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.

Flowers Laura gave me

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

I took a few pictures of the flowers that Laura gave me last week. I really enjoyed getting them. ( I then generated a little collage with Picasa, which gave my pictures an unexpected new life!)

I've gotten into fabric! (really?)

Originally uploaded by Raymond Yee.

I thought that it would be really cool to pick up some fabric for my new cubicle -- but the line was too long for my tired brain and feet to wait.

I'm a Malcolm Gladwell fan but not on the scale of some of his devotees. BTW, he is speaking at Cody's Bookstore next Thursday.

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

Readers of my personal blog might be interested in a little essay that I've just posted in my professional blog: Anthony Hecht, Czeslaw Milosz, and Poetry on the Web

I was excited to learn that Andrew Ross, the classical
music critic for The New Yorker Magazine
has a blog:The Rest
Is Noise. I developed a special interest in Ross after using of a quote by
Ross in my essay The
Cosmic Bach?:

"When people talk about Bach, they often sound
like Erich von Stroheim in 'Sunset Boulevard,' as he intones, in
tribute to Norma Desmond, 'She vas de greatest of dem all.' .... One
can end up saying, in a distinctly off-putting way, not only that
Bach...is the greatest but also that everything else is worthless."

Some other references to J. S. Bach in Ross' blog are:

The Rest Is Noise: Escaping the Museum:

                
 Were Baroque listeners uncultured

idiots? Or did they have a healthier attitude toward music’s place in
society? At about the time audiences began treating composers like
gods, it would seem, the truly godlike composers began to disappear.

Alex
Ross: The Rest Is Noise: Abba to Zywny:

                
 When it comes to the central figures

of musical history, the Grove gets the proportions right. Beethoven is
still champion after all these years, with forty-two double-columned
pages of biography and analysis. As in the previous edition,
Beethoven’s works are written up flawlessly by Joseph Kerman, the dean
of American musicologists. J. S. Bach gets thirty-six pages, Schubert
thirty-four, Haydn thirty-three, Handel thirty-one, Mozart
twenty-nine.

I am happily settling into the life of my own family in Toronto but am surprised by how fatigued I am. I slept a very sound 9 hours the last two nights, which is much more than the typical seven hours I get in Berkeley. Yesterday, I felt energetic, but after lunch today, I started to feel really weary. What's going on? Am I coming down with something? I need to remind myself that for many, many years that my visits to Toronto were opportunities to sleep and rest. I am somehow able to give myself permission or space (at some deep subconscious level perhaps) to sleep in.