G.M. Hopkins

An interesting (and deep) poem by G.M. Hopkins:

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-- G.M. Hopkins

Carter Emmart demos a 3D atlas of the universe

I thought this worthwhile posting to my blog. Hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Philip K. Dick

I love the stories written by Philip K. Dick. But then I tend to love most sci-fi, sometimes even the really tedious--nerdy stuff (PKD's works fall into this category). Here is a brief excerpt from the official biography web site, written by Laurence Sutin.

On the Edge of Eternity

...Dick wrote as focused a self-assessment of his aims and talents as a writer as can be found in any of his journals, letters, essays, and interviews:

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history."

One can readily imagine this passage having been written by Franz Kafka in his diary. And it is among the great fictionalizing philosophers of the twentieth century - Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Rene Daumal, Flann O'Brien - that Dick's place in literary history lies. His uniqueness in this lineage is all the greater for his ability to have created great works in the broadly popular SF form. Dick remains compulsively, convulsingly readable. He is the master of the psychological pratfall, the metaphysical freefall, the political conspiracy within a conspiracy within a conspiracy. He is - as much as any contemporary writer we have - an astute guide to the shifting realities of the twenty-first century.

--Lawrence Sutin is the author of "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick", "Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley" and "A Postcard Memoir". He edited the Philip K. Dick collection "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings". and "In the Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the Exegesis."


The link:

http://www.philipkdick.com/new_ex-thevictory.html

Personality Tests and Brain Games (to make you smarter)

Here is a myriad of personality tests. I'm sure there are more out there, but I found this site, which has Google ads but a comprehensive list of personality and every other kind of test you can think to take:

http://similarminds.com/

http://www.lumosity.com/

Becoming a Student at 51!

I have returned to school. It's scary, and a shocking revelation to discover you actually remember stuff you learned in elementary school. Math 020, which is where I placed, is nothing better than a foggy recollection of gibberish concepts, but still I managed to do well on tests. How can that be? We [humans] have l-o-n-g memories apparently. It's still all very foggy, to me. And being the oldest, generally, is kind of a humbling experience -- but I try not to think about that too much. I'm enjoying the ride (all the cool stuff you learn).

I really REALLY appreciate good teachers. Teaching can't be easy.

What I didn't know I knew - list:

• how to find the circumference, radius and diameter of a circle
• all about absolute numbers (more than I can imagine one needs to know!) :-)
• Pythagorean Theorem
• Irrational numbers
  

  Interesting fact: Apparently Hippasus (one of Pythagoras' students) discovered irrational numbers when trying to represent the square root of 2 as a fraction (using geometry, it is thought). Instead he proved you couldn't write the square root of 2 as a fraction and so it was irrational.
  
  However Pythagoras could not accept the existence of irrational numbers, because he believed that all numbers had perfect values. But he could not disprove Hippasus' "irrational numbers" and so Hippasus was thrown overboard and drowned! -- quoted from the web page "mathisfun"
  

New stuff I learned - list:

• David Foster Wallace's commencement speech. You can read his commencement speech on the WSJ website: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html
• How to twitter
• How films are made; and the music; and the scripts; and directing...
  
• Another cool essay by Bertrand Russel titled "What I have Lived For"

What I Have Lived For
(The Prologue to Bertrand Russell's Autobiography)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

---

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) won the Nobel prize for literature for his History of Western Philosophy and was the co-author of Principia Mathematica.

Our English teacher cut up each section or sentence of this essay into separate pieces of paper, and then asked us to put these back together in the order they should be in, which was like solving a puzzle. I loved the exercise and Betrand Russell's essay!

So now I'm back to school. Maybe this time I'll finish.

Origami In The Pursuit of Perfection

Interesting clip...

Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection from MABONA ORIGAMI on Vimeo.

Did You Know?

My seventy-four old mother sent me this youtube video. It was the last thing I expected from mom...worth sharing so anyone visiting this blog, enjoy...(and thanks mom!)

Watching the movie "Earth" with my grandson

I took my grandson to the movie Earth. He's an active 5-year-old with a short attention span (but he's so cute anyway). And believe it or not, he actually watched the whole thing, without much fidgeting.

There was this particularly heartbreaking scene toward the end of the film.

A male polar bear, out of sheer desperation, is forced to go after unlikely prey -- some sort of abundant group of very large sea-lion-like animals (and why are they so abundant?). He is desperate because of current environmental circumstances affecting his means of survival (which I don't totally understand why, yet). Anyway, he was too weak at this stage to overtake any of them, and after several attempts, and in the midst of hundreds (if not thousands) of these obnoxious sea-lion-like animals, he curled into a ball and died. It was truly heartbreaking to watch.

However, the two cubs they followed from birth did survive (at least to the young adult stage), so maybe there is some hope. Who knows what will ultimately survive and what won't, over time.

