Oh no, not funny--it's WITTY, or CLEVER.

Happiest of birthdays to Dorothy Parker!

"Dorothy Parker's Poetic Sneakers"

Life Stories, Books, and Links

A Class I'm Hoping to Take

COS 109 Computers in Our World

Computers are all around us. How does this affect the world we live in? This course is a broad introduction to computing technology for humanities and social sciences students. Topics will be drawn from current issues and events, and will include discussion of how computers work; what programming is and why it is hard; how the Internet and the Web work; security and privacy.

Prerequisites and Restrictions: Not intended for science/engineering/mathematics students.

"The Perfect Secretary"

"The perfect secretary should forget that she is a human being, and be the most completely efficient aid at all times and on all subjects. Her object is to coordinate with her employer's endeavor, and not make any intrusions which would be more likely to affect him as hurdles than as helps.
She should respond to his requirements exactly as a machine responds to the touch of a lever or accelerator . . ."

Emily Post's Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage; copyright 1945

Some subtitles from Emily Post's Etiquette

The Kitchen Finds Itself in Society
To You Who Are Mrs. Three-in-One
But No Shutters That Bang!
Bacon
Fashion and Fat
Have Silver That Shines or None
Favors Too Much Taken for Granted

"The Heart of the Whole Domestic Problem!"

"Whether a house runs smoothly or roughly depends entirely upon the personal adjustments made between the lady of the house and the one or many whom she employs. This is the heart of the whole domestic problem. I think we all have certain neighbors whose houses suggest the smoothness, the tranquility, and the beauty of a sun-dappled mountain brook. And we can also name others who live in a storm center of perpetual upheaval. We know, too, that wealth is not the important factor."

Emily Post's Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage; copyright 1945

When misogyny is sort of okay--except, you know, not.

Let us all greet the sun and rise in recognition of Ernest Hemingway's birthday. Ha!

Found Object

found in a copy of Great Books by David Denby

Found Object

found in a copy of Earthworks by Brian W. Aldiss

Questions from a Myers-Briggs Test

Are you more interested in
a) what is actual b) what is possible

Is it worse
a) have your head in the clouds b) be in a rut

Are you more comfortable in making
a) critical judgments b) value judgments

Are you more satisfied having
a) a finished product b) work in progress

Which appeals to you more:
a) consistency of thought b) harmonious relationships

Common sense is
a) usually reliable b) frequently questionable

Are you inclined to take what is said
a) more literally b) more figuratively

Do you value in yourself more that you are
a) reasonable b) devoted

Do you prize in yourself
a) a strong hold on yourself b) a vivid imagination

Are you drawn more to
a) fundamentals b) overtones

(One of the frustrating things about this test comes up when you think about the relative ambiguity of these terms. For example, one question asks whether you are more "practical" or "fanciful"--what on earth do those words mean? Practical from a personal point of view or from the view of the general population? . . . But that's probably just another part of the test.)

Edward F. Albee said

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.


Who is Edward F Albee?
No really, who is he?

Caring for your friendly neighborhood introvert.

In March 2003, Jonathan Rauch published this little bit of writing in The Atlantic Monthly. It is called "Caring for Your Introvert: The habits and needs of a little-understood group." Voila!

Livres d'Artistes . . .

. . . at the New York Public Library.

Here's also something nice by Max Ernst.

22 May 1859

Today is Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday.
It might also, therefore, be considered the birthday of the inimitable Sherlock Holmes himself.
I first read him when I saw a book at the library whose spine said, The Essential Boy's Sherlock Holmes (or something like that).
I read the title and said, "Aha! You sexists, I'll show YOU!" So I read the whole thing. And then I read the rest of the books in the Teen Section. Then I ventured into ADULT FICTION, stood on a chair, and day by week by month read all of the big dusty books off of that top shelf.
The Sign of the Four is one of my favorites. Ahhh, scratch that--they're all really good.
These people like him just as much as I do.

Hello, Boris.

The Reading of the Manifest.

The Fair.

Boris Kustodiev (Kustodiyev) painted these things.

He was part of the Mir Iskusstva (look here too).

This is a page of more images of his work.

Poetreeeeeee

I like these.

By Michael Drayton (1563-1631).

