A Life's Morning

This is to let you all know that I've plowed through, not single-handedly, another Audiobook recording; it's titled "A Life's Morning" by George Gissing, published in 1888.  It can be downloaded here for free from Librivox.  I joined in the group recording effort in May 2013 and recorded 18 of its 33 sections.  It was hard-going at times, but boy I'm glad it's finally done.

I did not know of this late 19th century British author before I started recording for this project.  Though priding myself on having read a lot of the English literary classics from 18th century to early modern era, I've been finding out, to my amazement, the names of so many writers whom I've never heard of, simply by randomly browsing the free (no longer copyrighted) titles available on Project Gutenberg.  Like so many men and women of letters in various time and various quarters of the globe who have been overshadowed by their greater contemporaries, Gissing in his brief existence left a considerable literary production.  Whether his novels have any significant worth in the opinion of literary critics, they provide a window onto the life and preoccupations of the people of his time, which though very unlike our own, we can still thoroughly enter into on the basis of our shared human experience.   

die Fußballweltmeisterschaft

Like a Dream

Like millions of people worldwide, I've caught the soccer fever, which has gripped me for the past four weeks or so and has just ended in Germany's being crowned the Weltmeister!  Wow! Such a run -- from the unbelievable header by John Brooks (that's him on the image here) of the USA team, to intricate footwork, dives, injuries intended or unintended, bizarre refereeing, near misses, jubilation, and heartbreaks on a colossal collective scale.  I so wanted Argentina and Messi to win (the Pope should have intervened), though I believed the Germany team well earned the title by patiently grinding the game out without ever losing their concentration.  

After this world cup, I hope the sport soccer or "football" in every other country in the world will gain more of a following in American society, alongside the NBA, NFL, MLB, and other team sports and eventually produce some world-class athletes. 

Phares Whitted Quartet

Otherwise, it has been a laid back summer, an extended stay-cation, you might say. Though a lot of students have left town, the university has kept up with non-stop summer arts, film, and music programs, workshops, and recitals, most of them with free admission.  We've gone to the Jazz in July outdoor concerts a couple of times at the IU Art Museum, which is something new for us this year, and despite the heat and occasional searing loud trumpet, we've enjoyed the performances. Who would have known that Indiana has been the hot bed of Jazz since its early days, with the likes of Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael, a Bloomington native, both hailing from Hoosier country, and that many other renowned Jazz musicians have graduated from the IU Jazz Studies program since the 60s?

   

Slow Movement

At the beginning of this century (it's kind of special that our lives straddle two centuries), there arose a movement towards "consciously" slowing down the frantic pace of life that carries us along whether we want it to or not.  And that was in the pre-iPhone era, mind you.  The movement started more or less simultaneously in various aspects of our modern life - there is a Slow Food Movement, a book called In Praise of Slowness, a blog called Slow Love Life, albeit that came later, and so on.  

Even in architecture, it was becoming cool, when I was studying architecture from 2001 to 2005, to draw, design, and fabricate by "hand"- molding beautiful architectural adornments painstakingly from raw material to finished products.  The design philosophy of architects of the likes of Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, and Tom Kundig were given as examples in class.  I remembered going on a field trip to see the now-no-longer-existing American Folk Art Museum on W. 53rd Street, New York, designed by the Tsien-Williams team, completed in 2001, and being awe-struck by its fractured façade, consisting of 63 individually cast, copper-bronze panels (which incidentally have been saved from demolition).  The building was torn down recently to make way for an expansion of the Museum of Modern Art.  There was a huge outcry regarding MOMA's controversial decision to demolish this unique, jewel-box-like museum (itself a work of art), whose brief, barely a decade old life span was almost unheard of in the annals of building construction. 

What has got me thinking about slowness, though it is not really relevant to the slowness movement described above, was my recent discovery of a German learning blog called Slow German, posted by someone who periodically reads in a slightly slower pace a short essay in German on various topics to aid people who are interested in learning German.  (It is amazing how many helpful and free resources one can find on-line about almost anything.) I have been frustrated by not being able to break through the barrier between understanding the grammar and vocabulary of German and speaking it spontaneously.  I'm convinced that there is a mysterious threshold which one crosses in learning a new language as an adult, when, quite unbeknownst to you, one day you become able to speak in consecutive sentences about certain subjects in that new language, like the time you came to be able to ride a bicycle.  This of course is just fuzzy thinking on my part; I know full well that nothing will happen unless I put in the time to practice and practice and practice.(But, I'll keep you posted on the day it happens for me, if it does happen at all.)

What follows is a TED talk by the author of In Praise of Slowness, Carl Honore, if you're interested -

Stand up for Health

Writing while standing

Kirk's first DIY project for this summer and the sabbatical following were two hardwood stands which we used to turn our current desks into standing desks. I think he was more excited by the opportunity to build something by hand than the possible health benefits (BBC, NYT) associated with standing more vs. sitting all the time.  From my casual mentioning of shopping for a standing desk and our chance discovery of a lumber store in town, it took Kirk less than four days to put together two stands, meticulously finished and made to fit our respective desks and heights.   

