This is so close to exactly where I am, right now, in my own putatively "spiritual" journey.
"…if you read the chapter on atheism, I call it ironic atheism. I think the Buddha was not a devout atheist. The Buddha simply did not have any time for the very concept or the language of God, and he dismissed it, really, as just yet another example of how human beings can dream up of all sorts of things, and he put it to one side. So Buddhism is atheistic in the sense that it simply it doesn’t have recourse to God language, but it’s not atheistic in the sense that it has as a central doctrine the denial of God." – Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist scholar being interviewed for a website called buddhistgeeks.
I know atheism makes most people very uncomfortable. Unless asked directly, I don't bring it up. I have no interest whatsoever in confronting other people's faiths. It serves no purpose at all. But my "faith-based" atheism is pretty strong – it's taken shape and survived for 10 years. I do believe strongly that it is by our acts that we define our moral character, and not by what we believe or fail to believe.
Yo como tú amo el amor, la vida, el dulce encanto de las cosas el paisaje celeste de los días de enero.
También mi sangre bulle y río por los ojos que han conocido el brote de las lágrimas. Creo que el mundo es bello, que la poesía es como el pan, de todos.
Y que mis venas no terminan en mí, sino en la sangre unánime de los que luchan por la vida, el amor, las cosas, el paisaje y el pan, la poesía de todos.
– Roque Daltón (poeta salvadoreño).
Lo que estoy escuchando en este momento.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood, “War (Long Version).”
Escúchenla, y lean su letra:
Oh no, there’s got to be a better way Say it again, there’s got to be a better way Yeah, what is it good for? (War)
Man has a sense for the discovery of beauty How rich is the world for one who makes use of it to show Beauty must have power over man (war) After the end of the war I went to devote myself To my thoughts for five to ten years and to writing them down War has caused unrest among the younger generation
Induction then destruction, who wants to die? Wars come and go what remains are only the values of culture
Then of course there is revolutionary love Love of comrades fighting for the people and love of people Not an abstract people but people one meets and works with When Che Guevara taught of love being At the center of revolutionary endeavor, he meant both
For people like Che or George Jackson or Malcolm X Love was the prime mover of their struggle That love cost them their lives…
love… coupled with immense pride love… coupled with immense pride
(Give it to you on top, now)
War, I despise ‘cos it means destruction of innocent lives War, means tears to thousands of mothers how When their sons go off to fight and lose their lives
I said, war, good god, now, what is it good for? Absolutely, nothing Say it again, war, what is it good for? Absolutely, nothing, listen to me War, it ain’t nothing but a heart breaker War, friend only to the undertaker, war
War, war, war, war War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing Say it, war, good god now, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it, war
Oh no, there’s got to be a better way Say it again, there’s got to be a better way Yeah, what is it good for? War, what is it good for?
This is incredibly funny. I must quote it at length.
Rush Limbaugh, modern Epimenides?
Wikipedia tells me that Limbaugh lives in West Palm Beach, FL. Yet for years now he has been telling listeners something different:
Now, look, folks, as I’ve told you countless times, I live in Literalville. [Transcript, 10.9.2010]
It’s an outright lie, and I know this because Rush doesn’t do metaphor. In fact, that’s what he means by claiming Literalville residency:
If you tell me something, I take it literally. I believe that you mean it. I don’t dance around edges trying to figure out what you really meant. If you say it, I believe it. I live in Literalville […]. [Transcript, 10.9.2010]
There are only two possibilities here:
1. Limbaugh literally lives in Literalville, FL. 2. Limbaugh metaphorically inhabits a place devoid of metaphorical meaning or implication, which he describes figuratively as Literalville.
The first possibility is empirically false. There is no Literalville in FL, or in any other state. I checked (and no, Google, I did not mean Littleville, AL).
