Emily Dickenson's Boat

This is a random note on the hilarity of poetic meter.

Teaching high school students serves to remind me of the little things that I learned in high school. When I was in the ninth and eleventh grades, I had a wonderful English teacher who peppered his classes with colorful stories and eccentricities. I remember that he said once, "I don't lie. The stories that I am recounting simply change as I tell them." Although his own stories-- often involving intellectualism, chess, and Italian wine-- were perhaps flavored by his embellishments, his insights on poetry and literature were sound and thoughtful.

One of the more amusing anecdotes (about English) that he related is that the majority of Emily Dickenson's poetry (written in alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter [1]) can be sung to the theme song for Gilligan's Island. In class that day, we sang "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" in that manner. As Cerinthus pointed out, "Adrift! A little boat adrift!" fits the song quite aptly.

Endnotes

1. I rechecked the names of the meter at this website.

Touch at Your Own Risk

This morning I went on a mini-adventure to try to find some of the ingredients for a special holiday appetizer [1].

One of the things that characterizes the holiday season, according to much of the buzz on SparkPeople.com, is holiday parties, and specifically "the dreaded potluck" [2]. I really enjoy cooking, so I love bringing food. The problem is, that party-organizers always seem to ask my family to bring appetizers, which tend to be pretty boring (although my mother has come up with some clever things in the past). This holiday season I found an appetizer that I wanted to make: the Gỏi Cuốn from My Year on the Grill.

The Gỏi Cuốn are non-fried vegetarian spring rolls-- essentially the salad rolls from my favorite Thai place by my Alma Mater. These wraps are yummy and full of vegetables with a spicy dipping sauce. In order to make them, one needs rice-paper wraps in order to make them. In order to do that, my mom and I took a trip to the local Japanese (but really more general Asian) grocery store.

I borrowed this picture from My Year on the Grill.

The first thing I noticed about the store were the 20 lb bags of rice. The best part, was that there were not only 20 lb bags of white rice and brown rice, but rice from different regions (California seemed to be the most common) as well as sweet white and brown rice (which looks more like seeds than actual rice), different sizes of rice grain, red rice, black/forbidden rice, and various mixtures. There was even brown jasmine rice! I've never heard of brown jasmine rice. I also noticed that there was some wonderful cookware, including every size and shape of rice cooker imaginable.

My favorite moments came in the fish and shellfish section. On the pre-packaged shelves, there were some lovely cuts of salmon sitting beside what proclaimed to be fabulous cuts of squid. The most amusing part, in my opinion, was the shellfish. There were tanks upon tanks of crabs and lobster. The tanks themselves were kind of sad-- the crabs and lobsters were pretty crowded. However, there was a gigantic...vat (for lack of a better word)...which contained some kind of shellfish. I did not actually peer in because I was distracted by the sign above which said "Touch at your own risk. We are not responsible for your injury." Suddenly, I was struck by one of those ridiculous impulses to stick my hand in and see if something bit it, but luckily I refrained. The sign totally cracked me up.

Cerinthus later told me that I should make a comic strip out of my life and that he could totally imagine the cartoon version of me sticking my finger into the tank, getting pinched by a lobster, and saying "this one's fresh!" Ponticus introduced Cerinthus to Questionable Content a few months ago, and Cerinthus is clearly addicted.

Most of the rest of the trip was without incident. We found the rice wraps.  As we were browsing around we also found wonton and gyoza wraps [3]. We also wandered by the hot food section in which a very snappily-dressed Japanese man looked at my mom suspiciously, as if she might be tempted to impede his efficiency.

I am really excited about making the Gỏi Cuốn. I will report back!

Endnotes

1. Obviously the term "adventure" is amusing after my last blogpost on Sartre's Nausea.
2. Personally, I do not attend that many holiday parties and I have never been particularly partial to holiday food, so (since I almost entirely stopped eating holiday cookies) I do not gain that much weight during the holidays.
3. I love vegitable gyoza. if anyone has a recipe, please send it my way. I saw a couple having it at the table next to Cerinthus and me at my favorite Japanese place near my Alma Mater and I ordered it on a whim. This was definitely the right decision.

