Apr
16
ceremony
April 16, 2005 | Leave a Comment
“okay you win; you take the prize,
but what you said just now –
it isn’t so funny
it doesn’t sound so good.
we are doing okay without it
we can get along without that kind of thing.
take it back.
call that story back.”
(ceremony by leslie marmon silko)
Apr
13
something stronger
April 13, 2005 | Leave a Comment
tonight in tom mcbride’s class, we discussed what to do on the last day.
nick hall: can we have cookies?
mcbride: sure. or we can go out for something stronger afterward.
nick hall: . . . ice cream?
Apr
10
a volatile affective style
April 10, 2005 | Leave a Comment
john gottman, a ph.d. who studies married couples, accurately predicts a HUGE percentage of couples who will divorce. taken from a 2002 study by his institute:
“derived from post-hoc analyses of the data, we explore the idea that there will be two factors emerging from the data, one factor tapping a volatile affective style, which will be related to early divorcing, and another factor tapping a more neutral affective style, which will be related to later divorcing.”
he uses small populations, but the results are intriguing.
anyway, on the radio show, he also talks about gay and lesbian couples — he did a parallel study with 21 lesbian couples, 21 gay couples, and 42 hetero married couples. people responded on a questionnaire and they were chosen based on what they said was “high relationship satisfaction.” ira glass:
“they found that the homosexual couples were far better than the heterosexual married couples at bringing up an issue in a positive way.”
gottman gave an example where a man asked his partner who initiated sex that morning. his partner said something like, you know you don’t have the kind of body i find most attractive. his partner said, yeah, i know, but who initiated sex this morning? gottman asked ira glass if he could imagine a husband saying something similar to his wife and getting any response at all, let alone the cooperative response of the partner here. gottman:
“so there’s so much less deception, so much more honesty, so much more directness [in the gay couples]. i don’t know if it’s representative, but i was impressed.”
(gottman’s study was published in the family process journal. it’s a long, in-depth analysis of the study’s parameters and findings. here‘s the episode of this american life.)
Apr
9
what you feel that’s lacking
April 9, 2005 | Leave a Comment
“sometimes when you get the blues there’s a reason.”
by charles bukowski.
it only takes 6 or 8 inept political leaders
or 8 or 10 artsy-fartsy writers, composers and painters to
set the natural course of human progress
back
50 years
or more.
which may not seem like much to you
but it’s over half your lifetime
during which time you’re not going to be able to
hear, see, read or feel that
necessary gift of great art which
otherwise you could have experienced.
which may not seem tragic to you
but sometimes, perhaps, when you’re feeling not so
good at
night or in the morning or at
noon,
maybe what you feel that’s lacking is
what should be there for
you
but is not.
and i don’t mean a blonde in
sheer pantyhose,
i’m talking about what gnaws at your guts
even when she’s
there.
Apr
6
gordon moore
April 6, 2005 | Leave a Comment
this morning in computer science, kurt identified gordon moore as one of the founders of intel. five minutes later, when i knew the circumference of the earth was about 25,000 miles, kurt called me a nerd.
Apr
5
got a black magic woman
April 5, 2005 | Leave a Comment
santana recorded “black magic woman” in 1970 for the album abraxas, which fucking rules, by the way. the style of it always made me think it was something santana wrote, until today, when i was listening to a fleetwood mac album from 1969 called english rose.
it turns out peter green, the original guitarist and songwriter for fleetwood mac, wrote “black magic woman.” haha i am nerding out about this because it’s yet more evidence of how drastically fleetwood mac changed during its band-life.
Apr
2
he was karol
April 2, 2005 | Leave a Comment
(from knowledgenews.net)
Today, news is fixed on the Vatican, where Pope John Paul II lies in “very serious” condition. Our thoughts are with the pope, too. Hard as it is to remember now, the young Karol Wojtyla was a strapping fellow, eager to ski and kayak and hike. Here’s what his life was like before he became pope.
Before He Was John Paul, He Was Karol
On May 18, 1920, Karol and Emilia Wojtyla welcomed the arrival of their second son and named him Karol Jozef. The family lived in Wadowice, a small town just south of Krakow where Catholics and Jews lived side by side. When Karol was 8, he lost his mother. Three years later, his older brother also died.
Portrait of the Pope as a Young Man
Karol grew up to excel in academics and athletics. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he was studying literature and philosophy in Krakow and exploring a passion for theater. After the Germans shut down his university, he saw his professors rounded up–some deported, others executed–and Poland’s Jews sent off to death camps. Auschwitz was less than 50 miles away.
Karol took a job as a stonecutter, but then personal tragedy struck again: his father died in 1941. Karol Sr.’s last wish was that his son become a priest, and Karol soon began training at an underground seminary in Krakow–secretly, since the Nazis had outlawed religious study. From 1944 until the end of World War II, he had to lie low to escape the notice of the Germans, who had begun rounding up Polish men.
From these experiences, Karol became convinced that moral purity is best attained through suffering. Later in life, when addressing arguments that priestly celibacy should be relaxed, or that other dimensions of Catholic life should be made less difficult, Wojtyla would return to the idea that some things in life are supposed to be hard.
On-the-Job Training
Once Karol entered the Catholic church, his rise through the hierarchy was steady. He was ordained in 1946 and continued to study, earning doctorates in theology and philosophy. He became a bishop in 1958, archbishop in 1963, cardinal in 1967.
A priest in the Polish church faced plenty of obstacles. When the Germans were thrown out of Poland at the end of World War II, the Communists took over, and the new regime was every bit as authoritarian as the old–and even more hostile to religion. A rising star, Karol grew proficient in the difficult balancing act of resisting the government’s periodic crackdowns on religion without inviting even harsher reprisals.
The great turning point in his career came at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The young church leader from Krakow, relatively unknown outside his native land, attracted attention by arguing forcefully that the church should explicitly condemn anti-Semitism and officially reject the view that Jews are responsible for Jesus’s death.
All Roads Lead to Rome
When Pope John Paul I died in 1978 after only 34 days in office, Cardinal Wojtyla traveled to Rome to help elect a successor. On the eighth ballot, his peers elected him to lead their church. He was the first non-Italian pope in more than 400 years and the first Slavic pope ever. At age 58, he was also the youngest pope in generations.
In 1981, he was shot twice by a Turk named Mehmet Ali Agca. He recoved within months, and resumed his arduous schedule. He even went to his assailant’s prison and forgave the man who tried to murder him.
Throughout his papacy, John Paul has been a traveling man. In the past quarter of a century, he has made more than 100 trips outside Italy. Plenty of people have traveled to him, too. The Vatican estimates that an astounding 17 million pilgrims have traveled to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to see John Paul over the years. Many of his followers are there with him today–physically or spiritually or both.
Mark Diller
Updated April 1, 2005