I got this in an e-mail from a Moscow bookseller:
Армадa [Armada]
by Il'ia Vladimirovich Boiashov
Ilya Boyashov is the 2007 winner of the award, "The National Bestseller". "Armada", is his first novel. Terrorists are on a boat, sailing to the coast of America to destroy it. But during the journey, an event takes place that causes the disappearance of all continents of the world. The world is one big ocean! The terrorists are the last living survivors on the planet.
Also: I'M DONE WITH MY THESIS!!!!!!! Now I just have to give this accursed presentation at the Rohatyn Center symposium on Monday (haven't wrote that talk yet...), and do the defense, and it will be over. It's a little anti-climactic, actually. I never stayed up all night, or raced to the end; one day I was just done writing it, in plenty of time, and I've been leisurely editing since then. I am stressed out about other things, such as some other papers I haven't written and should have by now, and this symposium presentation, but the thesis seems to really be done.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Half Marathon
It was so fun. So much more fun that I thought it would be. I hadn't run a race in about two years, and I had forgotten how great it is. Even the feeling, yesterday, of drinking water on a hot day and the cold hitting your stomach in the way it only does when you're nervous the day before a race in hot weather, was familiar and exciting.
It was a cold, wet, windy day, but pretty good for a long race. I wore a long-sleeved shirt for the first five miles, then was fine in a tank-top. Oh, man, it was so, so fun-- I started far back in the pack, as I wanted to, and tried to stay calm the first few miles, but I kept speeding up without meaning to, and I decided to just go with it. I really like the Sheep Farm loop when it's wet-- the colors all seem richer-- and I was having fun, and I figured I might as well have fun while I felt good, and I would deal with dying at the end when the situation arose. But I felt really good the whole time, and gradually passed people, and every time I passed a mile marker I looked at my split and told myself to slow down but didn't. I did end up dying a little around the 11th mile, but I didn't really mind, as it was so much fun racing. And I didn't get passed, so it wasn't that bad, and I can in strong enough.
I really had forgotten how completely different racing is from going for a run, and how the kind of tired you are is completely different. I need to do this more.
My favorite part of that course, which is the Sheep-Farm loop followed by and out-and-back on South Street, is the part running out South Street when you see the horses from Eddy Farm out grazing on the hill sloping down from the barn. They look just like the horses my toy cowboys used to have, and I always expect and Indian raiding party to come riding over the hill.
It was a cold, wet, windy day, but pretty good for a long race. I wore a long-sleeved shirt for the first five miles, then was fine in a tank-top. Oh, man, it was so, so fun-- I started far back in the pack, as I wanted to, and tried to stay calm the first few miles, but I kept speeding up without meaning to, and I decided to just go with it. I really like the Sheep Farm loop when it's wet-- the colors all seem richer-- and I was having fun, and I figured I might as well have fun while I felt good, and I would deal with dying at the end when the situation arose. But I felt really good the whole time, and gradually passed people, and every time I passed a mile marker I looked at my split and told myself to slow down but didn't. I did end up dying a little around the 11th mile, but I didn't really mind, as it was so much fun racing. And I didn't get passed, so it wasn't that bad, and I can in strong enough.
I really had forgotten how completely different racing is from going for a run, and how the kind of tired you are is completely different. I need to do this more.
My favorite part of that course, which is the Sheep-Farm loop followed by and out-and-back on South Street, is the part running out South Street when you see the horses from Eddy Farm out grazing on the hill sloping down from the barn. They look just like the horses my toy cowboys used to have, and I always expect and Indian raiding party to come riding over the hill.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Preemptive Nostalgia
It has happened: I am conscious enough that I am leaving Middlebury forever that it now seems to me completely wonderful and idyllic.
