You know that list of 1,000 books you must read before you die? It's not true. You will be permitted to die even if you don't read them. So, sad to say, delaying reading them is no guarantee of a longer life. But there may be other reasons to put them off.
The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything : Monkey See : NPR
2011/04/25
2011/04/19
Other worlds, dark and joyous
I had long wanted to read this famous book — a space fantasy far from my usual choices of fiction reading; it's good to break routine once in a while, as industrial diplomat and star traveler Marq Hyeth (the narrator of most of this book) might say. And it was not at all what I expected. Which is good, I guess. I wanted surprises and got them.
As I did expect, it is fantastical and ironic. But it is not light comedy. It is a story contrived to reflect on complicated, unresolved philosophical questions, with dark hints about the answers: how the brain really works and how its processes can be disrupted; the construction of memories, creating myths; the varied ways of negotiating our sexual obsessions, and, finally (finally!) time, space and death.
The setting: Millennia from now, when humans and other intelligent beings from other planets (some of them with 6 legs, multiple tongues, wings and metallic claws) have achieved relative peace in their competition to colonize the 6,200 or more known worlds in the universe, a big (7'4") 19-year old social misfit, homosexual and long drug user in a world that discourages that sort of thing volunteers for Radical Anxiety Termination to turn him into a "rat", an anxiety-less and thus ambition- and curiosity-less human used as a slave by the more-or-less corrupt state industries. His partial recovery of his mental faculties and belated discovery of emotion, described mainly by the short, stocky interworld traveler and industrial diplomat (ID) Marq Hyeth, his perfect love object, is the central story around which we witness many other relationships, experiences and memories. And hovering over all of it are two massive, possibly related conflicts which may threaten them all: first, an internal rivalry among the federated worlds between a fundamentalist political-ideological movement called the Family (apparently the inventors of Radical Anxiety Termination) who want everyone and everything to be controlled and orderly and invent exquisite punishments for those who are not, and the more tolerant, laid-back, open-to-experimentation Sygn; and beyond them, outside any known federation, a mysterious and immensely powerful system of beings who offer no communication to the others, the Xlv, whose intentions are unknown but, if hostile, may be spell disaster.
The book is full of invention, with new worlds and new sorts of intelligent beings and new technologies with strange names appearing in every chapter, almost on every page. Which often makes it very difficult to figure just who is having sex with whom, and how they're doing it, or what's really going on in the dinner parties. (There's a lot of explicit, sloppy sex, but unless you're attracted to six-legged evelmi with shiny scales, or have an opportunity to stroll or float through a love-park on one of the Sygn controlled worlds, it will be beyond reach for you.)
My favorite parts include the long first section, before Marq Hyeth even appears, where we witness the brain-zapping in the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute and its consequences — which include the inability to take in new information from the General Information (GI) network which other humans and evelmi (those six-legged, winged- beings with all the tongues) use to learn new languages or access whatever data they want. This is because, as the high-ranking interworld official Japril explains,
Another delight is the dragon-hunting chapter. I won't tell you more. You just have to experience what happens in Dyethshome when you go on a dragon hunt. The final chapter comes as somewhat of a relief from all the interminable invention and learning of new creatures, habits, worldscapes. For here Marq Dyeth recalls his earlier life, which helps bring some coherence to the jarring, seemingly chaotic space travels we have just gone through.
Here's what Wikipedia through Google (our primitive version of "GI") tells us about the ebullient and creative Stephen R. Delany. And here's something else I found when I looked him up. Delany doesn't even appear in this first part, but it's in his spirit. Check out this video, The last angel of history.
This is not directly relevant, but fun: a view of some of those 6,200 worlds from our own little planet, in Terje Sorgjerd's video, The Mountain on Vimeo.
As I did expect, it is fantastical and ironic. But it is not light comedy. It is a story contrived to reflect on complicated, unresolved philosophical questions, with dark hints about the answers: how the brain really works and how its processes can be disrupted; the construction of memories, creating myths; the varied ways of negotiating our sexual obsessions, and, finally (finally!) time, space and death.
