Hypotyposis on a Good Day

Multiple mini-responses

I'm really quite gratified by the responses I've gotten to my new personal blog. I still think of the encouragement I received in the early moments by Lloyd and Laura. I'm thrilled that I have a group of loyal readers -- and their responses energize me. For example:

• Tonight, I took to heart Catherine's encouragement to see Ursula K. Le Guin. Not surprisingly, tons of people filled the 2nd floor of Cody's Books. It was better than the usual book reading, not only because the stories read were so fine but because Le Guin is a really charming respondent. She seemed quite unpretentious, mixng humor with rather sharp insight in her answers to questions. More than that, she had an audience full of fans intimately knowledgeable about her work who wondered about that essay or this story written over decades.
• My friend Ginny Hearn responded to a whole slew of my previous posts. I responded to one of her comments and plan to answer some others when I'm less sleepy
• I wonder what Lynn will have to say about my new blog when she has a moment.
• I didn't realize that there would many others in our blogging community writing about faith, Christianity, and religion.

Off to bed -- I'm still hoping to turn my daily blogging ritual into a morning rather than a late-night activity.

Tempted to go hear Ursula K. Le Guin tomorrow

I'm tempted to go hear Ursula K. Le Guin speak about her new book Changing Planes: Stories at Cody's Books tomorrow. I knew nothing but her famous name until I read a review of The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories by Margaret Atwood in (you guessed it), The New York Review. I wish the review were publicly available (because it turned me on to both Le Guin and Margaret Atwood) -- but this quote should give you a flavor for both:

Which brings us to Ursula K. Le Guin. No question about her literary quality: her graceful prose, carefully thought-through premises, psychological insight, and intelligent perception have earned her the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, five Hugos, five Nebulas, a Newberry, a Jupiter, a Gandalf, and an armful of other awards, great and small. Her first two books, Planet of Exile and Rocannon's World, were published in 1966, and since then she has published sixteen novels, as well as ten collections of stories.

Collectively, these books have created two major parallel universes: the universe of the Ekumen, which is sci-fi proper—space ships, travel among worlds, and so forth—and the world of Earthsea. The latter must be called "fantasy," I suppose, since it contains dragons and witches and even a school for wizards, though this institution is a long way from the Hogwarts of Harry Potter. The Ekumen series may be said—very broadly—to concern itself with the nature of human nature: How far can we stretch and still remain human? What is essential to our being, what is contingent? The Earthsea series is occupied—again, very broadly speaking—with the nature of reality and the necessity of mortality, and also with language in relation to its matrix. (That's heavy weather to make of a series that has been promoted as suitable for age twelve, but perhaps the fault lies in the marketing directors. Like Alice in Wonderland, these tales speak to readers on many levels.)

Only the lack of time during the week I leave for the east coast makes me hesitant about attending what should be a great reading.

Ang Lee: Inner Hulk

China, Chinese, Chineseness, Chinese-Canadians (and by extension, the Chinese-American experience) have been on my mind a lot recently. Much of my interest has more to do with connecting to my own family background: hence, the creation of a "Finding My Roots" category in this blog.

Not surprisingly then, the profile of Ang Lee in the lastest issue (June 30) of The New Yorker caught my attention. The first Lee movie I saw was Eat Drink Man Woman. I was then surprised (but delighted) to learn that Sense and Sensibility was another of his films. I later found myself repeating the quip that Lee's most famous film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was Sense and Sensibility with martial arts.

There's a lot in the profile to which I reacted. Let me recount the easier-to-blog about matters and see whether I reach the more challenging materials. (In blogging, I find it a challenge not to do what I'm about to do: when faced with a rich source that provokes multiple and deep responses, I often do not have the resources of time or energy or courage to publicly respond; when I do react in my blog, it is often to point to the quirky, fun, delightful. My blog entry barely does the source justice, but if I wait to do it justice, I will have nothing to say.)

Back to matter at hand: I laughed in reading about a date between Ang Lee and his-wife-to-be Jane Lin (p. 76):

On that bus, Lee met his future wife, Jane Lin, an independent, outspoken graduate student in microbiology (on whom Lee later based aspects of the fierce, intrepid character Yu Shu Lien in "Crouching Tiger"). "I never pursued a woman," Lee says, "She came and talked to me. She's a good listener, and she has the smallest ego of anybody I know. I was a shy guy, but I was a future director--I had that ego thing and I wanted to express it. I couldn't find anybody to listen to me. And there she was, interested in what I did." Lin also remembers their meeting. "I could be a chair. I could be a bucket of water. It doesn't matter, he just talks--about everything," she says. "I fall asleep, I wake up, he's still talking."

Interestingly enough, Lee is also described in the following way: "Lee doesn't hector; he doesn't bluster; he doesn't insiste on his own superiority; and he's not materialistic....In fact, there is nothing conspicuous about Lee's behavior but his talent. 'He has the most quiet footprint, a tremendous humility,' Hope says. 'He once said to me, describing his process, that movies pass through him.'" (p. 72)

A major theme of John Lahr's profile is the role of Lee's Chinese/Taiwanese background on his work and his psychology. I'm still working through the piece, wondering whether Lee is caricatured/stereotyped in the profile or whether he is indeed as he is described....

More later perhaps.

A little note for a grand day

I could tell you about how moved I was by the long-anticipated wedding of a friend on a sweltering afternoon in Livermore.

I could write about how I learned that I had misremembered a quote by Albert Einstein in a way that says more about myself than anything about the great scientist.

Instead, I'll just scribble down that because I didn't want to miss a blogging day, I am writing trivia from my wireless phone while lying in my bed. I will also commend to my gentle readers a profile about Ang Lee in the June 30 issue of The New Yorker. Tomorrow, I'll say why specifically I am intrigued by the piece.

