying to find some meaning and some romance in their little lives. Strangely, it is these very qualities of ordinariness that give the play such enormous resonance with modern American audiences.

"Uncle Vanya is an American play," a Russian director once told me. "Family members come for a visit, they fight, they scream, someone fires a gun, and then everyone makes up and says, 'See you next Christmas.'" This overly simplistic assessment gets at the core of why the play engenders such interest, such passion in America in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. After one has experienced the claustrophobic poetry of Tennesse Williams' fire escapes and tiny rooms, Chekhov's estate seems all the more vivid. After one has witnessed the works of Sam Shepherd, a handful of little people squabbling over an inheritance seems overly familiar. After one has watched the films of Woody Allen, Uncle Vanya feels like an old, amusing family friend, appearing both funny and tragic at the same time. Today's American audience feels finally what Chekhov spoke so succintly a hundred years ago.

I don't know much about Tennesse Williams or Sam Shepherd myself -- but this essay encourages me to explore these playwrights.

A lazy, most excellent, Saturday

It's midnight but I've already turned into a pumpkin. As I lay my head to sleep, it will be full of fond remembrances of a near perfect Saturday. I slept in, ate a leisurely breakfast (while still in my pyjamas). As I approached lunch, I figured that I should shower before having the second meal of the day. The only work I did all day was to replace the registration tag on my car. After talking to a friend on the phone, I had dinner with a group of 7 friends at the Berkeley Thai House. We gathered in anticipation of a performance of Mark Morris' L'Allegro il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which turned out to be very pleasing indeed. I was so happy to be among friends tonight. I walked home with my friend Dan, which gave us an opportunity to chat. And now I blog to give my dear readers something to read with their morning coffee tomorrow.

What more could I have asked of a Saturday?

Catch up without giving up

As unread issues of The New Yorker and Times Literary Supplement pile up in my home office, I might apply a technique I learned today from coworker Tom: put the magazine subscription on the hold normally used for vacation until I go through the issues already on hand. Make that one year subscription into a two year journey of humanely paced reading!

A wake-up earthquake

As my housemates and I sat around the dinner table tonight, we heard a loud bang and then felt some quick shaking. It was an earthquake, though in the seconds after the rumbling, I fought hard not to go into a state of surreal denial. What did we have to do next? Should we stand in the doorway? What's the chance of an aftershock? When a minute or so had passed without any tangible shakes, I pulled out my Treo 300 and surfed around to find some info on the earthquake. It wasn't easy to find any information immediately after a quake, at least from a little cellphone/web browser; I did finally land on the "Most Recent Event" ShakeMap page. Yes, indeed, there had been a quake 6 km SE of Berkeley.

Another wakeup call, no doubt. The power outages out east already made me wonder how prepared we are for natural disaster. It's time to double check our preparations.

When I hear from two trusted sources....

This evening, my housemate Ildi asked me whether I had read Jon Carroll's column from yesterday. "He mentions weblogs." Of course, I had to look up the piece, which starts:

I suppose blogs have had their day as a populist phenomenon. Democratic candidates for president have blogs now, and that's pretty much the death knell for cutting-edge status. If John Kerry has one, it's not a trend, it's an appliance.

But I think that's true only of blogs produced in the United States. In other countries, the Internet is still a revolutionary tool, a place for information censored in every other medium in the nation. Vox populi, and no pop-up ads. It's 1991 all over again.

Carroll goes on to commend Baghadad Burning, a blog that comes ostensibly from Iraq. "Oh, isn't that the blog that Lloyd mentioned on his blog recently?" -- yes, indeed.

Now that both Ildi and Lloyd have referred me to the same Carroll column, I am paying attention....

So often these days, having something mentioned by one friend is not enough for it to register. Once two friends independently mention a website or new item, then my attention becomes engaged. I'm a bit sad about this reality; shouldn't the recommendation of one friend enough for me to do something? Well, maybe -- but I'm just in dire need of my filters.

Back at the PFA with Fassbinder

Tonight, I saw The Merchants of Four Seasons, my first film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The Pacific Film Archives is hosting a Fassbinder retrospective. I blame the PFA for getting me hooked on Kurosawa in December and making me a fan of immersing myself in the oeuvre of a given director.

I quite enjoyed the film tonight; I don't have much to say about Fassbinder yet. I may end up hanging out at the PFA over the next week....

truth, lies, and the blogosphere

The piece by Steve Winn in today's SF Chronicle about stand-up performers made me ponder whether bloggers who talk about themselves (like I do here) raise the same issues as the performers:

What are we actually getting when performers stand up and talk about themselves? Where does offstage end and onstage begin in first-person theater?

The answers are complex -- bedeviling to performers and directors and endlessly alluring to audiences. We're instinctively drawn to stories that arrive in the envelope of truth.

Believing that the artist standing before us actually lived through the experiences he or she re-enacts has a kind of testimonial power. We become de facto participants and fellow travelers in shows by Spalding Gray, Marga Gomez, Reno, Tanya Shaffer, Tim Miller or anyone else who chooses to stand and deliver autobiographically onstage.

