Welcome to my web pages!
I want to offer my congratulations to one of my very closest friends, Sarah Ying, and her husband, Howard Ying, on the birth of their son, Anthony Gabriel Ying, on 2004 December 16.
I want to offer my congratulations to my friend, Sean Bowles, on his wedding on 2005 March 12.
I just had the best week that I've had in years. I had the great pleasure to show a group of students from Kyoto University around Los Angeles. I think that the tours were a big success. Some pictures are in the gallery in the navigation bar. I made some great friends, and I miss them terribly already.
In case anybody's interested, I have a recommendation: Battlestar Galactica. I was blown away when I saw the miniseries pilot last winter. The series is pretty edgy science fiction. I like how the writers thoughtfully reworked the original story. In the new series, the Cylons are the creation of humanity, and when they return to wage war against humans, they come as religious zealots convinced that they are on a divine mission to cleanse the universe, that God worked through humanity to create the Cylons endowing them with souls as part of a new creation. It's pretty interesting, and I highly recommend it.
I saw the greatest trailer the other day, A Scanner Darkly. You really have to follow the link and watch this trailer; it's beautiful. The movie is by Richard Linklater, one of my favorite directors, and is based on the book, A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick. I'm a really big fan of Philip K. Dick. I think that he is one of the premiere examples of an author experimenting with narrative structure and narrative boundary, one of the two major styles of experimentation conducted in the twentieth century, and A Scanner Darkly is one of his best books, a sad account of the lives of a group of drug addicts and dropouts who are investigated and manipulated by the police.
For fear takes away presence of mind, and without valour art is useless.Cnemus and Brasidas as quoted by Thucydides,
Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, and jealousy, and we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done, like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. When that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore.Battlestar Galactica
Dune, Frank HerbertMany have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis for this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
—from "The Humanity of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
So that you don't think that the following is just a beautiful quote, I wanted to offer a word of explanation about why I selected it. Most other quotes in this list have some obvious import, but this line from The Virgin Suicides is subtle. The book is very clever. In my opinion, Eugenides undertakes a deconstruction of gaze. The real subjects of the story are the boys that narrate the events, and there is a distinctly voyeuristic aspect to their relationship to the Lisbon girls. Because of their attraction to the Lisbon girls, the narration of the boys is affectionate, and though the gaze of the boys is conscious of its bias and careful to remain objective, the boys are never able to understand why the Lisbon girls kill themselves. In the end, the book paints a picture of the operation of a benign and impotent gaze that works on the events of the lives of the girls without conclusion. The author interrogates the effectiveness of gaze in this closing line, which accomplishes a pure, post-structuralist project undermining the ordering power of gaze by confronting it with events that are perhaps impossible to explain rationally and finally refusing even to take a stand on gaze, itself, as either good or bad by making the boys sympathetic victims of their own observations and transforming the passion and intimacy of their gaze into despair and confusion. Lines in the last few pages of the book about the boys meeting and going over events again and again remind me of a scene described by Foucault in The Order of Things in which a researcher notes the inability of insane subjects to permanently classify swatches of fabric, their minds continually breaking up existing sets and reorganizing the swatches into equally unsatisfying collections. The implication is that the sane gaze is privileged and effective. Eugenides along with Foucault rejects the privileged position of an ordering gaze, but at the same time that he rejects the power of gaze, he uses the boys' gaze to soften them and give them a tragic aspect. The book is beautiful and brilliant, and you should definitely read it.
It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
Matt. 6:27,"And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to the span of your life?"