I found The Essential Guide to Children's Books and Their Creators to be incredibly helpful in my choice of books for my housemate Bori, a soon to be six-year old girl.

How to have Movable Type post automatically on schedule?

MovableTypeTrickle: "Trickle allows automated posting of deferred Movable Type entries. To use, create a category called 'Deferred', place entries in 'Draft' status, add them to the 'Deferred' category, and set the created date to the date when the item should be posted."

This script should be very handy when I go on vacation but have a series of posts written ahead of time that I wanted posted. I'm not sufficiently organized in my blogging to be in need of such a facility yet. But one day....

What kind of man on the street am I?

I just have to get this down.

As I walked towards my usual lunch-time haunts on Telegraph Avenue, I was approached by two girls and a boy in their early teen years. One girl, who held a piece of paper, seemed to be the leader and asked me whether I was willing to answer some questions. They happen to be well-groomed, well-spoken white kids. However, I immediately knew what they were probably about.

I said, "Sure, why don't you tell me who you are and where you're from." I don't remember the exact exchange of words, save that they were from a Baptist church and had been sent by their youth pastor to ask these questions. They asked me one question -- which I can't remember exactly, except maybe it was about what my purpose in life was. I immediately asked them for the other questions. The kids obliged me and read off all the questions to me. They were predictable ones and went something like: Do you know where you going in life? What do you think is important? What do you think will happen to you when you die? The last question was "What do you think of Jesus?"

I didn't answer any of the questions. I didn't feel like submitting to a regimen of deep, engaging, powerful and potentially highly personal and charged questions submitted by a group of kids that I knew for 10 seconds, who probably had only the foggiest as to what they were actually asking. Instead, I turned the game around, asking the teens what they were hoping to accomplish through asking me these questions. They said that they didn't know, that they would be informed of the purpose after they finished the exercise. I told them that people don't usually talk about deep stuff like what they are asking, especially to strangers. I asked them how they would feel if they were to ask their friends these exact questions. I thought I saw some squirming.

They thanked me and I told them that I myself was a Christian, a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley. I mentioned that I would hope that people would be won to Jesus. But I didn't think that this exercise was terribly helpful.

Now at a moment when I should be sleeping, I ponder what that whole exchange was about. Why was I so adamant in responding to the kids the way that I did? Did I actually perform a service of love to them by sharing my perspective? Or was it an ill-considered deconstruction of some possibly useful but poorly constructed exercise? What was the point of sending kids to ask such deep questions of strangers? Why weren't they told about what they were doing?

Now I wish I had taken down the name of the church and gotten the name of the youth pastor. I'm curious about the motivation. If I were teaching teens, would I do the same? As the creator of The Nexus of Newton and Nietzsche, I was hardly against people talking about deep things. But the evangelistic hook as the last question made me unhappy. (But was my own course evangelistic?)

How do you tell you love someone?

If I could put in words -- exactly -- what is in my heart of hearts, then I would do so with alacrity. But rarely is such the case. Most of the time, I fear. Scared that my words would lie. Uncertain of what would happen if I could speak of love. Frightened by being swept away, losing all perspective, all logic, all balance. Yet I want to be swept up by something/someone good. Yet I want us to be swept up -- together.

But words fail me. Less talk, perhaps, and more walk?

If Robert MacNeil didn't figure it out until recently....

I am blessed -- and cursed -- by the overabundance of cultural opportunities in Berkeley (let alone, the surrounding area). Attending readings at Cody's Bookstore is a favorite opportunity for me to hob-nob with the many famous authors who pass through this town and renown bookstore. The array of writers is overwhelming, and I need to be selective in whom I go hear. Why this writer and not another, I need to ask myself. Otherwise, I try to take in more than I can absorb.

Last night, Robert MacNeil, known to me and, I suspect to many, primarily as the broadcaster who retired after many years at PBS' NewsHour, spoke about his new book Looking for My Country: Finding Myself in America. I went to hear MacNeil because he is a Canadian who in 1997 became an American citizens after many long years in this country. It was no accident that I learned about the talk from my friend Peter (and fellow Canadian-living-in-the-US).

MacNeil spoke about his search for self-identity, specifically that part which resides in nationality. He spoke about things that I understood -- that of being an outsider/insider. I know a lot about the U.S. -- so it's easy to appear for me to pretend to be an American. Yet I come from an alternative existence, one not well-known to most people south of the border but one shared currently by 35 million people ("Canadians"). Although MacNeil came from a Canada of the 1940s and I, from a Canada of the 1980s, we share, strangely enough, enough commonalities for me to say, "hey, we're both Canadians -- maybe all Canadians share these experiences."

I've been in the U.S. for thirteen years with no immediate plans to return. I am working on getting a green card. I even surprise myself with thoughts of becoming an American one day (thoughts that are tinged with guilt and intimations of betrayal). When MacNeil spoke about being torn between being Canadian and living in the U.S., the conflict that inhabited his body of seventy years is probably going to be one that sits in my for the rest of my life. There's all that me that grew up in the north -- and though most of the time these days, Canada seems remote while I pass my days in northern California, I only have to let my guard a moment or two, stare out the window at the wrong time to be transported back to a long lost moment of purity and tranquility that I associate with childhood or Canada or fantasy. I have no desire to make my residence in the city I was born -- Timmins -- but there's something there for which I still long. I can't name it; I don't know what it is. Canada has something to do with it though, I'm sure.

(FYI and FMI, I've blogged in the past about being Canadian: when troubles come, the differences surface; remembering Canada Day through the Maple Leaf flag; Glenn Gould as an eccentric Canuck)

MT has adjustable timestamps -- a temptation to dishonesty?