By Robert Browning (1812-1889). I was actually only given a cutting of this one at first, but I like the whole thing (even if I don't understand it).

By Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). Trivia! Some of her unpublished poems were recently collected and published by Alice Quinn (look!). It's caused something of an uproar--if a poet had the chance to publish some of her work, and didn't, should people root through her things after she's dead and shove them in the public's face? The Denver Post had a nifty article about the problem. And here's something from The Atlantic Monthly (sigh) published in January.

Heaven help me.

This is what people actually do at the school I'm going to. And I hope that what he's wearing isn't an informal uniform.

I learned something new!

(Remember that bhajan that was called "Aiso Ko Udaar Jag Maahi"? Turns out that that line, which is the sthai, or primary theme, means "The Lord is all merciful.")

The story of Mira Bai feels similar to the stories of the Catholic saints--you know, we can visit Saint Catherine's house, but we don't know if she really loved God when she was three, or what exactly she was like. Historical facts get all mixed up with oral tradition, and literary tradition, and the beautiful ideas painters have long after the people are dead.

But we do know some things almost certainly--Mira Bai (Meera Bai) was a nobel woman in Rajasthan, an area in India. She was married to the king-to-be at thirteen, but the family didn't take to her and made trouble. And here's the good part, the not-necessarily-factual part: she said she couldn't really be a wife to the king, because she had already dedicated her whole heart to Lord Krishna. Her husband died, and she did not commit satti (also sati, suttee) but instead wandered Rajasthan, preaching and writing poetry and music. She is credited with at least 200 bhajans, though some attribute more than 1300 to her. Her writing is called a whole bunch of things--"mystical love poetry" or "love poetry" seem to be repeated the most. In any case, she had an overwhelming love for Krishna, to whom she devoted her life.

To learn more (IT'S SO INTERESTING!):
Here is a basic summary.
Here is a very comprehensive website, with good links to other respectable sites, where you can read her writing or listen to some of the bhajans.
Here is more, and here, and here is Wikipedia's take.
And here is an interesting one by a believer (like reading about St Catherine from a Catholic traditionalist).

To Use Instead of Ipecac:

Purchased at the library.

Published in 1945.

This is JUST the kind of information I need!

Please notice the name of the chapter.

I think this was my favorite.
I will take this to the scanner soon--there is so much hilarity yet to be discovered!

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!!!

Who is this man?

(bum bum bummm)

A Conversation in Each Bottle!

Check out these ads for Grand Marnier--

Who gets paid to come up with this?!??

I sure do love this man--

--Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Bear with me here, on behalf of this GENIUS:

Tom Faulkner writes about Garcia Marquez's short story "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings":

"The problem García Márquez presents us is not just What if angels were real? but What if they were real, and nothing like we expect them to be? He creates a tension between the old man's magical and human qualities, leaving us unable to fit the character into a comfortable mental category. The old man is far too human and decrepit to match our cultural image of angels: perfect, powerful, majestic, immortal. Nor does he appear to be a heavenly messenger, sent by God as a sign of momentous changes; his presence seems to be purely an accident of the weather, without purpose or meaning. Nonetheless, he certainly has his magical qualities, and is even credited with miracles (though, like everything else about him, they are disturbing, and fail to satisfy expectations). However miraculous his nature, origins, or abilities may be, he is stranded here, and relatively powerlessan exile from his former life, at the mercy of strangers. The villagers must somehow account for him, and because no one understands his language, he is unable (and apparently unwilling) to explain himself. Several possible interpretations arise, but most of them are clearly absurd, telling us more about the villagers' superstitions and beliefs than about the old man's true nature. They are rendered with playful humor, ensuring that the reader will appreciate the irrational and illusory basis of such folk wisdom. Yet our superior, conventional methods of logic and reason don't seem any more useful in reaching a secure explanation. The old man remains a stubborn, intriguing mystery, both magical and ordinary, impossible to decipher but undeniably there."

and,

"By combining factual and imaginative descriptions, and seeming to treat them with equal credibility, the author suggests that both ways of knowing are valid, perhaps even necessary to achieving a balanced understanding."

and,

"Works of magic realism are both praised and criticized for their childlike wonder, their depiction of a world of almost-infinite possibilities, where the supernatural and the everyday take on the same vivid intensity. But they are not fairy tales or two-dimensional fantasies; they offer no clear lessons, simple events, or sharp distinctions between reality and magic. Wondering includes both delight and confusion, the struggle to comprehend experiences that challenge our understanding, and don't fit our accustomed map of reality. Far more things are possible in the world of magic realism, including miracles, contradictions, and logical impossibilities but this also means that more meanings are possible, and that all meanings will be elusive and uncertain."

