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2002-01-29

Time to play guitar. I've been practicing my solo guitar pieces quite a bit lately, in hopes of increasing my fluidity and improving my interpretation. Which reminds me that I need to print off the sheet music so that I can work through some of the hard parts, correct any errors in the scores, and add some fingering information here and there (I've got some crazy fingerings in some of my pieces, especially in my "Arctic Suite", where I put the thumb of the left hand to good use on the fretboard!).

Posted on 2002-01-29 at 21:43. File under music.

~ link ~

I'm making good progress on our new XML format for JEPs. I'm pretty much done, I think. I'm not sure how to handle tables, though, such as those found in JEP-0011. Ick.

Posted on 2002-01-29 at 21:28. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Cool, I got a new experimental JEP format working with XML + XSLT rather than the old SGML + jade. I still need to clean up the XML format (simplify some of the markup and add support for everything we use in writing JEPs), but at least now I've got a version that works in both IE and Mozilla. This will make it much easier for JEP authors to create their documents.

Posted on 2002-01-29 at 12:46. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Another essay on Robert Nozick, this one by James Ostrowski.

Posted on 2002-01-29 at 09:47. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

2002-01-28

I just updated the mime.types file on aspect.net so that text/xml is the MIME type for both .xml and .xsl file types (the latter was not defined before). Presumably that takes effect the next time Apache is re-started....

Posted on 2002-01-28 at 22:10. File under technology.

~ link ~

This evening I've been experimenting with the XSLT implementation in Mozilla. It's fairly straightforward and the XSLT stylesheets I've made so far seem to be cross-browser compliant with IE (although there might be a problem with aspect.net, which is where my web pages are hosted, since for instance the XML version of my resume loads fine in IE and also in Mozilla if I view the files locally, but not if I view them on the server). If I can get some of the kinks worked out, I'll move up the schedule for changing the JEP format from SGML to XML. The SGML seems to throw people off, and it doesn't help that you need to install Jade in order to perform the transformation to HTML. XML + XSLT will be less intimidating, I hope, while still providing us with a structured format.

Posted on 2002-01-28 at 21:38. File under technology.

~ link ~

Two reflections on philosopher Robert Nozick, who passed away last week: one by Brian Doherty and the other by Will Wilkinson. I might post more about Nozick in the next few days.

Posted on 2002-01-28 at 09:47. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

2002-01-27

Speaking of getting to work, I made good progress on the new Jabber RFC today. In the next few days I'll post a preliminary version to get feedback from the Jabber community.

Posted on 2002-01-27 at 21:58. File under jabber.

~ link ~

One more thought on new formalism: I'm not convinced of the value of traditional meters. I'm slowly reading through the journals of Ayn Rand, and one thing that she got from Frank Lloyd Wright is the concept of organic architecture (although she shies away from the language of organicism). The catchphrase here is "form follows function" (although not in the original sense espoused by Louis Sullivan): the form of a building must be appropriate for its site and its function. Certainly it's harder in poetry or music than in a practical art like architecture to assign exact meaning to the term "function". Yet I find myself much more open to nonce forms in poetry than most new formalists are, just as my love of jazz (can we even speak of jazz "forms"?) puts me at odds with the traditionalism of most classical musicians. And despite my love of Bach and Dvorak and such, I simply find jazz to be more organic and alive than compositions created in slavish pursuit of sonata form or whatever. That's not to say I don't like writing in traditional meters -- I most decidedly do. And poetry is "inter-textual" in ways that most arts are -- when I write a poem such as Ancient Fire or Cobalt that refers to Sappho, I like to write it in Sapphic meter because I'm making a connection not to objective reality but to poetic history. Yet by no means am I wedded to writing poems (or music) solely in established forms, as my friends the formalists seem to be. But perhaps that's just because I lack the necessary discipline. :-)

Posted on 2002-01-27 at 20:57. File under literature.