On Tuesday I went to a lecture by Eva Brann, an aged tutor at St. John’s College who writes books about Greek philosophy and such and is brilliant. She is a friend of Murray Dry, from whom I took Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy this fall. The lecture, on Plato’s Phaedo was excellent, and everyone there was excited about it. Lots of students from my class this fall were there, and professors I knew, and the atmosphere just seemed to be the ideal one for a university (which I guess we’re not, but it sounds better than college): a little awed, but festive, and students and professors furiously took notes about the eternal questions of philosophy, and asked good questions, an smiled and talked to each other. Then there was a dinner at the Ross commons house, and the festive intellectual atmosphere continued. It was so delightfully nerdy: the boy sitting next to me at dinner talked enthusiastically about Latin grammar, and Risk, and Pavlos talked to Ms. Brann about Greek archaeology, and Prof. Dry and the political science kids had some sort of dorky political science discussion that I half-way joined; none of it seemed artificial or for show, either. Part of its favorable impression on me, I think, was that it reminded me of Prof. Dry’s class, which was one of the most ideal-college-y ones I’ve had, and it was connected to Prof. Dry’s enthusiastically-communicated confidence that a community the enabled people to sit around and talk about Plato’s Republic was about the best thing that ever happened to the world.
This morning my Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian class met at the Town Hall Theater, where they have the farmer’s market until it’s moved outside (next week, actually), and bought Bosnian food from this very nice woman there who explained everything to us slowly and clearly in Bosnian and did not laugh at our attempts to answer. Then we sat out on the town green, where some high school boys were playing drums and an electric guitar in the gazebo, and St. Stephens was having some sort of Earth Day event with a giant revolving globe, and most of Middlebury was sitting around enjoying the beautiful weather. We had very funny, stumbling conversations in BCS.
The Philomethesians meeting last night was well-attended, and we discussed “the end of history,” with readings from Fukuyama, Leo Strauss, Marx, Hegel. It was exactly the topic of my recent melodramatic musings on Notes From the Underground, actually, and it seemed wonderfully fortuitous.
In general it seems to me like I didn’t really do college right. I’m not sure I could do it better if I went back and tried again, but my college career seems significantly lacking in the spontaneous craziness that it seems like it was supposed to have been full of. Plus, college often seems to involve a very odd, un-natural social structure, and have various other significant faults. Sometimes, though, it all seems more than worth it.
On Tuesday I went to a lecture by Eva Brann, an aged tutor at St. John’s College who writes books about Greek philosophy and such and is brilliant. She is a friend of Murray Dry, from whom I took Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy this fall. The lecture, on Plato’s Phaedo was excellent, and everyone there was excited about it. Lots of students from my class this fall were there, and professors I knew, and the atmosphere just seemed to be the ideal one for a university (which I guess we’re not, but it sounds better than college): a little awed, but festive, and students and professors furiously took notes about the eternal questions of philosophy, and asked good questions, an smiled and talked to each other. Then there was a dinner at the Ross commons house, and the festive intellectual atmosphere continued. It was so delightfully nerdy: the boy sitting next to me at dinner talked enthusiastically about Latin grammar, and Risk, and Pavlos talked to Ms. Brann about Greek archaeology, and Prof. Dry and the political science kids had some sort of dorky political science discussion that I half-way joined; none of it seemed artificial or for show, either. Part of its favorable impression on me, I think, was that it reminded me of Prof. Dry’s class, which was one of the most ideal-college-y ones I’ve had, and it was connected to Prof. Dry’s enthusiastically-communicated confidence that a community the enabled people to sit around and talk about Plato’s Republic was about the best thing that ever happened to the world.
This morning my Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian class met at the Town Hall Theater, where they have the farmer’s market until it’s moved outside (next week, actually), and bought Bosnian food from this very nice woman there who explained everything to us slowly and clearly in Bosnian and did not laugh at our attempts to answer. Then we sat out on the town green, where some high school boys were playing drums and an electric guitar in the gazebo, and St. Stephens was having some sort of Earth Day event with a giant revolving globe, and most of Middlebury was sitting around enjoying the beautiful weather. We had very funny, stumbling conversations in BCS.
The Philomethesians meeting last night was well-attended, and we discussed “the end of history,” with readings from Fukuyama, Leo Strauss, Marx, Hegel. It was exactly the topic of my recent melodramatic musings on Notes From the Underground, actually, and it seemed wonderfully fortuitous.