My petite stand

The beginning of the summer break is always the impetus for getting us to give tired resolutions a fresh start.  Today, having doggedly stood for about eight hours in front of our computers, we officially kick-started our summer resolution to get more fit.  Surprisingly it was not as uncomfortable as we anticipated it would be.  I think I'm going to be addicted to it soon and to regard sitting as rather ungainly.  As for Kirk, he would like to reserve his opinion until tomorrow morning, I think.      




26. 06 2014 Update:

Compression socks and
anti-fatigue mat
to the rescue

Actually we are completely accustomed to working standing now.  There is no turning back...

Spring Delayed

March 26, 2014

We have been shrouded by a lingering chill that just won't lift since the arrival of spring was officially declared by the calendar on March 20th.  Now that spring break is over, I am beginning to feel as if we were cheated of some promised relief from the cold, as the temperature is still hovering in the 30s to low 40s.  I looked up some of my old posts to get a sense of what it was like at this time of the year in Bloomington in the past few years and they seem to confirm that spring, or the manifestation of it, has been notably delayed for this year.  There is not a stitch of color in sight to relieve the monotonous gray.  My gig with CMA ended a couple of weeks ago and I am now back on my own resources and to my old routines.  There is some prospect for more work in the summer when some of the new projects of the firm kick into gear.  

Happy Chinese New Year!

From Google Image

May your life take off this year to new heights like the prancing horse in the picture!  May it carry you to where you wish to go!  For my part, I think I'm due for some distant travel this year; not sure what life has in store for me.  I'm hoping Kirk might be invited out to give a paper somewhere in Europe, say, Germany, for example, so that I can tag along and put my German to practice.  This semester, instead of going to classes, I've been meeting with a German Ph.D student once a week to practice German.  It's been working out very well so far; we meet at a coffee house across from where I've been working. Hope our friends in the south have not been too adversely affected by this new cold blast from the North Pole.  It no longer bothers us when the temperature is in the teens.  We've definitely grown accustomed to the cold, especially, now that we're well insulated by the inimitable "Canada Goose" parkas!

Why do I continue to watch Downton Abbey?

Downton Abbey Cast Season 4

Dynasty Cast Season 6

Maybe the question to myself should be posed in another way, by appending, "And nothing else?"  The New York Times today tried to treat the American fascination with Downton Abbey as a pop cultural phenomenon, a veiled look at the life of contemporary America through the lens of a period British romance spun out of the mind of Julian Fellowes - the writer and creator of the series.  It suddenly occurs to me that this BBC Masterpiece series is not much different from Dynasty, the # 1 American soap opera of the 90s.  That TV series ran for 9 seasons with 220 episodes from 1981 to 1989, while Downton Abbey with its fourth season debuting in the U.S. this Sunday, may be, for all we know, geared to catch up in its longevity and popularity with the vintage American TV drama.

I'm not at all sure, as I write, where this query is going to lead to or what my answer will be at the end of this post.  My take on this is strictly personal; I'm certainly not qualified to speak about contemporary American pop culture, though my life is unavoidably immersed in it, nor to discuss the social significance embedded in D.A.  What especially disqualifies me to speak like a social or cultural critic is the fact that I do not watch, aside from Downton Abbey, any TV dramas--the large array of hip dramatized stories of modern life on TV that supposedly reflect the American Zeitgeist and are often discussed on Fresh Air by Terry Gross.  The cause of this aversion is complicated, visceral rather than rational, like avoiding looking at blood.  I also don't read popular fiction, those appearing on the Time's Best Sellers list or Oprah Winfrey's Book Club reading list or what have you.  In fact the fictions I read are mostly from the late 18th to early 20th century, by authors such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and the like.  Somehow I feel more at home in those bygone eras.  But why the anachronism?  What is it about those times which speaks to me more than the here and now?  Perhaps I'm an Anglophile; that will explain why Downton Abbey is my cup of tea!  However, with the exception of having the tendency to a stiff upper lip, I can't say that I feel especially akin to the Anglo-Saxon race.

Nor can I say that I'm hooked by the plot lines in the ever-developing saga.  They are more potboilers than great literature, written in a haphazard fashion, dictated by contingencies sometimes (such as Mathew Crawley's untimely death) than the internal logic of the storyline.  What about the characters?  Are they more special than the general human lot?  It is probably fair to say that these people are no better nor worse than the average Joe, then or now, though somewhat glamorized, both those living upstairs and downstairs.

Maybe--here is the anti-climax--what attracts me most is the depiction of the tenor of life in the late 19th, and early 20th century, in both the novels from that period and the period dramas which BBC excels at.  There is a certain quality to it, like strolling in a green field, of taking in life in a calm and orderly way, a certain nicety of speech or manner, which seems to be missing in our lives.  At any rate, life seen at a distance seems to me more palatable than seen in close-up.