The second possibility can only be true if it is false. You can only live in Literalville in the metaphorical sense if you move away for a time (the time it takes to say, figuratively, that you live in Literalville), during which time you’re not a Literalville resident. It’s a neat version of the Cretan paradox: the Cretan says, ‘all Cretans are liars’. Neat, because it shares the element of local belonging as a logical class, but also because it shifts the dichotomy from Truth-Lie to Literal-Figurative. And because that shift, equating Truth to Literal and Lie to Figurative, is one that only makes sense if you live in Literalville. Note that this isn’t the same as the use of vacuous ‘literally‘ as a sort of intensifier in a metaphorical context (‘I was literally going to explode’) though maybe it’s related. Limbaugh is actually using figurative language to deny that he understands figurative language.
Fidel Castro escribió un ensayo entitulado "El mundo maravilloso del capitalismo" que parece ser un chiste estilo "primer día de abril." Se presta de el conjunto de imágenes del movimiento "Occupy…" pero con la retórica hiperbólica típica del líder cubano. Lo chistoso: "¡Verdad compatriotas que el capitalismo es cosa maravillosa! Quizás nosotros seamos culpables de que cada ciudadano no tenga un submarino particular en la playa."
Un sabio se paró ante un público y contó un chiste y todos se reiron. Al cabo de un rato, contó el mismo chiste y casi nadie reía; contó el chiste una y otra vez hasta que nadie se reía. Y dijo: si no puedes reírte varías veces de una sola cosa, ¿por qué lloras por lo mismo una y otra vez?
Translated:
A wise man got up in front of a group of people and told a joke, and everyone laughed. After a little while, he told the same joke and almost nobody laughed; he told the joke over and over, until nobody laughed. And then he said: if you can't laugh more than once or twice at the same thing, why do you cry over the same things over and over?
"Individual o colectiva, la juventud necesita creerse, a priori, superior. Claro que se equivoca, pero éste es precisamente el gran derecho de la juventud: tiene derecho a equivocarse impunemente." – José Ortega y Gasset, filósofo español.
En trabajar como maestro de jovenes, creo que debo siempre recordarme de este pensamiento.
Siempre me han gustado los aforismos. Hoy encontré una colección de aforismos del escritor chileno Vicente Huidobro. Algunos sobresalientes:
Las creencias religiosas tienen como origen la ley del menor esfuerzo.
..
Es incomprensible que un individuo que haya estudiado profundamente la sociedad actual no sea comunista. Es incomprensible que un individuo que haya estudiado profundamente el comunismo, no sea anarquista.
..
En nombre del Arte. En nombre de la Belleza. En nombre de la Verdad. En nombre del Orden. En nombre de la Ley. En nombre de la Bondad. En nombre del Deber… Palabras, palabras.
뜻이 있는 곳에 길이 있다 will-SUBJ exists-ADJ place-LOC way-SUBJ exists Where there’s a will there’s a way.
This proverb translates almost exactly to the English. I was almost shocked when it dawned on me that it was equivalent. Mostly, proverbs aren’t so easy to translate.
Not very useful advice, to someone such as myself who seems to be suffering primarily from willpower issues.
I’m not, personally, a big Doctor Who fan. I was always a trekkie, when it came to inordinate otakuosity vis-a-vis sci-fi shows (and by the way, I just invented the word “otakuosity” so don’t complain – look up the Japanese slang term “otaku” and you’ll understand).
Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but be very impressed and pleased to see an 8th grade Korean girl write the following speech composition for me in 2012 (and note that, as always, I will type what she wrote verbatim – without corrections – I think she did very well for her level):
Hello my name is Yeongeun. I’m going to talk about my plan for camping trip. I want to go to Tardis. Because Tardis is a very interesting spaceship. Tardis can go anywhere even future and past, too. If I go to Tardis, I have to bring some food, water, a sleeping bag and clothes. I have to bring weapons, too, because when I trip with doctor, that I have many happens. Also, I will have to see many aliens, and they will attack me and doctor and I will be scared. But maybe doctor can’t kill them. So, I have to attack aliens with weapons. This is my plan for camping trip. Thanks for listening.
