A Showbiz Idea of Being Important

From "Practicing Like Your Hair's on Fire," by Gelek Rinpoche, Buddhadharma (Fall 2008):

Many of us complain, “I have no time.” I like to call that a good, fancy, stylish excuse. Everybody likes to say, “I’m too busy,” because everybody would like to seem important. It is a great excuse that offers several benefits: you can avoid what you don’t want to do; it gives you a showbiz idea of being important; and all the important people do it, so you can include yourself with them.

I refer to that as busy laziness. We experience this kind of laziness because we have a problem recognizing our real priorities.

...

In short, our human life, with the limitless capacity of our minds, is capable of producing any results we wish. If your goal is to get rich, your human life is capable of producing it. If you want to become famous, your life is capable of doing it. Hollywood is full of such people. It's the same with anything else you choose to do. Whether you are satisfied with the results or not is a different story, but human life is capable of delivering the goods. If you want to be fully enlightened, if your ultimate goal is to achieve enlightenment, then this life is capable of delivering that as well. From our point of view we may fail, but it won't be because our human life lacked the capacity for total enlightenment. It's be because we didn't take advantage of it.

Being Normal is Extraordinary

From "Typically Twisted," by Kathleen McGowan, Pscyhology Today (August 2008)

Being normal is actually extraordinary. It's an unusual combination of specific traits that all have to do with being extra likable. The people who see themselves as most normal (and are seen that way by others) are much less neurotic than the average person, uncommonly easy to get along with, unusually respectful of propriety, and highly responsible.

Normal people may be nicer than average, but they also have character traits that aren't universally appealing. They're not adventurous. They're not above average in intelligence, nor are they outgoing. Truth be told, a lot of our best qualities are unusual. A sense for music like Mozart's is certainly exceptional. So is the ability to speak six languages, or the courage to leap onto the subway tracks to save a stranger's life.

 

Time Stops

Frozen Grand Central
Improve Everywhere

[Thanks Kimberly!]

No Self Behind the Curtain

Despite our every instinct to the contrary, there is one thing that consciousness is not: some entity deep inside the brain that corresponds to the "self," some kernel of awareness that runs the show, as the "man behind the curtain" manipulated the illusion of a powerful magician in The Wizard of Oz. After more than a century of looking for it, brain researchers have long since concluded that there is no conceivable place for such a self to be located in the physical brain, and that it simply doesn't exist.

From "Glimpses of the Mind," by Michael D. Lemonick, Time (Aug. 17, 1995)

Vidéomusique

A sample of the music videos by young Montréal artists from this year's Vidéomusique, part of The Québec Triennial at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.

 

Walk the Walk
The National Parcs

 

Them Kids
Sam Roberts

 

Montréal -40° C
Malajube

 

Une Rose Noire
Paul Cargnello

 

Luscious Life
Patrick Watson

 

Au gré des saisons
Dumas

If It Takes Me All Day (Aubade II)

The Lamps Unlit
by Billy Collins

It is difficult to write an aubade,
a song about noon, or a few crepuscular lines
without stopping to realize
just where you are on the dial of a certain day

which is at least a beginning
and better than the usual blind rush
into the future, believed to reside
over the next in an infinite series of hills.

I'm all for noticing that the light
in the tops of the trees,
is different now with the grass cold
and moist, the heads of flowers yet unfolded,

all for occupying a chair by a window
or a wayside bench for an hour—
time enough to look here and there
as the caravan of time crosses the sand,

time to think of the dead and lost friends,
their faces hidden in the foliage,
and to consider the ruination of love,
a wisp of smoke rising from a chimney.

And who cares if it takes me all day
to write a poem about the dawn
and I finish in the dark with the night—
some love it best—draped across my shoulders.

From A Public Space (Issue 6)

• See also: "How To Write an Aubade" by Brian McDonald

It Hasn't Amounted to Much (Aubade I)

"I feel I am landed on my 45th year as if washed up on a rock, not knowing how I got here or ever had a chance of being anywhere else. ... Anyone would think I was Tolstoy, the value I put on writing, but it hasn't amounted to much."

~ Philip Larkin, from a letter he wrote in 1966

From 1974 to 1977, Larkin worked on a single 50-line poem—the last major poem he wrote—called "Aubade," about watching the sunrise in a bedroom and thinking about the fear of death. It's the poem that most critics considered to be his masterpiece (Writer's Almanac).

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Not as Crazy as It Sounds

22

Learn how to stand still
if you want to go places.
Get on your knees
if you want to stand tall.
If you want wisdom,
empty your mind.
If you want the world,
renounce your riches.
Push yourself until you're exhausted,
and then you'll find your strength.

You can go far
if you don't have anything to carry.
The more you acquire,
the less you can really see.

