Ireland... a land of high divorce rates, teenage pregnancies, and ....happy people!

How so? Read this fascinating article about how this country of 310,000-odd people has succeeded in creating an utopian-sounding society, despite being beset with would be seen by most other societies as myriad problems. And to think it was one of the poorest nations in Europe at the start of the 20th century.

How did it manage this? By being very practical.

It is a largely pagan country, as the natives like to see it, unburdened by the taboos that generate so much distress elsewhere. That means they are practical people.

Link via a post at India Uncut.

Sometimes the truth does not set you free

"We Disappear" is more honest, and thus more troubling, for it reflects the stark knowledge that truth is only an amalgam of experience, a collection of individual shards that don't coalesce into a pleasing whole. As Heim suggests, the search for truth invites the Hansels and Gretels of the world to follow the wrong adult home, the Alices to peer down the rabbit hole -- and fantasy to cover up the nasty grime of reality. - Sarah Weiman reviewing Scott Heim's 3rd novel, We Disappear.

Other reviews of the book here and here. A trailer for the book made by the author can be seen here.

In this 2003 interview, Dean Kamen, serial inventor & entrepreneur (inventor of Segway amongst many other novel innovations), defines very well what innovation is all about (emphasis mine):

I remember when the first Pong game came out. People were glued to their sets doing this eye-hand coordination, watching this thing go up and back. I'll call that a video game.

The fact is, it was a crude box, a crude little puck, and it kept you mesmerized for hours and you probably did it with a few thousand bytes of RAM. Today, we go from hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes on a video game that will have almost lifelike characters running around. But in reality, when you do the same eye-hand coordination exercise you did on Pong, instead of pushing the pong up and back with ever-more realistic graphics — the mindless violence of this thing ripping the head off of that thing and squirting blood has no extra value in either making the game an eye-hand coordination challenge or amusing. It's not an innovation.

But suppose instead of multiplying the bandwidth by a hundred in the past five years, you left the bandwidth alone, and you figured out how to get the Internet to a hundred times as many people so the four billion people living in Africa and Asia and places where they have no access to information and knowledge, got access. That would be an innovation.

I think in some cases inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.

Also this very simple idea that not many people seem to grasp:

We can't live anymore in a world which is based on stuff and not ideas. If you want to live with the world of stuff, we're all doomed. As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources, except it won't be just gold we're fighting over. It will be water and air. This is not a happy thought.

"I write to find out how much I know. The act of writing for me is a concentrated form of thought." - Don Delillo

"When it comes to writers being obsessed, I have one notion. Obsession as a state seems so close to the natural condition of a novelist at work on a book, that there may be nothing else to say about it." -DeLillo, from the 1979 interview with Tom LeClair.

"The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell." - Paul Auster in The New York Trilogy.

Excerpt from How to Write by Richard Rhodes:

The empty page is a Spinx, blankly ferocious.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the introduction to his short-story collection Strange Pilgrims, calls beginning "intense":

Beginning a novel... everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the personality of a character. All the rest is the pleasure of writing, the most intimate, solitary pleasure one can imagine,....

As for the novel, so also, mutatis mutandis, for any work of writing: the first paragraph charts a course that may lead the reader -- and will restrain the writer -- through hundreds and even thousands of pages, to the near or distant end. And first among firsts is voice: who is telling the story?

Well, who is telling the story? You, of course. Only you. .....

... Even the you who is telling your first-person personal story is you but not you, isn't it -- is one but not another of your many persona, whichever one you've selected for this particular task? It follows that voice in writing -- who is telling the story -- is always to some degree made up for the occasion, which is to say, is always fictional, even when you intend to use that voice to convey documented fact.

...

"A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought... " - Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Voice and its grammatical correlate, point of view, shape the frame through which your reader experiences your story. That necessary frame limits what your reader will know, of course. But its limitations cut both ways. The frame of voice limits what your reader will know because it limits what you can tell him.

Three excerpts from fiction & poetry that I read at the New Yorker.