I'm trying to develop the habit of posting something (anything) each day. MT allows the timestamp to be entered by the user. Would it be cheating for me to go to sleep right now, wake up, and then backpost an item? Technology -- a new temptation to feed on my weakness!

Now does one read a meta-how-to book?

A blog entry a day keeps the guilt demons away: For fans of self-help books and unexpected self-referentiality, take a look at How to Read How-To and Self-Help Books: Getting Real Results from the Advice You Get

Only at the Film Archives

I just got hold of the BAM/PFA calendar for July and August. Coming attractions include CZECH HORROR AND FANTASY ON FILM. It is series like these that used to make me think that "I'm a high-brow person but this is even more high brow than I can ever aspire to!" (I guess times have changed, being a hopeless addict to the wonderful archives that are only hundreds of feet from my office.)

BART to SFO used to be the impossible dream

Yesterday, Krista, Don (friends of mine) and I went out on an excursion of the new BART line that goes out to SFO. It was fun to get out, especially to do so with friends. I wasn't sure how many would show up for a new BART line -- does one have to be a BART geek to trek out there? I was pleased to see families do the BART tour -- I hope that this bodes well for a new generation of BART riders. (Get them while they are young!)

The central disappointment was the lack of interesting developments around the new station -- at least the parking lot around the Milbrae station did not strike me as an attractive destination -- unlike what I understand the Fruitvale Transit Village to be. Maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense to make the end of the line a destination spot; it'd have to incredibly hot to get folks to travel about an hour to reach the station.

At any rate, access to SFO is the main attraction; looking forward to using it soon (providing the hours are right.) I just downloaded the new Palm-based BART schedule. I realized yesterday that I didn't have a schedule for the new station.

See the SF Chronicle coverage of the tour date of BART for something more journalistic. Darn, I missed being on the train with Nancy P.....

Touring the new BART stations as Saturday fun

I have tons of stuff to do at home today but I was thinking of taking the BART tour of its new lines to the San Francisco Airport: "Saturday, June 21 from approximately 3 p.m. to 8 p.m., BART will be offering free rides on its new San Francisco Airport line. Riders wishing to tour the new line and its facilities will be able to ride free between the new South San Francisco Station and Millbrae Station, or into the BART Airport Station, making all station stops."

The day was full, the night calls out

I should have blogged in the early morning, when I had the energy and the time and the right ideas. But the day was full, and the time was short, and the drive to get stuff done was pushing hard, relentlessly. It was a good day -- no, really it was a great day. How many get to sit around and dream big dreams for a living and have the great fun of chasing those dreams? But it didn't feel like a good day while I was in the thick of it all. Too many masters, just one slave.

I'm thankful for the evening, for the cessation of conscious striving. Dinner was a blessing, communion with my beloved housemates. Tonight we met a prospective housemate, a rare treat. Later this evening, the newspaper lay open for evening contemplation as we talked about our days. I said I wanted to blog, to write something before I slept tonight. But what would that be?

Research tackles age old question "Does more money make one happier?"

From 06.16.2003 - Can money buy happiness? UC Berkeley researchers find surprising answers:

"Perhaps making a lot of money in your job can actually cause you to question why you are working at the particular job you have, even if you chose the job for intrinsic reasons," Malka said. "There's a substantial psychological literature showing that receiving monetary rewards for doing a fun task can make the task seem less enjoyable. This past research suggests that your sense of how fulfilling and personally rewarding you find a task is very fragile, and money can shake this delicate sense of enjoyment."

"Individuals have a fundamental psychological need to feel as though their actions are freely chosen," the authors wrote. "In other words, we all need to feel that we are not just doing the work for the money, and intrinsically motivated individuals need to feel this even more so," Chatman added.

A quote from A Blogger's Big-Fish Fantasy that resonates with my thoughts on blogging (blog daily; keep in mind that my parents can be reading what I write):

If quality is the ultimate reader magnet, what makes a blog great? One ingredient is to write daily, according to Mr. Sifry, who said Technorati's rankings showed that daily bloggers tended to draw more readers.

Ms. Hourihan said she made postings to her blog (www.megnut.com) as if she were writing for a small group of readers, while being aware that a larger group might end up reading it. "My guiding principle is always to write with my grandparents in mind," she said. "It keeps me from being too personal or too technical or too complainy."

Reading the SF Chronicle as Morning Ritual

How do you deal with what you read and learn in your local newspaper? My household has subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle for years. For a while, one of my housemates also subscribed to The New York Times -- which I much prefered but found to be too expensive. I typically read The Chronicle over breakfast. If I'm out of the house for breakfast, I don't tend to read the paper that day -- the Chronicle is almost always a morning-only companion for me. I sometimes wonder whether this means that reading the Chronicle is mostly a waste of time -- like channel surfing or mindless web browsing.

Still, I learn stuff when I read the paper. And they certainly provoke various reactions in me.

Articles that make me think that I should watch my bank very closely: Banks defeat privacy bill yet again / Speier vows to put stricter measure on state ballot and Wells dishing out bank data

Article that makes me think that the current administration is really as bad as I have suspected:
E. J. Dionne's Framing the issue and the lastest column by Robert Scheer: "What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?" (no permalink yet)

An article that makes me want to organize a group of friends to go to the Oakland museums: Powerful glimpses of black history in Oakland exhibition

Something that helps me think about what I can do for the many homeless in Berkeley: John Carroll's Well, sure, a house can be a home, about the Berkeley Food and Housing Project

A techno-lust inducing piece: Handspring unveils Treo 600 handheld / Wireless device to be available in the fall

Forcing myself to respond to what I read, I hope, redeems some of my morning time. (But isn't it just enough that I have fun reading the Datebook?)

