Wistful with a Fist-ful

Heifer Plug

2008-05-08T22:28:00.001-07:00

I found an interesting charity recently. They're called Heifer and they have a wonderful approach to helping people obtain a sustainable source of food and income. You can give a gift of a water buffalo for $250, or a goat for $120, or a flock of chicks for $20, for example. The Heifer website says: "In poor Filipino villages, water buffalo from Heifer provide draft power for planting rice and potatoes, milk for protein and manure for fertilizer and fuel. A farmer can plant four times more rice with a buffalo than by hand." You can also create a registry at Heifer so that your gifts go directly to a worthwhile charitable cause. Learn more at: http://www.heifer.org/

bigger questions than i can answer

2008-02-28T23:31:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wonder if I'm an aphorist or a system builder. Right now everything seems to critically depend on which side of the fence I fall on, assuming such a fence exists.

My Reading ADD

2007-12-03T08:31:00.000-08:00

Very often these days I find myself reading several books simultaneously. I start a book, read a chapter or two, then find myself strangely attracted to some other title falling off its shelf at the local library or bookstore. While my partially-read stacks make like rampant high-rises, I feel guilty and unsettled. It's almost as if I owe some sort of allegiance to the books I've begun to read; as if I'm cheating on them, breaking some ancient unwritten law. I fear the unread are waiting to rise from their early graves and come a-hauntin'. My reading ADD has led to a rather ridiculously long list now - so here I present a random sampling from the books I'm "currently" reading:

1. Train - Pete Dexter
2. Rashomon and Other Stories - R. Akutagawa
3. The Elements of Statistical Learning - Hastie et al
4. The Black Swan - N. Taleb
5. The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose
6. What are you Optimistic about? - Brockman (ed)
7. Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
8. The Omnivore's Dilemma - M. Polan
9. Freakonomics - S. Levitt
10. The Argumentative Indian - Amartya Sen

More than a year of blogging inactivity

2007-11-15T23:08:00.000-08:00

But will next year be any different?

Paintings

2006-07-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

Since I got myself a graphics tablet and pen, it's been deceptively simple to render random sketches and paint-ful figurative missives as the mood strikes me. Witness here the fruits of my labor on a lazy Saturday afternoon. I call them "Sun and Moon #1 and #2":

Camilo José Cela

2006-07-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

My introduction to Camilo José Cela came recently through the English translation of his first novel, 'The Family of Pascual Duarte'. And boy, what an introduction. Pascual Duarte is everything that Camus' Stranger is not. It is every bit as Spanish as the Stranger is French. Cela is supposed to have revitalized Spanish literature at a time when it was dying of the excesses of ornate lyricism. I see now how. Banned in Franco's Spain for its gratuitous violence and crudeness (oh the irony!), the writing is stark, straightforward, disturbing, and yet borne of a superior imagination - rich with inventive prose and blessed with a deep dark vision. The Family of Pascual Duarte introduced to the world a style of writing called Tremendismo or Brutal Realism which, perhaps, highlights certain aspects of society from an existential perspective - the darkness resting just under the surface of the human heart, the meaningless violence and the slaughter of the innocents. Cela and Hemingway were friends. It is easy to see this. In Cela, I may have found the voice - the honesty, the starkness, and the inspiration I need to push my own fledgling writing over the stagnant stylistic rut it has become mired in. Maybe.

Camilo José Cela died in 2002, almost 12 years after receiving the Nobel prize, and after having published over 50 works. In the delightfully crude and simple language that characterized his writing, this is what he wanted written on his epitaph:

"Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible."

3000 feet of Perspective

2005-08-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I went flying with my friend Rob who's getting his pilot's license, one choppy flight at a time. We flew in a rented 4-seater Piper Archer, a single propeller aircraft from the '70s, which was painted, like other aircraft of its type, an uninspiring dull shade of metallic blue over white. We took off west-bound from the Palo Alto airfield and soared into the Pacific ocean at an altitude of about 3000 feet, just under SFO airspace. Then, turning due east near the Marin headlands, we headed towards Concord where we landed and had lunch. On the way back we circled past tall Mt.Diablo and across the blue-gray waters of the bay.

I realized that the Bay Area is simply beautiful from up in the air. I'd probably have to try very hard to dream up something more picturesque, more appealing as a whole. Imagine: the deep blue hues of the Pacific ocean shimmering in striking contrast to the wispy, fleece-white clouds hovering above it. Imagine the soaring, majestic California coastline dotted with dozens of little sandy beaches and rocky coves. Lush verdant mountains, redwoods and forests, little colorful waterways with white sailboats and their creamy wakes - the bays, the inlets, and the lakes. The surreal gleaming glass city at the tip of the peninsula. The Golden Gate. Mount Tamalpais.