A Master takes this to heart
and sets an example
for everybody else.

She doesn't show off
so people take notice.
She's not out to prove anything
so people take her at her word.
She doesn't brag about herself
but people know what she's done.
She hasn't got an agenda
but people know what she can do.
She's not out to get anybody
so nobody can get in her way.

"Learn how to stand still
if you want to go places."
That's not as crazy as it sounds.
Get in touch with Tao,
and you'll see what I mean.

33

Knowing things makes you smart,
but knowing yourself makes you wise.
To rule others, you must be powerful,
but to rule yourself,
you must be strong.

If you have only what you need,
you have true wealth.
If you never give up,
you will find a way.
If you stay true to yourself,
you will never be lost.
If you stay alive your whole life,
you've really lived.

Translation by Ron Hogan

Feeling Safe Kills

From "Slow-Moving Vehicle," a New York Times review of Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt:

Traffic jams are not, by and large, caused by flaws in road design but by flaws in human nature. While this is bad news for drivers — there’s not much to be done about human nature — it is good news for readers of Tom Vanderbilt’s new book. “Traffic” is not a dry examination of highway engineering; it’s a surprising, enlightening look at the psychology of human beings behind the steering wheels.

...Nowadays, the cause of collisions, or one of them, is people believing they’re better drivers than they are. We base our judgment on the number of crashes we’ve been in, rather than on the number of accidents we narrowly avoid, which, if we’re being honest (or we’re being me), happen just about every time we drive.

Compounding this vehicular hubris is the fact that most of the driving we do appears to be safer than it is. Driving rarely commands 100 percent of our attention, and so we feel comfortable multitasking: talking on the phone, unfolding a map, taking in the Barca-Lounger on the road’s shoulder. Vanderbilt cites a statistic that nearly 80 percent of crashes involve drivers not paying attention for up to three seconds.  Thus the places that seem the most dangerous — narrow roads, hairpin turns — are rarely where people mess up. “Most crashes,” Vanderbilt writes, “happen on dry roads, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers.” For this reason, roads that could be straight are often constructed with curves — simply to keep drivers on the ball.

This basic truth — feeling safe kills — lies beneath many of the book’s insights...

...S.U.V.’s are more dangerous than cars. Not just because they’re slower to stop and harder to maneuver, but because — by conferring a sense of safety — they invite careless behavior.

Deprived of the Ability to Subtract

From LIfe is a Miracle: An essay against modern superstition by Wendell Berry:

If there are critics of science in government and the bureaucracies, they are largely inaudible. In the universities, the scientists generally proceed from promotion to promotion and from grant to grant, leaving few recorded moments of conscience or professional self-doubt; and the professors of the humanities seem for the most part merely to be abashed by the sciences, deferring to their certainties, adopting their values, admiring their wealth, and longing even to imitate their methodology and their jargon. The journalists think it intellectually chic to stand open-mouthed before any wonder of science whatsoever. The media, cultivating their mediocrity, seem quite comfortably unaware that many of the calamities from which science is expected to save the world were caused in the first place by science -- which meanwhile is busy propagating further calamities, hailed now as wonders, from which later it will undertake to save the world. Nobody, so far as I have heard, is attempting to figure out how much of the progress resulting from this enterprise is net. It is as if a whole population has been genetically deprived of the ability to subtract.

I know that there are some scientists who are speaking and writing sound criticism of science or of scientific abuses of science, but these people seem to have the status of dissidents or heretics; they are not accepted as partners in a necessary dialogue. Typically, their criticisms and objections are not even answered. (If you are making money and have power, why debate?) In short, the scientific critics of science are not effective. That there has been no effective criticism of science is demonstrated, for instance, by science's failure to attend to the possibility of small-scale or cheap or low-energy or ecologically benign technologies. Most applications of science to our problems result in large payments to large corporations and in damages to ecosystems and communities. These eventually will have to be subtracted (but not, if they can help it, by the inventors or manufacturers) from whatever has been gained.

*     *     *

The only science we can have is human science; it has human limits and is involved always with human ignorance and human error. It is a fact that the solutions invented or discovered by science have tended to lead to new problems or to become problems themselves. Scientists discovered how to use nuclear energy to solve some problems, but any use of it is enormously dangerous to us all, and scientists have not discovered what to do with the waste. (They have not discovered what to do with old tires.) The availability of antibiotics leads to the overuse of antibiotics. And so on. Our daily lives are a daily mockery of our scientific pretensions. We are leaning to know precisely the location of our genes, but significant numbers of us don't know the whereabouts of our children. Science does not seem to be lighting the way; we seem rather to be leapfrogging into the dark along series of scientific solutions, which become problems, which call for further solutions, which science is always eager to supply, and which it sometimes cannot supply.