When I have too much to say, I have nothing to say

It's about 10:30pm now and I am dead tired. I will go to bed soon. This is probably the worse time to blog since I am not thinking terribly clearly. Yet I don't want another day to pass with adding something to my personal blog.

When I'm not in front of my computer, my mind races with ideas for my blog. But right now, I'm at a loss as to what to write -- save this self-referential drivel.

Just got the latest issue of The New York Review. Started reading Freeman Dyson's review of James Gleick's new book Isaac Newton. (Quite fitting to have a great physicist review a book about the greatest physicist of all time....) I'm also looking forward to reading Clifford Geertz's second part of his megareview of new books on Islam. Indeed, I might read it in bed tonight. I'll read the review and think about the new books -- though I am getting small hints that what I'm really after will not be found in the books. Not quite sure what I'm looking for though.

Happy Father's Day

I hope that all of you out there are having a great time celebrating Father's Day -- as a father yourself or as someone who has a father. Since I sent my Dad a card a few days ago, it probably hasn't arrived in Toronto yet. It's not the usual type of card I send -- it's actually sillier and more sentimental than usual. But I hope he'll like it.

I'll give him a call in a few hours, wishing him a wonderful Father's Day, hoping that I'll be able to convey even a small part of how much I love him.

Background reading for designing my site

So far on raymondyee.net, I have some entries for my blog. Now it's time to think about how to fill out the site with more context. A good resource to help one think through how to do so is Patterns for Personal Web Sites.

How can I not consider the gallery space?

The wonderful thing about being part of a great blogging community is that there is so much good material written by friends, eliciting many thoughts and reactions. The bad thing is there is so much to respond to, and I never quite have the energy to do so immediately.

I'm now getting around to thanking Chris for his reflections on his visit to the SF Asian Art Museum. Once I read Chris' observations, I immediately thought, "hey how can I totally miss out on how the building affected the viewing of the collection." We're in agreement that the collection at the SFAAM is fantastic. I've just been wrapped up with the individual objects. Chris has changed the way I now see the relationship among the objects; he articulated what I had not verbalized.

I too am very interested in what electronic media can do for presenting the materials of the SFAAM. A topic for posts to come, I hope.

Complications on a Smooth Saturday Afternoon

On a Berkeley Saturday afternoon marked by weather that is the envy of friends who don't live in the Bay Area, I trotted over to my local branch of the Berkeley Public Library to pick up the latest book on hold for me: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science The book first entered my consciousness when I encountered an essay in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, the book's author. When my friend Grace then emailed me some of her thoughts about Complications, I threw the book on my Berkeley Public Library hold list (a la Netflix), looking forward to reading the popular book whenever it happened to come my way.

That time came today. With book in hand, I partook in one of my favorite lazy afternoon activities -- drinking Darjeeling tea while reading in a local cafe. After reading the first three chapters, I am ready to write some of my preliminary thoughts on the book.

First of all, Gawande reminds me quite a bit of Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik -- two fellow staff writers for The New Yorker-- who wrote endorsements of the book. I can invariably count on essays from Gladwell, Gopnik, and, as I'm learning, Gawande, to be sparklingly intelligent works that make routinely inspire me to write this or that point down and tell my friends about some neat thing I had just learned. (Never read Gladwell? Then try his "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg" -- I was glad to see Catherine's mention of it several weeks ago.) Their essays are memorable and satisfying.

(Trouble is that they are too satisfying sometimes, certainly for my questioning, never-quite-settled-life-can't-be-that-simple mentality. After reading some of the essays in The New Yorker, I think, "wow, is it really that simple?" Now, that can be the mark of superb explication and things really weren't that difficult after all. However, I often get the feeling that a lot of things have been swept under the carpet. I can't point to any specific example right now -- so I may just be full of hot air. But I digress.)

Complications is a book about surgery written by a young surgeon who happens to also be a superb writer. There are probably better surgeons than Dr. Gawande, but few are able to tell us outsiders about surgery the way that he can. I love books of this ilk, written by practitioner-essayists, ones that promise to unveil the mysteries of a field in wonderful prose.

So why do I care about surgery? No one I know is about to undergo surgery (knock on wood) -- but it's almost a certainty that my loved ones and I wll undergo major sugery some point in our lives. I've been feeling this urgency to be prepared for that event, to know as much about this mysterious process of modern medicine as I can as a layman so that I can be an effective advocates for others and for myself. When I was a kid, I used to have this implicit, imperturbable trust of doctors. When my parents questioned their judgement, I was thought that my parents were rubes; surely, my mom and dad just didn't grok the sophistication of modern western medicine.

I now think that I was the rube. I now am quite skeptical of what the medical system can provide in the way of care. Not that I've stopped going to my doctor. But I have a caveat emptor attitude. Doctors are human, very imperfect like the rest of us. This is also very scary since I don't want my doctor to make mistakes, especially with me and with the ones I love. Thankfully, it seems, physicians are often correct and the system works well enough. But that next mistake might be the one that kills you or someone you care about -- and it's that thought that fuels my interest in books like Complications (I'll just mention in passing that Frederick Wiseman's six hour documentary Near Death, which I saw recently has also been part of my recent exploration about modern medicine.)

Gawande jumps right in with a question that has probably bothered a lot of us: Physicians (and specifically, surgeons) have to practice on people in order to become proficient -- so how do we reconcile this reality with our individual demand for the very best care for ourselves and for our loved ones? It is both reassuring (but a bit disturbing) to read that many physicians -- when push comes to shove -- don't want residents (the inexperienced members of the profession) to operate on their loved ones either. The author was one such person. (pp.31-32) And because they are the insiders, they often get the best treatment because they know how the system works. As Gawande writes poignantly: "If learning is necessary but causes harm, then above all it ought to apply to everyone alike. Given a choice, people wriggle out, and those choices are not offered equally. They belong to the connected and the knowledgeable, to insiders over outsiders, to the doctor's child but not the truck driver's. If choice cannot go to everyone, maybe it is better when it is not allowed at all." (pp. 32-33) I'm looking forward to seeing some answers to this dilemma. The next time I have to advocate for someone, do I say, "sure, go ahead, let your people learn on my mother because if it's not my mother, it's someone else's" or do I say, "I know how this system works -- there's no way that my mother will be the guinea pig."

