The Coldest Winter
A few years back, a sigh of relief escaped me when I learned that Vincci was to quit her job and go study aboard. After all, people with exceptional qualities and experience could only be chained to a single place and a single lifestyle for so long.
That’s why her latest journal “the coldest winter” was such a blast to read. Every page was overflowing with her optimism, vivid energy and crazy spirit. The meticulous details she gives on her encounters (eg. breaking into the foundry) and her canning ability to capture the essence of the moment with words and emotions is as ingenious as it is entertaining. Furthermore, seeing an old friend coming to enjoy life at it’s fullest again is one of the most rewarding things ever.
It’s good to have you back, Gi.
《卓韻芝奇遇記──最冷的冬天》
ISBN： 978-988-8081-69-1
出版社：明窗出版社
Mind over Matter – The Lost Symbol
It’s easy to ridicule The Lost Symbol, for the abundance of all Dan Brown clichés littered around its four hundred pages. Indeed, after a few novels and two major block buster movies in the space of a few years, not to mention seven seasons of 24, the formula has long been beaten and tired.
Apparently that didn’t deter Brown from ripping the spine from his previous works and reconstructing a new story around it. From the photocopied plot line to the latest offerings from Brown’s (limited) stereotype character moulds, little was left to the imagination. Hell, it was as if the author was deterring us from thinking too much about the characters themselves.
Having said that, being an International Best Seller, there is so much more in store than a second rate cat-chases-mouse thriller. Some of these were truly fascinating and deserve a bit of casual study. This is what this post is about.
Chamber of Reflections
A reminder of the caves where primitive men lived. A symbol of regression, By meditating on the inevitability of death, a Mason gains a valuable perspective on the fleeting nature of life. When emerged from the chamber, a person shall be as if born like a new man.
Symbolisms:
The Skull - caput mortuum, the epitome of decline and decay. Man’s final transformation through decay; it’s a reminder that we all shed our mortal flesh one day.
Bread and Water - symbols of simplicity, a pointer to how one should conduct his life. The elements necessary to life, but even though food and the material body are indispensable, they remind the candidate that the physical aspect should not be the main objective in one’s existence.
Sulphur is symbolical of the spirit, Salt is a symbol for wisdom. Alchemical catalysts that facilitate transformation.
Hourglass - a reminder of mortality. The transformational power of time.
V.I.T.R.I.O.L.(U.M.) - one must search within oneself, as the truth is hidden there, and this truth is the real solution to our problems.
Candle – formative primordial fire and the awakening of man from his ignorant slumber: transformation through illumination.
Scythe – transformative nourishment of nature: the reaping of nature’s gifts.
Mirror – speculum, or to scrutinize…which is what one does in the Chamber of Reflections.
References:
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/texts/gmd1999/pondering.html
Noetic Science
Foundation of Noetics – “human thought could and did influence the world around us because of a relationship with the world, and that non-rational thought could relate to reason”.
Institute of Noetic Sciences – “founded in 1975 by former astronaut Edgar Mitchell after returning from space on an Apollo 14 mission. The core principle belief of the institute is there is no true or solid universe – rather everything is influenced by our perceptions.”
The idea distills into the general concept of mind over matter – that we have the ability to influence ourselves on a biological level, as well as influence others using non-verbal communication.
References:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2384174/noetic_science_and_the_true_power_of_pg3.html?cat=4
Thermal Trails
“Thermal-imaging equipment had become so sensitive to heat differentials that it could detect not only a person’s location . . . but their previous locations.” – so it said in the book. Very science fiction like indeed.
I haven’t been able to find a credible source to substantiate the power of such an imaginary device, until coming across this, which stated some $15,000 cam that is handy for tracking:
When someone stole a front-end loader in Cheney, Kentucky, last year, a quick-thinking sergeant trained the TacSight on the roadway. “I saw their tracks,” the officer said, “as if God himself had painted arrows on the roadway.” Amen.
And these were just a tiny fraction of the novel concepts and ideas introduced in The Lost Symbol. It was said the experience of reading a good novel is akin to crossing a door to another world, but in this case, the doors being opened were within hidden in the world we thought we knew. Fascinating.
“Always on the side of the egg”
It sure was Murakami month alright. With the launch of 1Q84, the media industry spun into a frenzy, with all sorts of commentaries, blog posts, magazine articles and commercial products (CDs and such) joining the cash-in. Very often though, the coverage is disappointing and unoriginal, with the emphasis being placed on irrelevant trivia like 60s fashion, sales figures, and unforgivably – instructions on how to cook pasta in ways depicted in the novels. Now, with people in the media (who should be more concerned with the contexts in publishing than anyone else) provoking this trend, it is to little wonder why so few people actually care about actually reading the novels anymore.