Idea + Square = Origami

From TED Talks:

Origami, as Robert Lang describes it, is simple: "You take a creature, you combine it with a square, and you get an origami figure." But Lang's own description belies the technicality of his art; indeed, his creations inspire awe by sheer force of their intricacy. His repertoire includes a snake with one thousand scales, a two-foot-tall allosaurus skeleton, and a perfect replica of a Black Forest cuckoo clock. Each work is the result of software (which Lang himself pioneered) that manipulates thousands of mathematical calculations in the production of a "folding map" of a single creature.

The marriage of mathematics and origami harkens back to Lang's own childhood.  As a first-grader, Lang proved far too clever for elementary mathematics and quickly became bored, prompting his teacher to give him a book on origami. His acuity for mathematics would lead him to become a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and the owner of nearly fifty patents on lasers and optoelectronics. Now a professional origami master, Lang practices his craft as both artist and engineer, one day folding the smallest of insects and the next the largest of space-bound telescope lenses.

Download Robert Lang's Treemaker software to start designing your own origami projects.

Every Tool Can be Misapplied

From "How Meditation Works," by Shinzen Young:

Deep contemplative attainment does not make a person perfect; it confers mind power, a sense of happiness which is not dependent on circumstances, and a basically loving orientation toward one's environment. It does not, however, automatically guarantee immunity from stupidity, poor judgement or cultural myopia.

Furthermore, each meditative system has its characteristic weaknesses. Theravadan Vipassana meditation could make one humorless and depersonalized if not balanced with loving-kindness meditation. Tantric practice can easily degenerate into manipulation, sterile ritual and obscurantism. Belief in original enlightenment and just sitting could get in the way of rapid growth. In Japan, Zen training, particularly Rinzai training, can be brutal and imbue a tendency towards authoritarianism. In fact, Zen suffered a temporary eclipse in Japan following World War II precisely because it had been widely used as an underpinning for militarism. The practice of meditation to get tough and the cultivation of detached repose so that one may kill and be killed without fear or compunction represents a tragic perversion.

Finally, it is a mistake to identify meditation with a particular life style. Obviously, if one's daily life is seamy and chaotic, it will be difficult to attain a settled mind, but it is ludicrous to think that a person must be a vegetarian or enter a monastery to make headway in meditation. Such externals can help. They can also distract. The path to freedom is systematic and open to all. You don't need to be a Buddhist to profit from Buddhist meditation.

That these aberrations and misdirections exist should not in the least surprise, dismay or discourage us. Every tool can be misapplied. The fact is that each of the above approaches to meditation, if skillfully and persistently cultivated, produces a well-balanced, fulfilled individual whose very presence benefits his or her fellows. As such, they represent significant and powerful contributions to human culture.

The Way of Ignorance

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

~ T.S. Eliot, from "East Coker," the second poem of his Four Quartets

Time Seems to Slow Way Down

"At times, and with increasing frequency now, I experience a kind of clarity that I've never seen adequately described in a football story. Sometimes, for example, time seems to slow way down, in an uncanny way, as if everyone were moving in slow motion. It seems as if I have all the time in the world to watch the receivers run their patterns, and yet I know the defensive line is coming at me just as fast as ever. I know perfectly well how hard and fast those guys are coming and yet the whole thing seems like a movie or a dance in slow motion. It's beautiful."

~ John Brodie, former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers from an interview in January 1973

Writers Workshops

#21 from Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander:

It’s no secret.  White people want to be writers.  Why wouldn’t they? Work 10 hours a week from a country house in Maine or England.  Get called a genius by other white people, and maybe get your book made into a film.

Every single white person harbors this dream.  No matter what they tell you, all of them have at least one chapter of a novel stashed away somewhere.

Being a marginally crafty race, white people will often seek out every possible route to achieving this goal, and one of the most popular methods has been writers workshops.

These are expensive mini go-to-school type vacations.  Where you talk with a published writer (often someone you haven’t heard of,  but they have a book on Amazon) who will tell you how they became writers. If there is time, they will listen to you read your stuff and tell that you it’s good but it needs work on (a) structure, (b) characters, (c) dialogue. Then they will collect their check and go back to their country house or studio apartment in New York.

The Flash

By Italo Calvinao from Numbers in the Dark:

It happened on day, at a crossroads, in the middle of a crowd, people coming and going.

I stopped, blinked: I understood nothing. Nothing, nothing about anything; I didn't understand the reasons for things or for people, it was all senseless, absurd. And I started to laugh.

What I found strange at the times was that I'd never realized before. That up until then I had accepted everything: traffic lights, cars, posters, uniforms, monuments, things completely detached from any sense of the world, accepted them as if they were some necessity, some chain of cause and effect that bound them together.