Above I mentioned that my eternal infatuation with doubt. No wonder I was then struck by the following passage: "There is a saying about surgeons, meant as a reproof: 'Sometimes wrong; never in doubt.' But this seemed to me their strength. Every day, surgeons are faced with uncertainties. Information is inadequate; the science is ambiguous; one's knowledge and abilities are never perfect....But he [the surgeon] still cut." (pp. 15-16)

There's more to say -- and I hope to return to writing more about Complications. The first chapters have lots of intriguing thoughts about how surgery might benefit from systemic reform instead of a focus on individual faults and an unexpected discussion on human errors (a systematic study of human error still strikes me as slightly paradoxical). But I got to stop for now.

(If this little blog entry is not enough to arouse an interest in the book, perhaps an interview with Gawande in The Atlantic will. Google also yielded a book review that comes from a medical perspective.)

WANTED: compelling portraits of Jesus in film

Last night, eight of us went to see Nicholas Ray's King of Kings. As I have written previously, I would not have seen this film save for the fact that it was by a great film maker; I'm a Christian who is prejudiced against Bible films. I write and speak out of ignorance, however, since I have actually seen very few films drawing from Biblical stories (and specifically the life of Jesus). But that hasn't stopped me from writing them off as schlock.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself drawn into the movie, mind stimulated and heart (somewhat) engaged. I fought back a few tears in the scene of the two Marys (Magdalene and the Mother of Jesus), with the latter taking in the former -- holiness embracing sinner in love. I should not have been surprised that the story ("the greatest story ever told") would still manage to shine through, especially the words of Jesus as recorded in the gospels.

What the film did force me to confront (which I didn't grasp before seeing the film) is the question -- "Well how would you fill in the gaps of the Biblical narrative to make a film?" There are lot of things that the authors refrain from commenting that Nicholas Ray had to deal with: What did Jesus look like? How did talk? (Was he merely a parable-talking machine?) What motivated Judas' betrayal? What about Pontius Pilate -- what was he like? (I'll have to write about Sub Pontio Pilato, a new chamber opera about Pontius Pilate that some of us saw recently.)

Last night, I felt quite unsatisfied by the portrait of Jesus in the film. The blond hair and blue eyes are certainly a bit hard to get over for many viewers, especially for early 21st century Berkeley types like me. But as I reflected a bit more, that's not really the big problem or challenge in my eyes -- since there have been so many images across time and circumstance -- and because the Bible is silent on Jesus' appearance. I now think that our portrayals of Jesus are always going to reflect a big part of who we are as individuals and as a culture -- and maybe that's exactly the way it was meant to be. Jesus for us all -- collectively and individually. (As I write this, I shudder at the thought of the orthodoxy police knocking at my door, asking me to explain what exactly I meant and to show my credentials as a bone fide right-thinking Christian. Now why should I be so worried -- when what I've just expressed really isn't that radical...hmmm.)

The heart of the matter for me is whether there are portrayals of Jesus in film that really get at how attractive of a presence he must have been and (how as Christians affirm) he still is. It's a tough job, I know -- one must capture how Jesus was simply not like the others (the traditional affirmation is that Jesus was God incarnate, that he was without sin) and yet how he was human, through and through -- indeed, more profoundly human than anyone you will see walking around on the planet now.

For example, I figure that Jesus must have had a amazing (dare I say "wicked") sense of humor. Yes, saving humanity was serious business and he had more than his share of suffering. But he must have been laughing a lot and causing others to share in the comedy (sometimes absurd comedy) or life. I found the Jesus of Ray's film rather humorless. Maybe I missed the humor, maybe Ray couldn't have made Jesus humorous/humorful, maybe Jesus was really just dour. That's just one example.

So -- what I want: compelling portraits of Jesus on film.

(I wondered why there are so many powerful evocations of Jesus in music -- and I guess part of the reason is that musicians don't have to tackle the same challenges as filmmakers. Bach's Jesus in The St. Matthew Passion sings -- how he looks doesn't enter the picture. (Now, what's the significance of Jesus being a baritone/bass and not a tenor? A topic for another day.))

There is more than one way to love

"But I love Bach."

"You don't love Bach -- you analyze Bach."

Multiple genres and voices

In all my blog writing so far, every time I've written "I", I have been speaking for myself. I've also been very careful in what I've written, to be as honest and truthful and accurate as possible -- stating what I do know and don't know.

I'm getting tired to writing in just this way.

So how can I write a poem or a story or a blob of text or drop in a drawing in this space without the "I" literary being "me"? Should I depend on context? Should I use some type of typographic or graphical convention? Should I mark it "story" or "fiction". I hope that if I'm writing a parody (say a parody of myself), that I wouldn't have to explicitly mark it with "Warning: self-parody".

How do others do this? There are probably examples in my own blogging community of such doings -- forgive me for not paying closer attention and missing out. Something I think that Laura might have something in her blog of this nature. Maybe Chris or Lloyd or Catherine. I thought tonight that textism might be what I wanted to study -- but my initial look did not yield what I wanted. Actually, maybe it's Ray Davis who has blogs that address this issue.

What does Kenneth Pollack think today?