The setting: Millennia from now, when humans and other intelligent beings from other planets (some of them with 6 legs, multiple tongues, wings and metallic claws) have achieved relative peace in their competition to colonize the 6,200 or more known worlds in the universe, a big (7'4") 19-year old social misfit, homosexual and long drug user in a world that discourages that sort of thing volunteers for Radical Anxiety Termination to turn him into a "rat", an anxiety-less and thus ambition- and curiosity-less human used as a slave by the more-or-less corrupt state industries. His partial recovery of his mental faculties and belated discovery of emotion, described mainly by the short, stocky interworld traveler and industrial diplomat (ID) Marq Hyeth, his perfect love object, is the central story around which we witness many other relationships, experiences and memories. And hovering over all of it are two massive, possibly related conflicts which may threaten them all: first, an internal rivalry among the federated worlds between a fundamentalist political-ideological movement called the Family (apparently the inventors of Radical Anxiety Termination) who want everyone and everything to be controlled and orderly and invent exquisite punishments for those who are not, and the more tolerant, laid-back, open-to-experimentation Sygn; and beyond them, outside any known federation, a mysterious and immensely powerful system of beings who offer no communication to the others, the Xlv, whose intentions are unknown but, if hostile, may be spell disaster.
The book is full of invention, with new worlds and new sorts of intelligent beings and new technologies with strange names appearing in every chapter, almost on every page. Which often makes it very difficult to figure just who is having sex with whom, and how they're doing it, or what's really going on in the dinner parties. (There's a lot of explicit, sloppy sex, but unless you're attracted to six-legged evelmi with shiny scales, or have an opportunity to stroll or float through a love-park on one of the Sygn controlled worlds, it will be beyond reach for you.)
My favorite parts include the long first section, before Marq Hyeth even appears, where we witness the brain-zapping in the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute and its consequences — which include the inability to take in new information from the General Information (GI) network which other humans and evelmi (those six-legged, winged- beings with all the tongues) use to learn new languages or access whatever data they want. This is because, as the high-ranking interworld official Japril explains,
"It's precisely those 'anxiety' channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you actually used consciously." (Pp. 161-162 in my edition.)Wow! So all that we would give up if we lost all anxiety. That is a heavy thought. If I were a rat, i.e. if I had been subjected to blockage of my "anxiety" channels, I might be able to repeat that paragraph but I would never fathom its meaning. The novel is full of rather surprising, often profound, usually wittily stated observations.
Another delight is the dragon-hunting chapter. I won't tell you more. You just have to experience what happens in Dyethshome when you go on a dragon hunt. The final chapter comes as somewhat of a relief from all the interminable invention and learning of new creatures, habits, worldscapes. For here Marq Dyeth recalls his earlier life, which helps bring some coherence to the jarring, seemingly chaotic space travels we have just gone through.
Here's what Wikipedia through Google (our primitive version of "GI") tells us about the ebullient and creative Stephen R. Delany. And here's something else I found when I looked him up. Delany doesn't even appear in this first part, but it's in his spirit. Check out this video, The last angel of history.
This is not directly relevant, but fun: a view of some of those 6,200 worlds from our own little planet, in Terje Sorgjerd's video, The Mountain on Vimeo.
2011/04/15
In the peninsula of Bithynia…
[Text found in an old notebook, dated 1983.6.11 — slightly edited]
In the peninsula of Bithynia, in about 120 B.C. — the chronicles are not very precise, saying only "in the reign of the Elders of the House of Baal" —a girl was seen near the Temple of Tanit with a T-shirt (for this would seem to be the garment described) inscribed thus: "Ravissez-moi, je suis vièrge. Estienne."
When asked what that meant, the girl said she wasn't sure (the characters themselves were quite unlike the Phoenician script known to the region) but that it was her father's idea, that it was addressed to the Carthaginians and would assure her — and thus the House — of eternal existence in the fiction of Flaubert.
The interlocutor, a young acolyte of Tanit, was not troubled by the reference to the unknown foreign god Flaubert — there were so many gods, and it was well to respect them all — but he was puzzled by the severe and undecipherable characters. How, he asked, were the Carthaginians — who in all events were not expected in the area — how were they to understand a message in a strange language?
"Oh, my father says the Carthaginians of Flaubert understand it perfectly," replied the girl.
[I must have been reading Salammbô; "Estienne" may be a reference to the type-face used for at least some editions of Flaubert's works.]