Then the laugh died in my throat, I blushed, ashamed. I waved to get people's attention and "Stop a second!" I shouted, "there's something wrong! Everything's wrong! We're doing the absurdist things! This can't be the right way! Where will it end?"

People stopped around me, sized me up, curious. I stood there in the middle of them, waving my arms, desperate to explain myself, to have them share the flash of insight that had suddenly enlightened me: and I said nothing. I said nothing because the moment I'd raised my arms and opened my mouth, my great revelation had been as it were swallowed up again and the words had come out any old how, on impulse.

"So?" people asked, "what do you mean? Everything's in its place. All is as it should be. Everything is a result of something else. Everything fits in with everything else. We can't see anything absurd or wrong!"

And so I stood there, lost, because as I saw it now everything had fallen into place again and everything seemed natural, traffic lights, monuments, uniforms, towerblocks, tramlines, beggars, processions; yet this didn't calm me down, it tormented me.

"I'm sorry," I answered. "Perhaps it was me that was wrong. It seemed that way. But everything's fine. I'm sorry," and I made off amid their angry glares.

Yet, even now, every time (often) that I find I don't understand something, then, instinctively, I'm filled with hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.

The NeoCube

The NeoCube

Almost Completely Forgotten

"Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air."

~ Herman Melville (Aug. 1, 1819 – Sep. 28, 1891), Moby Dick

From The Writer's Almanac (8/1/08):

...Melville got married and had four children, and the family bought a farm in Massachusetts, where Melville became friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville was working on Moby-Dick, his story of Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for the great white whale, and Hawthorne encouraged him to make the novel an allegory, not just an account of whaling.

Melville became consumed with writing Moby-Dick. He would work all day without eating until evening, and he would bellow across the house, "Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!" He was elated when he finished his novel (published in 1851) and considered  it his greatest work yet. He wrote to Hawthorne, "I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb." But it was a flop. Readers didn't like it. His American publisher only printed 3,000 copies, and most of those never even sold; in 1853, a warehouse fire destroyed the plates and the unsold books, and the publisher refused to reset the book or compensate Melville.

Melville wrote two more novels just to make money, and he said the experience was like "sawing wood," but he still couldn't make enough to live on. His work became darker and more psychological, and it sold even fewer copies, and Melville began to get depressed. His last major work was The Confidence Man (1857), a biting satire of American life. He wrote poetry but couldn't find a publisher, so he had to publish it himself. He moved to New York and got a job as a customs inspector on the New York docks. The manuscript of his final work, Billy Budd, was found in his desk after he died. At the time of his death, Melville had been almost completely forgotten, and The New York Times called him "Henry Melville" in his obituary. Moby-Dick is now considered one of the great American novels.

El Sistema

"In my view, the root cause of all our social problems is exclusion. We must fight to ensure that a larger number of people -- everyone, if that's possible -- have access to this wonderful world, the world of music, the world of the orchestra, the world of song, the world of art."

~ José Antonio Abreu

• El Sistema official site
• El Sistema: The Music of Hope, 60 Minutes (7/23/08)

Belief System

As a species
        we dreamed. We used to
dream. We did not know for sure about
        the other species. By the mind we meant
the human mind. Open and oozing with
        inwardness. Thinking was the habitation of a
trembling colony, a fairy tale—of waiting, love—of
        the capacity for
        postponement—we shall put that
        off the majesty of the mind
        said, in the newspapers, walking among the blessed,
        out in the only
lifetime anyone had—in that space—then in the space
        of what one meant by one's
        offspring's
space. The future. How could it be performed by the mind became the
        question—how, this sensation called tomorrow and
        tomorrow? Did you look down at
        your hands just now? The dead gods
        are still being
        killed. They don't appear in
        "appearance." They turn the page for
        us. The score does not acknowledge
        the turner of
        pages. And always the
absent thing, there, up ahead, like a highway ripped open and left hanging in the
        void—only listen—there is no void, no, it is still
material, which is most terrifying, is still expanse, only without you in it, or anything else
        in it—the last word you said before
        you screamed
still on your tongue, like a taste, your broad warm tongue out of which existence as we
        know it was
made. The waves hit the rocks. The sensation of duty dissolves. The rule of
        order—of love—of
        what? Don't look at me now I'm not
        ready. It's a sur-
        prise, I want you to be
surprised. The heartbeat on its little wheels. Your given days its chariot. The rendez-
        vous awaiting. Nothing
        to be done about
        that! Also
the poking about in the ashes which was human
        curiosity—always the shadow of what the yes
        which springs from a mind
        sparks—of what filled the mind when the yes was
        felt—also human the
        ownership of such
        sad hands,
now still slicing everything, so carefully—the lemon is opening, the letter, the glance, the
        century, the sky, the forest—oh—the monster, the
        valley and the next-on
        valley, also the
army, look, what an idea, an army—the long-gone stars making their zodiac—the severed
        fingers and the dirt they're tossed onto,
the moon, sliced, the forum, sliced—still those few pillars and the written voice—here it
        comes now the jesus, the body full of its organs,
        the parts of the stoning, each part—bone, sinew—
        each stone—till she's
        gone, she's clothes on the
ground with brothers and uncles around—& the space where the blood flows
        sliced open
there—& the circle of god, the circle of justice—the red eye at the center, the crowd dispersing,
        & the halo of arms still hovering
        where each
        let fly its stone.

