Wall-E Word

Wall-E is brilliant.



EDIT: It occurs to me that one might ask, "How so?" The best way to find out is to go see it. Once I've seen it again, maybe I'll do a little write-up of The Gospel According To Wall-E or something.

On Wednesday night, I'm starting a discussion group at my house on A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren. I think there will be about five or six people for the first meeting, and I'm really hoping for a good discussion. On Sunday, the young adult program at my church is starting a 3-part series on Christianity in the Postmodern World, which should give people some additional insight into how the ideas in the book are relevant to their spiritual formation, mission, and so on.

This should give you a good idea of what I've been doing lately:



[screenshot from the Facebook Typing Speed application page, "Today's Top Typists"] All those years of Type to Learn and instant messaging paid off. Now Freddy will have to stop gloating about beating me without even having any fingers. He managed about 132wpm.

I am doing other things, though. Today I learned about Markov chains, digraphs, and error-correcting codes, in addition to practicing some music and reading the first section of Dismantling The Silence, an early Charles Simic book I found online for a few dollars(!). It includes his "object poems," among others from What The Grass Says and Somewhere Among Us A Stone Is Taking Notes. His books (and poems) have the best titles...the one that came out after this one is Return To A Place Lit By A Glass Of Milk.

I'm currently hoping to memorize his long poem "White", or at least a representative portion. Here's what I've got so far:

White

A New Version: 1980

What is that little black thing I see there in the white?
Walt Whitman

One

Out of poverty
To begin again:

With the color of the bride
And that of blindness,

Touch what I can
Of the quick,

Speak and then wait,
As if this light

Will continue to linger
On the threshold.


All that is near,
I no longer give it a name.

Once a stone hard of hearing,
Once sharpened into a knife...

Now only a chill
Slipping through.

Enough glow to kneel by and ask
To be tied to its tail

When it goes marrying
Its cousins, the stars.


Is it a cloud?
If it's a cloud it will move on.

The true shape of this thought,
Migrant, waning.

Something seeks someone,
It bears him a gift

Of himself, a bit
Of snow to taste,

Glimpse of his own nakedness
By which to imagine the face.

[...]

It's formatted into two sections, each composed of ten sets of five two-line stanzas (so 100 lines per section); the sets are a bit like cycles of smaller poems. This is followed by "What The White Had To Say", which is in two twenty-line stanzas. It's introduced by a quote from Meister Eckhart: "For how could anything white be distinct from or divided from whiteness?" You can read the whole poem here, if you care to.

Waiting Room

Windowless purgatory for patients.
Those who ail load into magazines
Until they can be charged
For some costly golden bullet
In pill-bottle form.

Someone’s little girl
With ears bandaged tight.
A lady blowing her brains out
Through her nostrils
Due to who-knows-what.

After taking up their infirmities
On a clipboard and checking
The proper boxes, they mark time
Until the clock’s nervous tick
Summons the Good Doctor.

An old man shuffles to the corner
With a hacking cough.
The crease of his pant leg
Traces the crisp line
Of an obsolete metal prosthesis.

A boy with two black eyes
Takes apart the plastic pieces
Of a many-colored model of the heart,
Complete with intricate diagrams
And many terms in Latin.

You had only scheduled a checkup,
But the man with a swollen lip
And crutches is eyeing you
Like a long-lost brother.
“Be right as rain,” he murmurs.

The moths orbiting the light fixture
In crazy spirals—they, likewise,
Could not have envisioned
This unseemly affliction before,
As inchworms measuring floor tiles.

casting the first stone

     casting the first stone
in the sand into her pail,
     girl collecting shells

good vibrations

You can listen to my recent piano piece, Valid Concerns for Piano, at my music MySpace. It took this long to post it because I just found the CD it was on in my Flight of the Conchords DVD case. It's hard to believe I hadn't opened it since I got home until now.

I've been trying an Internet marketing thing recently. Basically I spend money to advertise other people's products, and if I sell any then I receive a commission. Nothing sold yet. More updates on this bad idea as events progress. I'm doing it because I paid for something that I thought had to do with getting work doing data entry and word processing online, but the promotional information was deceptive (i.e. a scam). Trying to get my money back, but it seemed interesting enough to give it a shot and try to justify the mistake. (Update: got my money back, except what I've spent on ads.)

Tomorrow I'm going to Ocean City, New Jersey with my mom and Laura for a few days. We'll be back Friday or Saturday, although I think I'll have Internet access in the meantime.

I've been working on teaching myself linear algebra with a textbook and MIT OpenCourseWare. My main goal is to learn it so I can move on to some of the more interesting and fundamental concepts in higher math, since it's a prerequisite for them. Between GEB and other things I've been reading lately related to philosophy and music, it seems like math is a pretty universal doorway into the nature of things, and I am interested in the nature of things. What is real that cannot be known or understood logically? What are the limits? I'd like to know someday. "Only those who are willing to go too far..."

A family of birds occupies the hanging plant in our front doorway every year. This time around I got to see the baby birds in the nest and hear their high-pitched peeps when their parents came with food. We even got to observe the day they learned how to fly: the parents flew in circles near the nest to demonstrate how, and a bird at a time would flap around precariously above the nest for a few seconds until eventually they had all left the nest. They haven't come back.