~ link ~

The Mary Lou Williams CD that I got from the library is extremely good. I've heard some of her earlier big-band recordings before and they never touched me, but this CD -- a solo piano recording entitled Nite Life and made much a later in her career (1971) -- is powerful stuff. I hear influences here from James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington, Lennie Tristano, and Thelonious Monk, as well as intimations of Keith Jarrett in places. This CD is definitely going on my wish list. :-)

I was less impressed by After New Formalism, a collection of essays edited by Annie Finch on the recent poetic trend toward meter. I guess I just don't derive much value from a bunch of professors holding forth in their academic way, even on a topic that I find of interest. Yes, even in a movement so outside the poetic mainstream as "new formalism", most of the contributors are just a bunch of professors, teaching literature or creative writing alongside their postmodernist and free-verse brethren. The poet I respect most in this collection is Dana Gioia, who worked in business for a long time while pursuing his writing on the side, and who a number of years ago decided to devote himself full-time to the writing life. Gioia strikes me as someone who has maintained at least some distance from the insidious tentacles of academic thinking, and who remains tied to the reality of poems and their readers, as opposed to the false world of critics and their theories. Last night I started reading his latest volume of poems (Interrogations at Noon) and it feels like a keeper.

Perhaps it's not fair of me to be so hard on academics -- perhaps it would be more beneficial for me to see professors as people who have made a certain career choice (simply one different from mine -- although I nearly ended up going to graduate school so "there but for the grace of God go I"). In a way I feel sorry for those stuck in the university system, because all too often there's not much else they can do in life but pursue their research and teach their students. I certainly doubt they'd make it in the high-pressure world of a high-tech startup company like the one I work for. Similarly, I often feel sorry for many full-time artists -- they are so single-minded (or single-talented) in their art that they're otherwise fit only for low-value jobs like waiting tables and clerical work. Usually I'm glad that I'm more multi-talented (or just less focused) than that, because it seems that I have an aptitude for at least a few things other than music and poetry.

That said, I do resent the intellectual hubris and detachment of the academic system. Far too often, academics are concerned only about their little area of specialty and care not about life itself. I suppose one could say the same about those of us creating and documenting software (how important is it really to create an instant messaging application?), but my experience is that engineers don't usually project any greater significance onto their work, and they certainly don't reduce the meaning of human experience to software. I remember back in college I read in the New York Times a roundtable of perspectives on what's wrong with the world and how to fix it from a number of professors. The historian (Gertrude Himmelfarb, I believe it was) said that obviously people are lacking in historical perspective and if we'd just become more aware of history, all would be well; similarly the economist was convinced that an understanding of economics was the key to solving the world's problems, the biologist made a pitch for biology, the mathematician bemoaned rampant "innumeracy", and so on. Such limited horizons. And those horizons become even more limited when one realizes that any given historian (say) looks askance at those benighted generalists who seek to derive greater lessons from the vast sweep of human history, and instead focuses on some suitably publishable topic such as villas within a day's chariot ride of ancient Rome or necromancy in southern France in the period 1100 to 1300.

What I find especially galling is that those in universities fail to realize that a vast system of "crass" production (and taxation) is necessary to sustain the privileged class of scholars who because of the productivity of others are able to delve at their leisure into such arcane matters. To top it off, most scholars are proud leftists who rail against the free market and capitalist exploitation of the working class -- never thinking that perhaps it's the academics themselves who are the true exploiters of the labor of others.

Yet I mustn't personalize things too much. In fact the problem is not with individual scholar-teachers (many of whom may be quite competent and thoughtful), but with the very system of university academics itself. The same can be said for pre-collegiate education, where many dedicated teachers try their best to focus on the children in the context of a system that in most ways is positively inimical to true learning.

But rather than complain about "the system" (as most Randians and libertarians do), I have long found it more productive and emotionally satisfying to concentrate on my own life and the value I can create within my own sphere of influence. So enough ranting. I think I'll get back to work now. :-)

Posted on 2002-01-27 at 20:33. File under music.

~ link ~

2002-01-24

The library rocks. My catch this time: Interrogations at Noon by poet Dana Gioia, After New Formalism edited by Annie Finch, and The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. I also picked up CDs by Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Professor Longhair. Good stuff.

While at the library (the Eugene Field branch of the Denver Public Library, to be specific) I also read a fascinating article in The Atlantic on religion in the 21st century, specifically on the rise of "New Religious Movements" thoughout the world. Wow, I hadn't realized how fluid the religious marketplace is. According to one scholar quoted in the article, there are almost 10,000 recognized religions (many of which are sects within established religions) in the world and a new religion is founded every 2 or 3 days! Many of these religions are unknown outside their geographical areas of influence except to scholars of religion, yet they have tens of thousands to even millions of adherents. So much for the "secularization thesis", which postulated that religion would wither away under the inexorable spread of reason and science. On the contrary, the pace of religous change and growth seems to have increased along with everything else in the modern world.