I know that's a lot of text, but c'mon!! Have you read One Hundred Years of Solitude?

If anyone thought that Kant was boring . . .

. . . prepare to change your mind. Turn the volume up really loud. Courtesy of Jenn.

I was reading, and I learned something new.

The bhajan is a traditional Hindu devotional song.

Most were written between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries as a result of the Bhakti revivalist movement.

This movement's center was the idea that to attain spiritual salvation a person had only to attain a pure and selfless love of God.

For some interesting discussion, see Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, and Deuteronomy 6:4-9.

For more on the Bhakti movement:
from Answers.com
from Wikipedia

To listen: Here (with RealPlayer) (I like the one labeled "Aiso ko udaar")

Psh.

Happy Birthday to Billy Shakespeare . . . goshdarned misogynist . . . .

Article

Last summer, my teacher at the Iowa Young Writers' Studio was Kevin Moffett. This is an article he wrote in The Believer (a magazine related to McSweeney's)--the most important part is the list. Just take a quick look, okay? Here.

(In case you love Kevin's writing and want more, he was also published in McSweeney's Issue 16, and 40 Stories Quarterly, and The Chicago Tribune, and plenty of other places. He's working on a novel right now, though says his little son is such a distraction it's taking him longer than he thought.)

Agree or Disagree?

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love. (Socrates, quoted by Plato)

birth day

Happy birthday to Kenneth Grahame, one of my favorite authors.

Escapism

http://www.trevorvanmeter.com/flyguy/

Good things people've said:

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was the coordinator and part-author of the first real encyclopedia. Here is a beautiful line I found in his section on The Slave Trade: "Men and their liberty are not objects of commerce; they can be neither sold nor bought nor paid for at any price."
In his section on Fanaticim: "Fanaticism has done much more harm to the world than impiety. What do impious people claim? To free themselves of a yoke, while fanatics want to extend their chains over all the earth. Infernal zealomania!" Ha ha!

Also very cool is Caesare Beccaria (1738-1794), who wrote about torture in On Crimes and Punishments: "No man can be called guilty before a judge has sentenced him, nor can society deprive him of public protection before it has been decided that he has in fact violated the conditions under which such protection was accorded him. What right is it, then, if not simply that of might, which empowers a judge to inflict punishment on a citizen while doubt still remains as to his guilt or innocence? Here is the dilemma, which is nothing new: the fact of the crime is either certain or uncertain; if certain, all that is due is the punishment established by the laws, and tortures are useless because the criminal's confession is useless; if uncertain, then one must not torture the innocent, for such, according to the laws, is a man whose crimes are not yet proved . . ." Someone ought to put this on a billboard--feels very relevant, to me at least.

Speaking of Might is Right, The Once and Future King by TH White should be required reading. Take a week in the summer----agh, such good writing! I would post some Pat Conroy to show you bad writing, but I think it might make me vomit if I were to type it.

Feliz Navidad! (er, that is . . . uhh . . .)

Happy birthday to Theodor Seuss Geisel--may we all be blessed with the ability to write both beautiful and hilarious childrens books as well as dirty adult cartoons . . . and political satire, and military educational films, and successful ad campaigns . . .

T. S. Eliot said:

"Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is pefectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."

(courtesy of friend Zach S.)

Knowledge is POWER!!!!

"MRI" stands for "magnetic resonance imaging." Your body is exposed to radio waves while in a magnetic field, and a picture is created by energy emitted from hydrogen atoms in the body. Cool!

The mridanga is a drum from India that is shaped like an elongated barrel and has tuned heads of different diameters.

The msasa tree is a small shrubby tree from Africa that is flat-topped; it grows in savanna forests of South and Eastern Africa (Tanzania, Mozambique, etc).