Please note, I did not in any way plant this idea in her mind. It emerged utterly on its own, and in the hostile environment of Korean hagwon-based English education, which for the most part stultifies imagination and creativity and discourages interest in unusual cultural artifacts from foreign cultures, such as Doctor Who.
I recently gave my most advanced class of middle schoolers a speech assignment, based on the idea of interviewing some famous person. I have gotten some very interesting and well-thought-out results. One student imagines interviewing the late Steve Jobs (there are plenty of Apple fans in Korea). He actually did quite a bit of research, apparently, into Jobs’ biography. He asks the following question:
What did you feel when you were fired from Apple?
His answer isn’t exactly perfect, idiomatically, but it’s clear and deeply insightful, if not downright philosophical:
I felt absurd but My mind was light.
It’s worth recalling that Jobs was a practicing Zen Buddhist. This invented “Jobs quote” on the part of my student is even more insightful when considered in that light.
Now… don’t get me wrong: I’m still the ultimate anti-Apple-fanboy. But Steve Jobs as a business persona has always interested me more than the particular strategies and style that he adopted for his company, and they’re something I’m more inclined to look upon favorably.
Here's Ira Glass (who I'm not always a fan of, but, well…) on the topic of creativity, with a creative accompanying animation by someone named David Shiyang Liu.
Is it possible for me to follow this advice? I did some writing today, but when it comes to the recommended focus on volume, I'm not really doing that well. My perfectionism (or my "taste" as Glass calls it) is too annoyingly interfering.
"Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue… Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If there is a god, why did he make me an atheist? That was his first mistake." – Ricky Gervais
This is one of those "filler" posts that happen when I'm not really in the mood to write something. But, to provide a diary entry:
I watched the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot of Star Trek last night, and liked it more than I would have expected. I'd actually avoided it up until now. It was clever as a reboot, since it took the characters from the original series and literally rebooted them into an alternate timeline, via a time-traveling psychopathic Romulan – and don't we all need one of those now and again? By dumping everyone into the alternate timeline, they needn't ever concern themselves with complaints about canon-breaking. It reminds of the way Heinlein resolved all possible issues with inconsistencies in his future history(-ies), by just saying "They're ALL true – parallel universes!"
This is the recreational philosophy blogentry-du-jour.
Let’s see if I can explain this. “Occam’s Razor” is the “law of succinctness” in philosophy, the dictum that given a simpler and more complex explanation for something, the simpler is better, all other things being equal. So this philosopher named John Holbo, blogging at Crooked Timber, coins “Occam’s Phaser,” in which he suggests, “Do not compound the silliness of your examples beyond necessity.” This is due to one of those trolleologicalparables which he encountered while reading something by Nozick.
Personally, I agree with some of the commenters, who point out that the humorousness of these philosophical examples and stories is part of the point of them – I would suggest that, in discussing awkward or unexpected ethical or philosophical intuitions, these resorts to humor can help “disarm” us, vis-a-vis our preconceptions. They lower our defenses, thus enabling a more objective self-reflection.
Still, in all, I understand his point. Why suggest an outlandish situation that relies on impossibilities, when realistic examples meeting the same criteria (from a philosophical standpoint) are feasible? Perhaps because the philosophers aren’t as comfortable with their conclusions as they’d like to hope.
And beyond that, I love the name – the label – that he’s given to his new principle of trolleological plausi-parsimony: Occam’s Phaser. Occam, of course, would have a blue shirt – he’d be a science officer, right?
John Holbo, incidentally, is someone who offers change you can really believe in (which is to say, I was delighted by the below image, which is one of his compositions):
Obama is basically socialist in the same way that GW Bush is (was) socialist. In most of the areas that I most hoped he would reverse Bushian policy, he's merely entrenched and continued it: civil liberties, various wars, Guantánamo, etc. So, since the Repubs have to "prove" that Obama is socialist, they have no choice but to plunge ever farther rightward, themselves. Even Jeb Bush is uncomfortable, now. Go figure. The quote that's circulating:
I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective, and that’s kind of where we are.