I've always wondered

Although it's way too late to write coherently about the "problem of evil" (How is it possible that a perfectly good and omnipotent God allow evil?), I did want write a bit about one particular spin on the problem that I've been particularly puzzled by as a Christian. If there is a heaven, then why do we have to go through this present age of suffering? It seems to me that heaven (or the new earth) will be a place in which humans will be not do evil but who are still free beings. So if such a state can exist, why could not God have been created right from the start? Genesis 1-3 shows that humans were created innnocent but ultimately fell, leading to the rest of history. But was the fall inevitable? That is, are free beings destined to become corrupted. No, according to traditional Christian teaching -- Jesus is an example of a free but perfectly good God/Man.

The reason I dwell on this particular spin on the problem of evil is that evil is often explained as the consequence of having beings having real freedom. So I picture a time in which we will be gloriously free but gloriously not wanting to sin -- that heavenly state. But can such a state really exist? In heaven, will humans never do wrong again? What's so special about heaven?

But is history the journey that must be taken to get to the glorious future? So it would seem that there is something very special about history, about our lives, our journeys that God deemed as worthwhile in some sense.

I have rambled here, struggling to express the question I have. Maybe I have to try again later....

Running for Britannica

My parents were and are generous to a fault. The spared no expense to get my sisters and me the educational opportunities that we needed and wanted to succeed. Two particular gifts stand out in my own mind as specific and profoundly influential shapers of my own life. I'll tell you about one today: a copy of the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

I have only vague memories of how we ended up with the 30 volumes of that incredible set of books. I see images of a door-to-door encyclopaedia sales man, a contract signed in multiple parts ordering the Britannica. I was ten years old at the time, and I couldn't wait to get my Britannica set.

The day that it was set to arrive, I ran home. I was not the type of kid to run too often -- but on that day, nothing was going to keep me from bursting through the door and racing down to the basement of the house in which there were three very heavy boxes of books.

I loved the EB. So many days would I just take down the volumes and thumb through the pages, diving into the mystery of things I couldn't quite grasp but knew to be incredibly fascinating. One day, I swore, I would understand this all.

If it weren't for the EB (along with the reams of yearbooks to keep the EB "up to date") -- a big expense for my parents who were part-restaurant owners -- I would not have: 1) gotten into the big questions about how human knowledge is organized, 2) created an independent study course as a senior to study the Britannica outline of human knowledge (called the Propaedia -- the brainchild of Mortimer Adler), 3) become so disappointed now with the online EB 4) become so curious about so many things as I am today.

I still have a copy of the EB Propaedia on my shelf today in Berkeley -- though not all 30 volumes.

Why I'm so into Uncle Vanya: Take One

Besides the magnificent oeuvre of Bach, the work of art that has spoken most profoundly and insistently to me the last several years has been Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, as particularly manifested in Louis Malle's film Vanya on 42nd Street, which in turn, was based David Mamet's adaptation. I've long wanted to write in depth about Uncle Vanya but have yet to muster the focus and energy to do so.

But I feel that I'm entering a new phase in my life in which I'm letting go of some old things to embrace a new vision. Part of that transition, I feel, will be aided in looking at why Uncle Vanya has meant so much to me and why I now feel the desire to move on.

So now I want to play a bit.

I know that I cannot write a finished essay on Uncle Vanya and my life in one go. But I want to use this space to sketch some impressions, ideas, and thoughts on the way to writing that essay or essays. What follows below, then, is "Take One". (I don't know whether anything I write below will have much to do with Uncle Vanya per se....)

---

Ever have the experience of being understood by a film? Weird isn't it? That's how I've felt about Vanya on 42nd Street since the second time I saw it. The first time, I fell asleep and except for the very last monologue, the film was too long.

The characters talk, kinda like in real life
But just a tad more thoughtful
No a lot more thoughtful.

Time has slowed down
Lethargy has set in
And we see our people
Suspended

Usually, they are moving too fast
Too many patients to heal
Too much hay to produce
Too many articles to write
But when you stop
Oh no, don't stop
You begin to feel

The pain that does not go away
The sense of lives wasted
With no hope in sight -- ever
Well, maybe in heaven,
If you can trust in such a thing

Love unrequited
Bride lost
Big visions, big dreams
Reduced
From the thousand year plan
To drunken steps nowhere

Normally we don't talk
About Big Ideas
Mortality, Ultimate Worth
The Judgement of History
Of Future Generations

It's so nice(?) -- no, healing
Freeing, Gripping
To hear real people
Talk
Cry
Sigh
Laugh
Despair
Hope

How we deceive ourselves
Seeing neither the bad
Or the good
Or just the plain human
In ourselves?

The crisis in me
I have dubbed
The pre-midlife midlife crisis
Found voice in Vanya.

Many have gone before me.
Many come after me.
I am gripped by
What?

I was a scholar too
So I thought
It's hard to give up
Dreams of being well-known

I want to be that beautiful man
To be loved as such
But I am found out
To be no better
Than all who came before
And all who come after.

What is my drink?
My unconfessed dream?

Academics don't change much
In 100 years, do they?
We/They still spew forth
Like a farm machine.
We are a funny, funny bunch.

If I can laugh at myself
Then indeed I will be free
Or freer than all that I have ever known.

What do women want?
Actually, what do men want?
I don't even know what I want.

Some good advice on a Labor Day

From a Salon interview with Garrison Keillor:

If you could give me one piece of advice, what would it be?

Get outside more and take long walks. Much sadness is caused by lack of sunlight and exercise and visual stimulation.