In the peninsula of Bithynia, in about 120 B.C. — the chronicles are not very precise, saying only "in the reign of the Elders of the House of Baal" —a girl was seen near the Temple of Tanit with a T-shirt (for this would seem to be the garment described) inscribed thus: "Ravissez-moi, je suis vièrge. Estienne."
When asked what that meant, the girl said she wasn't sure (the characters themselves were quite unlike the Phoenician script known to the region) but that it was her father's idea, that it was addressed to the Carthaginians and would assure her — and thus the House — of eternal existence in the fiction of Flaubert.
The interlocutor, a young acolyte of Tanit, was not troubled by the reference to the unknown foreign god Flaubert — there were so many gods, and it was well to respect them all — but he was puzzled by the severe and undecipherable characters. How, he asked, were the Carthaginians — who in all events were not expected in the area — how were they to understand a message in a strange language?
"Oh, my father says the Carthaginians of Flaubert understand it perfectly," replied the girl.
∞∞∞
[I must have been reading Salammbô; "Estienne" may be a reference to the type-face used for at least some editions of Flaubert's works.]
Authors Sign eBooks Electronically - NYTimes.com
What great ideas! For all the Kindle and Smashwords readers of A Gift for the Sultan (and other things that I will be publishing shortly — watch this space).
Authors Sign eBooks Electronically - NYTimes.com
By the way, if you're hesitant about shelling out $4.99 for this e-book (even though you've seen the reader reviews and know that lots of other people really liked it), you can download a sample free in either Kindle or Smashwords. With the latter you get the first 20% (with Kindle a little less) — enough to either whet your appetite or (in the unfortunate and less likely case) to tell you that it's not for you.
If you're reading your e-books on an iPad or Nook or anything but a Kindle, Smashwords is your best bet: click here.
Authors Sign eBooks Electronically - NYTimes.com
By the way, if you're hesitant about shelling out $4.99 for this e-book (even though you've seen the reader reviews and know that lots of other people really liked it), you can download a sample free in either Kindle or Smashwords. With the latter you get the first 20% (with Kindle a little less) — enough to either whet your appetite or (in the unfortunate and less likely case) to tell you that it's not for you.
If you're reading your e-books on an iPad or Nook or anything but a Kindle, Smashwords is your best bet: click here.
2011/04/14
David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose | The New York Public Library
If I were still living in New York, I'd want to go to this. You literary folk who are in New York should know about it.
David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose | The New York Public Library
David Bezmozgis and Francine Prose | The New York Public Library
2011/04/12
When Brooklyn was gentle
Brooklyn by Colm TóibínMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A sweet, gentle story of an Irish girl who migrates in the 1950s from her small town to bustling and multi-ethnic Brooklyn, learns to cope, finds a nice Italian-American guy, returns to Ireland for a wake and a visit and is briefly torn between slipping back into the familiar comforts of the old place and returning to her new life back in Brooklyn. Though written by a man, this is a woman's book, told from Eilis Lacey's point of view and mostly about her relations with other girls and women, who try to advise, guide or — ineffectively — control her; the guys are secondary characters, mostly bumbling and insecure but generally well-intentioned. Toibin has made Eilis' fears, desires and hesitations all sound authentic, and presented her with a real but not very dramatic dilemma: she will either remain in Ireland and reintegrate herself into what she now knows is a very slow, limiting but unthreatening life, or she will go back to Brooklyn for what she foresees as a dull routine as a housekeeper for her Italian-American plumber husband. There is little excitement, hardly a hint of violence or even serious ethnic conflict in this Brooklyn, but still it is an enjoyable read because Eilis is so likable and believable. But was Brooklyn ever really so sweet?
View all my reviews
2011/04/11
Books Without Batteries:The Negative Impacts of Technology
Why e-readers are bad for our forests, and our brains (a provocative little essay by Bill Henderson)
Books Without Batteries:The Negative Impacts of Technology
It's all true. It's also almost entirely irrelevant. Every new technology has negative impacts, beginning (if we restrict ourselves to literary matters) with the invention of writing and reading. People stopped having to learn the great poems by memory, and the very practice of writing (and of reading) rewired our brains, creating many more connections between the right and left hemispheres, with — among other effects — the loss of the voice of the gods.