In general it seems to me like I didn’t really do college right. I’m not sure I could do it better if I went back and tried again, but my college career seems significantly lacking in the spontaneous craziness that it seems like it was supposed to have been full of. Plus, college often seems to involve a very odd, un-natural social structure, and have various other significant faults. Sometimes, though, it all seems more than worth it.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
OH ALSO
Everyone (meaning the like 2 people who read this, but tell your friends) should go re-read Anna Karenina immediately. I never understand why serious Russian literary scholars all seem to hate it. Spite them, and go delight in the... I can't even find words to describe how good it is. I don't even care that much about the over-all plot, there are just so many perfect scenes.
Otto Rank and Rousseau meet Canticle for Liebowitz
Last weekend I went to an Orthodox Easter service at an OCA (Orthodox Church of America) church near Montpelier. It was very interesting, and I should have written about it. Interesting things always happen when you’re too busy to stop and record them—not coincidentally, just as a matter of course.
I finished Escape from Evil. More evil than escaping from it, frankly. My classmates and I complained loudly about the systematic way in which the book makes meaningful life impossible, with the result that Prof. Schine got sort of annoyed with us and told us that if the result of the book is greater honesty in our views of ourselves and our lives, it shouldn’t be ‘depressing.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Actually it’s a fairly amazing book. I was a little disappointed for the first fifty pages, as they didn’t seem to serve up the grand drama of good and evil promised by the introduction, at least not in the same medium that the introduction suggested. It has footnotes. Still, when I got over my initial disappointment at its extreme academicness, I was pretty damn impressed by its brilliance. Becker is one of those people who has read everything and then can still see over the pile of books; he just effortlessly tosses around the intricacies of Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, ancient and modern philosophy, pretty much every social theorist ever, and it never seems superfluous.
The argument (I think) is that all human evil is due to man’s attempts to achieve immortality of some kind. It is demonstrated, very convincingly and with many examples, that pretty much everything you do is part of a rather unattractive scheme of some kind to hoard life, generally at the expense of other people. I’m sort of sorry I started on this explanation, because I am not doing a very good job. But anyway, the various forms of “immortality schemes” are traced through history, from primitive ritual to stratified society to economic exchange, and it is pointed out how every cultural structure and ideal is designed to feed the myth that we will not end at death, as do all organisms. Do you like to give other people presents? Part of an ancient ritual of sacrifice, feeling that surpluses pacify fate, expending your possessions to expiate your guilt at the space you take up in the world. Do you admire fast cars? Are you pleased with the numbers on the stock ticker go up? Do you aspire to make a name for yourself in literature, art, academia, anything? Do you love your country? All to cling to constructed ideals that you imagine are undying, and to distract yourself from the primary tragedy of humanity: that we are the only animals that can imagine our own deaths, and every attempt to make ourselves less animal only increases our capacity for evil. Nazis killed out of a drive to create more life for themselves, not from a need to destroy. It’s all more convincing in the book. I think the conclusion is that, as it is impossible to live without myths, we should be aware of the subjectivity of these myths, and try to choose less destructive ones.
The main problem with Becker’s outlook (though I think it is probably a bad policy to argue with someone so much smarter than you), as far as I can see, is that he doesn’t show why we should be guilty about the evil we create. If human beings are animals like any other, why should we feel guilty about taking what we need? If we, as a species, are so designed that we need to subjugate or kill others in order to survive psychologically, why should we feel worse about this than a male elephant does when he kills a rival, or a mink does when it eats a fish? Becker takes guilt as a given for the human condition: man, because of his consciousness of life and death, knows that he is necessarily destructive of life, and he makes great efforts to expiate this guilt, generally then tying into an attempt to deny his own death. But I don’t see any reason why Becker, with his seeming confidence that the ultimate reality is the finality of death, should consider this guilt a consciousness of evil, rather than simply irrationality.
Final note: Becker scored about fifty points with me for his frequent, admiring citation of William James. But he scored about ONE HUNDRED POINTS for citing the “great science-fiction tale Canticle for Liebowitz.”