Time Worms

Last night I spent most of the night helping my friend out with her Sartre paper. I have never read any Sartre. She simply needed a sounding board for ideas and someone to help crystalize her thoughts into a more coherent form. Although it may not seem like it sometimes on this blog, I do have some talent for extracting the essence of and repackaging thoughts. We spent a long time on the phone and then on skype-chat trying to figure it out.

Although I do not miss the stress and horror of finals week, I miss the intense discussions it created between students. Most of my friends who are still in school have this crazed vibrancy about them. Staying up late last night to talk over this existentialist work reminded me of some of the reasons that I like academia. That rush of excitement over suddenly comprehending something, phrasing a sentence artfully, or writing something both for a class and because it is fulfilling is fabulous. I am not a fan of existentialism, so far as I know, but I enjoyed the process nonetheless.

In my senior year of college, I started a group reading the first half of Being and Time. Although I had little time to spend on it and I probably should not have started it in the first place, the group of people who came (including the wonderful Ovid II) were wonderful and the discussions were fun and productive. I did not read Heidegger nearly as closely as I should have, and I would like to try reading it again sometime in the next two years. Hopefully soon (even my Greek history reading and my Horace has fallen by the way-side a bit). One of the things that someone mentioned was that Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which I was given a few years ago, was considered "a brilliant misunderstanding of Heidegger's Being and Time" and I am very excited to read it at some point.

I have more Μήδεια to read tonight, which is one of the fun things that I've been doing with old friends from my Alma Mater. However, it's much less fun to read Greek when I'm sick because my brain does not process it very well (and I hate that I'm still sick).

The Digital Age: Internet Access and Education

This title is more abstract and promising than my actual thoughts at the moment. I have been having a lot of trouble with my internet access, so posting may be spotty over the next couple of days. However, I have been reading some interesting thoughts on education.

When I finished Phrasikleia while I was proctoring an exam on Sunday, I began reading a free kindle book that I downloaded called The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. The book is a study of sorts, done with collaboration from UC Berkley and Duke and I think published by MIT that discusses the nature of education in an era of participatory technology. The study itself was placed on a website for a year where readers could leave comments, and many of these suggestions were incorporated into the document itself.

I have really enjoyed the study thus far. It notes that although there is a significant amount of participatory technology available and some of it has been put to educational use (like wikipedia), teachers and institutions are still focusing on the top-down form of IT (information technology) rather than the participatory technology platforms.

I think this educational dilemma is very interesting. There is obviously a lot of value in a top-down system of learning, but as the study points out the US has a ridiculously high dropout rate and perhaps some of the participatory technology (often not accessible to the type of low-income students who drop out of school due to lack of computer and internet resources) could be incorporated into the educational system to help update it and increase graduation rates.

Some of these ideas about participatory technology are already being employed by educators such as Sugata Mitra (see my blogposts on his TED talk: #1, #2). I also discuss some of them in my blogpost on textbooks and opencourseware. I am excited to read the rest of the study and see where it goes.

Kindle DX: A Side-by-Side Comparison

My mother's college roommate came into town this week and stayed with us. She used to be a librarian and a library sciences professor. Although she has some limited vision, her vision is so low that she is legally blind and has not been able to read a book in almost 15 years.

Last year, she and my mom bought my Kindle DX for me as a gift (which was lovely). My mom's college roommate finally decided to buy herself one of the new generation of Kindle DXs and she loves it. Although the buttons are almost impossible for her to read, she is learning how to use them by feel and by increasing the font to the second-to-largest size, she has been able to read again.

Since she was staying with us, I got to play around with her new kindle and see the differences first hand, although I did not try out the internet on it, so I cannot report on that aspect.

There were some notable great developments.

1. The new Kindle DX is 50% brighter. There was a significant difference in a side-by-side comparison between the two devices.
2. The new kindle has global 3G, which is fabulous.
3. The pages seem to turn a little faster, although that might be my imagination.

Some things I'm still holding out for:

1. The new 6 inch kindle has an improved PDF system, so that one can actually put notes on individual PDF pages. Seriously-- this is much more useful on the kindle DX because of the larger screen size. Why did they not add this new software to the kindle DX? It makes no sense to me.
2. The font size on menus cannot be modified. As amazon has successfully marketed the device to those with low-vision, it would be useful to let them see their menus as well as the books.
3. You cannot have the dictionary look up a word while the text-to-speech feature is in use or even paused. You have to actually stop the reading and look up the word before resuming.

