Intense shadows on Sproul Plaza

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

I was taken the by the very sharp and dramatic shadows at around 2pm yesterday.

The Nobel Laureates are gone!

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

There used to be banners of Nobel Laureates around campus. No more....

I answered Lloyd's question ("How much of yourself do you think you have revealed in your weblog...?") on my professional blog, but my post might be of interest to my readers here.

You might get a chuckle out of Jib Jab's Second Term on Yahoo!, though the first big Jib Jab hit This Land was funnier in my opinion.

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > From the Desk of David Pogue: For TiVo, It’s Not Over Yet: I have always wondered what made TiVo interesting.

Generating my own collages prompted me to notice The New York Times > Arts > Art & Design > Making Art From Bits and Pieces:

In rescuing and dignifying scraps of local life - a matchbook from a bar, someone's tossed-off photo-booth portrait - Mr. Evans can be thought of as a historical preservationist, operating on an unusually intimate scale. Yet his own moods seem reflected in how he handles the materials. In one day's collage, ticket stubs and candy wrappers explode like fireworks against an ebulliently bright background. In another, juxtaposed images of Hitler and Oliver North make a grim political statement.

The sky near 2195 Hearst (I)

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

The other day, while waiting for CV to arrive, I looked up in the sky and saw this dramatic image.

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:

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  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.


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  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."


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  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’.

I now know who LeRoy Neiman is.

More on Milosz: Books | In gratitude for all the gifts by Seamus Heaney.

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."

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.