Also, did you know Tanzania is The United Republic of Tanzania, made of Tanganyika (the mainland) and Zanzibar (an island)? Except Zanzibar isn't a very good republic, because it's more of a theocracy that kills a lot of people. Ah! And Tanzania's first president was actually a widely respected literary figure--he translated some Shakespeare into kiswahili.

Bon Anniversaire

Happy Birthday to Chaim Potok, who was born on this day in 1929. He wrote The Chosen.

I have a question for you.

How do you define fear? Is it an inherently rational or irrational thing (if either)? How do we as individuals and cultures deal with fear?
I've written a speech that claims many fears are driven by very basic fears--fear of pain, rejection, judgement, love, etc. And these are what keep us from living full lives. I want someone to disagree with me!
Any responses welcome and desired.

Paragraph, 5 February

Part of an attempt to flesh out a character for a story:

"Ms. Plank grew purple wisteria across the front of her house. The women who owned the house before her wore down everything to the cleanest of bones; now the flowers hung their violet petals in heavy sighs around all the windows, draped over each other, growing fat in the sun. Ms. Plank wore gray flannel pencil skirts and primly patterned cardigans. In the mornings, before a mirror, she ran a fine-toothed comb through her wet hair and ribboned it at the nape of her neck. She wore shoes to conceal her slender feet. Her arms, too, were shaped like willow limbs.
Ms. Plank owned a hat with a broad brim, which she was forever adjusting with agitated fingers. In the late afternoon she stood on the wide porch, poised before three men in rocking chairs."

Paragraph, 1 February

(Maybe best read as a prose poem?)

"Everyone smells of the earth, barefooted, walking from the water with the sun doming us a yellow hemisphere washed over the bright blue half-globe, and behind them the water groans at the loss of enthusiastic limbs laughing in its waves and spilling red canoes from its banks to tip in the kelpy, fishy center like hilarious thieves--everyone smells of the earth, breathless and barefoot and drying as we move through the coarse sand paths, grass between our toes and laughter smeared on our faces."

"Oh, Troxel!"

To explain Avana's and my laughter, here is the first paragraph in full. A sequel will be coming later tonight:

As her feet pressed into the plush purple carpet and the silk robe slid from her shoulders, and Luigi purred into her ear, Tafoyla threw back her long, silky red ravishing hair and cried out, "Never! You shall never have my father's diamond mines, although you have most cruelly killed my former lover Troxel with your vicious knifefighting skills, I will never love you!" Luigi grasped her arm and hissed menacingly into her ear, "You will love me! and I will have your father's fortune even if I have to kill another hundred men to get it!" "No, no, no!" cried Tafoyla breathlessly, "I refuse most categorically!"

Faulkner, dude.

I've been reading and analyzing Faulkner's "Barn Burning" for a few days, and I have to admit, I like the guy. For me, his sentences require multiple reads, but it's worth it. In the spirit of exercise, I wrote a long sentence for my paragraph.

"I burned myself--scalded with boiling tea so that my skin's been smudged into ridges and boils and stained with the scent of peppermint, almost pungent and sharp, its already-scarred thickness further purpled and roughed by heat, which makes my fingers twitch at sight of a mug of steaming liquid."

So it wasn't very long. Oh well.

Words to drink

Not my words--recent paragraphs have been unbeautiful struggles to finish sentences.

Here is a sonnet by John Donne, one of my favorite poets. If I am not mistaken, this is one of his Holy Sonnets, some of my favorite poems. Altogether, he seems a pretty nifty guy, and certainly handles the English language very well.
If you are so inclined, I recommend reading it aloud. I know I like to.

"Death be not proud, though some have called thee"

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and souls delivery.
Thou are slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

I also love especially this one.

Evelyn Waugh said

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."

un autre paragraphe (Sunday's)

excerpt:
"The bus was a large space of white and orange and neat dark rows of seats in two lines. Our hair--light, dark, curly, clean--stood out against the rest and our arms were stretched out careless on the seatbacks. The windows were bright striated streaks of light. On the way back home, we fell asleep in ones or twos, leaning on ripped faux-leather seats, and warm shoulders, and cold windowpanes."