I saw that somewhere online. I must remember this quote – I can use it, should I ever fall in love again.
I had a pretty good day at work today, but I feel really tired – I have 6 1/2 classes (the half is a sort of tutoring thing I do before my first class). I have all these little tasks hanging over me, though. Having a full class load allowed me to avoid them, in good conscience – but they'll be back with a vengeance tomorrow, when a lighter class load will require me to confront them.
Voi ch'ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond'io nudriva 'l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore, quand'era in parte altr'uom da quel ch' i' sono,
del vario stile in ch'io piango e ragiono, fra le vane speranze e 'l van dolore, ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, spero trovar pietà, non che perdono.
Ma ben veggio or sí come al popol tutto favola fui gran tempo, onde sovente di me mesdesmo meco mi vergogno;
e del mio vaneggiar vergogna è 'l frutto, e 'l pentersi, e 'l conoscer chiaramente che quanto piace al mondo è breve sogno.
Con tal vehemencia el viento viene del mar, que sus sones elementales contagian el silencio de la noche.
Solo en tu cama le escuchas insistente en los cristales tocar, llorando y llamando como perdido sin nadie.
Mas no es él quien en desvelo te tiene, sino otra fuerza de que tu cuerpo es hoy cárcel, fue viento libre, y recuerda.
– Luis Cernuda
Es posible que algun libro de poemas de Cernuda fue el primer libro de poesía que leí en español. Algo comprado en las calles del DF en 86 or 87. No es mi poeta favorito, pero por eso si ocupa un lugar único en mi desarrollo literario.
발 없는 말이 천리 길 간다 foot not-having horse(word)-SUBJ thousand-mile journey goes A horse with no feet [still] travels a 1000 miles.
This is based on the pun on the fact the word for horse and the word for “word” are the same: 말 [mal]. So a “horse with no feet” is a word, or a rumor. It’s the idea that “rumors fly.” It wasn’t too hard to figure out, except I had to read something to figure out that the pun was going on. I just got the horse with no feet, but I suppose I’d have eventually figured out the pun.
I was reading an article in the wikithing entitled “Principles of Learning.” I don’t really think it’s a well-done article – it’s quite unclear where the “objectivity” (that wikipedia strives for) stops and the author’s opinions related to the theory being expounded start. In fact, it’s not even clear on a cursory read that it’s a theory rather than objectively proven information. Much of “education theory” is rather like this, however. I find particularly bizarre the oddly specific reference to “aerospace instruction” in the header – this makes me think that a better title for the article might be “Principles of Aerospace Instruction.” Yet the article is highly general in its approach – it has the appearance of a generalized theory of pedagogy.
Nevertheless, despite this, I find the statement below highly quotable, and it may form a core idea of my own teaching philosophy – at least on good days (of which I’ve not had many, lately, to be frank).
The principle of freedom states that things freely learned are best learned. Conversely, the further a student is coerced, the more difficult is for him to learn, assimilate and implement what is learned. Compulsion and coercion are antithetical to personal growth. The greater the freedom enjoyed by individuals within a society, the greater the intellectual and moral advancement enjoyed by society as a whole. Since learning is an active process, students must have freedom: freedom of choice, freedom of action, freedom to bear the results of action — these are the three great freedoms that constitute personal responsibility. If no freedom is granted, students may have little interest in learning.
An elementary student of mine wrote the following essay, which was supposed to be about an imaginary trip. It could be read as a depressing reflection of shallow values and crass materialism and at least a small dosage of racism thrown in, to boot… but I've decided instead to read it as a satire in the vein of Swift's Modest Proposal. Hereforthwith I present her writing, unedited:
I will go to Africa with small boat just by oneself. At first, I will go to African's village and give lots of money and play with them. Second, I will go to the diamond mine and dig many diamonds with African children workers and take it to Korea and sell at a high priceㅋㅋ Third, I will go to national park and photographing all of the animals and plants and I will take small and cute animals put in the small case. Then I will go back to home and sell diamonds, cute animals, and I will be very very rich person in the world. finish..