First up, an excerpt from a short story:

Looking back, Eva could see that the real interruption had not been her father’s death. The fact was that in the aftermath of the funeral, when it had seemed as if the whole world had fallen silent, what had troubled Eva most was her marriage… -- The Bell Ringer, by john Burnside

Also,

Our capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful
Survives, unlike beauty,
Amid the harshest distractions.
- from the poem, On Beauty by James Longenbach

and..

echoes in every room
without a sound
all the things that we
had never been able to say
I could not remember
- from the poem, A Single Autumn by W. S. Merwin

Interesting video of a song from the 1970s from the nation of Georgia

Found it via a Metafilter post that links to:

Streaming audio of traditional music from the former Soviet republic of Georgia. This is some of the strangest, most haunting and blissed-out singing you can hear on this planet.

More at the Mefi post

Paul Auster, in an online Q&A chat at the WaPo in 2003:

I don't believe in the idea of fate. I don't believe that our destinies are mapped out in advance. We create our lives every day, and they're constantly shifting, and each one of us, I think, has the potential to live many, many different lives. And circumstances, coincidence, accidents and choice and desire and will all play their part in the paths we take. But I don't believe that these paths are preordained. Life would be terrible if we thought that were true.

Indeed! It is the choices we make that ordain what paths our lives take. To deem something as fate or destiny takes away the power of choice and free will.

Idea: She would pop the balloon as he popped the question.

Bad idea: A $12,000 engagement ring inside a helium balloon.

Note to all the guys thinking of popping the question .... helium is lighter than air. Helium rises.

In an interesting post about the love for books and more particularly, the love of reading books, Amit Varma writes (read the entire post - I am merely excerpting couple lines here and the essence of his posit may not come out correctly taken out of context like this):

The greatest happiness, even greater than sex, is reading a good book.
...
...one does not need to expend energy seducing a book, for it is always compliant and often, if the writer is skillful enough, enthusiastic.
...
Now I am carnal, happily writing notes in the margins of books, leaving them facedown, reading them while eating and allowing my gravy-stained fingers to turn the pages, as if to leave a mark that says You are part of me now, and here, I am part of you as well.

Beautiful! Well said.

On to writing next: I just began reading the book, The Art of Hunger, which compiles essays, prefaces, and interviews by Paul Auster, who is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. In the past year, I read two of his books -- Travels in the Scriptorium and a graphic novel, City of Glass which is based on Auster's book of the same name & part of the The New York Trilogy -- and was "seduced" by his writing style and imagination. Auster is a prolific writer - one of those few who writes a lot but not at the risk of a weaker quality - and there is so much more of his writing that I want to carnally devour. :)

More from his book, The Art of Hunger, as I consume it in the next couple weeks.. but here is a quote from the book that I loved.

"Writing is no longer an act of free will for me, it's a matter of survival."

Coming to think about it, I could perhaps say the same about reading. I do not think I could live my life without reading ever again. Due to things going on in my life, it has been difficult to focus and read much in the last 6+ weeks, let alone write or blog, but I am glad to find myself craving today for some real good writing. Carnal love, as Amit suggests in recommending a book of essays by Anne Fadiman, can very enjoyable...and it is a carnal love for reading that consumes me today. :)

“Ex Libris” is a beautiful book: if you love books, or are “bibliolatrous” like the Fadimans (what a charming word!), you will love every essay in it. I hope that love is carnal.

P.S. And here's something similar about writing that talks about the shapeliness, the sensuality, and the implied sexiness of putting a sentence together.

What he appreciated was the shapeliness of thought, the shapeliness of structure. He implied that there was a sensuality to the structure of the sentences and the structure of the thought. If all the sensuality is contained in the shapeliness of the grammar or the structure of the sentence then that structure has to be exactly right. The sentence has to be just right and the thought has to be just right because if it isn’t, well, it’s not as shapely.

The above excerpt is from the very end of an interview with the author Lydia Davis. I had never heard about Davis till today but read that she used to be Paul Auster's wife in the 70s and is also a writer. Being a fan of Auster's writing, I figured I'd google and check out what kind of writing Davis is known for and that lled me to the above and another interview and also couple reviews of her work.

