a fond hello

It's Thursday night here. I've pulled my way through yet another Linguistics problem set. As I have been derelict in my posting duties,I should perhaps add some context for that last statement. I've yet to start a ling problem set any earlier than the night prior. The questions are usually pretty beastly; problem sets can easily take ten hours. What makes them especially exhausting is that most of that time is spent on the one dastardly hard question. Hours can easily be spent on just one element. Take last night for example. The better part of the problem set was relatively straightforward, not easy, but manageable. However the last question (about some Peruvian language) involved (transitive) verbs that agreed both with the subject and the object, but not all the time. I still not entirely satisfied with the rules that I formulate, but alas.

It was very nice to be back in Vancouver last week. Sad to see my Mom go and the house exit the family (almost), but such is life. I really have to get back to work as my week isn't quite done. I've got a short paper to write for tomorrow and some Greek studying to do. I'm going to post a piece of writing that was writen as a blog entry on route to Vancouver. It meanders a bit, but that's sort of what travel does to my state of mind.

I miss you all,

Love Evan

Tuesday, Oct. 21.

It’s a few minutes shy of 8:40, my train for Vancouver should be leaving momentarily. My brain is still waking itself, some breakfast might help , but that won’t be an option until Seattle by which time it will more accurately be called lunch. I didn’t sleep much last night. However I did manage to watch an excellent Black Adder sketch (the one about being on the front, in the trenches), and most of The Long Hot Summer. Sleep overtook me a little more than half-way through the latter, I’ll have to watch it again with Kitty when I return to Portland.
I’m still sort of amazed that I made it through the last couple of weeks. I mean that both in a physical and mental sense. I can’t imagine that life will ever again require that I work as hard as it does while I’m in college. I’ve got one crazy, albeit very interesting and engaging, french prof who simply assigns an inordinate amount of work most every week. The last two weeks were no exception; in addition to the usual workload, we also had a seven page paper to write. Were it to be written in english that might not be so bad. Alas, I am a keener and choose to write mine in french despite that I was not required to do so (only French majors are required to, I am as of yet undeclared and very well may not be a french major). About ten days before the paper due date I stopped by my prof’s office to discuss my ideas. The exchange was really more me telling him my one vague idea about which I wanted to write and then him responding by elaborating on my topic, and then reccomending four other books I should look at as he thought they related to my expressed area of interest. The topic, really a rather interesting one I think, was a study of the use of repetition in Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. The book, about the length of a novella, is really more of a long lyric poem than a straighforward narrative based story. I highly recommend it if any one is interested. The poem is filled with surrealist metaphors that really bring to life the personal and cultural tension about which Césaire was writing. Getting back to my essay, my prof recommended I read the following:
An essay called Le Ritournelle from Milles Plateaux by Deleuze and Guattari
Différence et Repétition by Deleuze
An essay by Nietszche called On the Use and Abuse of History from his Untimely Meditations (this title has also been translated as, Unmodern Meditations, and a few other things as well)
Some parts of Sartre’s Situations (I don’t know if this is the name of the whole series, or just of volume two, but I read parts of volume two of an eleven volume series, the volume itself is entitled Situations)
I certainly didn’t read all of that, but I did read more than I perhaps should have. I say that because I spent over one week reading secondary sources (the above books) and then one day writing the paper. I’m not really sure how it turned out, I think fairly well, but I think I made a couple logical leaps during my argument.
We’re now leaving Vancouver Washington. The sun is fairly high on the horizon behind me and is streaming in over my left should creating an annoying glare on my screen. Despite being five minutes past nine, it still feels like early morning. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it has something to do with travelling. Perhaps in displacing myself physically I create some sort of displacement in my temporal experience. Anyways. My itunes player has now made it through, What Does Your Soul Look Like (parts 1 and 2), and Midnight in a Perferct World. Going back to my earlier thought, I think the music may have something to do with my extended sense of the early-morning-feeling (hyphens are your friends). I intentionally began the playlist with those tracks because I wanted to prolong and intensify my pensive and somewhat melancholy mood. For me this type of mood seems best suited to late-night or early-morning. Something about being exterior to the action of the day allows for greater dedication to my thought process.
Choices, choices. I make them every day. Sometimes I think about them too much, other times not enough. There seems to always be several levels of analysis of a given situation on which a choice can be based. Take for example my fast approaching decision concerning the movie Legally Blond, to watch or not to watch? Do I want to watch the movie. Why do I want. Am I interested in watching the movie, what is it to be interested? If I want to watch the movie but am I not interested (in an intellectual sense) in watching the movie, why then do I want? The answer seems rather obvious, I’d rather not be faced the painful reality of my own mind. I want to, as often as possible, and as easily as possible, escape the seemingly mudane, painful, aspects of my own exeperience. I’m going to go watch the movie.
I can at least take comfort in the fact that my own mind is not as vapid and hollow as that movie. I hardly made it through ten minutes. Actually I’m sort of ashamed, had the main character not been so easy on the eyes, I’m quite sure I wouldn’t have made it through five minutes.
It’s time to take a break and do some real work.