~ by Jorie Graham, from Sea Change: Poems

Our Dream-Like Experience of Yesterday

From "The Four Foundations Of Mindfulness," by Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche:

When we are dreaming, we have subject, we have object, and we have the action between the subject and the object, which is the experience of the threefold situation. As long as we remain in the dream state, those three things equally exist. We experience these three things as solid. We experience a real world, real phenomena, real body. Our own physical existence is there, the physical existence of the object is there, and the physical existence of the action is there. All three are simply existing in the dream state.

But if you look at your dream from the point of view of waking up, of the awakened state, it does not exist, right? If you look back at last night's dream, and if you look back at yesterday's experience of life, which is not really a dream, if you look back, they both equally do not exist. Your experience of yesterday is not solid; your dream of last night is not solid, as far as today is concerned. If you look back from the point of view of today, which is the awakened state, relatively speaking, then both of those equally do not exist, you know. There's no solid reason to say yesterday was more solid than last night's dream. There's no solid logical reason, so to speak, except that we cling to our dream-like experience of yesterday more than to our experience of last night's dream.

*  *  * 

Check out the two-part Buddhist Geeks discussion with Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, "the only Rinpoche we know who owns and uses a Blackberry!" (Episodes 74 & 75)

Something to share with the class?

[Spotted on JC's blog]

Objects in Motion, Objects at Rest

To Katharine: At Fourteen Months

All morning, you've studied the laws
of spoons, the rules of books, the dynamics
of the occasional plate, observed the principles
governing objects in motion and objects
at rest. To see if it will fall, and if it does,
how far, if it will rage like a lost penny
or ring like a Chinese gong--because
it doesn't have to--you lean from your chair
and hold your cup over the floor.
It curves in your hand, it weighs in your palm,
it arches like a wave, it is a dipper
full of stars, and you're the wind timing
the pull of the moon, you're the water
measuring the distance from which we fall.

by Joelle Biele, from American Life in Poetry (Column 174)

What People Forget

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

~ Maya Angelou

Introducing Samantha Crain

“I always wanted to be a performer. I was in college studying English literature but I probably would have joined the circus after graduation if I wasn’t doing music...being in a touring band [really] is...like being in the circus.”

~ Samantha Crain, from Paste Magazine (7.20.08)

Samantha Crain is a young singer-songwriter, born in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

The American Way of Debt

From The Debt Trap, a New York Times "series of articles and multimedia about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible."

Tuning Between Stations

"As a child, I remember playing with my grandfather's shortwave ham radio set in the blisteringly hot attic of his Ohio home. And I loved tuning between stations and listening to all the tones and beeps and whistles and static. And often I will do that now today. I'll just turn on a shortwave radio, put it next to the bed, and mistune it somehow so I'm really not hearing any station directly. There's something about that I find opens my mind...I find a peace and excitement at the same time."

~ Ben Burtt, the voice of Wall-E, discussing some of his sound design inspirations with Kurt Anderson on Studio 360 (6.27.08).

Below, he explains how he created the lightsaber sound.

Goodnight Moon

Richard Price borrowed from his novel Clockers, updating some of the jargon (crackheads and dealers from 1992 replaced by hoppers and hustlers in 2002) to write this closing scene from an episode of HBO's The Wire. Series creator David Simon often asked him to cannabilize from his book which inspired the show.

Karaniya Metta Sutta

This is what should be done
By one who is skilled in goodness,
And who knows the path of peace:
... Wishing: In gladness and in safety,
May all beings be at ease.

Whatever living beings there may be;
Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,
The great or the mighty,
medium, short or small,

The seen and the unseen,
Those living near and far away,
Those born and to-be-born —
May all beings be at ease!

Let none deceive another,
Or despise any being in any state.
Let none through anger or ill-will
Wish harm upon another.

Even as a mother protects with her life
Her child, her only child,
So with a boundless heart
Should one cherish all living beings;

Radiating kindness over the entire world
Spreading upwards to the skies,
And downwards to the depths;
Outwards and unbounded,
Freed from hatred and ill-will.

