If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans - Woody AllenIt all started well. My review began in mid-June. I found inspiration in a couple of my favorite bloggers who were in the same boat and found time to write about their experiences. July came and went. So did August. To my astonishment, my progress was excruciatingly slow. Spending the dog days of Summer studying for the MCAT would have been delightful if it had not been very time-consuming, especially to a non-traditional pre-med. I have been out of school in a very long time and I have forgotten how to study and manage time. I was mostly surprised to find out that I was only able to complete half of the questions in the allocated time. That would not have been surprising if it had just been for the verbal reasoning section. But that was the case for the physical and biological sections as well. After a long analysis, I could not convince myself that I was fully prepared and I did what I dreaded to do the most. I postponed.
Indeed it is better to postpone, lest either we complete too little by hurrying, or wander too long in completing it - TertullianI am already looking forward to 2012 hoping it will be a fruitful year!
1. One of a nomadic Caucasoid people originally migrating from the border region between Iran and India to Europe in the 14th or 15th century and now living principally in Europe and the United States. 2. Romany (sense 2). 3. gypsy. One that resembles a Gypsy in appearance or behavior [Shortening and alteration of Egyptian.]
"There is no such thing as a worthless conversation provided you know what to listen for. And questions are the breath of life for a conversation" - James Nathan Miller
This past summer, I met my maternal granduncle L for the very first time. He had come to attend my brother's wedding from Italy, where he has lived almost all his life. He is a fairly young, around forty-something year old, professor of history at a major university. He had married his high school sweetheart, an Italian physician, had a son and then gotten a divorce. Most of the older ladies, smitten by his good looks, outgoing personality, and charming wit, were ready to play matchmakers and find him his soul mate. He was flattered and amused by the attention. What I found most captivating was the cultural difference or, should I say, cultural illusion. A great storyteller that he is, he shared with us many anecdotes, one of them being this. One day in the early 1990's, he goes to a conference where a colleague, who specializes in African history, is presenting his research findings on Alexander Pushkin's East African ancestry and his future plans for the project. The presenter's position is that Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was originally from a border town between Ethiopia and Eritrea and that further research studies need to be conducted. A third colleague and L start to question whether Pushkin should even be a topic in African history. He is Russian and his contributions are to Russian literature. One who is specializing in African history should be focusing on Africa. Why create the illusion of a history? There are many topics within the African continent that need to be explored...The Pushkin expert overhears their remarks, fumes over their discouraging comments and protests to deaf ears...
Long after the conversation ended, I wondered whether my view would have been the same had I not been conditioned by the American view of race and politics. One of the issues that has disappointed, baffled and confronted me in the land of the free is how the free was, dare I say, mentally imprisoned by race. Over the last two decades or so, it has greatly improved. I only imagine it to improve in the future. But still... I sometimes resent the issue and the conditioning.
A recent controversy surrounding a new movie about Alexandre Dumas (père), L’ Autre Dumas, reminded me of L’s Pushkin story. The controversy centered around the fact that a black actor not having the role of Dumas, a person of color, but instead Gérard Depardieu being cast for it. The general American view is probably an emphatic No. It does not matter that Dumas is three-quarter French; he should be portrayed by a black actor and not by Depardieu with a tanned face and curly hair. I wonder what the general French view is.
"The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten-thousand truths.” Alexander Pushkin
I have yet to see the movie and I am already disappointed… not because Depardieu is playing Dumas but rather at the annoying storyline, i.e. Dumas allegedly had a shy collaborator, Auguste Maquet, who deserves much of the credit for the plots and drafts of Dumas’ most famous works. If this is not annoying to a Dumas fan, I do not know what is. I would have liked the illusion that exalted me to remain intact. Oh… how fascinated I was when I first read Dumas’ literary works as a child… and …when I found out his paternal ancestry as a new immigrant... knowing little then how many times I would have to examine and reexamine my illusions.
Photo 1: Two of Arts - 2000 Visual Mashups by qthomasbower
Photo 2: Alexander Pushkin in Negro History (Jet Magazine, May 28, 1953) by vieilles annonces
Photo 3: Alexandre Dumas in Negro History (Jet Magazine, July 24, 1952) by vieilles annonces
"My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me." Jim Valvano
The Center for Environmental Health went to 100 of the nation's top retailers--- including Target, Macy's, Wal-Mart and Kohl's -- and bought purses. The group had the bags tested for lead at an independent lab. Two separate tests were conducted. Some bags were wiped to see how much, if any, lead would simply rub off the material. The bags also were tested for the total lead content of the products. The tests came back showing disturbingly high levels of lead...
... and you don't know what to do ...
... and you try to remind yourself it could have been worse ...
My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up at bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him.Holden on dancing with smart girls
I’m not kidding, some of these stupid girls can really knock you out on a dance floor. You take really smart girl, and half the time she’s trying to lead you around the dance floor, or else she’s such a lousy dancer, the best thing to do is stay at the table and just get drunk with her.Holden on roommates with suitcases
At first he only used to be kidding when he called my stuff bourgeois, and I didn't give a damn — it was sort of funny, in fact. Then, after a while, you could tell he wasn't kidding any more. The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs — if yours are really good ones and theirs aren't. You think if they're intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don't give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do.Holden on people who cry watching sad movies
The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.Holden on good books
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.Well, I thought talking to J.D. Salinger on the phone would have been a pleasure. I thought Chicago Tribune reviewer Paul Engle put it well when he said that the story was "emotional without being sentimental, dramatic without being melodramatic, and honest without simply being obscene" and that it was “engaging and believable . . . full of right observations and sharp insight, and a wonderful sort of grasp of how a boy can create his own world of fantasy and live forms."
Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Noël!
¡Feliz Navidad!
Watching thousands people on Oprah participating on the flash mob dance had the same magical effect. One of the participants described the experience as “Joy rising.” For a period of time, it seemed that music joined us together—devoted fans, performers, and spectators alike; it felt like it transported us together into another space, made us appreciate its beauty and gave us a different perspective on life, a slightly richer perspective. When the history-making dance or musical trance ended, it seemed like we were a bit fuller, better...When I was in college, ... I took a course in anthropology where I studied and saw films of the bushmen of the Kalahari desert. And so they live now mainly in Botswana and Namibia.
And there was a blind musician, and the film that I saw was called "Bitter Melons." And a blind musician that played and sang, and played on an instrument that I'd ever seen before, but it was so magical that I was 19 and one of the things that you do when you're 19 is you think "What am I going to do with my life? What are the 10 things I want to do?"
That was one of the things I wanted to do. And for some reason -- and I feel very blessed because of that -- I had the opportunity to go there 15 years later and did a documentary on the trance dance and music practices in 12 villages in Namibia. And at the end of the trip, they did a trance dance. And I asked --where you basically go into, well, a trance, and people who go into trance after hours of singing and dancing, there's a laying on of hands.
And I saw something that was so -- it was about religion, it was about medicine, it was about society. Everybody participated, and anybody who came from neighboring villages who needed it also were helped. And the next day, I interviewed the ladies that were clapping the hands, sitting down, and chanting. I said, "Why do you do that?"
And their reply is the best answer for culture I've ever heard "Because it gives us meaning." And that is something -- and so for the bushmen, that was their most complex ritual. It was as complex, as meaningful, as transcendent as Beethoven or Bruckner or Stravinsky, because this is what -- they gave all of what they had for the meaning that they get back. And that's what motivated me ever since.