At least, if you accept Julian Jaynes
' argument, which I still find powerfully plausible: The ancients, according to Jaynes, including the Greeks before Homer, Moses, and all peoples before literacy would hear the voices in their right brain hemisphere as though they were coming from somewhere else. And since the voice telling him or her what to do was the remembered voice of the tribal leader or patriarch or sachem, its timbre carried great authority. And since the source was invisible, it could only be the voice of God. Some god or other, anyway. The loss of that direct communication with the gods was seen as an enormous tragedy in the societies that had only recently been corrupted by literacy.
That wasn't all. We went along for millennia with some people with re-wired, literate brains and most without, some people hearing spooks and others unable to except under extraordinary pressure (fasting, self-flagellation, opium-smoking, or some other practice to shut off those right brain-left brain communications). But then Gutenberg and his colleagues and successors made literacy available to almost everybody, with another unintended negative consequence: Widespread use of the written word now created new "imagined communities" of people who could read the same language! Thus people who had hitherto been unacquainted with one another and had nothing in common but the ability to read the same language began thinking of themselves as a "nation" and felt themselves apart from those who spoke and read some other language. And we all know what followed: the Napoleonic wars, world wars I and II, the partition of India, etc. etc. We're still paying the price for that kind of literacy.
And now e-readers, again rewiring our brains and pulping our environment. And like those technological revolutions of the past, they are unstoppable; we're just going to have to deal with them. And maybe there can be some positive effects, too, if we just know how to look for them. After all, there are still people who argue that literacy was a good idea. And that printing on paper had advantages over clay tablets. I'm not so sure — a lot of us still miss hearing those voices of the gods.
Click here for more Jaynes and his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's worth reading.
Books Without Batteries:The Negative Impacts of Technology
It's all true. It's also almost entirely irrelevant. Every new technology has negative impacts, beginning (if we restrict ourselves to literary matters) with the invention of writing and reading. People stopped having to learn the great poems by memory, and the very practice of writing (and of reading) rewired our brains, creating many more connections between the right and left hemispheres, with — among other effects — the loss of the voice of the gods.
At least, if you accept Julian Jaynes
' argument, which I still find powerfully plausible: The ancients, according to Jaynes, including the Greeks before Homer, Moses, and all peoples before literacy would hear the voices in their right brain hemisphere as though they were coming from somewhere else. And since the voice telling him or her what to do was the remembered voice of the tribal leader or patriarch or sachem, its timbre carried great authority. And since the source was invisible, it could only be the voice of God. Some god or other, anyway. The loss of that direct communication with the gods was seen as an enormous tragedy in the societies that had only recently been corrupted by literacy.That wasn't all. We went along for millennia with some people with re-wired, literate brains and most without, some people hearing spooks and others unable to except under extraordinary pressure (fasting, self-flagellation, opium-smoking, or some other practice to shut off those right brain-left brain communications). But then Gutenberg and his colleagues and successors made literacy available to almost everybody, with another unintended negative consequence: Widespread use of the written word now created new "imagined communities" of people who could read the same language! Thus people who had hitherto been unacquainted with one another and had nothing in common but the ability to read the same language began thinking of themselves as a "nation" and felt themselves apart from those who spoke and read some other language. And we all know what followed: the Napoleonic wars, world wars I and II, the partition of India, etc. etc. We're still paying the price for that kind of literacy.
And now e-readers, again rewiring our brains and pulping our environment. And like those technological revolutions of the past, they are unstoppable; we're just going to have to deal with them. And maybe there can be some positive effects, too, if we just know how to look for them. After all, there are still people who argue that literacy was a good idea. And that printing on paper had advantages over clay tablets. I'm not so sure — a lot of us still miss hearing those voices of the gods.
Click here for more Jaynes and his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's worth reading.
2011/04/09
A woman of courage in a ravaged land — Somalia
Thanks to colleague and friend César Chelala for writing and sending this example of courage in the face of terrible violence.
The Middle East Times - International
We have to try to understand the men who would so furiously destroy life-chances for women. We must try to understand, not to forgive them but to know better how to confront them and what to do so that the next generations can be free of such rage.
The Middle East Times - International
We have to try to understand the men who would so furiously destroy life-chances for women. We must try to understand, not to forgive them but to know better how to confront them and what to do so that the next generations can be free of such rage.