Both Lloyd and I wrote about Kenneth Pollack's Threatening Storm some time ago in our blogs as a must-read book in assessing the case for an invasion of Iraq. Pollack's book made me think, "hey maybe there is a sound case to be made for war given how Iraq might become an even more terrible menace to the world". So as I mull the current post-Iraq war situation, as I wonder whether the Bush administration misled the American public about how much it knew about weapons of mass destruction -- indeed wonder what is really true and who I can really believe in such a complex morass of spin -- I've been wondering how Pollack now stands.

Salon.com | Joe Conason's Journal points to a recent NPR interview with Kenneth Pollack. Now is Pollack back-peddling or was he duped or did we misinterpret Pollack? He seemed to one of the more credible analysts on the scene, but I don't know what to think right now.

Twenty-two holds already!

When I decided to see whether I could put a hold on Hillary Clinton's new book Living History at the Berkeley Public Library, I discovered that 22 people had beaten me to the punch. The BPL hasn't even taken ownership of any copy of the book. I look forward to reading the book sometime this fall....

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Resources (KQED)

Although I missed all the programming from KQED during Asian Pacific American Heritage month (May), I do appreciate KQED's KQED | Asian Pacific American Heritage: Resources 2003, which is described as "only a small portion of the many resources that serve the Asian Pacific American community in the Bay Area." This list should come in handy as I get increasingly involved with the Asian American/Canadian communities.

I'm looking forward to reading David Ledbetter's book

Because I've been listening intently to Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Books I and II) for a year now, I was thrilled to see a new book on the subject: Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier: The 48 Preludes and Fugues. I was disappointed that someone beat me to putting it hold at the music library -- but I need to be patient! I'm hoping the book will explicate some of the wonders of the music and pinpoint the whys and hows of the power of the WTC.

(Hmmm...using the Amazon "see related items" feature, I found another book that is currently on the shelf and can therefore be in my impatient hands sooner: Bach: The Goldberg Variations.)

MT experiments on a Sunday afternoon

This afternoon, I was going to sit down to do some leisurely modification of my new blog. It was supposed to be a low-stress activity -- but as I got into it, I got sucked into an obsessive-must-figure-it-all-out-right-away-or-else-I'll-go-crazy frenzy. That's when a nice walk helped me to break free from the infinite loop. Now I feel free to move on to other matters more conducive to restful contemplation on a Sunday afternoon. However, I also decided that I wante to write up what I've looked at instead of just leaving my thoughts in a disorganized jumble.

The overall goal I had set for myself was to get a good overview of the Movable Type (MT) system. It's funny that I looked around for various personal writeups on MT (e.g., [1, 2] ) before settling in on reading the official documentation.

Mark Pilgrim has also been a great source of instruction and inspiration for MT-related matters I'll come back to some specific work he has done.The following are some specific things that I learned:

For some basic modification of the look and feel of a MT blog can be had through copying and pasting pre-defined CSS based styles.

Templates

I'm content to leave the basic style for my blog in place -- it's classy enough for me at this point and the other sample ones didn't inspire me. However, I did want to figure out how to list my blog entries by categories. To do that, I had to figure out to modify and add new templates to MT. In this matter, I learned a lot from Mark Pilgrim's write-up on templates, particularly his own set of templates. With those examples, I was able to generate a page listing categories generated via a new index template for categories. Here specifically is my index template:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

  <head>

  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=<$MTPublishCharset$>" 
  />

  <title>Categoris [<$MTBlogName$>]</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<$MTBlogURL$>styles-site.css" 
  type="text/css" />

  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" 
  href="<$MTBlogURL$>index.rdf" />
<body>

  <h2>Posts by Category</h2>

  <ul>

  <MTCategories>

  <li><a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$> 
  (<$MTCategoryCount$>)</a></li></MTCategories>

  </ul>

  </body>

  </html>

In playing around with templates, I came across two sources that may be useful for future reference: a list of the MT Template tags and Ben Hammersley's "Making Feature-Rich, Movable Type RSS Files".

Plugins

I'm certainly not going to be satisfied with MT out of the box -- one of the things that most attracted me to MT was the active active community of users and developers around MT -- which usually means a lot of plugins. Just a quick glance through a MT plugin directory (especially, the most popular) was tantalizing.

One of the first that I will want to install is MTMacro. I will want to be able to abstract my references -- for example, the book links I'm generating point to my own service. But there's reason to believe that someone else will have a better ISBN->book mapping than I. If I generate the references to these books through a macro, redoing all the links will be a snap.

Some others caught my attention are: MTAmazon, the AllConsuming plugin, and SimpleComments. Finally, there is a tutorial on how to write a MT plugin-- which I will likely want to do at some point.

Integrating RSS aggregation and MT blogging

I'm still struggling to find a good way to integrate a number of things: my blogroll(s), keeping up with a lot of different sources, aggregating feeds, and then integrating some aggregated items right into the writing of my own blog entries. (I wrote about this issue in February.)

The frustrating part of today's explorations was that the miraculous solution that I was hoping to find in MT didn't manifest itself! My tentative conclusion is that I'm going to have to roll my own solution (much as I don't want to do so.) The solution might be a combination of one of the open source aggregators (Peerkat? AmphetaDesk?) combined with the Blogger-API -- so that I can gather RSS feeds and then use post my edited versions to my blog. Maybe newszcrawler (which I'd have to pay for) already does what I'm wanting to do. (Jon Udell's review of RSS aggregators came in handy today.)