As a secularist myself I find this information not a little discomforting, but it's an unavoidable fact of human reality. In fact, even secular or philosophical "movements" such as the Randianism to which I was for so long attached (as well as schools such as existentialism, Epicureanism, and Confucianism) bear a strong resemblance to new religious movements: rituals, hierarchies, sacred books, special days, places of pilgrimage, and the like. Interestingly, one scholar quoted claims that the belief-system of any given movement is less important than the social support network it provides. I wouldn't go quite that far, but I would agree that the sense of belonging to a world-changing movement (and of being on the right side of historical change) can be intoxicating, even for marginal movements like libertarianism, radical environmentalism, or Randianism.

Posted on 2002-01-24 at 20:38. File under society.

~ link ~

2002-01-22

I just found my friend Chris Sciabarra's remembrance of philosopher George Walsh, who passed away on November 8th of last year. George was a special person -- a serious philosopher who always had a twinkle in his eye. I recall that years ago George had some kind words to say about a short essay I wrote on medieval philosophy during my time at the long-defunct American Renaissance School, and that meant a great deal to me since I knew he was a real philosopher and not just some crank Randian. I would see him every few years at some Objectivist seminar (back when I still attended such events) and it was always a pleasure to be in his presence. He is missed.

Posted on 2002-01-22 at 21:39. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

In my few spare moments of late, I've been making notes towards some more of my Rand essays. The Rand centenary will occur on Feb. 2, 2005, and I'd really like to be done with all of my Rand-writing by then. Not that I've met such writing deadlines in the past, but one can hope. The essays I've touched most recently are Rand's Descriptive Style, Toward a Gnostic Objectivism, and Anarchy, State, and Objectivism. I just requested The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels from the Denver Public Library, so I'll be re-reading that soon for further research into gnosticism. And how, you might ask, can such an esoteric religion provide a model for approaching a world-view as overtly secular as Objectivism? Hint: gnosticism was pro-individual, pro-woman, anti-hierarchy, anti-church. Besides, bringing up gnosticism allows me to talk about Blake, Whitman, and the medieval troubadours (the Albigensian Crusades not only put an effective end to troubadour culture but also wiped out the heretical Cathars, whose views seem to have been heavily influenced by gnostic teachings, as were the Manichaeans before them).

Posted on 2002-01-22 at 21:02. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Wow, things've been busy. For one thing, traffic on the Jabber mailing lists has exploded since the first of the year. And since I'm chief traffic cop (actually list admin) and also need to follow all the discussions in my role as Executive Director of the Jabber Software Foundation, JEP Editor, and all-around Patron Saint of Jabber, I spend serious amounts of time just trying to keep up on all the conversations. In the past week I've also edited and released six new JEPs, just today I posted four news items, I've been interviewing accounting and bookkeeping services, and I've been working on the new RFC in earnest. Plus today the JSF finally took possession of some new server machines to replace lor and kelvin (the two aged warriors which have put in years of valiant service but which are about ready to pass away to computer heaven). That's not to mention my regular duties at Jabber Inc. Whew!

Posted on 2002-01-22 at 20:52. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2002-01-16

These weekly meetings of the Jabber Software Foundation are working out well -- they give the project a greater sense of continuity. We had another good meeting today (for which ChatBot of course kept a log). One thing we decided was to label Jabber Enhancement Proposals as "Experimental" when they are first submitted to the JEP Editor (yours truly). This will make it easier for JEP authors to get feedback on their ideas before I send the JEP to those sticklers in the Jabber Council for their stamp of approval. This afternoon I updated JEP-0001 with the revised process and then released three new JEPs as Experimental proposals. Word has it that at least four more JEPs are under development, so I'm going to be busy with them soon!

Posted on 2002-01-16 at 21:42. File under jabber.

~ link ~

The Christian Science Monitor notes that 9/11 may be ushering in a new nationalism that cuts across ideological lines.

Posted on 2002-01-16 at 11:44. File under society.