I think it's interesting that bird parents invest so much in feeding, protecting, and educating their your, considering that the children will not support the parents in their old age or buy them a beach house on the Pacific; they can't give anything back. There is no direct conscious reason for the parents to help their young--it's just instinct. The only direct benefit to the older birds is to get their genes transmitted and the development of DNA continued through them. The main purpose appears to be the preservation and progress of their species, and really the ecosystem at large. In that sense, their lives are gifts to (and of) the universe.

There have been a number of occasions recently where I've stayed up all night (writing, among other things) until it was light outside again. I trekked through the woods in our back yard (which is mostly mud and skunk cabbage) to see the sunrise from the fields on the other side of the woods, where a country club is currently under construction. Since no one's manning the bulldozers at 6 AM, I have acres and acres of open fields and dirt-covered land to myself to enjoy the sounds and sights of the morning. Once recently I came across a deer inside the fence that marks the edge of our back yard. It saw me first and was on its way out by the time I noticed it.

That reminds me of something I read recently about the proverbial question: If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The simple answer is no, it does not. Sound is a perceptual phenomenon; it's what happens in our brains when certain types of vibrations in the air push against our eardrums. If the question was about whether the trees make any vibrations at all, the answer would be a bit different, although if by 'no one around to hear it' the question means the complete nonexistence of Mind, I would still say the answer is no.

In summary, I like summer and I like outside.

EDIT: Interesting news article: Using parts from the PlayStation 3 (among other things), IBM has built the world's first petaflop supercomputer. That means it can perform a thousand trillion operations per second.

Let me try to give you a picture of how big that number is. In between one hundredth and one tenth of a second, it would perform as many calculations as there are cells in the human body. In four months, it would perform as many calculations as there are grains of sand on every beach and desert on Earth. In about three years, it would perform as many calculations as there are stars in the universe.

To put that in perspective: on a clear night, you can see about 5,000 stars with the naked eye. If they were grains of salt, you could fit them on a tablespoon. If all the stars in the universe were grains of salt, you could fit them in a ball eight miles wide.

And it still can't tell us why Pogs(R) aren't cool anymore. I swear the Collector's Series Puff Pogs I made will be in high demand in a decade or two.

Bowl

A stack of them holed up in some cupboard,
In back of matching platters, nested soundly
In each other’s mouths.

Mouths that cannot close or even swallow
Are all they are. Inexorable lectors
In the microwave.

A stoneware lens to blind a roving Cyclops
And any telescope that finds too much
Or not enough.

Mold for a mound of anything, for carving
Craters in planets where falling stars vaporize
As they come.

The discourse of a solid with its hollow.
Both are expert in wordless paralipsis
Through simple circles.

In Tic-Tac-Toe with the Universe, it’s a stencil
To oppose our next X. She grades our shrewdness,
Aims, and pours.

A plate whose center sags beneath the infinite.
Its lips formed in a perfect zero, the one
Thing it can say.

I Have Many Valid Concerns

At night they drip
from the faucet
in the next room
where I wash.

A drop wakes
me up and I take a leak
myself. The light
stays off.

Rain drizzles
on the roof.
A floorboard creaks
from the weight.

Following breadcrumbs-

     Following breadcrumbs—
the bits the ants carried off
     have found a way home.

the forgotten clock

     the forgotten clock
continues to yell
     its alarm

The Life You've Imagined

Simple dreams were the first
to go. You dropped them simply
because you could hold them
no longer, your arms were
too strong to only
hold anything.

No one has picked them
up, but when you smell
them disintegrating behind
you, you will
think it is the pie
on your neighbor’s sill.

It is much too high.

A Bird in the Hand

It’s no use crying
before they hatch.
Time flies
in small packages.

Necessity
killed the cat.
Even a stopped clock
is the best medicine.

The grass is always greener
but you can’t make it drink.
Laughter
is right twice a day.

Please don’t count your chickens
where the heart is.
Beauty is in
spilled milk.

Good things come
on the other side of the fence.
There’s no place like
the eye of the beholder.

Tabula Rasa

The winter sun lower and dull. All its beams lay
thin strokes barely across forms; before they estrange
the day, you write. What it is you try to convey
sticks in place as you ponder the coming exchange.

Thin strokes—barely a cross forms before they estrange
the winter sun. Lower and dull all its beams, lay
sticks in place as you ponder the coming exchange
the day you write what it is you try to convey.

I am being told

     I am being told by a homeless man what my eulogy will be. He cites “the deficiency in our ideas” and prophesies how and when.
     Of my relation to light, it will be said that I absorbed certain frequencies and reflected others. Indeed, many photons passed right through me.
     His eyes go bleary (because “reason is the slave of the passions”). From his bag he retrieves socks of mine that have long been missing, carefully mended.

Talking at dusk

Talking at dusk about suffering. “We are ignorant of the ultimate principle,” someone says someone said. The firefly’s flicker of insight as it leaves my palm.