2011/04/08
Istanbul memories
A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi TanpinarTr. by Erdağ Göknar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This lyrical evocation of Istanbul on the eve of the second world war may help us understand this increasingly important country, Turkey, now again —as it was in the time of A Gift for the Sultan — playing a key role in relations between Christian Europe and the Muslim East and North Africa. It is experienced through eyes, ears and mind of a young man especially sensitive to the terrible conflicts of its recent past, the city's two-faced identity (looking toward Asia and toward Europe), the country's economic backwardness, the beauty of the Bosphorus and of the homes, some splendid, some ruinous that border it, the sharp class divisions and the powerful ties of family. The young man is Mümtaz, orphaned in the war against the Greeks in 1923 and now, in 1939, 27 years old. Besides the city itself and its music, especially the traditional türküs and Ottoman classical music, the chief influences on him are his much older cousin İhsan, his professor and his guardian since his early ophanhood; Nuran, a beautiful divorcée with a lovely singing voice, two years older than Mümtaz, who was his fiancée in the previous summer but now has abandoned him and left him hopelessly forlorn; and Suad, another cousin, terribly smart, cynical, and tormented. Their conflicting passions and their doubts are a gigantic, complex metaphor for Turkey itself.
The translation is elegant, though the translator has a penchant for some unusual English words ("luculent" is a favorite) and resorts often to the Turkish words in the descriptions of boating on the Bosphorus and other passages. It is a moving and ambitious book, that can be appreciated by any reader but will be most fully appreciated by those familiar with the music that Tanpınar evokes almost throughout.
Here is an example of a mahur, sung by Ahmet Kaya. Perhaps my Turkish friends can suggest other (or more) appropriate examples.
Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) is an author we should get to know better.
View all my reviews
2011/04/06
Becoming an elder
Sunday I turned 70. That means that I am now one of the elders. I do not take this responsibility lightly. You and all the other members of our tribe — the entire human race — have a right to expect more of me now, and I shall try to satisfy your expectations.
I am probably not any smarter than I was when I was 20 or 30 or 40. Maybe even less smart, in the sense of grasping new information, like, say, all the technological changes that come so fast these days. But — unless we have been really dumb all these years and actively resisting knowledge — we elders are bound to be wiser than we were. That's just the way the brain works, accumulating experience, transferring new knowledge grasped by our quick left-brain to our more meditative right brain. Elkhonon Goldberg has explained how all this happens, the physical changes in our brains that make us maybe a little less quick to grasp new information, but nevertheless able to react more quickly and surely (without all that youthful Hamlet-like doubting) because almost anything we encounter is somehow like something we have seen before.
The job of youth is to change the world. Then — in our 30s, 40s, 50s — to understand it. And now, as elders, to accept it.
But accepting — I mean seeing reality as it is, without the screen of wishful thinking — is not enough. That could just be depressing if we didn't also remember our younger selves. Our job as elders is to share what we've learned so that all of us, young, mature and elders, can change things better.
That's been my story, and the story of others I have known and admired, including some who reached elderhood long before me. Those who were in their 20s back in the 1930s, for example. We Americans who were in our 20s back in the '60s did change the world, very substantially. We broke down some fierce racial barriers in the US, we changed the gender rules, we forced our government to accelerate the end of its war in Southeast Asia, we created new art forms in all the arts. Some of the changes came so fast that we who had been pushing for them were perplexed and confused, because the terrain was changing. And some of the changes were unexpected, and not all of them were good.
I began to get an inkling that things were more complicated than I had first assumed when I was still in my 20s. Work as a community organizer in what for me was a foreign culture, the poor barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, was a bath in a different pond. When I got back to the States I started grad school in sociology, still focused on changing the world but also recognizing that I needed to work harder to understand it. I thought I could do the two things simultaneously, coupling my sociological research and courses and readings with very active participation in the antiwar and civil rights movements, trying to bring those things together.