I finished Escape from Evil. More evil than escaping from it, frankly. My classmates and I complained loudly about the systematic way in which the book makes meaningful life impossible, with the result that Prof. Schine got sort of annoyed with us and told us that if the result of the book is greater honesty in our views of ourselves and our lives, it shouldn’t be ‘depressing.’ Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Actually it’s a fairly amazing book. I was a little disappointed for the first fifty pages, as they didn’t seem to serve up the grand drama of good and evil promised by the introduction, at least not in the same medium that the introduction suggested. It has footnotes. Still, when I got over my initial disappointment at its extreme academicness, I was pretty damn impressed by its brilliance. Becker is one of those people who has read everything and then can still see over the pile of books; he just effortlessly tosses around the intricacies of Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, ancient and modern philosophy, pretty much every social theorist ever, and it never seems superfluous.
The argument (I think) is that all human evil is due to man’s attempts to achieve immortality of some kind. It is demonstrated, very convincingly and with many examples, that pretty much everything you do is part of a rather unattractive scheme of some kind to hoard life, generally at the expense of other people. I’m sort of sorry I started on this explanation, because I am not doing a very good job. But anyway, the various forms of “immortality schemes” are traced through history, from primitive ritual to stratified society to economic exchange, and it is pointed out how every cultural structure and ideal is designed to feed the myth that we will not end at death, as do all organisms. Do you like to give other people presents? Part of an ancient ritual of sacrifice, feeling that surpluses pacify fate, expending your possessions to expiate your guilt at the space you take up in the world. Do you admire fast cars? Are you pleased with the numbers on the stock ticker go up? Do you aspire to make a name for yourself in literature, art, academia, anything? Do you love your country? All to cling to constructed ideals that you imagine are undying, and to distract yourself from the primary tragedy of humanity: that we are the only animals that can imagine our own deaths, and every attempt to make ourselves less animal only increases our capacity for evil. Nazis killed out of a drive to create more life for themselves, not from a need to destroy. It’s all more convincing in the book. I think the conclusion is that, as it is impossible to live without myths, we should be aware of the subjectivity of these myths, and try to choose less destructive ones.
The main problem with Becker’s outlook (though I think it is probably a bad policy to argue with someone so much smarter than you), as far as I can see, is that he doesn’t show why we should be guilty about the evil we create. If human beings are animals like any other, why should we feel guilty about taking what we need? If we, as a species, are so designed that we need to subjugate or kill others in order to survive psychologically, why should we feel worse about this than a male elephant does when he kills a rival, or a mink does when it eats a fish? Becker takes guilt as a given for the human condition: man, because of his consciousness of life and death, knows that he is necessarily destructive of life, and he makes great efforts to expiate this guilt, generally then tying into an attempt to deny his own death. But I don’t see any reason why Becker, with his seeming confidence that the ultimate reality is the finality of death, should consider this guilt a consciousness of evil, rather than simply irrationality.
Final note: Becker scored about fifty points with me for his frequent, admiring citation of William James. But he scored about ONE HUNDRED POINTS for citing the “great science-fiction tale Canticle for Liebowitz.”
Monday, April 20, 2009
Floods and Drainage
I have approximately 8 thousand important things to be doing today, and I have put off posting this for many hours now, but I can avoid it no longer.
Today, walking the stacks of the library looking for books about Russian peasants in the 19th century, I found a book called:
Floods and Drainage from the Risks and Hazards Series. The cover is green, with some weird concentric circles on it. How glad my life now seems! No matter what difficulties I may face, I am not in the position of E.C. Penning-Rowsell, D.J. Parker, or D.M. Harding, writing a treatise on British policies for "hazard reduction, agricultural improvement and wetland conservation."
Also notable is the dedication page; I can't figure out whether it's a joke or actually terribly rude. It reads:
"This book is dedicated to Dr Foster who, by retreating in adversity, happily left our research field wide open."
This book is now standing proudly on my thesis shelf. My neighbors in the carrels do not understand my enthusiasm.