~ link ~

This morning I released two new Jabber Enhancement Proposals to the Jabber Council: JEP-0012 regarding the 'jabber:iq:last' namespace and JEP-0013 regarding POP3-like handling of offline messages. I'm happy to be clearing out the JEP queue. And here I thought being the JEP Editor was going to be a breeze! :-) Actually it's a role for which I'm well-suited, and I enjoy it a lot.

Posted on 2002-01-16 at 11:28. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2002-01-15

Libertarians like to point to the Socialist Party as one model for electoral success in the USA: although the socialists never elected a President or even more than a handful of members of Congress (if that -- I need to check my facts), they garnered enough support for enough years to move the terms of debate in their direction. By skewing the entire political spectrum, they pressured the major parties (especially the Democrats) to begin using socialistic rhetoric and offering socialistic solutions to the nation's problems. The result? Most of the Socialist Party's platform, once considered radical, was eventually passed into law. And so, argue present-day libertarians, could the Libertarian Party do by finding enough success at the polls to transform the terms of debate and thereby pressure the major parties (especially the Republicans) to move in a libertarian direction.

While this argument is seductive, the analogy may be strained. Specifically, it overlooks the fact that while the Socialist Party never won more than 10% (or whatever) of the votes in any national election, it was considerably more successful in certain pockets of the USA. For example, the city of Milwaukee (at the time one of the larger cities in America) was run by socialists for 38 years out of the 20th century. These hotbeds made the Socialist Party seem more significant than it perhaps was, since the mayor of a large city is given much more credence than some state legislator from New Hampshire or Alaska (which is about the highest office so far attained by someone representing the Libertarian Party).

As far as I can see, the LP will remain politically feckless as long as its appeal is primarily rural. Most Americans live in cities, and no city that I know of has a libertarian presence of any kind. What success the LP has experienced has occurred in primarily rural states such as Alaska and New Hampshire. Even then, its success has not happened in Anchorage or Manchester, but in smaller towns.

One can speculate on why that might be the case, but I think it's primarily because libertarians have not appealed to the concerns of city dwellers -- or, perhaps more accurately, because libertarianism itself doesn't appeal to city dwellers. It strikes me that population density and government control go hand-in-hand. Most regulations -- from zoning to gun control -- are stronger in cities. Rural areas are closer to a "state of nature", in which government is weak or absent. It's easier to control people who are in close proximity, and the people themselves seem to prefer it that way. In addition, city dwellers tend to be (or to consider themselves) more sophisticated, more "liberal" if you will, with the result that no major city in the USA can be considered a bastion of conservative thinking (the largest one I can think of is Colorado Springs). One glance at the 2000 county-by-county electoral map tells the story: Al Gore won the cities and George W. Bush won just about everything else.

Now, libertarians (despite all the rhetoric about overcoming the political duality of left vs. right) have appealed primarily to disgruntled conservatives (this is one reason I became uncomfortable in the LP and ultimately quit). So it comes as no surprise that the LP has experienced its strongest success in the boonies. Here in Colorado, the LP is trumpeting the fact that the city council of Leadville is now solidly libertarian. But a victory in Leadville (which is isolated in the middle of the high Rockies and whose elevation is almost four times greater than its population) does not a revolution make. To have any sizable impact on Colorado politics, the LP would need to do well in the major Front Range communities, especially Denver. The same goes for the LP's standing on the national stage. Cities are where the media are, where the people are, where the governments are. Without the cities (or, as per the Socialist Party, some cities), the cause is lost.

Yet it seems to me that libertarians have historically made no appeal to city dwellers, and that they are not making any such appeal now. This despite the fact that certain libertarian positions are more liberal than the positions taken by the Democrats. Educational choice, economic freedom (can you say Jim Crow?), the war on drugs (which overwhelmingly singles out young minority males), expensive handouts for sports stadiums, and other urban issues lend themselves to truly liberal solutions. Yet libertarian voices are silent.

America needs an urban libertarianism. Will someone develop it and thereby challenge the Democratic grip on our cities? We shall see....

Posted on 2002-01-15 at 22:07. File under politics.

~ link ~

Regarding the idea of reclaiming the word 'liberal', here's a line I just heard in Bob Dylan's song I Shall Be Free No. 10:

Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want ev'rybody to be free
But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I'm crazy!