My Celebrity Crush... (a Christmas Show in Review)

Sorry Cerinthus...I swear it's totally innocent!

I have a friend who I consider to be a pop culture maven-- or at least in comparison with the rest of my friends. The other day, he said to me, "you know who my new celebrity crush is? Lyndsy Fonseca, the girl from How I Met Your Mother." I thought this was pretty random, but it occurred to me that I had not really had a celebrity crush until high school. Until last night, I remembered that I do actually have one, although the term celebrity might be a questionable name for this person. Back to this in a moment...

One of my mom's favorite holiday traditions for the last few years has been going to Aimee Mann's holiday variety show. I have never been home from school in time to be able to see it. This year, of course, I was home, so I was able to go.

The show was lots of fun. Aimee Mann was cheery and charming; she was her usual awkward self wearing over-size,d black-framed glasses and a blazer and tie with skin tight jeans and riding boots. There is an endearing hesitance to her demeanor as though she is surreptitiously enjoying herself, but does not want to make a spectacle out of it. She sang a bunch of Chirstmas songs with her band and with various guests such as Paul Tompkins and Ben Gibbard, the lead singer from Death Cab for Cutie. She even sang a New Year's Eve duet with Jeff Goldbloom. I really enjoyed the Status Quo song "It's Christmas Time" that Aimee Mann and Ben Gibbard played together.

Patton Oswalt and Michael Penn did a couple of songs and Patton Oswalt did a comedy most of which was quite funny (although I cannot repeat either the song they did together or any of the jokes here for fear of violating the "no adult content" rating for my site). She ended with what is reputed to be her favorite Christmas song, "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," that she performed as a duet with Paul Tompkins. It was adorable.

Amusingly enough, Paul Tompkins was dressed a little like Cerinthus does at Chrismas; he wore a stunning  crimson silk vest and a slightly old-fashioned suit with a bowtie. However, Paul Tompkins sported a frighting and silly mustache that ruined the elegance of the look.

A larger group of musicians than usual backed up Aimee Mann. The second they came on stage, my focus zoomed in on one particular person: Jamie Edwards. Jamie Edwards (whose name I literally discovered five minutes before writing this) is an incredible keyboard and synth player, and apparently also plays lead guitar incredibly well (as he demonstrated last night). He looks like a cross between Hugh Laurie as Dr. House and a good friend of mine from college and he even dresses a bit like House, wearing a blazer and jeans. There is a quiet flourish and an arrogance-tinged elegance to the way that he plays. It's really fabulous to watch. He seems to enjoy himself up on stage (he ended up laughing so hard during one of Paul Tompkin's jokes that I saw him quietly wipe his eyes with a smile before returning to playing lead guitar). I remember the last time I saw him I had a similar reaction: he's just incredible. At her last concert, I would have sworn he looked right at me staring at him and smiled, except I am almost positive that they cannot see the audience from the stage at the venue at which I saw Aimee Mann perform.

I do not know almost anything about Jamie Edwards. The first time I remember seeing him was after Aimee Mann released Smilers (which is a fabulous album that I highly recommend). I know he has played with other people, but there is almost no information about him online. On a forum on Aimee Mann's site multiple people inquire whether or not he's single, but there seems to be no real information.

Update 12/13/10:

Darrell on Don't Tell Betsy! also posted a review of the Aimee Mann Christmas Show with some of the music she played. Check it out. I also edited and added a few more comments to the above review.

Fiction, Postmodernism, and the Philosophy of Travel

"...and even if it was a matter of the past, it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route that he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places" (Calvino 28-29)

When I first met Corinna, two years ago, we exchanged book recommendations. I told her about The Shadow of the Wind, which may be my favorite work of literary fiction. She told me of a book called Invisible Cities, that she said I could read in an afternoon. I was intrigued. It has been a long time since I regularly read fiction, and I missed it. Although I wanted to enjoy it, as with every other fiction book at the time I picked it up and put it down over and over again, never able to maintain my attention, despite the eloquence and visual beauty of Calvino's writing.

My review, to accurately depict my thoughts on the fragmented novella, would have to be a meandering pastiche of sorts. I decided to read it this afternoon because I am inside with little to do (still being too ill to go out for a walk) and to little coherence of mind to read Horace or Mήδεια. The story drew me in and wanders just ahead of my mind, making sure my thoughts never stray too far from it's path. In short, I really enjoyed it.