Today, walking the stacks of the library looking for books about Russian peasants in the 19th century, I found a book called:
Floods and Drainage from the Risks and Hazards Series. The cover is green, with some weird concentric circles on it. How glad my life now seems! No matter what difficulties I may face, I am not in the position of E.C. Penning-Rowsell, D.J. Parker, or D.M. Harding, writing a treatise on British policies for "hazard reduction, agricultural improvement and wetland conservation."
Also notable is the dedication page; I can't figure out whether it's a joke or actually terribly rude. It reads:
"This book is dedicated to Dr Foster who, by retreating in adversity, happily left our research field wide open."
This book is now standing proudly on my thesis shelf. My neighbors in the carrels do not understand my enthusiasm.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
What I Wanted to Be a Really Good Blog Post but is this
For the past couple of weeks I have been wanting to write a really good blog post, partially because I'm supposed to be doing so many other things, and partially because I feel like I have something important to say, but I'm not sure what it is. So I have not written a really good blog post.
I read Notes from the Underground a few weeks ago, for the first time. It was probably something I should have done before, because I was in the familiar position of having to face one of those obvious truths of the world that you sort of know and everyone else knows but you all of a sudden have to admit. The list of these things is long, and includes things that seem really dumb to me when other people worry about them, but then at some point turn out to be legitimate, or not legitimate but unavoidable, things to worry about. So in this case it was that human striving seems fundamentally flawed, as the attainment of all our goals would be a disaster. The whole nature of humanity is involved with the building of things, and they are less than useless after they are built. The problem is boring, as I said, and you can just read Notes from the Underground if you are curious. The fact that the book was written with a view to making such a view unattractive is somehow not helpful. It still seems like there's not a lot of point in giving micro-loans to the poor to bring them into a home-owning middle class, when the next step is to despise the empty materialism of the middle class they've gotten into, and well-provided-for middle-class kids just do drugs and shoot their classmates. The answer can't be, I don't think, that the main thing is to stop paying so much attention to society's material needs, but to increase appreciation of art and literature or something. Art and literature have no meaning apart from human imperfection and striving. Michaelangelo's David is all very well, but you only need one of it: it's not usually about perfection.
The point, though, of one of the things I wanted to say, was that that all that doesn't matter. But everyone already knows it doesn't matter, obviously, because they go on working for things and wanting to attain goals and ideals. So I'm not sure why I'm so anxious to reassure you, but I am.
Because even if the good has no permanent reality that is evident in human life, the bad does. Vanquishing evil has to be meaningful, no matter what other evil immediately appears in its place. I think there is probably a philosophical argument to be made about the true ontological existence of evil proving the existence of good, but I don't really care that much. It's very funny how happy I was, sitting in the window seat in the Thunderdragons classroom at naptime last week, when I remembered the unmistakable reality of evil.
The second thing, which I remembered yesterday, is that the summer before my freshman year in high school I lay on my bed at my father's house one night, wide awake, on the blue-flowered sheets with the itchy lace border, and I thought that if I made the varsity field hockey team, as it amazingly looked like I would, if that astonishing trust were actually vested in me, I knew I couldn't say that I would never want or ask for anything again, because I saw with the logic that sees farther than the imagination that I would, but I promised I would never forget that once, in that little room with the lights from the gas station coming through the window, I hadn't been able to imagine making any further demand on the universe. And I would never look back later and laugh at my self, or act like any more adult issue that may have arisen since that night made it any less true.
In a not-very-amazing coincidence, the book we're reading this week for my religion seminar is Ernest Becker's Escape From Evil. All I've read so far is the preface, but it looks so awesome. The ambitious statement of mission: "In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil."
Two final, unrelated notes, but related because they have put me in a very good mood, as have the previous two subjects: 1) I have spent the past two days listening to Steve Earle sing "Sparkle and Shine" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As0XCEjFxpQ; start at 2:00), and 2) I was very flattered that so many people came to my symposium presentation.