The shift into a new phase of consciousness didn't happen all at once, but suffered some big jolts when I was in my 30s. First, the coup in Chile (September 11, 1973, when I was 32) made it clearer than ever how hard the democratic struggle was going to be. And then the rapid deflation of the anti-war movement in 1975 drove a lot of us activists back to the books and into ferocious debates over political and revolutionary theory. And a lot of it turned out to be wishful thinking. The proletariat that we had imagined didn't even exist, the capitalism we were confronting was not the caricature that had been drawn for us, the people we thought we were liberating didn't always (if ever) behave the way we had expected.
Which didn't mean that we shouldn't try to change the world, to make it more just, to open more opportunities to more people. Just that it was going to be harder than we thought, and maybe there would never be a final, total victory, but rather the unceasing struggle to widen justice and keep injustice from encroaching.
I've learned some things, I think. And now that I am one of the elders of our tribe, it will be my honor and especially my duty not just to share knowledge already acquired, but to use my new elder skills to seek out reasonable strategies in the face of all our several crises of war, contamination, and continued injustices of all kinds.
By the way, the birthday party on Sunday was a blast. Thanks to all my good friends who participated, and all the others who couldn't be present but sent their good wishes.
(Check out my earlier blog comment on Eros and Thanatos for more about Goldberg's thesis.)
I am probably not any smarter than I was when I was 20 or 30 or 40. Maybe even less smart, in the sense of grasping new information, like, say, all the technological changes that come so fast these days. But — unless we have been really dumb all these years and actively resisting knowledge — we elders are bound to be wiser than we were. That's just the way the brain works, accumulating experience, transferring new knowledge grasped by our quick left-brain to our more meditative right brain. Elkhonon Goldberg has explained how all this happens, the physical changes in our brains that make us maybe a little less quick to grasp new information, but nevertheless able to react more quickly and surely (without all that youthful Hamlet-like doubting) because almost anything we encounter is somehow like something we have seen before.
The job of youth is to change the world. Then — in our 30s, 40s, 50s — to understand it. And now, as elders, to accept it.
But accepting — I mean seeing reality as it is, without the screen of wishful thinking — is not enough. That could just be depressing if we didn't also remember our younger selves. Our job as elders is to share what we've learned so that all of us, young, mature and elders, can change things better.
That's been my story, and the story of others I have known and admired, including some who reached elderhood long before me. Those who were in their 20s back in the 1930s, for example. We Americans who were in our 20s back in the '60s did change the world, very substantially. We broke down some fierce racial barriers in the US, we changed the gender rules, we forced our government to accelerate the end of its war in Southeast Asia, we created new art forms in all the arts. Some of the changes came so fast that we who had been pushing for them were perplexed and confused, because the terrain was changing. And some of the changes were unexpected, and not all of them were good.
I began to get an inkling that things were more complicated than I had first assumed when I was still in my 20s. Work as a community organizer in what for me was a foreign culture, the poor barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, was a bath in a different pond. When I got back to the States I started grad school in sociology, still focused on changing the world but also recognizing that I needed to work harder to understand it. I thought I could do the two things simultaneously, coupling my sociological research and courses and readings with very active participation in the antiwar and civil rights movements, trying to bring those things together.
The shift into a new phase of consciousness didn't happen all at once, but suffered some big jolts when I was in my 30s. First, the coup in Chile (September 11, 1973, when I was 32) made it clearer than ever how hard the democratic struggle was going to be. And then the rapid deflation of the anti-war movement in 1975 drove a lot of us activists back to the books and into ferocious debates over political and revolutionary theory. And a lot of it turned out to be wishful thinking. The proletariat that we had imagined didn't even exist, the capitalism we were confronting was not the caricature that had been drawn for us, the people we thought we were liberating didn't always (if ever) behave the way we had expected.
Which didn't mean that we shouldn't try to change the world, to make it more just, to open more opportunities to more people. Just that it was going to be harder than we thought, and maybe there would never be a final, total victory, but rather the unceasing struggle to widen justice and keep injustice from encroaching.
I've learned some things, I think. And now that I am one of the elders of our tribe, it will be my honor and especially my duty not just to share knowledge already acquired, but to use my new elder skills to seek out reasonable strategies in the face of all our several crises of war, contamination, and continued injustices of all kinds.
By the way, the birthday party on Sunday was a blast. Thanks to all my good friends who participated, and all the others who couldn't be present but sent their good wishes.
(Check out my earlier blog comment on Eros and Thanatos for more about Goldberg's thesis.)
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