 

The novella tells of a young Marco Polo relating to an old Kublai Kahn descriptions of the different cities in his empire. Most of volume is taken up by short remembrances of "cities" which employ fabulous rich descriptions of fantastical features. In some ways this is almost a Parmenidean thought experiment. There is a line in Parmenides somewhere that says that humans can only imagine what already exists. My thoughts on what he means by that is that we can only conceive of elements that exist already and recombine them to create fantastical non-existing things [1]. Calvino essentially remixes reality into wonderful images, sounds, and smells for the reader.

Aside from this Parmenidean aspect, there is also a Baudrillardian twist. Kublai Kahn is trying to understand his empire, see a pattern in it, learn of it. He has maps and hears the stories of merchants, but that elusive global comprehension constantly slips out of his grasp. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard relates a fable from Borges in which there was a great empire. A map was created of this empire, so detailed that it actually covered the empire inch-by-inch. The map was supposed to grow and crumble with the empire. In Baudrillard's version (if I remember correctly), the terrain under the map begins to rot and decay along with the map itself. The people in the empire, living on the map, try to recreate the empire from the map, which now has no original, and they instead create pure simulation-- a hyperreality [2]. Kublai Kahn seems to try to be resurrecting his decaying empire in his mind-- creating some rational explanation for it. Marco Polo's stories, complex and fantastical, always slip just beyond his grasp. They allow him only to build pure simulation, which does not and cannot reflect his empire.

I really enjoyed the novella. It was sort of meandering and associative. I probably missed a lot of the point, being sick and not as able to concentrate as I would like, but tangentially it reminded me of the way that I travel. I cannot see a city for the whole of it, but rather find the little things that I enjoy or that bother me. I also find that I see a slightly different version of myself in each city-- sometimes more independent, sometimes more cautious, sometimes more open to embracing the world, and sometimes threatened by the general atmosphere. The quote at the top spurred this line of thought.

Since Cerinthus is traveling in Italy, I told him that he should find a copy of the book. Although the book centers around Venice rather than Florence, there is something, I imagine, very Italian in the writing (and it was originally written in Italian). I would hope he likes it, but I cannot be sure...

Endnotes

1. I will have to beg the readers' pardon for not citing this properly. I have no idea where this is in Parmenides or even if it is entirely accurate, but it is what I remember.
2. I may have not quite represented the Baudrillard correctly. It has been a while since I read it, but I tried to represent it how I remember. I hope my Lit Theory professor will not think to poorly of me if he were to see this attempt at explanation. I would be happy for corrections.

Much Ado About Nothing

Much Ado About Nothing is my favorite Shakespeare play. Oddly enough, Much Ado About Nothing is one of only two Shakespearean comedies that I like, although I like many of the tragedies (Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth). I have seen five versions of it now, including the movie, and there is something so charming about the play (although only three of the versions, not including the movie, were any good).

Last night, I saw a version starring Helen Hunt, which was musically organized by Lyle Lovett. Oddly enough, Lyle Lovett was sitting directly behind me as I tried not to cough too much during the show. Sean and Sara Watkins from Nickle Creek played the music that Lovett wrote to add a bluegrass twang to the Shakepeare. There was an article in the LA Times.

Overall, I thought the production was cute. The music was great. The setting in California wine country was a lovely new twist. The male cast was fabulous. My least favorite of them was Claudio. I do not believe I've ever seen a Claudio I particularly liked (the closest was in the Saskatoon production I saw), but I think that is more the stilted writing of an earnest character rather than the fault of the acting. The female cast was not quite as strong as the male cast, I am sorry to say. Helen Hunt generally did a nice job and I enjoyed her acting, but I thought she lacked a little bit of the fire of the ideal Beatrice. On the other hand, the colder, cooler Beatrice is a valid interpretation of the character. The rest of the female half of the cast was fine, but the male half outshone them in my mind.

I love Much Ado About Nothing because of the wordplay and the bickering of the lead characters. This production nicely rendered the spates between Beatrice and Benedick, and the music provided a lovely background to the frivolous and fun comedy. I thoroughly enjoyed it.