I read Notes from the Underground a few weeks ago, for the first time. It was probably something I should have done before, because I was in the familiar position of having to face one of those obvious truths of the world that you sort of know and everyone else knows but you all of a sudden have to admit. The list of these things is long, and includes things that seem really dumb to me when other people worry about them, but then at some point turn out to be legitimate, or not legitimate but unavoidable, things to worry about. So in this case it was that human striving seems fundamentally flawed, as the attainment of all our goals would be a disaster. The whole nature of humanity is involved with the building of things, and they are less than useless after they are built. The problem is boring, as I said, and you can just read Notes from the Underground if you are curious. The fact that the book was written with a view to making such a view unattractive is somehow not helpful. It still seems like there's not a lot of point in giving micro-loans to the poor to bring them into a home-owning middle class, when the next step is to despise the empty materialism of the middle class they've gotten into, and well-provided-for middle-class kids just do drugs and shoot their classmates. The answer can't be, I don't think, that the main thing is to stop paying so much attention to society's material needs, but to increase appreciation of art and literature or something. Art and literature have no meaning apart from human imperfection and striving. Michaelangelo's David is all very well, but you only need one of it: it's not usually about perfection.
The point, though, of one of the things I wanted to say, was that that all that doesn't matter. But everyone already knows it doesn't matter, obviously, because they go on working for things and wanting to attain goals and ideals. So I'm not sure why I'm so anxious to reassure you, but I am.
Because even if the good has no permanent reality that is evident in human life, the bad does. Vanquishing evil has to be meaningful, no matter what other evil immediately appears in its place. I think there is probably a philosophical argument to be made about the true ontological existence of evil proving the existence of good, but I don't really care that much. It's very funny how happy I was, sitting in the window seat in the Thunderdragons classroom at naptime last week, when I remembered the unmistakable reality of evil.
The second thing, which I remembered yesterday, is that the summer before my freshman year in high school I lay on my bed at my father's house one night, wide awake, on the blue-flowered sheets with the itchy lace border, and I thought that if I made the varsity field hockey team, as it amazingly looked like I would, if that astonishing trust were actually vested in me, I knew I couldn't say that I would never want or ask for anything again, because I saw with the logic that sees farther than the imagination that I would, but I promised I would never forget that once, in that little room with the lights from the gas station coming through the window, I hadn't been able to imagine making any further demand on the universe. And I would never look back later and laugh at my self, or act like any more adult issue that may have arisen since that night made it any less true.
In a not-very-amazing coincidence, the book we're reading this week for my religion seminar is Ernest Becker's Escape From Evil. All I've read so far is the preface, but it looks so awesome. The ambitious statement of mission: "In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil."
Two final, unrelated notes, but related because they have put me in a very good mood, as have the previous two subjects: 1) I have spent the past two days listening to Steve Earle sing "Sparkle and Shine" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As0XCEjFxpQ; start at 2:00), and 2) I was very flattered that so many people came to my symposium presentation.
Fun Game
I just found my notes from Russian Literature class on Thursday. Here is the game: I will transcribe my notes, in their entirety, and you will try to determine to what each line item refers. Hint: the topic of the class was the epilogue of Crime and Punishment. Notes follow in bold:
--zombies, Pride & Predjudice
--Power Rangers, death row
--Shakespeare, southern accents
--John Grisham, beet payments
--closet rapist/ closet ice tunneler
5 points for each correct answer, partial credit given.
--zombies, Pride & Predjudice
--Power Rangers, death row
--Shakespeare, southern accents
--John Grisham, beet payments
--closet rapist/ closet ice tunneler
5 points for each correct answer, partial credit given.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Your Friday plans
I am presenting in the student symposium at 4:30 on Friday in Bi Hall room 311. If you are in Middlebury, Vermont, you should come. I will tell you all about the Virgin of the Burning Bush icon.
I'm concerned that I won't convey how interesting the topic is. I don't have much time to present, so a lot is cut out-- it's basically just describing the icon. I've been thinking about this all year, so I don't remember anymore whether what I'm talking about is obvious to other people, or interesting, or comprehensible, or what. I assure you here, it's very interesting and important, no matter how my talk might turn out.
