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The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven’t learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.
The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.
The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.
The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I’d ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who’s trusted me
I’d be substantial, presently.
I haven’t read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.
And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.
I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.
I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body’s hunger;
That I have forces, true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.
While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.
Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.
— “April Inventory” by W.D. Snodgrass
I wished I had more to say on this matter. With memories of undergraduate days as a physics major far behind me, I find myself short of opinions. This post had been in draft status for far too long…
More than a year after Lee Smolin’s article “Why No ‘New Einstein’?” (registration required) appeared in the June 2005 issue of Physics Today, the discussion continues on this page. Scroll to the bottom of the page for his response.
I like Weinstein’s analogy between physicists and mountaineers. There are physicists, and then there are physicists. I see this amongst my fellow physics majors in college. There are the technically and mathematically deft ones. Then there are those who will keep the professors on their feet with the deep, and important questions. We also have the gifted experimentalists, and the ones who never run out of random, out-of-the-world ideas. The latter are great to have around in the nights when we’d otherwise only have our problem sets for company. Some of us are a bit of each.
I place myself in the first category, that of the technical climber. That may come as no surprise, for “technical climbing skills” are highly valued today, as Smolin had alluded to in the article. It comes as even less of a surprise if we consider the academic climate I was brought up in, prior to my college days. For middle and high school students here, one’s performance at academic activities with easily quantifiable outcomes, for example, exams, science competitions, and olympiads, is generally regarded to be indicative of one’s competence in the (science) subject. With elements of school rivalry and national pride mixed in, some students grow to approach these events with the spirit of competitive sports. The mountaineer analogy becomes more vivid here. Consequently, it is “technical climber type” who receive the most commendations, awards and peer admiration, and get upheld as models of success. To be fair, there are research opportunities (aka lab-rat stints, hah) at the middle-high school levels, where students get to develop scientific competencies beyond technical/exam abilities. Accomplishments in these programs, however, are not celebrated and understood quite as much by the masses. It is the “technical climbers” who derived enough confidence to further their studies in the discipline they were deemed to be good at. It is thus no accident that science majors from this land tend to be “technical climbers” who do well on exams and calculations, but fall a tad short in the imaginative and creative dimensions.
I’m not calling for a de-emphasis on the promotion of “technical climbing skills”. Rather, I’m in agreement with Smolin’s proposal to promote and recognise more of the valley crosser types and I’d like to see that happen at pre-college levels. But I suspect that the solution would take a shift of beliefs entrenched in our students and educators here, more so than a policy change.
Chasing shadows… I don’t want to see it end in November.
I find the countdown pretty meaningless now. The sense of thrill and anticipation has subsided. I’m not even sure if I look forward to starting work. The “right” thing to do is to make my rounds of farewell around the office, even to those whom I don’t really wish to bid farewell to. And that’s what N did. Kudos to him. He has good reasons to. If there’s a survival skill I haven’t acquired, it’s faking sincerity.
Damn. I feel tempted to leave the country again.
Can’t stop thinking of her. It aches whenever I realize that our paths will diverge in four months’ time. It’s not even about standing a chance. It’s about our positions in life… and realities.
With 30-something days to “freedom”, I figured that between now and then, I’d need to be in the office for just 8 days. It’s time for me to bid farewell and show my appreciation to those who were acquainted with me either through work or otherwise.
It’s been more than a year since I started taking yangqin lessons and I believe I’ve made decent progress. I’m fairly comfortable with how things are going currently, until my teacher got a little pushy with “persuading” me to sign up for the graded exam.
I must admit that I didn’t think too hard about what I wanted out of these lessons, which started out of a gestating desire to learn the instrument since I was in school more than 10 years ago. After all, I wasn’t about to enter a music competition. Neither was I depending on the instrument as my source of livelihood. I just hoped to master the instrument, well enough so I can perform in an ensemble.
Still, that was not good enough. The question remains: “How far do I want to go?”
I’d imagine it can get rather unnerving for my teacher. She sees my enthusiasm, yet I am under no pressure to “get things right”. So what if I consistently fail to execute the crescendos and fermatas? I also happen to have the undesirable habit of backtracking when I stumble on notes. Better to play the wrong notes once and continue with the music than to repeat the same phrase, so says my teacher. Suggestions aplenty, but I don’t really need to act on them.
I have my gripes about graded music exams. I certainly won’t want to spend all my time perfecting the few exam pieces and scales, to the effect of mastering only the handful of exam pieces that everyone else had slogged over, and risk smothering any modicum of passion I still have for the instrument. Elsewhere in the world, I’ve met amateurs who were either self taught or coached without exams, and still play decently. I remain skeptical of the prevailing view that exams must accompany any music instruction to achieve any level of competency and accomplishment on an instrument. I’m also reluctant to lend implicit endorsement to the local music exam culture.
As much as I dislike going the way of exams, I find it inevitable that I’d have to take them, if I were to get any serious on this instrument I’m picking. For the reasons alluded to before, it will help my teacher and myself if we had very specific goals, and if these goals translates to some larger objective. She’s probably asking the same questions I’m asking, along the lines of how much she should teach and how insistent she should be on me “getting it right”. I’d see my preparations as opportunities to overcome major practical shortcomings, and for the first time, master solo pieces “fit for aural consumption”. The Grade x certificate is really not the point.
So that’s the answer to my teacher. Preparing for exams sucks time and life, but it seems like a worthy short term goal to have. Hopefully, I’ll balance it against my other aspirations for the instrument. Balance is key.
I’m feeling tipsy and plugged into music from my mp3 player…
I guess it’s been a year since I attended movie screenings at the local Japanese film festival. I know this is really random, but I can’t help getting reminded of the film every now and then.
Here’s the story. There’s this young married couple who haven’t had sex since they got married, due to the wife’s unwillingness to engage in the act. Otherwise, they appear typical of every Japanese family, on the surface.
The girl, thanks to her exceptional memory, is able to answer questions in quiz books on trivia facts with perfection. The guy would quiz her from books after books of trivia quizzes, and she would get all the answers right. Their conversations are practically in a routine and mundane question-and-answer mode. They seem to enjoy it nevertheless.
Things are different outside the home. The guy had resorted to various seduction tactics to get his wife into the act, to no success, and with lots of frustration. To satisfy his sexual needs, the guy had been visiting brothels. The wife (she looks better than the hookers in the film btw) is aware of this fact, having found discount tickets to the seedy joints which were left in his pockets. But she had nothing to offer him.
If I remember correctly, a relative of the girl came to stay over at the couple’s home (probably her father), and let the guy in on the reason for the girl’s phobic response to sex (Ok, this is the part I couldn’t remember that well). When she was a young girl living on a farm, her mother had slept with other men in neighborhood while her father was out working on the land. She came to develop her phobia out of the association of the violent moans she heard from her mother, betrayal, and family break-up, with sex. This was quite a revelation for the guy. He had a better strategy for “rehabilitation” and the movie ended well… they finally made love all night in his car, parked along a deserted highway. The scenes were very tastefully shot. I reckoned it must be one of the more artful ones I’ve seen on screen. When all was done, the girl was quizzed on trivia the next morning, but she got the answers wrong. She had lost her ability to beat trivia quizzes.
I’ve watched half a dozen Japanese film at the festival last year, but this stuck. In literature and the arts, sex is never just sex. It would be pornography otherwise. The symbolisms are delicious and apt. Something in there resonated with parts of my consciousness, and still do today. Anyway, I’m too light-headed to search for the film’s title and other info, so I’ll leave it at this…
You’re leaving?
