July 2010
12 posts
“Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most...”
– Pg
“And Esperanto is for noobs ;) If you want to see a real conlang built from the...”
– w1ntermute
“Matsushima ya / Ah, Matsushima ya / Matsushima ya”
“It is a wonderful and surprising fact that programmers are highly motivated by...”
– How to be a programmer
Not a good sign:
From your 201 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 163 items, starred 2 items, shared 4 items, and emailed 0 items.
“There are no dreams in the New Immediacy”
– OM
“We don’t ask consumers what they want. They don’t know. Instead we apply our...”
– Akio Morita
“Computer programming is an activity that is also a culture. The unfortunate fact...”
– How to be a programmer
Thy name is like a prayer an angel whispers…
Time passes quickly. I do not journal. I only work — and not particularly well. Thought patterns stitched together, overlap, and then become tangled together like so many cords, re-reading countless lines of codes to catch a single bug, also of my introduction. There is no one to blame here, there is on I myself and I, sitting in front of a computer screen for countless hours, occasionally...
June 2010
12 posts
“What remnant of Númenor still stands upon the shore, and weeps ?”
– The man without a face
In the end it is dollars and cents / this new renaissance.
“Not well? What is sickness to the body of a knight-errant?
What matter wounds?...”
– Don Quixote, Man of la Mancha Finale
“Naked I was sent back—for a brief time, until my task is done. And naked...”
– Gandalf the White
“One arrives in faerie only by invitation and, even then, only at one’s...”
– Bradley Birzer, JRR Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth
Readers here may wish to note that I maintain two other blogs:
The Idiots (mostly interviews and essays)
and
d3developer (tech stuff)
Work brings constant stress and exhaustion. Minor to do items pile up and I live in the constant tyranny of the urgent, until some wave breaks over my fragile barrier and I am, for a moment, submerged, then, gasping for air, flailing and struggling to regain my place on the beachhead of life. For dollars and binary, code castles free of damsels in distress, and the only dragon the one inside,...
Return from the Zen Center. There is only one thing left. Resurrection in every moment.
I sit by the Roshi’s chair. It is the end of the first day. He was grumpy this morning. We are trapped in word worlds he said, if only a couple students got it, made it to zero, he would exclaim success. This does not look likely. I stare at my mind mirror, encrusted algae and fairy tale palaces. Find me Europa. Perhaps then I can settle.
I circle round the stupa. I listen to the parade of...
Walk by faith he said. Sight is overrated. Then he carried me. Vision’s valley. All the nations and their desires Are mine.
All that is left is to obey.
Schubert | Holderlin Fragments, Sokrates und Alcibiades
May 2010
24 posts
The very sides of the grave itself shall pass, Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void, Into the unseen for ever, — till that hour, My golden work in which I told a truth That stays the rolling Ixionian wheel. And numbs the Fury’s ringlet-snake, and plucks The mortal soil from out immortal hell Shall stand. Ay, surely; then it falls at least And perishes as I must, for O thou...
“Contrary to Islam, Judaism has a very weak tradition of martyrdom. In the end,...”
– Leon de Winter
“Addictive things have to be treated as if they were sentient adversaries—as if...”
– PG
Rain
Twin worlds and yet, and odor, rises from the deep, stretching from referent to referent, descriptor to descriptor, so the resonance rises into the air, hands clasped. ‘We are children again’ they cry as they evaporate in the sun’s outstretched rays, forever young.
“How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?”
– De Gaulle
“When you see one who was not born of woman, fall on your faces and worship. That...”
Bits of Halevi, Schmitt mixed with a near endless stream of code and occasional bouts of internet gaming, more a process of natural attraction than choice, and little in the way of recreation except increasingly frequent yoga classes. I may begin to sing in the church choir. I am talking with Hackers (and their angels) more these days. Recently finished a mini-commentary on the canonical gospels...
“But to what shall I compare this generation”
“Night Journey
Eat my flesh.
Drink my wine.
Intoxicated
you carry me to...”
“O King of the seven heavens grant me this —
Thy love to be in my...”
Femininity
Discussions of femininity surface here from time to time. Does the woman complement the man or stand alone — and v.v. ? Or, as often suggested in current discourse, does it even make sense to separate these at all? Would not this be reaching back to ‘essentialism’ — the necessary bane of self-claimed ‘progressivism.’
We are offered both. Hugh Hefner has...
“David melech Yisrael chai chai vekayam”
“He drew the line, however, at intelligent women; those, he said, he didn’t know...”
– Algis Valiunas on Hugh Hefner
“Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our...”
The language by which the world turns is secret, cloaked in runes. Post-modern magi show formulaic shafts to startle the dumb, amaze the daft. There is little here that I can say, ‘cept making love will turn the day. But for all that go to bed, Few fair lovers be that wed.
“Hagall er kaldastr korna;
Kristr skóp hæimenn forna.”
“Those who live by the sword…”
Who is the greatest god? I do not suppose that Dionysus will be found lacking, when Puritans and satyrs clash on the Witches Sabbath.
“Order is not imposed.
It is apprehended.”
“When it comes to either/or there is only the quick choice of death”
– Hagakure
What does it mean to
turn one’s life into a line of poetry
written with a splash of blood?
April 2010
32 posts
Life Update
Accepted to the PhD program at University of Pennsylvania in East Asian Studies without funding but received funding for the one year Masters. So will spend the next year in Philadelphia and then see what is next. For the foreseeable future most of my time is devoted to coding (and yoga). I also recently won a couple of little contests, including “Best Use of the Embed API” in this one...