I'm concerned that I won't convey how interesting the topic is. I don't have much time to present, so a lot is cut out-- it's basically just describing the icon. I've been thinking about this all year, so I don't remember anymore whether what I'm talking about is obvious to other people, or interesting, or comprehensible, or what. I assure you here, it's very interesting and important, no matter how my talk might turn out.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Dream Job--Vocation discovered
Last night I dreamed that I opened a museum entirely devoted to landscape paintings of bean farms. There were many such paintings, all coming from secret, tormented periods in the artists' lives. The press and public were most interested in a series by Hans Holbein the Younger, about ten paintings in some sort of symbolic sequence. There was another series, though, more violently executed, that I liked, though I think I had a hard time convincing visitors to the museum to look at them, and then I couldn't find them.
Now I have the Ray Wylie Hubbard song "Snake Farm" on my mind, but about a bean farm ("Bean Farm... it's a legume house!").
Now I have the Ray Wylie Hubbard song "Snake Farm" on my mind, but about a bean farm ("Bean Farm... it's a legume house!").
Friday, April 10, 2009
A distinct possibility
Свидригайлов сидел в задумчивости.
— А что, если там одни пауки или что-нибудь в этом роде, — сказал он вдруг.
«Это помешанный», — подумал Раскольников.
— А что, если там одни пауки или что-нибудь в этом роде, — сказал он вдруг.
«Это помешанный», — подумал Раскольников.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Quantum Jumping-- The Inter-dimensional Quest for a Better You
Look, all my problems are solved!
http://www.quantumjumping.com/lp/manifesting?sr=1&gclid=CJnuiLnC4pkCFRINDQodpgGqVA
Also, I'm going to Tomsk from June 1- August 7. Actually I think I'm in Washington for orientation June 1 and 2. I remember Tomsk from Siberian History textbooks-- it is a little picture of a wooden fort.
http://www.quantumjumping.com/lp/manifesting?sr=1&gclid=CJnuiLnC4pkCFRINDQodpgGqVA
Also, I'm going to Tomsk from June 1- August 7. Actually I think I'm in Washington for orientation June 1 and 2. I remember Tomsk from Siberian History textbooks-- it is a little picture of a wooden fort.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Ancient Astronaut Theories
I just read a parenthetical description of a cited website in a wikipedia article. I wish very much that this description belonged to something of my own creation:
"(mostly a site aimed at refuting various ancient astronaut theories)".
Happy Palm Sunday to all. Today in the First Congregationalist Church of Middlebury, after the usual flock of bubbly 8-year-old girls in pastel dresses flitted about handing out the palm fronds in an inefficient but picturesque manner, these two teenage boys, very broad-shouldered and scowling, one in a sort of amazing leather jacket, strode up to the front of the church with the big bunches of left-over fronds. They were supposed to put them in these vases near the foot of the alter, but, much to their embarrassment and the congregation's hilarity, they couldn't get them gathered together to fit, and they stood there at the front of the church looking more and more awkward, shoving these palm fronds into the vase. Eventually they gave up and just let them spill out everywhere, and gave fake triumphant gestures as they self-consciously swaggered back to their pews. The messy palm arrangements looked very nice, actually, and I can't imagine how they could have been improved.
"(mostly a site aimed at refuting various ancient astronaut theories)".
Happy Palm Sunday to all. Today in the First Congregationalist Church of Middlebury, after the usual flock of bubbly 8-year-old girls in pastel dresses flitted about handing out the palm fronds in an inefficient but picturesque manner, these two teenage boys, very broad-shouldered and scowling, one in a sort of amazing leather jacket, strode up to the front of the church with the big bunches of left-over fronds. They were supposed to put them in these vases near the foot of the alter, but, much to their embarrassment and the congregation's hilarity, they couldn't get them gathered together to fit, and they stood there at the front of the church looking more and more awkward, shoving these palm fronds into the vase. Eventually they gave up and just let them spill out everywhere, and gave fake triumphant gestures as they self-consciously swaggered back to their pews. The messy palm arrangements looked very nice, actually, and I can't imagine how they could have been improved.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Big with Man
I'm reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It's pretty amazing. I keep underlining spectacular lines, each better than the last.
"Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big with man, becomes in-drawn and aloof."
"Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big with man, becomes in-drawn and aloof."
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