Think of it as a perfect description of the modus operandi of contemporary global capitalism. As explained from the mouths of babes…. Even if it's utterly presented at face value, there are lessons to be taken here.
Garrison Keillor said of the Democrats, "…the party of people who don't mind waiting in line." Somehow, this captures a lot. It's a little bit funny, too. Some days, I enjoy "A Prairie Home Companion," and other days, I don't at all.
물 밖에 난 고기 water out-AT coming-out fish A fish out of water
This proverb wasn't difficult. I guess there's a first time for anything.
Unrelatedly, here's an interesting quote – yet another thing I can hit myself with when I contemplate my lack of progress in language-learning: "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." – Thomas Edison. I am constantly missing opportunities to learn Korean because of this exact problem. My inherent laziness kicks in.
The blogger IOZ is such a talented writer that I enjoy reading what he writes even when I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment. In a recent, broader discussion of Obama's rhetorical style and the recent State of the Union Speech, he says, "What, after all, is authenticity but the habituation of the self to its own autobiographical invention?"
That's such a brilliant, memorable line. It's going on my list of favorite quotes, thusly decontextualized.
My student Jeongjae wrote this as a speech about a trip to an imaginary place. I like it. He’s an interesting student. His writing is unedited, below – I have corrected nothing. Not perfect, of course, but I think for a 6th grader he does pretty well.
I went to an opposite world. It looked complicated, funny and horrible, because everything in the world was opposite to Earth.
I will introduce my experience in an opposite world. First, it was funny. A mouse was giving pain to a cat like Tom& Jerry and penguin was walking in a desert and flying through the air. Second, it was good for students. The students were teaching teachers and giving a lot of homework.
teachers were crying because of a lot of homework, but every teachers studied hard. Third, it was good for kids. Every animation chracter and game chracter was living with people and the animals were walking like people. The greatest thing is the president was Pororo, every citizen liked the president. Finally, it was good for everyone. All things were free and they didn’t have war, so an opposite world’s citizen liked to live in this world.
The below is apparently a very famous poem in Korea. I find it notable that the author was imprisoned and tortured by the dictatorship in the 1960’s.
귀천 / 천상병 나 하늘로 돌아가리라. 새벽빛 와 닿으면 스러지는 이슬 더불어 손에 손을 잡고, 나 하늘로 돌아가리라. 노을빛 함께 단 둘이서 기슭에서 놀다가 구름 손짓하면은, 나 하늘로 돌아가리라. 아름다운 이 세상 소풍 끝내는 날, 가서, 아름다웠더라고 말하리라…..
Back to Heaven by Cheon Sang-Byeong I’ll go back to heaven again. Hand in hand with the dew that melts at a touch of the dawning day, I’ll go back to heaven again. With the dusk, together, just we two, at a sign from a cloud after playing on the slopes I’ll go back to heaven again. At the end of my outing to this beautiful world I’ll go back and say: It was beautiful. . . . (translation by someone who goes by “Brother Anthony“)
I took the picture below in April, 2010. Somewhere near Gwangju.
Can you tell I’m a political news junkie? I found a really interesting study into the father-son dynamic between George Romney and his son the Mittbot, and how the latter seems to somehow be a Hamlet-like reaction to the traumas of former’s parabolic political career. I think it’s obviously just speculation, but it’s quite interesting.
Note that George Romney was probably farther left in the late 60’s than Obama is now, in all kinds of ways, but the subsequent evolution of the Democratic and Republican parties since the 1960’s means that he was perceived as being rightish back then while Obama is perceived as leftish now. Also, somewhat interesting, is the fact that Romney the Elder was born in Mexico, yet no one seemed to really question his eligibility for the presidency in 1968. How did things change such that Obama’s Kenyan father is a problem now?
