funnyat3am

Book TV rocks

2005-07-25T05:36:47Z

Right now I'm watching Book TV on C-SPAN2, where authors come on to talk about their books.

I just saw part of Jack Cashill's segment. From what I could gather, his book Hoodwinked debunks conventional wisdom, the "sacred cows" of the intellectual community. For example: there were apparently problems w/Margaret Sanger (birth control advocate), Margaret Mead (anthropologist) and Mumia abdul Jamal (sp?). The latter killed a police officer in an open and shut case, but the intellectual community turned him into a hero, and succeeded in getting him off death row. Gotta read that book sometime.

Now, Jon Lee Anderson is reading excerpts from his book The Fall of Baghdad.

My first poem

2005-07-22T08:32:35Z

I’ve decided to start writing poetry. Here’s my first poem, (or “poem,” if you’re a self-important asshole who likes to “belittle” other people’s “creations” by using “quotation marks”), in, oh, 4 years:

Stream of consciousness is what I do best.
Words
More words
Jump.

But I need somewhere to land.
A trail,
A
series
of
boxes
to
hopscotch
in.

I like to play
visual games
with my poetry.

Does it distract me from the task at hand?
Crafting a poem,
Sentence by sentence,
Word
By
Word
Is painstaking. It calls for perfection.

But a piece of wood, a block of marble, cannot be redone.
Words can be erased.

I’m flyingthroughthispoem.
Guilt, the word floats to the top of my mind.
But I don’t really feel it.
I feel joy.
Freedom.
Life.

Part of it is the techno in the background,
Trumpets playing multicolored flags, a hero’s welcome home.
How poetic!

I think this is the beginning of a beautiful thing.

N.B. I’m not looking for comments. I don’t particularly know why I posted this online if I’m not looking for comments. Go figure.

That was a lot of fun. I’d say I’m giddy with excitement, but I’m not, really, I’m just having a good time. Part of it, of course, is the enthusiasm that comes with staying up late for no reason listening to fun music.

Anyway, I’m taking a free online course, “Writing Poetry With Writer’s Digest Books,” at Barnes and Noble University. They expect you’ll buy the book from B&N Online, but I just got it from the library. Me: 1. B&N: 0. I'm also taking a Speed Reading course, but that was getting kinda boring. For that, I did buy the book. So I guess the score is tied.

I’ve always kinda dreamed of writing things, but I haven’t written a poem since 8th grade, and haven’t written fiction for much longer. The main reason is that I feel compelled to write excellent, awesome work of mind-blowing quality, and I know it’s impossible to pull that out of a hat. My perfectionism gets in the way of actually achieving anything. I fear this tendency will be amplified when I am surrounded by exceptionally talented writers at Yale.

But this summer I resolved to do some non-philosophical-reflection writing, and so I am.

funnyat3am @ 2005-07-08T02:11:00

2005-07-08T09:12:52Z

Musings on the London bombing

I figured I'd write something. It probably won't be well-written enough to befit such a tragedy (if you think such a tragedy needs befitting), but whatever.

My dad was in London today on a business trip. Luckily, he was wholly unharmed (though somewhat inconvenienced by the lack of public transportation).

It seems most Londoners are viewing the bombings as just that - an inconvenience, not a life-altering event.

David Plotz reported in Slate: "the feeling of the city—at least of those who escaped tragedy—seemed muted, inconvenienced rather than heartbroken. Four years ago, every one of us who lived in Washington and New York had our lives changed by 9/11. We discovered we had a new enemy; we started a new war; we had the face of our cities changed forever. But Londoners already knew who their enemy was. Their cops and soldiers were already fighting this war. And their city looks exactly the same today as it did yesterday. London was not surprised today; it was put out."

Contrasting the reaction to the London bombings with 9/11 sent a chill through my body. I remember my reaction on 9/11: my mom told me something as I was walking out the door to catch a ride to school. I arrived at school and my friends and I talked excitedly about what we had heard. Then I realized: safety was no longer a given. We could no longer take safety for granted. That was a pretty earth-shaking epiphany. My reaction to the London bombings was somewhat similar: "yet another big, safe city bombed by terrorists? It's only a matter of time before we'll have random suicide bombings in the U.S." Thank god we don't.

Life will go on, of course. And apparently, that's the way to fight terrorism. Tim Naftali pointed out , "Perhaps it bears repeating that terrorists seek to alter the way in which we lead our lives, to close open societies, and to turn liberals into authoritarians."

The mindset of "if we change the way we're living, the terrorists have won" may sound kinda hokey, but I guess it's really true.

Indeed, I was watching ABC today, and they brought on an Irish ex-terrorist as one of their experts. The one thing terrorism cannot deal with, he said, is futility. Terrorism can only survive in an atmosphere hospitable to terrorism; that is, an atmosphere in which people overreact in the name of security (he cited the PATRIOT Act as an example of overreaction).

This entry is kinda running out of steam, so I'll end it here. Slate has a bunch of insightful articles on the London bombings, if you're interested. (I haven't read all of them yet, so don't blame me if they suck. But their articles are generally awesome.) My writing skills have severely atrophied in the last few weeks, so I'll probably try to post more often. My last several entries have been very, perhaps overly intellectual. I thought that no one would really want to read mundane details about my life, but I'm meeting a buncha new people these days ('09 Yalies, mainly), and I realized that blogs are a good way to get to know people better. So look forward to less serious entries ahead.

[The above was copy-and-pasted wholesale from my Xanga. I might start doing that for all my entries; but probably not. Perhaps I'll move to livejournal entirely. Till then, go to www.xanga.com/shak2pac. The newer entries are way intellectual; scroll down if you want less highbrow stuff.]