I think I write fiction because it's so much easier to make things up than attempt to recreate such an intricate situation of reality! Memory, distance, and/or time make things infinitely easier--some kind of separation allows for a blurriness that then must be filled by an action, description, or character that is a compromise from truth. Maybe it's all about compromise--that's why trying to write "truth" is tough, because I can't stand the thought of not conveying everything perfectly to the readers. Sheesh.

Fifth Paragraph

Yesterday's paragraph was remotely connected to an unfinished story, so I didn't bother posting.
The first sentence of today's was written around 6:30 a.m., on the drive to the Greeley West Forensics tournament. I was (of course) napping, and woke up really quickly and looked past my friend's profile to see this weird vision:

"Far in the distance were the white lights of a parking lot, stretched over a flat gray expanse like a net of glowworms. Through the haze of a sleepy inertia, we saw the land lying in the cool metal window frame, moving by with the slow stretch of arms in the morning."

I dunno, blame it on the myopia.
If you've read Robert Pirsig's monumental rant (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) then you've heard his opinions about landscape seen through window frames (contrasted, of course, with the ultimate superiority of motorcyle-viewing). I'm pretty sure he and I disagree. Any good road trip stories?

Happy birthday to Anton P. Chekhov!

Speaking of femininity . . .

Ah, for those who are still here after the title--
Ibanez and I were talking about Neruda, and Garcia Marquez, and Latin American writing in general and how strongly it is able to reflect a more feminine side of life/living/truth. Here's something from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first volume of autobiography (called Living to Tell the Tale, translated by the inimitable Edith Grossman):

"I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the family and to the many in our service who ministered to my childhood. They had strong characters and tender hearts, and they treated me with the naturalness of the Earthly Paradise." [then skipping a few paragraphs, in which he speaks of, among other instances, how when he was about six he saw one of the maids giving birth in the laundering room, with the aid of all the other maids] "In any case, I think my intimacy with the maids could be the origin of a thread of secret communication that I believe I have with women and that throughout my life has allowed me to feel more comfortable and sure with them than with men. It may also be the source of my convictions that they are the ones who maintain the world while we men throw it into disarray with our historic brutality."

Reading this made me want to reread everything of his that I've read! I have been thinking, recently, that I like to get to read books and authors the same way it is interesting to get to know people--everyone has something we can empathize with, and everyone has at least one thing we can find interesting. It doesn't matter what's absolutely true, really--if I read Garcia Marquez's books differently now, is that so wrong? This isn't explaining it well. In any case, I'd like your thoughts.

Paragrafo Numero Tre

An excerpt:
". . . unroll the strip of teabags like a roll of candy buttons. I would rip each open and pour the specks of scent into my hands, lift them to my face and rub them between my fingers, so that for weeks the wrinkles of my knuckles would smell of peppermint and chamomile, and the deep lines of life and death and fortune in my palms would be stained green . . ."

Le paragraphe numero deux

"The discussion of age must always result in the tossing of hands and an exclamation of impossibility. For in a discussion between two, the advantages and disadvantages are evenly divided: half has lived further into their thread of years, while the other half has not yet been tainted by compromise or fatigue. Half have seen, and felt, and believed and disbelieved more than the other, while the other sees and feels and believes everything for the first time, all afresh. Half are filled with history and stand high on their accumulated years; the other is unweighted by time, still filling themselves with truth and ideas. How are we then to frame our speaking, when each half moves within their own strong lens and thier own strong netting of truth? We can't, perhaps."

I have no ideas on this question--and seeing as I'm currently in that state of overdoing the cutting of the cord to the family, I'd like to know what you think. (flatter me and ignore the grammar mistakes)

Paragraph Numero Uno

Today's paragraph was a recreation of one of my favorite Iowa-exercises--writing as badly as you possibly can, to break down any fear you have of writing badly. Never underestimate the power of pulp. Here's an excerpt:

Tafoyla threw back her long, silky, red, ravishing hair and cried out, "Never! You shall never have my father's diamond mines, although you have most cruelly killed my former lover Troxel with your vicious knife-fighting skills, I will never love you!"

We have Avana to thank for the names. You have to imagine 'Tafoyla' with a southern Jersey accent to make it even funnier. Maybe tomorrow I'll write something, I dunno, good.

Postscript: Happy Birthday to Virginia Woolf!

Micawber's Quote for the Day

"Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider." - Francis Bacon, Essays