Percussion... another thing I've always loved right from when I was a little kid. (I do not know to play any instrument -- just loved the beat of percussion instruments, is all)

First up, a dance to a djembe beat from Bamako, Mali.



Here's some djembe drumming and dancing at a marriage ceremony in Bamako, Mali


and more djembe and dancing from Senegal this time (Mamadou Sidibe on the djembe)


And here is 4-year old Isaiah Chevrier playing the djembe -- I had seen some of his videos on youtube before. The future is in good hands, literally!





Abdoulaye is Isaiah's 2-year old brother


Some day, these kids will be like this Grand Master Djembe Player - 70-year old Sega Cisse.




Related: A travel log about drumming in Bamako, Mali

David Rieff writes about his mother, Susan Sontag, who died of cancer in December 2004 (wow...3+ years! Feels like a couple at most!):

My mother loved science, and believed in it (as she believed in reason) with a fierce, unwavering tenacity bordering on religiosity. There was a sense in which reason was her religion. She was also always a servant of what she admired, and I am certain that her admiration for science (as a child, the life of Madame Curie had been the first of her models) and above all for physicians helped her maintain her conviction -- and again, this, too, was probably an extrapolation from childhood -- that somewhere out there was something better than what was at hand, whether the something in question was a new life or a new medical treatment.

I found the above excerpt in a review of David's book Swimming in a sea of death, in which Thomas Lynch writes:

"Swimming in a Sea of Death" is Rieff's brief record of how high priests of the body and blood sort -- whether oncologists or monsignors -- must so often disappoint. And how they disappointed his mother. In the end, neither science nor medicine, reason nor raw intellect, "avidity" for life nor her lifelong sense that hers was a special case -- nothing could undo her death. Susan Sontag "died as she had lived: unreconciled to mortality." And there is the sadness at the heart of Rieff's testimony: that mothers die, as fathers do, regardless of what they or their children believe or disbelieve. It is our humanity that makes us mortal, not our creeds or their antitheses.

All of us swim in the one sea all our lives, trying to stay afloat as best we can, clinging to such lifelines and preservers as we might draw about us: reason and science, faith and religious practice, art and music and imagination. And in the end, we all go "down, down, down" as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, "into the darkness," although she did not approve and was not resigned. Some lie back, float calmly and then succumb, while others flail about furiously and go under all the same. Some work quietly through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' tidy, too hopeful stages; others "rage, rage" as Dylan Thomas told his father to. But all get to the "dying of the light." Some see death as a transition while others see it as extinction.

(Emphasis mine. Loved that sentence.)

Read the review in its entirety. Well written and kind of timely for me in some ways as my wife and I are dealing with some health issues with our own parents this month.

This video (may be considered NSFW) for a song called 'Sex has made me stupid' is NOT what I had in mind when I blogged earlier about robotic sex! ;)

Great video though. It's UK artist Dave the Chimp's second video for the British electro-punk band, Robots In Disguise. The earlier one is here.

Seems, when the band plays live, they are joined by a drummer named Ann Droid. Maybe its an intentionally assumed pseudonym..... but, that's pretty cool. Ann Droid. Great futuristic name! ;)

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith." - J.B. Priestley

Found the above at a link that refers to Faulkner's Nobel lecture in 1949. Three short paragraphs but what a punch they deliver! Some day, I will read my Faulkner!

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it c

an be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

After enjoying his son's guitar playing over and over again for more than an hour, I am tempted to go visit Ali Farka Toure's music again. In one of my first posts tagged music here, I had linked to some of his videos at youtube in July 2006 -- I never embedded videos then but they are there towards the end of the post. Go seek them... 7 videos of pure joy!

Here then are a few more gems from the master!

In my previous post, I thought I went to heaven listening to his son play "Ai du". Here is the master himself playing that beautiful piece.



You can also hear him on the recorded version of "Ai Du" with Ry Cooder, in the Grammy-winning album Talking Timbaktu. Also, another song, "Diaraby" also from the same album.


Two great videos with 9+ minutes of great music each, thanks to the comment someone left here. Anonymous...but thanks a lot, my friend.





And finally,
live from the Festival of the Desert in 2003.