It's an excerpt from what is quite possibly my favorite public radio program, "Radio Lab." (the first four and a half or five minutes is the introduction to this episode, and is particularly intriguing. this whole thing is the first 20 minute segment of the hour long show)
Each Radio Lab show deals with another interesting topic, some of which are memory, time, and emergence. The musical language show is one of my favorites. Most of the shows are available to download as a podcast from itunes. For some reason the musical language show is not. If you are so inclined, listen to or download the whole Musical Language show by clicking here and visiting the radio lab web site.
My current favorite author is without a doubt Harold Brodkey. I'm reading "Stories In An Almost Classical Mode," and even though I'm only a little over 100 pages into a 600 page book, I already know that it will join the ranks of my all-time faves.
I don't remember the last time I have fallen completely in love with an author's writing after reading only a page or two of his work. The first story in this collection is called "The Abundant Dreamer," and it is incredibly well-written. I was immediately drawn into this wonderful world Brodkey created.
If you're looking for a new book to read, this is definitely a viable option. And it's a book of stories, so you don't have to read the whole book at once. Here's a little teaser...the first half of the first paragraph:
Marcus Weil has said he is chiefly concerned with virtue and death in the movies he makes, but the truth is that his usual theme is that we are not capable of much virtue because we are afraid of death. He would have us believe that we flee from logic and order because they remind us that we must die, while illogic and disorder soothe us by proving that nothing makes sense, that nothing is certain, not even death. In his movie "La Nouvelle Cleopatre en Avignon," the narrator says, "Do not be cross because our characters do not always have the same faces; they are being true to life and death." The narrator says, "We hope to demonstrate not Euclidean but mortal geometry, the grand trickery of theorems we place in nature and find there for our own delight."
Ok, so Mandy tagged me, so I guess I'm supposed to list 8 random facts/ weird things about myself. So...
1. I frequently become supremely annoyed by slate.com's pop-under ads.
2. I decided what I'm going to do for my Wikipedia entry. It's on my life to-do list to contribute an entry to wikipedia.com. I'm fascinated by the premise of the site... to effectually become the sum of all human knowledge. My entry is going to be about smoothaise, which is a condiment that Greg Grunberg's character Sean invents during season 2 of "Felicity."
3. After a little over a year of being "in style," I'm finally starting to like skinny jeans.
4. I totally cleaned up last night on "Jeopardy." Even though it was the Teen Championship, I still felt really great about myself.
5. Pretty soon I'm going to start learning how to play the violin. A friend of mine is a teacher, and she's going to snag me one from the school's music department. I can't wait!
6. Last weekend a friend introduced me to a place in the city with $3 margaritas. Jackpot!
7. I recently found out the correct phrase is "for all intents and purposes." I've always thought it was "for all intensive purposes."
8. I really do love a good turkey and avocado sandwhich.
So I guess the idea is that I'm now supposed to tag 3 other people. Not sure who really reads this and also has a blog...I'll pick Lindsay, Becca, and Erin.
Tonight I had to work until 10 pm, and so my boss gave me some cash to take a cab home. It was crazy how different the city looks from the inside of car. I've pretty much walked all over Manhattan, of course, so I'm famliar with the streets, stores, layouts, etc.
Still, I was floored by how different everything looked from out the cab window. Driving can totally change your perspective. It was just so beautiful, especially with all the lights at night. It was so peaceful to have the windows down and feel the wind in my hair while I went over the East River and looked at all the city lights.
It usually takes about 20 minutes to get home by subway, and the cab ride took a little over 10. It was 3.94 miles and cost $14. That's not too shabby, so I think I might start treating myself to a nighttime cab ride every couple weeks or so.
A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Gregory Maguire's "Wicked," the novel that birthed the Broadway musical of the same name. I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of issues with which the book dealt, such as death, evil, desire, choices, belief, and intentions. Here are a couple of passages that speak of evil in a thought-provoking way:
"To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her-- is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions."
This is a conversation between several people at a dinner party. It's a tad lengthy, but interesting.
"Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward. There's no absolute value to behavior. First of all--" "Institutional inertia," claimed the Witch. "But whatever is the great attraction of absolute power anyway?" "That's why I say it's merely an affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed, and we all know vanity and greed can produce some pretty astounding results in human affairs, not all of them reprehensible." "It's an absence of good, that's all. The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace." "Evil is an early or primitive sate of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn't progress...". "I think it's a presence, not an absence. Evil's an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It's an other. It's not us." "Evil isn't a thing, it's not a person, it's an attribute like beauty." "It's a power, like wind." "It's an infection." "It's metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation--" "Blame it on the Unnamed God then." "But did the Unnamed God create evil intentionally, or was it just a mistake in creation?" "It's not of air and eternity, evil isn't; it's of earth; it's physical, a disjointedness between our bodies and our souls. Evil is inanely corporeal, humans causing one another pain, no more no less--." "No, you're all wrong, our childhood religion had it right: Evil is moral at its heart--the selection of vice over virtue; you can pretend not to know, you can rationalize, but you know it in your conscience--." "Evil is an act, not an appetite. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal." "Oh no, evil is repressing that appetite. I never repress any appetite." "The real thing about evil isn't any of what you said. You figure out one side of it--the human side, say--and the eternal side goes into the shadow. Or vice versa. It's like the old saw: What does a dragon in its shell look like? Well no one can ever tell, for as soon as you break the shell to see, the dragon is no longer in its shell. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret."