Steven Winn on truth and truth-telling

From today's SF Chronicle, I read Lies are no longer damned lies / Americans reduced to expecting deceit, an article that comes at a good time for me, especially as I reflect on the challenges of getting at the "truth". The article calls for a more nuanced response than what I can give immediately -- but my off-the-cuff reaction is this: The fact that I'm not surprised by the great amount of deception half-truths, mistruths, failed attempts to convey the truth, delusions does not mean that I don't long for the truth to be told or for a system in which we can trust each other and our leaders to be truth-tellers (and perhaps, more importantly), truth-bearers. I am tired by the amount of effort it takes to figure out what's going on. It's hard enough when well-meaning people try to communicate. Add to the mix people who are struggling for power over each other and we start to get this incredible mix. I don't exempt myself from the class of people who add to the mess -- for I am deeply sinful too. Hence my dependence on a hermeneutic of self-suspicion in addition to skepticism of others. And to throw in something else I will want to elaborate as I go along -- even well-intentioned self-suspicion is insufficient!

[If I get back to revising this post soon, it would behoove me to deepen my understanding of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" -- an article on Paul Ricoeur might be a place to start for my own self-education.]

A day to be with friends

This morning, my housemate Ildi and Orsi -- one of her daughters -- came with me to experience the first of the monthly "Family Days" at the Asian Art Museum. As a member of the museum, I'm able to take some people with me for free -- in fact, I've been wanting to issue a more general invitation to friends to join me. Each time, I think that I want to go off on my own so that I see new things. Each time, I also want to hang out with my friends.

Today, I got to do a bit of both. In three previous trips, I never seem to get past the first of two floors on the tour. Today, I started in the Chinese galleries (at the end of the first floors of exhibits) and also checked out the resource center. I have been reading Art in China (Oxford History of Art) to help me better understand what I see. (It was gratifying that one of the videos I watched hit directly upon the issue of bronze work in non-Shang dominated China, an issue addressed in the book.) One of the real finds of my trip today was the "Educators' Guide to the Asian Art Museum" -- a booklet that is helpful to any student of Asian Art, and not just those who are trying to teach others about the subject.

Tonight, I got the special treat of seeing my friend Deborah for the first time in about a year. She just got back from China -- and it was great to see her. My housemates know her too and the kids in the house were especially excited to be with her. I'm thankful for email and the phone, which have helped us to stay in touch -- but there's nothing -- nothing at all -- like real life presence, is there? Tonight, she introduced me to the Red Sea Ethiopian restaurant in Oakland -- where there was tasty and filling food to be had. After talking for hours, we got the signal to leave the restaurant (the lights were being turned off -- hint, hint). I told her about my blog -- let me know, Deborah, if you read this item!

It's time to go to bed now for me. I'm finding it hard to imagine why my readers might care concerning what I just wrote. More precisely, I'm used to thinking that my readers might care about what I thought -- but maybe less so about what I did. Nevertheless, I felt the need to write something about the matters the mean most to me. In the byline of the blog, I mentioned friendship. I wanted to remember this day as one dedicated to spending time with my wonderful friends. That's it. Nothing grander or more abstract to say than that. (Perhaps this last paragraph is itself extraneous.)

One does not live by blogs alone....

Thanks to Lloyd for publishing a picture from our bloggers' lunch:

There is more I'd like to say -- but it's already 11:30pm and it's been a long day. Suffice it to say that I loved every moment of our lunch; I wish we could meet more often in "meatspace" or "IRL". [See other blogs for "coverage" of/reaction to this lunch: Isaac, Laura, Lynn

Music in The Connections archives

Because of a series of wonderful hours about Bach, I decided to tune in to the latest goings-ons at the WBUR interview show "The Connection". I'm listening to The Connection.org : The Fresh New Beat of Early Music right now through the wonders of streaming audio. Soothing and entertaining.

Jon Carroll -- a columnist with whom I largely agree

As a subscriber to the San Francisco Chronicle, I have become an avid reader of Jon Carroll's column. I don't read it all the time and must admit that I don't get into his cat columns. However, I usually find myself in violent agreement with his politically-oriented columns.

I mention his columns today not to get into the specifics of what he has written (I hope to do so soon enough) but to write about how I'm attempting to ferret out the truth of what's happening in our world. In this blog and in my reflections, I have been adopting a type of hermeneutic of self-suspicion. I put the emphasis on self-suspicion because I feel the need to inspect my own prejudices and thought-processes with as much vigor as I do of others. Finding articles and commentary that largely agree with my own viewpoints and writing about them (and occasionally subjecting them to vigorous examination) is an indirect way of testing my own assumptions. By writing out in this public space, by drawing in different perspectives, and by inviting others to comment -- I hope to grow and learn and become increasingly free to avail myself of the truth, whatever that might be.

The plan then is to do some close(r) reading of Jon Carroll's columns, distilling what I agree with, and then playing devil's advocate. Over the last little while, I've been following a good number of weblogs and journals that have substantially different orientations. I hope to bring these various points of views in dialog.

Might this be a futile exercise? Some days, I do think so -- since often understanding each other is often not really about logical, rational engagement. Passions run deep. However, Lou Marinoff -- during his reading at Cody's Books, said something that really struck me: he thinks that although humans might be governed strongly by passion in any short-term interaction, it is their ideas and fundamental convictions that shape the large-scale aspects of humanity. Take this as what I think I heard Lou Marinoff saying -- it would good to nail it down precisely. And though one can argue strenuously against what I think he said, there is more than a grain of truth in that view.

Some excellent (free) articles in the latest NYRB

I'm starting to get back into thinking about politics after a hiatus of sorts (between the declaration of the war in Iraq and a week or two ago -- the reason for the slow down should be a subject of a future post)

I'm very grateful for The New York Review of Books, which remains my favorite periodical. Two fine articles I can recommend: Which Way to Mecca? by Clifford Geertz and Stanley Hoffman's America Goes Backward
There is a lot to say that I cannot even begin to write out right now but I was really impressed with the fact that Geertz in preparing the article on Islam had read 50 books on the subject -- reflecting the obvious ferment around the topic. "50 books! And just to start to get a feel for how things relate...." Reading about the process and seeing how shallow my own understanding of Islam is (not surprising given how little I read or know in the concrete about Isalm) made me almost stop reading altogether on this topic.