Overall the entire film is truly spectacular, as well as heart-breaking, astounding, a little scary and so much more, and I can't wait to see it again.

Declaration of Independence

Katy's "Declaration of Independence", which I believe she wrote around 13 or 14 years old. She insisted I sign it (how funny):

Preamble:
Even though my parents have taught me almost everything I know, I think it's time to be on my own now. I still want to have trade options and negotiations. I hope we can still keep the peace.

Declaration of Natural Rights:
On top of the rights to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness, all children should be treated equally.

All children need shelter, food, drink, responsibility, respect, freedom, & most importantly, Love. Children also have the right to stability, guidance, security, & privacy.

List of Grievances:
I have suffered an intolerable amount of wrongs. I haven’t had enough love, attention, respect, or freedom.
I have gotten grounded for too many things & I’m not allowed to drive.
I also think my curfew is too short.

Resolution of Independence by Me:
I, the representative of myself, do, in the name, and the authority of the good me, solemnly publish & declare, that I am, & have the right to be free & Independent. I am absolved from the allegiance to my parents.
I want to reserve the right to conclude peace, establish commerce, & do all other acts & things which Independent people have the right to do.

Me: X Katy
Mom: X Mom

Sleepless in Portland

No rest for the weary they say, and tonight I'm feeling very weary, moreover restless, which translates to sleepless. For better or for worse, my sleepless-restless-weariness takes on a life of its own. And times like this I find myself cavalier about our primordial need for sleep, so I shrug it off, like any other culpable human-being, demanding responsibilities notwithstanding. Ironically, it is often when I'm my most productive; so here I am, at the onset of one of these predictably sleepless nights, grooving to the sounds of Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and the Flash Dance soundtrack (image is from a dance scene to the song imagination).

My grandson is still up, captivated by the movie Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl (most excellent kids movie by Robert Rodriquez), but I can tell he is fading (unlike me).

Grandson

I grew up in a very backwoods kind of family (though admittedly I've seen worse). My paternal grandmother started having children at the tender age of 14. She was still a child herself! My father was the 5th (I think) and about 11 years younger than the next youngest. It never quite dawned on me, at least until I became a grandmother, how being a young mother would have turned me into such a young grandmother. I lacked the wisdom of foresight, likely a genetic trait and a lineage I would like to change ultimately, though I'm not sure how I would do that. Most of my friends waited to have children until much later in life, so now their children are around the age or even, in some cases, much younger than my grandson (he is almost five now), which makes for interesting conversations. This ultra-matriarchal status often leaves me feeling like I've somehow defied time.

Just the word grandmother conjures up images of a very elderly craggy-faced, gray-haired sweetie, baking apple pie in the kitchen and wearing thick, skin colored circulation stockings, and with awful bad breath (but still very lovable), which is how I remember my grandmother, an image of everything but what I am (except the sweetie part, of course), yet here I am, undeniably, a grandmother!

What I am confused about is why the other neighborhood children also call me grandma. How quickly little people spot irony and naturally exploit it (at my expense of course); a joke life has played on me.

The upside of all this is I'll be around long enough to see him (most precious & beloved grandson) grow into a gracious young man and possibly witness long into his adult years (another blessing life may offer me).

Maybe someday I'll write more about how this little man changed me into the neighborhood non-quintessential grandma, but for now I'm content just living the role of this munchkin's kin.

Tumbleweeds

Here I am at three o'clock in the morning, and all is quiet, and at this moment I'm reminded of how it feels to be under water, muted and surreal.

There is a L'Amour western called Conagher. Conagher the cowboy (Sam Elliott) meets lonely widow (Kathryn Ross) in a remote and desolate frontier, abounding with Indians, cowboys, tumbleweeds and purple sage. She's abandoned and isolated with two children to care for, but she makes the best of the situation. But out of her desperate loneliness she develops a compulsion for writing Haiku-like sonnets, and then carefully tying them to tumbleweeds, thus releasing her muse into the prairies. Clearly she's a resourceful woman, because what better way to self-publish in the southwest, near or around the mid or late 1800’s, but to tie your sonnets to tumbleweeds? Anyway, some of these imbued tumbleweeds happen to bump into Conagher, well actually Conagher’s horse (he’s an observant cowboy). Dazed & amazed by this weird phenomenon he ponders this poetic prose, and yearns to discover the muse behind them. But being a true cowboy the business of settling down is unknown to him. Upon realizing the need to nudge his affections, she decides to lay down a clear path, one I might note, he readily follows.

I like to think she was blogging, trying to connect, fulfilling a need to express (western style of course), maybe even searching for the cowboy of her dreams (by the way, that's not why I'm blogging). It's a simple story, as only this genre can deliver.

This venue does take some warming up to, acclimating to the whole idea of being so, transparent, but if nothing else, I hope to at least entertain and perhaps even to enlighten.

More about me at another time; suffice to say, I'm here and open to this experience.