Whether standing or walking, seated or lying down
Free from drowsiness,
One should sustain this recollection.
This is said to be the sublime abiding....

~ Suttanipata 1.8

After My Grandfather's Second Stroke

by Lou Lipsitz

Three-week coma,
enfeebled left arm. He slowly came back —
physical therapy, exercise — and after a time
he was himself again,
and we figured the binges would resume.

But instead he stayed in his room
without the radio on
and let his beard grow out white.

Instead of not coming home
for a week at a time, or coming home
cursing five nights in a row,
he was silent and every evening
came out for a snack of bread, jam,
and tea before bed.

While he was taking a stroll
one day, we snuck in
and found the poems:
one about the death-fear
he'd experienced before the coma;
one about walking the streets
alone; one about a woman
he could not speak of;
one about the ocean and
how it might feel to be a blind man
walking into it; one about
how he had seen his mother's
breasts when she'd been
drunk and wild, and he'd wanted
to run into the street.

It was as if we'd come across
a tunnel under our house
that led out beyond the lake
to the valley of another language.

No one mentioned the poems, but
something changed after we found them. My anger
began to dissolve. And when we assembled
at the table for dinner,
I noticed how my grandmother,
who had not slept in the same bed
with him for thirty years,
would sometimes, while serving
the food, reach over to touch his hand.

Happiness

"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self."

~ Iris Murdoch

One Day's Following Another

Excerpt from "What He Was Like," by William Maxwell from All the Days and Nights:

He himself got older. His wife got older. They advanced deeper into their seventies without any sense of large changes but only of one day's following another, and of the days being full, and pleasant, and worth recording. So he went on doing it. They all got put down in his diary, along with his feelings about old age, his fear of dying, his declining sexual powers, his envy of the children that he saw running down the street. To be able to run like that! He had to restrain himself from saying to young men in their thirties and forties, "You do appreciate, don't you, what you have?" In his diary he wrote, "If I had my life to live over again -- but one doesn't. One goes forward instead, dragging a cart piled high with lost opportunities."

Though his wife had never felt the slightest desire to read his diary, she knew when he stopped leaving it around as carelessly as he did his opened mail. Moving the papers on his desk in order to dust it she saw where he had hidden the current volume, was tempted to open it and see what it was he didn't want her to know, and then thought better of it and replaced the papers, exactly as they were before.

"To be able to do in your mind," he wrote, "what it is probably not a good idea to do in actuality is a convenience not always sufficiently appreciated." Though in his daily life he was as cheerful as a cricket, the diaries were more and more given over to dark thoughts, anger, resentment, indecencies, regrets, remorse. And now and then the simple joy in being alive. "If I stopped recognizing that I want things that it is not appropriate for me to want," he wrote, "wouldn't this inevitably lead to my not wanting anything at all -- which as people get older is a risk that must be avoided at all costs?" He wrote, "Human beings are not like a clock that is wound up at birth and runs until the mainspring is fully unwound. They live because they want to. And when they stop wanting to, the first thing they know they are in a doctor's office being shown an X ray that puts a different face on everything."

* * *

"William Maxwell: the Wisest, Kindest Writer," NPR/Fresh Air (1.25.08)

Fetchable

From "Koans for Troubled Times" by Joan Sutherland (Buddhadharma, June 2008):

We spend a lot of time in the company of our thoughts and feelings, and sometimes we are a companion to silence. Even a hermit sits in a web of connections with things visible and invisible. Our meditation is made not just of the vastness and the deep engine of concentration; it is also made of these relationships. And then one day, for no apparent reason, something in particular comes to fetch us: the cook coughs or the morning star rises, and we fall open. A particular intimate meeting with a particular other opens us to an intimate relationship with life itself.

Practice is about making us fetchable. It helps us to recognize what gets in the way of our being fetched, and then it gives us a method to deconstruct the obstacle.

Marry Me

a senryu sequence

when I come late to bed
I move your leg flung over my side
that warm gate

nights you're not here
I inch toward the middle
of this boat, balancing

when I turn over in sleep
you turn, I turn, you turn,
I turn, you

some nights you tug the edge
of my pillow under your cheek,
look in my dream

pulling the white sheet
over your bare shoulder
I marry you again

by Veronica Patterson,
from American Life in Poetry (Column 172)

"...the senryu is a Japanese form similar to haiku but dealing with people rather than nature."

The Danish Poet

 

A fIlm by Torrill Kove
Narrated by Liv Ullman

[Spotted on JC's blog]

Making Mistakes

“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.”

~ Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck quoted in "If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow" (Janet Rae-Dupree, New York Times, 7.6.08)

[Thanks Kit!]

