Monthly Archives: January 2005

János Pilinszky

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As I shared my interest in Czeslaw Milosz known among my friends, one of my housemates told me about the great Hungarian poet János Pilinszky. I'll list some references that I will come back to when I'm ready to learn more about Pilinszky:



  • JÁNOS PILINSZKY:


      • As a writer of metaphysical poetry, essay and drama, Pilinszky has deeply influenced postwar Hungarian poetry. His early experiences in the second World War prison camps where he spent several months had only strengthened his personal alienation and existential anguish, and resulted in uniquely intense poems.


  • Partisan Review:


      • In their attempt to confront the horror and name the unnameable, poets such as Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rózewicz, and János Pilinszky committed themselves to a dry, laconic anti-poetry. They displayed a powerful ambivalence toward the very work they were creating, mistrusting it for outlasting the Catastrophe and, in the words of Rózewicz, "for having survived when those who created the poetry were dead."


  • poetrymagazines.org.uk - János Pilinszky:


      • HUNGARIANS CONSIDER János Pilinszky to be one of their best living poets. Sándor Weöres, a towering poet, and nobody’s lipserver, calls him ‘our greatest’.

Rise of Mandarin

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I have mixed feelings about the rise and perhaps inevitable dominance of Mandarin Chinese in the North American context.   My parents and I speak Toisan, a dialect of Chinese closely related to Cantonese.  On the one hand, I would love to learn Mandarin myself.  (A summer of study gave a taste for the beautiful tones of the language spoken by over a billion people.)  On the other hand, I'm afraid that the history of Chinese immigration to the U.S. and Canada will be rewritten to neglect the fundamental early contributions of Toisan and Cantonese speaking Chinese immigrants, the ones who help build the railways and slaved in these countries before it became easier to be Chinese in North America.

BAY AREA / Mandarin speaks to growing class / Immigration, business spur Chinese classes:


    Much as Japanese was the language of aspiring capitalists and cultural adventurers in the 1980s, Mandarin Chinese is attracting more students at all levels and ethnicities, in part because of mounting recognition of the importance of the language, and the growing number of Chinese American students enrolled throughout the Bay Area.

    Mandarin, the national language of China, is one of many dialects. Cantonese, the main dialect of southern China, once predominated in the Bay Area. But immigration from Taiwan and elsewhere in mainland China boosted the number of Mandarin speakers here -- and has now pulled ahead of Cantonese, community observers say.


Chasing Mandarin dreams in S.F. schools:


    Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said she realizes the demand and is incorporating some immersion programs into her "Dream Schools" initiative, which involves adding academic rigor and longer hours to low-performing schools.

    "I'm looking at what are going to be the languages that are widely spoken in the future, in these young people's adult lives," she said. "Mandarin and Spanish -- those two are certainly world languages. ... Those are the ones we want to make sure they have access to."

busy week; slow start to writing

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I flipped my wiki page this morning, and only now, in the late afternoon am I getting some quality time to write. It's rather remarkably how much time and energy meetings take up. I also find it difficult to achieve fluent expression when I cannot settle into my writing mental space.

Believing what can’t be proven

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I thank Catherine for pointing out edge.org's What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?. I see that at least Catherine, Lloyd, Lynn, and Laura have presented some of their own answers or intimations of answers. The question is certainly one of those big and sloppy ones. But it is hardly a novel one, so I am bemused by the interest that edge.org's posing of the question has generated.

The question is a tough one to answer for me because I need to fight the temptation to be comprehensive, definitive, and exacting in whatever I might write today. I also don't want to go for the most basic or obvious (for example, that I believe in the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God or that Jesus was that God Incarnate) but feel the need to make such fundamental statements because they are in such contradistinction to the vast majority of "third culture" scientists who share what I'm guessing is the largely unarticulated (and I might add unproven) belief that there is no God.

I want to move beyond a meta-discussion. I will just throw myself out on a limb and throw out a bunch of things I believe are true but can't prove:

  • there is no odd perfect number

  • the humanities will never be reducible to physics

  • in fact, chemistry will never be reducible to physics

  • our knowledge of physics will always be limited and subject to expansion

  • Bach is the greatest composer ever

  • life is a miracle

  • love even more so