The complaint about Barry Goldwater was to be expected (this was 1964, after all), but the assumption is that a true liberal wants everyone to be free, which sounds rather libertarian to me. Yes, "I am a liberal". :-)

Posted on 2002-01-15 at 14:26. File under politics.

~ link ~

2002-01-14

We're having yet another Jabber hackfest at Peter Millard's house. Lots of talk about Jabber protocols and design of future features. The first topic after I arrived was invisible mode, which seems fairly straightforward and we might even have it in the soon-to-be-released 1.4.2 server. Now up for discussion: sending binary data over Jabber. Talk about a messy topic.

In other Jabber news, I worked through two JEPs today. I still have a few more to clear out of the queue.

Posted on 2002-01-14 at 20:49. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Lawrence Reed of the Makinac Center asks his fellow libertarians when will we know when we've won? One of his criteria: when the term 'liberalism' means what it still means outside the USA and what it originally meant here before it was hijacked by moderate socialists: full respect for liberty. We might as well start now. Repeat after me: "I am a liberal." :-)

Posted on 2002-01-14 at 09:32. File under politics.

~ link ~

2002-01-13

I didn't spend this weekend working on what I'm supposed to be working on. Instead I loafed around by starting the process of reconstructing version 4.0 of The Ism Book, the dictionary of philosophy I wrote way back in 1990 and have been fiddling with ever since. I'm not sure why I keep returning to it, since it's not as if the world needs yet another dictionary of philosophy. Yet I do keep returning. One reason, I think, is that for me this book is what hypertext is all about. I wrote (or, more accurately, conceived) the book as hypertext back in 1990 -- despite the fact that at that time the book was paper-only, it was in my mind a web of information. When I discovered the real Web in late 1995 and then started creating my own website in early 1996 (yeah I know, I came late to the game), just about the first thing I did was convert The Ism Book to HTML.

Since then, my work on The Ism Book has been near the cutting edge of my work with hypertext. In late 1996 I added scads of forward and reverse links to the book, making this web deeply intertwined. Version 4.0 was a fairly advanced application of XML (at least for me), but I lost it when my web hosting company went bankrupt suddenly and my hard drive crashed right around the same time. So now (as explained here), I'm working to reconstruct version 4.0 and go well beyond it. My first step, taken yesterday, was to collect together all the HTML files (I'm embarrassed to say how poor my markup was back in 1996!) and convert them into one clean, well-formed SGML file that conforms to the DocBook spec (well, almost completely -- I may have to extend DocBook to handle my categorization of the isms into types and branches). So it all parses cleanly now and I can get jade to output a big HTML file for it. The next step is to write some XSLT stylesheets that will take this structured source file and output HTML, text, PDF, or whatever format I desire. I haven't played with XSLT in a while so this'll be fun. :-)

The only problem is now I'm behind on Jabber stuff. I'll have to play catch-up on that during the week....

Oh, and to accompany my work this weekend I listened in chronological order to every original Yes album I own (skipping the live stuff), from Yes (1969) to Magnification (2001). Twenty straight CDs of nothing but Yes. Fanatical, eh?

Posted on 2002-01-13 at 21:56. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

2002-01-11

It was bound to happen: my brief fling of interest in current events has ended. Once again I'm focused solely on Jabber, music, writing, and my other pursuits, and I'm not even visiting news and opinion sites any longer. My sole news source is now the daily email I receive from free-market.net (as well as my favorite blogs, naturally).

Posted on 2002-01-11 at 21:03. File under personal.

~ link ~

We had another good Jabber Software Foundation discussion the other day. The log is here. We're going to start having these discussions weekly again, which I think will help us stay productive -- there's nothing like the threat of public shaming to keep you working. :-)

Posted on 2002-01-11 at 14:48. File under jabber.

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Randal O'Toole (author of The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths) argues that one lesson of September 11th is don't bunch up into large concentrations of people (thereby creating tempting targets for terrorists).

Posted on 2002-01-11 at 09:55. File under society.

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Two columns on the blog phenomenon: Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. InstaPundit) says that blogs are sparking a media reformation, and Russ Stein says that blogs are hastening a libertarian revolution. Goodbye Big Media! Goodbye Big Government! (Well, they'll always be with us, but it seems that their power is being threatened.)