New Romantic

English folk/pop-singer Laura Marling performs 'New Romantic' at BBC2's Later... with Jools Holland (November 2007):

Glósóli

Sigur Rós

Digging In with Wendell Berry

Excerpts from a conversation between Jeff Fearnside and Wendell Berry from "Digging In," The Sun Magazine (July 2008):

Jeff Fearnside: I’ve noticed that the Amish seem less self-conscious than most Americans. Why do you think this is so?

Wendell Berry: I’d say that in their community, honesty is the norm. One of the most striking things about the Amish is that their countenances are open. We pity Muslim women for wearing veils, yet almost every face in this country is veiled by suspicion and fear. You can’t walk down a city street and get anybody to look at you. People’s countenances are undercover operations here.

...

JF: In your Sierra Club talk, you said that you would like conservationists to become more interested in “economic landscapes” — in working farms, ranches, and forests. Do you feel that most people’s definition of the natural world is too small?

WB: The human definition of the natural world is always going to be too small, because the world’s more diverse and complex than we can ever know. We’re not going to comprehend it; it comprehends us. The question is whether we can use it with respect. Some people in the past who knew very little biology were able to use the land without destroying it. We, who know a great deal of biology, are destroying our land in order to use it.

...

JF: I came to Kentucky after four years of living in Central Asia, and I was struck by how environmental disasters both here and there have the same causes: shortsightedness, greed, and the concentration of wealth among a powerful elite. Do you think these are simply part of human nature?

WB: Greed is a part of human nature, and greed is the root cause of these disasters. Once you have greed and the means of exploitation, the high-toned rationalizations — in other words, the excuses — follow as a matter of course. A real culture functions to limit greed. Our culture functions to increase it, because, we are repeatedly told, it’s profitable to do so, though the majority of the profits go to only a few people.

JF: We’ve talked about what consumers and producers can do to change things. What should the role of government be?

WB: The appropriate role of government should be to see that power and money don’t accumulate in too few hands.

JF: But too often governments act in their own self-interest and harm the people they’re supposed to be working for and protecting.

WB: Unless a community consists entirely of like-minded individuals, the community must, to some extent, have laws, which means government. It’s the nature of an organization like a government — or a corporation — to be self-aggrandizing and self-perpetuating. Once it starts running, it aims to keep running. The real limit on government would be reasonably independent, self-sustaining localities and communities. But if there is no local independence, then governments and other organizations have a kind of freedom that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

If you’ve got 300 million people, most of whom produce nothing for themselves or for the community and to whom everything has to be brought from somewhere else, then there’s no way you’re going to have limited government, or limited anything. All organizations feed upon the helplessness and ignorance and passivity of the people.

More...

Human Mirror

Another fun prank from Improv Everywhere, the folks who gave us the annual No Pants Subway Ride. This time, they recruited fifteen sets of twins to fill a subway car, creating a human mirror.

More missions here

A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

by Denise Levertov, from Sands of the Well

[Thanks Dōshin!]

Indistinguishable

What you loved and what you strove for,
What you dreamed and what you lived through,
Do you know if it was joy or suffering?
G sharp and A flat, E flat or D sharp,
Are they distinguishable to the ear?

~ Herman Hesse

Ára Bátur

From Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (With a Buzz In Our Ears We Play Endlessly) by Sigur Rós

Gobbledigook on Jonk Music

The New York City Waterfalls - Brooklyn Bridge

One of Olafur Eliasson's four massive installations on New York Harbor which started on June 25 and will run through October 13, 2008 (7:00am to 10:00pm). In addition to the waterfall in Brooklyn at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, there is one at Pier 35, just north of the Manhattan Bridge, another between Piers 4 and 5 near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, and a fourth on the north shore of Governors Island. 

Video courtesy of the Public Art Fund

Double Awe

"Well, one of the tricks is to maintain your sense of awe at what you're experiencing. And one of the ways you do that is—I think André Gide said, The only way to write about Africa is to go there for ten days or ten years—so I'm one of those ten day, big-eyed guys...The other thing is to be a little afraid of what you're doing 'cause terror keeps you slender. If you feel like,  I don't know if I can capture this, that means you're going to bring everything to the table. And so it's a double awe: one is I can't believe I'm seeing this, the other one is I don't know if I have the chops to capture this. It's not as easy as it looks, I promise you that. It's a hummingbird that starts flying like a frigate-bird, but at the end it looks pretty quick."

~ Richard Price, discussing his most recent novel, Lush Life, with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm (6.12.08).

Authors@Google (3.27.08)

America

"What splendor! What poverty! What humanity! What inhumanity! What mutual good will! What individual isolation! What loyalty to the ideal! What hypocrisy! What a triumph of conscience! What perversity!"

~ Czeslaw Milosz on American life, from Milosz's A B C's

Classical Music with Shining Eyes

"Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections."