Hoffman captures a lot of my own feelings and concerns about the current state of things. But I want to test out my thoughts in this area. I've been reading many blogs, looking for political viewpoints that are not my own but which are well-articulated and open to change when shown to be wrong. I need to do more processing before I jump in looking for dialog. Finding the right place and right people seems very important -- otherwise, one just gets embroiled in so much heat with so little light.

Oh yes, Elizabeth Drew's The Neocons in Power also caught my attention. Margaret Atwood's review was probably the most fun to read (being a fine novelist gives her a leg-up on writing essays, I suppose) -- but it's not free for the reading, alas.

What Nicholas Ray film(s) to see?

I'm finally sitting down to pick a film or two or three of Nicholas Ray's to see with my friends. (It seems that we've all been so swamped with life that we still haven't decided what to see.) Alas, as Ray Davis pointed out, many really interesting ones have already come and gone.

I decided to look at the film resources that Lynn pointed to. My first reaction was "wow, that's way to much -- give me google; I can put up with getting garbage as long as I don't have to wade through so much dense good stuff." But somehow, I persevered, looked through a few links and ended up using the Movie Review Query Engine to look up MRQE: King of Kings (1961)
Even though I'm a Christian, I must admit that I haven't found very many Bible stories on film that interesting. And now in the early 21st century, I don't expect to see any made by prominent mainstream directors. So the prospect of seeing a Hollywood picture on Jesus that, as the PFA notes describes, "surprised critics as a profound, affecting story of Christ" intrigues me.

I'll have to see what my buddies think. (I'm also considering The Savage Innocents and 55 Days at Peking....)

Working on book handling services

I want to demonstrate the first steps in where I'm planning to go with building better ways for folks to point to books and gather information about books -- and ultimately other digital resources. I now have a little Python script running on this site that takes an ISBN (so far) and display pointers to a number of different "services": amazon.com, BookSense.com, the Library of Congress, my local public library -- the Berkeley Public Library, etc.

Let's use as an example, a book that I mentioned yesterday -- Iris Chang's The Chinese in America. In that blog entry, I already placed four separate links. I wanted to generalize that approach so that I could easily add more links and services. So...now if it you hit

Iris Chang's book

you will get a popup window for the same book entry.

By centralizing things on one Python script, I will now be able to expand the functionality I will implement. I'll write in detail on my professional site of where we'll be heading. (Some ideas: dropping entries into Endnote, connecting to the Berkeley and University of California systems, deeper integration with amazon.com's wishlists, listmania, bridal registry, etc., making collections of books, etc.)

Credit is in order: Jon Udell's LibraryLookup project, Endnote functionality, Mark Pilgrim's pyAmazon library, David Williamson at the Library of Congress among others.

I can always count on Lloyd for support

Thanks, Lloyd, for noticing my new blog. I figure that you might like the name -- but is anyone going to remember it? I like the clever solution you came up with how to point to my dual blogs: ray.mond. Yes, it is going to be a bit of challenge to know how the two blogs are going to work together. For instance, do I want to load down my personal blog with MT shop-talk. Well, I guess it fits -- though my techie readers on the IU Technology Lodge might care more about this stuff....

Iris Chang -- more than a book reading

On Saturday morning, some friends and I attended a reading by Iris Chang on the occasion of her new book The Chinese in America [booksense, amazon, LC, BPL]. The event turned out to be substantially more than and different from the book readings I've been used to attending at Cody's Books (one of the co-sponsors).

As one to two hundred folks crowded in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center (above the Asian Branch of the Oakland Public Library), I felt that I was clearly at a high-octane community gathering/political rally/consciousness-raising group exercise. My friends and I were impressed with how gracious Iris Chang was throughout the event. (I can only speculate that her writing of The Rape of Nanking and the reaction that she received afterwards must have been a trial by fire.) I was taken aback by how much promotion of varied agendas were taking place simultaneously. Ms. Chang read from the last chapter of her book, "An Uncertain Future." It felt that the largely Chinese audience was in agreement that the position of Chinese-Americans is rather tenuous in this society. Though a lot of progress has been made in terms of advancement on many fronts (economic, political, scientific), Americans of Chinese ethnicity are still viewed, by and large, as foreigners in their own land. Hence, it's not surprising to me that a book reading by Chang would also serve a real political, rallying purpose.

Hypotyposis, eh?

Quite a few years ago, my former housemate Ken referred me to a wonderful line from Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose: "The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wonderful hypotyposis." Ken knew how much I love lists.

Since that day, I've wanted to use the word hypotyposis in some appropriate context. I've toyed with using the term in the name of my website but have hesitated -- largely because it sets the expectations too high. For how will I consistently provide "lively description[s] of an action, event, person, condition, passion, etc. used for creating the illusion of reality?" (following one particular definition of hypotyposis)

So to manage expectations and to use that lovely word, I've chosen to temporarily christen my personal weblog "Hypotyposis on a Good Day" I suspect that I'll change my name quickly enough since it's going to be darn difficult to remember, not to mention a bit stuffy.

My First MovableType entry

Well, here I am, writing my first entry at my new personal blog. It's going to take a while for me to get used to this new system, to figure out what I can do easily and what I can't. Can I link back to my professional blog? Yes, I think I can...OK, now can I publish it?

Things work but I quickly see that there's a lot of changes I'll want to make soon. Some specifics:

how to generate RSS 2.0/0.9x feeds?
how to generate my blogroll?
how to change my template?
what plugins are available?
how to write my own plugins?