I’m now on the Trailways bus heading north along I-5 to Vancouver. For any of you who have ever driven this highway, you may know of the existence of the express route; one embarks onto the express route by way of an exit off of I-5 somewhere in the heart of downtown Seattle. The express route which I am now on was a later addition to the Seattle area I-5, a great behemoth that in its infancy seemed almost monstrous in its size and capacity, and now, but forty years later, seems monstrous in its congestion and chaos. The addition of the express-way was an atempt to bring order, through the process of modernization, to the chaos beget by modernism. Like the invention of the traffic light in 1905, the express-way brings a temporary and mostly symbolic reprieve from the chaos, momentarily providing a cocoon in which the dualism of modernism appears to cease existence. As we hurtle along this stretch of road, this modern symbol of our society’s great progress, I am struck by its linear progression, by how it seems to negate, or at the very least work against that other element of modernism, the clash of abstract forces. It seems to me that modernization has overtaken modernism and so brought about the latter’s death; or has it? Let’s take a step back. In an essay written in 1855 entitled On the Modern Idea of Progress as Applied to the Fine Arts, Baudelaire wrote the following:

There is yet another and very fashionable error which I am anxious to avoid like the very devil. I refer to the idea of “progress.” This obscure beacon, invention of present-day philosophizing, licensed without guarantee of Nature or God – this modern lantern throws a stream of chaos on all objects of knowledge; liberty melts away, punishment [chatiment] dissapears. Anyone who wants to see history clearly must first of all pur out this treacherous light. This grotesque idea, which has flowered on the soil of modern fatuity, has discharged each man from his duty, had delivered the soul from responsibility, has released the will from all the bonds imposed on it by the love of beauty… Such an infatuation is a symptom of an already too visible decadence. (translation quoted from Baudelaire: Modernism in the Streets from All that is Solid Melts into Air)


“Modern life has a distinctive and authentic beauty, which, however, is inseperable from its misery and anxiety.” -Baudelaire

I leave aside the question of whether, by continually refining humanity in proportion to the new enjoyments it offers, indefinite progress might not be its most cruel and ingenious torture; whether, proceeding as it does by a negation of itself, it would not turn out to be a perpetually renewed form of suicide, and whether, shut up in the fiery circle of divine logic, it would not be like the scorpion that stings itself with its own tail – progress, that eternal desideratum that is its own eternal despair!
-Baudelaire

It’s good to be home. The bus is slowly making its way up Knight st., edging along through the evening traffic. There is something comforting in the thought that, at this very moment, reccurs in my head, I am in Canada, I am home. Is it political, is it geogprahical, is it some unconscious abstract sense of place and birth? It seems a disparate synthesis of all of these and more, of parts brought together, fused together, but not thoroughly understood together.

The mountains jut up in front of me, a barrier of sorts between here and there. I am here, that is what seems important at this moment. As the evening light softens my perception of familiar buildings, I wonder what has changed since last I visited here. What evolution, or progression, has time brought, or wrought. How have I evolved? What am I looking for in this native land, in this abstract coalescence of my place?
The bus is stopped at Clark and 12th, the cars heading west catch my eye. I wonder where they are headed, what lies at the end of their trip. I’ll probably drive that road tomorrow, perhaps to have coffee with old friends, or to visit the beach of my childhood memories. Walk along the water and look out in the chasm of incomprehension that is the ocean. Held at bay by only the mountains and this city. I somehow feel more at ease standing before the ocean, as though this chaos without concept is more easily understood; it somehow allays the misery of my soul wrought by the abstract but all too real chaos of my modern world.

----

P.S. I've refrained from rereading this before posting as I was afraid it might not make it up (perhaps that would have been a good thing).

a brief hello

This entry is but a short respite from my competing pastimes of school-work and sleep. I've done a good job of letting my consciousness meander between the two over the last hour or so. A few lines of reading followed by a few moments of unconscious semi-sleeping then abruptly interrupted by the realization that I am no longer reading.
Back to work. There will be a much longer post appearring sometime in the next few days. Till then, I hope all of you are well.

In Search of Things Lost

What have I lost? It's a good question, and one that perennially seems to pop its little head. Some might be tempted to say, "Evan, you've lost your mind", and I might chuckle and smile a little, but then I'd be left right where I started.

I'm reminded of a little Buddhist saying, "If you lose your mind, come back." It's really rather simple, and I'd do well to heed its advice more often.

I find myself here about to enter my fourth week of school. It's rather surprising really, the speed with which the days fly bay when your under the golden yoke of school never ceases to amaze me. That was a long one. I'm reminded of some francophone literature I've been reading lately, "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal," by Aime Cesaire and, "La Lezarde," by Edouard Glissant. Glissant once said (in a critical paper entitled Discours Antillais) that meaning in francophone literature (or at least that from Antillais) is not supposed to be straightforward, at least not necessarily. Perhaps I should let him make his point because he states it much better:
C'est un des avatars de la pens�e occidentale que de pr�tendre qu'une oeuvre doive toujours se donner sans hiatus, et je connais nombre de contes de nos pays dont la puissance d'impact sur leur auditoire ne tient pas � la clart� de leurs sens. -p.345, Discours Antillais

Rough translation: One of the mistakes of western thought is the claim that a work (piece of writing, piece of music, etc.) must without discrepancy unfold its meaning. I know a number of stories from our countries whose strength of impact on their audience does not pertain to their clarity of meaning.