“When you want to win the hearts and minds of people, you don’t kill them and destroy their property. You don’t use bombers and tanks and napalm to save them.” – George Romney, while campaigning against Richard Nixon in 1968 (he was talking about Vietnam, of course).
There’s this funny quote about Romney’s 1968 campaign, too, in the wikithing article: “Watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.” – Jim Rhodes, once governor of Ohio. Perhaps one could view the current Romney presidential aspirations as being the unholy spawn of that weird fly-by-night romance between duck and football.
Ta-Nehisi Coates remains one of the more “mainstream” political bloggers (as opposed to the rather more antiestablishment marxisty types) who most often manages that rare mix of fine writing and scathing analysis to “knock the ball out of the park,” as his commenters like to say.
He recently wrote about the Gingrich’s deployment of race-baiting code in the recent South Carolina (and the subsequent, deeply depressing standing ovation). Most compellingly, with his concise prose, in his conclusion, Coates writes,
When a professor of history [i.e. Gingrich] calls Barack Obama a “Food Stamp President,” it isn’t a mistake to be remedied through clarification; it is a statement of aggression. And when a crowd of his admirers cheer him on, they are neither deluded, nor in need of forgiveness, nor absolution, nor acting against their interest. Racism is their interest. They are not your misguided friends. They are your fully intelligent adversaries, sporting the broad range of virtue and vice we see in humankind.
Walking home from work, the night air sparkled with a sprinkling of snow, the air cold and clean-tasting. Work is hard these days. I’m trying hard to improve my teaching, and there’s a lot of pressure and discomfort at work because we’ve been losing students, too. This is partly just because hagwon business is cyclical, and parents always pull their kids out of hagwon in January, when public schools are in vacation and parents find other things to do with their kids. I can never understand how Korean managers – ever relatively good ones such as my current boss – seem to take these cycle-driven losses of enrollment so personally, and assume there’s some mistake being made by teachers as opposed to just being the vagaries of the market.
Well, anyway. So work is hard, these days. I have a tight, dense schedule, too. But I felt OK about it, today, walking home in the dark in the cold in the snow in my dreams.
I really, really like the resolution that goes: “19. Keep hoping machine running.” It appears he doodled a picture of it, too. I like the idea of a “hoping machine.” I’m doing some repairs on mine, currently.
What I’m listening to right now.
Neutral Milk Hotel, “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.”
I have decided to coin a new word, “atheisticist,” for use to describe atheists who are offensive, in the same way that sullyblog uses the term Christianist (apparently he coined it) to describe Christians who are annoying because of their shallow hypocrisies, militancy and/or dogmatic ideological rigidities and intolerant attitudes. The term Christianist is meant to parallel Islamist. Similarly, I would conceive Atheisticist as the same sort of parallel.
Having thus coined a new word, I shall apply it posthaste to the recently deceased philosopher/gadfly/atheisticist, Christopher Hitchens. There’s some irony (or poetic justice?) in my imitating the sullyblog in this, since apparently sullyblog and the hitch were pals.
As is often the case in his bloggings on various current events, the blogger IOZ provides the sort of biting, dark and yet shiny, brilliant prose that best captures my own sentiments (almost exactly) RE the recently deceased man. He writes about his own perspective vis-a-vis Hitchens, “As an atheist, I found him as embarrassing as my loudest aunt’s impenetrable Pittsburghese, mortifying in polite company. If the universe were just, he would wake from his passage on Kolob, basking in the angelic light of billions of perfect, white, immortal Mormon smiles.”
This connects back to something I observed about a concept from Bertolt Brecht in this blog entry from a few weeks ago – one man’s heaven can be another’s hell. And nothing would be more hellish for an atheisticist of Hitchens’ ilk than a Mormon Kolob.
Perhaps releated, perhaps not (you decide): what I’m listening to right now.
This is from the DPRK. Don’t suffer under the illusion that only North Korea produces music like this. You can find very similar things on South Korean television, with merely different themes – it’s thought of as old-people’s music, rather like Sinatra, maybe, in the U.S.