I guess it often takes a change of perspective, 3000 feet in my case, to appreciate the fading charms of something you once treasured but now have come to take for granted.

They say that beauty doesn't last, that it inevitably fades and is replaced by something else. They say that everything that is beautiful is sad, because it's going to be gone soon. But there's the other side to it - that even if things stay as they are, unchanged for eternity, our perceptions of them don't remain the same. Sooner or later, what used to be beautiful becomes boring, ordinary, unattractive. When I first moved to the Bay Area, driving up 280 was a feast everyday the way the setting sun painted the sky like a playful child would splash colors on an empty canvas. Now, I don't pay as much attention to most sunsets because spectacular sunsets are so common here that they're ordinary. I almost wish they weren't.

Is this a tragic shortcoming of us humans, with the grass always duller on our own familiar side, or is it a necessary evil, required for change, evolution and progress? I wonder.

Blindspots and Rationality

2005-07-28T10:32:00.000-07:00

Victor Niederhoffer is a brilliant man, no doubt, besides being immensely capable in many other fields (he was US national squash champion, for example, quite a few times in a row). But as I read his book, "The Education of a Speculator", I thought to myself, why would someone so rational and bright take the kind of speculative risks he seemed to routinely gamble with? It would be understandable if he was in it for the thrills and the excitement, if the very essence of bone-chilling risk propelled him down the slippery slope he took. But no, it appears that he genuinely believed in the infallibility of his trading strategies (despite his faux-humility and the picture of the Titanic hanging in his office).

Given the utter unpredictability of the kind of leveraged derivatives trading that he specialized in, it should've been obvious that sooner or later he'd blow up like a primed case of dynamite. And he did. Not many years after writing the book, he lost his shirt, his house, and everything he owned. He had to borrow from his own children. A man who managed in excess of a 100 million dollars was reduced to penury in a matter of hours.

I believe all of us have our blindspots where the exacting knives of logic and reason suddenly go blunt. I see people who are extremely smart in many areas not apply the same level of intellect and scrutiny to other, often more critical, areas of their lives. It's a shame we're wired this way.

(Speaking of rationality, this isn't to say that I don't believe in the inherent absurdity of life a la Kafka, Camus, et al. I have my own ideas on this, based on a stochastic view of life , but I'll save that for another day)

Zen and Existentialism

2005-07-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

It's quite tempting to think of Existential Phenomenology in a way as being the western equivalent of Zen thinking. But there's a stark, striking beauty to Zen writing that escapes most western articulations of existential and phenomenological thought. To illustrate my point in the classic Zen way, I quote from the Buddhist nun, Ryonen, who wrote the following just before she passed away from this world.

Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing
scene of autumn
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no
wind stirs

Demise of the Renaissance Man

2005-07-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

As I stood under the colorful bookshelves of the local library last Sunday, I had a sudden epiphanic realization of the silent tragedy that is rapidly coming to be. I looked at all those books, juicy fat tomes arranged in long neat lines, and suddenly realized for a fact that I'll never be able to read them all. And neither will you.

We humans have produced and unraveled a cornucopia of knowledge and thought, a spectacular growing mountain of information about everything: from the ruminations of wise-old-men about the human condition to models of nano-particles that can't be seen with the naked eye. A staggering, gigantic, leviathan universe fueled by our thought and imagination over the ages and crystallized into little words dancing around conceptual paragraphs.

Why is this a tragedy? Because no single man can experience the fullness, the entirety, the breathtaking enormity of our legacy. We can nibble on the mountain, little chunks at a time, we can stand back and use devices such as synopsises and summaries, telescopes to give us the macro view of a ledge, a peak, a forest on the never-ending slopes, perhaps. But we simply can't partake of the whole.

So this is where the individual ends and Man begins. For only the human race as a whole can imbibe of this metaphorical mountain - only a billion people can scale it and consume it together. While a surgeon who specializes in taking apart the left-pinky may not know a coccyx from a cockatoo, "the surgeon" as a collective figure can repair everything from despondent bone marrow to that peculiar bigger breasts vanity of ours.

The Individual Man, proud, self-sufficient island of yesteryear, is revealed in all his nakedness to be neither. It may seem obvious, even laughable, this inevitable predicament of ours, but I lament the loss of innocence, the demise of the Rennaisance Man.

You cannot be an astronaut and write a Walden too.

an experiment

2004-12-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

So this is it then.