Posted on 2002-01-11 at 09:31. File under society.

~ link ~

2002-01-07

The Formalist, long one of the premier journals dedicated to metrical poetry, finally has a website.

Posted on 2002-01-07 at 21:40. File under literature.

~ link ~

Wow, I have a large backlog of work to complete -- creating more documentation for the Jabber Developer Program, updating the old Jabber RFC and submitting it to the IETF, processing some new Jabber Enhancement Proposals, continuing the cleanup of the Jabber Software Foundation, and so on. So I may not be blogging as much over the next month or two!

Posted on 2002-01-07 at 12:20. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2002-01-04

I just wrote another dialogue on a Randian theme. Dialogues are fun. Maybe after I finish all these Rand essays I'll write some pure dialogues in more of my own voice.

Posted on 2002-01-04 at 22:02. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Moira quotes the following poem in her new blog, and I like it so much I'm going to include it here as well:

Allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

--Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robert Bly

Posted on 2002-01-04 at 19:44. File under literature.

~ link ~

2002-01-03

A journal entry on intellectual property.

Posted on 2002-01-03 at 21:19. File under society.

~ link ~

My friend Michael Bauer has posted some interesting thoughts on common source (as opposed to open source). We're definitely doing some of what he talks about within the Jabber project, but there's more we can do. I guess I'll add some of this to my to-do list. :-)

Posted on 2002-01-03 at 15:36. File under technology.

~ link ~

2002-01-02

One of the books I read over vacation was The Gospel of Thomas (the other was about half of The Portable Nietzsche translated by Walter Kaufmann!). I found a number of the sayings captured in this gospel to be of interest, at least as they relate to my continuing research into gnosticism. Here are some of the purported sayings of Jesus I'd like to reflect on more fully:

If your leaders say to you, "Look, the kingdom is in heaven," then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, "It is in the sea," then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and it is outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty, and you are poverty. [3]

Fortunate are those who are alone and chosen, for you will find the kingdom. For you have come from it, and you will return there again. [49]

His followers said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place, and whn will the new world come?" He said to them, "What you look for has come, but you do not know it." [51]

Fortunate is the person who has worked hard and has found life. [58]

Look to the living as long as you live, or you might die and then try to see the living one, and you will be unable to see. [59]

He who knows all but is lacking in himself is utterly lacking. [67]

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you. [70]

Whoever has found himself, of that person the world is not worthy. [111]

[The kingdom] will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, "Look, here it is," or "Look, there it is." Rather, the father's kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it. [113]

Posted on 2002-01-02 at 21:09. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

As we walked away from the World Trade Center site (or as close to it as we could get), a woman on a cell phone turned the corner onto Washington Street and said "I'm there. All I can see is empty sky." That captured it perfectly for me. If you had never been to the World Trade Center before they were destroyed, this empty sky would be meaningless. But I kept looking up, half-expecting to see two enormous white towers shining in the cold December sun. In Lower Manhattan, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.

Posted on 2002-01-02 at 20:35. File under personal.

~ link ~

In between stops at the World Trade Center site and my favorite Greek restaurant (Symposium, on 113th Street -- absolutely scrumptious baklava!), Elisa and I enjoyed a quick visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art last Saturday. The two memorials by sculptor D.C. French in the American Wing -- the Melvin Memorial and Milmore Memorial -- held special meaning for me this time, although I've always found them quite moving. Other works I especially enjoyed were a Chinese scroll painting of fishes (playfully rendered and full of life) and a powerful statue of Bodhisattva Maitreya ("the Buddha of the Future") from 2nd or 3rd century Pakistan.

Posted on 2002-01-02 at 20:14. File under personal.

~ link ~

My friend Moira has started a new blog devoted to book reviews. I'm looking forward to it!

Posted on 2002-01-02 at 19:43. File under literature.

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Happy 2002! I spent the last ten days visiting friends and family on the East Coast and I didn't touch a computer the whole time, so I'm just getting back into the swing of things. I hope to blog a bit tonight with reflections on my visit to the World Trade Center site, as well as thoughts spurred by books I've been reading and conversations I had with friends back east. More soon!

Posted on 2002-01-02 at 12:28. File under personal.

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