A Clean Slate
I can hardly believe it's mid-August already!!!
On the technology front, I'm ramped up to 2 gigs of memory with a clean install of Leopard. I just bought iWorks 08 and in a couple weeks I'll get Office 08 for Mac *deeply discounted for students and academic professionals*. I read up on both and it's too close to call for a non-techie like me. iWorks costs a lot less and this version seems to have a bunch of nifty stuff. And with an education discount for both it and Office, I can have it all for under $100.
A clean install meant wiping everything off my hard drive. A "do over". I backed everything up, of course. But I'm diggin' the idea of starting with a clean slate. I'll probably import my fanfic stuff back, but the rest, I don't know. I have a chance to start fresh. I want to take advantage of it.
So, what's new? Well, not much, but there have been a few significant events.
I met Maxine Hong Kingston, and I will never be the same again. A friend at work invited me to a salon where Maxine was the guest. She talked about her writing, her travels, her spirituality and social activism. It reminded me a lot of meeting Viggo for the first time. They are both grounded and know themselves really well. Both are articulate and thoughtful when they speak. I read The Woman Warrior and was blown away. I collected all of her other books too.
Maxine talked about negative capability, an idea the poet John Keats made famous. I was intrigued by the idea and embarked on reading some Keats. One of the poems recognized as representative of his definition of negative capability is La Belle Dame Sans Merci which was a KA 100 prompt. The poem inspired quite a few artists and I found a painting by Sir Frank Dicksee that I fell in love with. It was a particularly lovely way to discover it.
Another name that came up often in relation to Maxine's work is the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I went to the campus library and checked out just about every book of his work and was floored by the richness of his poetry and writing. At one point I was reading The Woman Warrior and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge at the same time, and I had to stop. The writing in both books was dense with meaning and images and ideas and it was exhausting. Reading one at a time was much better.
I've been going to a lot of movies lately. I just saw a great documentary American Teen. Others include Brick Lane, Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, Up the Yangtze, Prince Caspian, Mongol, Ironman, Tarsem Singh's The Fall.
I didn't watch this year's Tour de France. I strongly disagree with ASO's decision to ban Astana from the race inspite of the sponsors doing everything they could to turn everything around and the work the new management and new team put in to bring respectability and dignity back to the team. I have more respect for Team Astana than I have for the ASO. And I saw, too, that Team High Road was not among the competitors. No Levi. No George. No Alberto. No interest.
I'm not watching the Olympics either in protest of China's inhumane treatment of Tibet and her people. The Three Gorges Dam Project will eventually flood close to two thousand cities, towns and villages and displace over a million people. A million people! Most of them haven't seen a penny of compensation or assistance in relocation. In fact, many have been forced to leave their homes and abandon their businesses, literally thrown out into the streets. Not to mention the ecological catastrophe that will come of it. And it's one of several mega-projects proposed throughout the country in some of the most pristine and ecologically unique areas of the world. Shameful.
Okay, stepping off my soapbox.
On the technology front, I'm ramped up to 2 gigs of memory with a clean install of Leopard. I just bought iWorks 08 and in a couple weeks I'll get Office 08 for Mac *deeply discounted for students and academic professionals*. I read up on both and it's too close to call for a non-techie like me. iWorks costs a lot less and this version seems to have a bunch of nifty stuff. And with an education discount for both it and Office, I can have it all for under $100.
A clean install meant wiping everything off my hard drive. A "do over". I backed everything up, of course. But I'm diggin' the idea of starting with a clean slate. I'll probably import my fanfic stuff back, but the rest, I don't know. I have a chance to start fresh. I want to take advantage of it.
So, what's new? Well, not much, but there have been a few significant events.
I met Maxine Hong Kingston, and I will never be the same again. A friend at work invited me to a salon where Maxine was the guest. She talked about her writing, her travels, her spirituality and social activism. It reminded me a lot of meeting Viggo for the first time. They are both grounded and know themselves really well. Both are articulate and thoughtful when they speak. I read The Woman Warrior and was blown away. I collected all of her other books too.
Maxine talked about negative capability, an idea the poet John Keats made famous. I was intrigued by the idea and embarked on reading some Keats. One of the poems recognized as representative of his definition of negative capability is La Belle Dame Sans Merci which was a KA 100 prompt. The poem inspired quite a few artists and I found a painting by Sir Frank Dicksee that I fell in love with. It was a particularly lovely way to discover it.
Another name that came up often in relation to Maxine's work is the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I went to the campus library and checked out just about every book of his work and was floored by the richness of his poetry and writing. At one point I was reading The Woman Warrior and Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge at the same time, and I had to stop. The writing in both books was dense with meaning and images and ideas and it was exhausting. Reading one at a time was much better.
I've been going to a lot of movies lately. I just saw a great documentary American Teen. Others include Brick Lane, Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, Up the Yangtze, Prince Caspian, Mongol, Ironman, Tarsem Singh's The Fall.
I didn't watch this year's Tour de France. I strongly disagree with ASO's decision to ban Astana from the race inspite of the sponsors doing everything they could to turn everything around and the work the new management and new team put in to bring respectability and dignity back to the team. I have more respect for Team Astana than I have for the ASO. And I saw, too, that Team High Road was not among the competitors. No Levi. No George. No Alberto. No interest.
I'm not watching the Olympics either in protest of China's inhumane treatment of Tibet and her people. The Three Gorges Dam Project will eventually flood close to two thousand cities, towns and villages and displace over a million people. A million people! Most of them haven't seen a penny of compensation or assistance in relocation. In fact, many have been forced to leave their homes and abandon their businesses, literally thrown out into the streets. Not to mention the ecological catastrophe that will come of it. And it's one of several mega-projects proposed throughout the country in some of the most pristine and ecologically unique areas of the world. Shameful.
Okay, stepping off my soapbox.