From TED Talks

Uncertainty

From "Surprises on the Way," by John Tarrant (Shambhala Sun, May 2008):

The core of all navigation is probably uncertainty: tolerating not knowing makes it possible to find your way. Not knowing means embracing what is not known rather than fighting with yourself over it. Since the mind always strives to know, not knowing is disorienting in a useful way. Uncertainty and not knowing teach you not to believe the stories your mind feeds you day in and day out. If you allow your own course to be mysterious, then even the hard things can become easy. This is the beginning of awakening.

...the most heartbreaking thing is not heartbreak; it's avoiding heartbreak. Inside the transience of life is the thusness of everything, of the tree with forty crows on it in the winter, the sound of death-metal drums from the kids in the barn, and the feeling of sadness when you lose someone. A lot of suffering is resistance to the life of feeling. If you surrender, you are surrendering to what is really going on. This is just to notice that nothing beyond your life is more important than your life.

Obstacles can be the gate. If your diagnosis is cancer or you lose people you love, there is no alternative but surrender. You can't rewind to yesterday when you were innocent. Meditation at such a moment might not take you back to the surface; it might take you down and through. Getting more emotional might be indicated; falling apart might happen. The practice is what tows you through. It doesn't take the rough crossing away from you but it give you a degree of safety in the passage.

Once when I lost a friend, I realized that I was weeping since my hands were wet. I was giving a talk at the time, being wise and all that, and it was a revelation--I couldn't trust myself not to weep in public. I also couldn't trust myself to sleep at night, either. At a time like that we have to surrender. We are facing something vast and, really, we have always known that we would have to face it. It is an enormous, shaggy beast blocking the way. And there is something exhilarating about the inevitable when at last it arrives; awakening is not a choice or a matter of technique anymore, it's the only place left. The huge animal rolls over us, and suddenly we find that we are riding on its back. It has become a vehicle. The obstacles really have become gates.

Things Get Better

"I like playing with ideas that invite people to think. I also like old-fashioned, upbeat themes and happy endings. Although life doesn't always seem that way, I believe that in the long term things get better. I don't think we're about to overpopulate the planet, blow ourselves into oblivion, poison ourselves into extinction, degenerate into Nazis, or disappear under our own garbage. For ten thousand years the power of human reason and creativity has continued to build better tomorrows, and nothing says it has to change now."

~ James Patrick Hogan

Creative Writing 101

Here are the basic rules of creative writing according to Kurt Vonnegut. It appears in the preface to his short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Vonnegut also noted,"The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that."

Inner Truths

"Writers may be practiced liars on the page, but they usually have a great respect for inner truths. There are, of course, exceptions, many of them famous. But writers tend to respect the truth of things and the otherness of other people, which makes them very poor liars. Very few writers are successful sociopaths. This is not the case with literary critics, who are often very good at lying."

~ Charles Baxter

[Thanks Linda!]

Boogie Man

Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story

"My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring -- acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul."

~ Lee Atwater, from a February 1991 article for Life Magazine.

Paying Attention

From "The Myth of Multitasking," Christine Rosen, The New Atlantis (Spring 2008):

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. People who have achieved great things often credit for their success a finely honed skill for paying attention. When asked about his particular genius, Isaac Newton responded that if he had made any discoveries, it was “owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.”

William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties of human attention. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), he outlined the differences among “sensorial attention,” “intellectual attention,” “passive attention,” and the like, and noted the “gray chaotic indiscriminateness” of the minds of people who were incapable of paying attention. James compared our stream of thought to a river, and his observations presaged the cognitive “bottlenecks” described later by neurologists: “On the whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention is the rule,” he wrote. “But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way.”

To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien—as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today’s multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an “extreme mobility of the attention” that “makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.” For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done “in the interstices of their mind-wandering.” Like Chesterfield, James believed that the transition from youthful distraction to mature attention was in large part the result of personal mastery and discipline—and so was illustrative of character. “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again,” he wrote, “is the very root of judgment, character, and will.”

[Thanks New York Times!]

Drudgery

"Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don't do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and will little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don't fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to drudge out another hole. But, as I've sustained this kind of life over many years, I've become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins. As soon as I notice one source drying up, I move on to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they've exhausted their source, they're in trouble.

"In other words, let's face it: life is basically unfair. But, even in a situation that's unfair, I think it's possible to seek out a kind of fairness."

~ Haruki Murakami, from "The Running Novelist," The New Yorker (June 9, 2008). His memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, will be released in July.

Some Core Truth

"What I'd finally say about truth and autobiography is that all writers are probably trying to get at some core truth of life, at some configuration that is enduring and truthful. I just haven't found the truth to be my vehicle."

~ Mona Simpson