The paragraph from which that sentence came has made understanding francophone literature much easier for me. The reading came out of my francophone literature course. Thus far I've found the classes and the readings to be very interesting, though the latter are sometimes a bit difficult. It's a small class (about 10) which can make for very engaging discussion, though when the readings are hard, the discussion is often stilted. Our syllabus includes readings (creative works and theroretical/critical) from the Antilles, Algeria, Djibouti, and Quebec. With the exception of Djibouti, we're reading two authors from each country.

I'm having even more fun in my Baudelaire class. This isn't necessarily because the readings are more interesting, but because they're easier. I had a particularly difficult time reading the first work in my aforementioned francophone lit class and so the class became, as a whole, a bit frustrating. Baudelaire is a much easier read, at least when compared to Aime Cesaire, who has some surrealist tendencies. Like the francophone lit class, Baudelaire class is a mixture of primary (his writing) and secondary readings. The secondary readings include stuff by Walter Benjamin, Barbara Johnson, and Jean-Paul Sartre. From the man himself we are reading, "Les Fleurs du mal" (how could one not), Les Paradis artificiels, other poems, and a selection of his critical/theoretical writings. A very interesting course. I can imagine few greater academic treats than a semester devoted to Baudelaire. Perhaps one devoted to Iris Murdoch. In fact, there are many possibilities, really the beautiful aspect is the depth with which I get to delve into one author. yahooo

Linguistics get slotted in here because, well, it would be a shame to finish with my most boring course, but it would also be a shame to start with whining and bitching. Phonetics and Phonology...Bouuu hearnnss (I'm sure I didn't properly phoneticize that). Hopefully later sections will be minterestingsing. Actually, I'm really looking forward to syntax.

And last, but certainly not least, my introduction to Greek. This course progresses fast. We have class every day for an hour and 1-2hrs (sometimes even more) of homework per night. I'll certainly have a good foundation in Greek by the end of the year (heck, probably by the end of the semester), but as it is now, my vocabulary extends only just past the realm of farming.

Next month a may enroll in a weekly Buddhist studies course at the local shambhala Buddhist center. Other than that, I think this covers the academic side of things here as they are.

Other stuff to follow when I finish my homework. What I am saying, homework is never finished. It is more accurate to say that other stuff will follow when my homework no longer seems like a great big looming scythe dangling precipitously (I can't be bothere'd to look up my spelling) over my neck.

Ciao Ciao

Fluid nations?

Have any of you ever heard the term fluid nation bantied about? I was doing a little bit news catch up earlier this afternoon. After surfing through some daily news sites I went to the New Yorker site and came upon a silly article about the emerging discipline centered around the study of "fluid-nations", a term that, to my mind, seems relatively synonymous with "cultural group". That's really not a very good defnition; however, it will perhaps work as a definition if "cultural" is understood to mean shared experiences/beliefs. The author seems to agree (veiled sarcasm at the end) that the whole discipline is a bunch of huey, but nonetheless I am still curious.

Here's the web link if anyone's interested:document.write(myObject.popReferrer);http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/?030922sh_shouts

some discussion

In the interest of journailistic integrity, I don't believe that I should let the figures speak for themselves. What follows is a selection of quotes (many paraphrased) culled from the "dicussion" section of the previously cited article:

Certainly, administration is an integral element of good healthcare. The leaps and bounds in patient outcomes that society (western, at least) has witnessed over the past century are due mostly to the implementation of principles known since the turn of the twentieth century (not, as touted by industry, technological advances). Implementation may not be synonomous with administration, but the two are very much related.

The question is two part, how much administration is optimal, and what form should it take. Does the high administrative spending in the United States relative to that in Canada (or that in the US 30 years ago) improve care? No studies have directly addressed these questions, however analyses of investor owned HMOs and hospitals have found that for-profit facilities have neither higher-quality care nor lower costs than not-for-profit facilities.

There is certainly more to be said, but I'm about to go eat some Raisin' Cane's chicken, hands down the best fast food chicken on god's green earth. Actually, some of the best chicken you'll ever eat. Add some sweet tea, texas toast, crinkle cut fries, and slaw, and you've got yourself one heart satisfying meal.

Some more healthcare facts

(From an article in The New England Journal of Medecine, August 21st 2003
Authors: Steffie Woolhander, M.D., M.P.H., Terry Campbell, M.H.A. and David
Himmelstein, M.D.)

Costs of Healthcare Administration in the US and Candada:

Numbers are Spending per capita in USD

Canadian figure follows the US in parentheses


Insurance Overhead 259 (47)

Employers' cost to manage
health benefits 57 (8)

Hospital Administration 315 (103)

Nursing home Administration 62 (29)

Administrative costs of practitioners 324 (107)

Home care administration 42 (13)

Total 1,059 (307)

A Question

I'm planning on purchasing a domain (name) and getting some hosting. Anyone have any suggestions on company?