Which makes it ever so much surprising to find a discussion on the historical references in the novel and their immense impact it might have on the Japanese literary cycle or the society as a whole published in the local papers. Since I’m going to wait till next July for the English version, I wouldn’t know whether the writer was simply being hyper sensitive to any historical references, or if he really was knowledgeable to identify trails purposefully left behind by the author himself. Hell, I know very well that I wouldn’t be able to judge even if I had read it myself. Spoilt by movies and tv dramas, it’s increasingly difficult for me to get pass the surface on the first read. I would dwell on the characters and dialogues and fall into traps of playing the I-know-what-would-happen-next game. It’s the same with listening to music as well…talk about frustration.
Anyway, the article is titled “村上春樹令人想起奧平剛士 ——《1Q84》裏的一段隱性歷史“, and gives an account on the background of the Japanese Red Army and student protests in the 60s, and hints on how Murakami might have dug up these events in order to send the troubled world a message – especially those in the middle east and in the far east.
Having read the speech given by the author in Jerusalem earlier this year, I became a lot more convinced with that idea. Here’s the speech is in full, taken from haaretz.com:
Always on the side of the egg – Last update - 22:56 17/02/2009
I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.
Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?
My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies – which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true – the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.
Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.
So let me tell you the truth. A fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came.
The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The UN reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens – children and old people.
Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.
Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me – and especially if they are warning me – “don’t go there,” “don’t do that,” I tend to want to “go there” and “do that.” It’s in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.
This is not to say that I am here to deliver a political message. To make judgments about right and wrong is one of the novelist’s most important duties, of course.
It is left to each writer, however, to decide upon the form in which he or she will convey those judgments to others. I myself prefer to transform them into stories – stories that tend toward the surreal. Which is why I do not intend to stand before you today delivering a direct political message.
Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”
Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.
This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficiently, systematically.
I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories – stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.
My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the war.
He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.
My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.
I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong – and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.
Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.
That is all I have to say to you.
I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here today.
horribly familiar: The Cell, by Stephen King
It had been more than a decade since a Stephen King novel landed in my hands, yet the experience of reading “IT” has been so vivid and profound that to this very day, it remains as my personal benchmark for judging good fiction and compelling story writing, not to mention the tongue twister perpetually imprinted in my head that is “he-thrusts-his-fists-against-the-post-and-still-insists-he-sees-the-ghosts”.
So it was both nostalgic and refreshing to find myself picking up a copy of “The Cell” before boarding a plane from Delhi to Bangalore, and reading it throughout the entire week that followed. About three pages into the book, you know there would be no turning back. Half a chapter was all it took for a master to throw the world into a burning inferno and have his readers completely hooked. Like an invisible virus, the uneasiness and horror could travel up the pages and take over your nerves, controlling the rush of adrenaline at will.
Only that it didn’t deliver upon the promise it started. In my opinion, the story began to take a dive towards the cliche around the time of death of Alice Maxwell, and ended in a climax so familiar that it treaded upon Resident-Evil-like cheesiness territory. It was also puzzling to see how the zombies suddenly developed abilities to levitate or read minds, only to be obliterated in a blast later.
If that were some points King was trying to depict (i.e. struggles between human during times of adversity.etc.), it was sadly lost in between the passages devoted to describing how bits of torn flesh dangled below the lips of one super zombie. Like many other reviews for the book from Amazon, this was King playing safe and being a caricature of himself. A “produced-by” effort destined to go straight to cable channels rather than theatres.
From a forgotten corner of consciousness, the creepy face of the IT clown made a triumphant grin before submerging back into darkness again. For that brief second, his cold eyes triumphantly declared: “try harder next time, pal”.
The Search
(draft)
Search Engines is something all of us are accustomed to taking for granted. Afterall, aren’t they just spiders that dig up hyperlinks and throw lots of ads at you along with the often inaccurate search results?
“The Search” describes Search Engine technology in detail without getting into too much technical jargons. It also explains the business model of search engine companies – this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff is revealing. When we fire up our search engines and randomly click through the results, who’d have thought that so many complex transactions are occuring in the background?
Add further notes on:
- Sergey and Grin
- Google’s IPO
- IBM’s WebFountain gives a hint of Search’s future.
iCon
Read a couple of interesting technology related books lately. One on Steve Jobs, the other on Google but more particularly on “Search”.
First Steve Jobs. What got me to buying the book and reading through it in merely a few days was the mesmerizing power of Steve’s speeches and on-stage charisma – that is no better word to describe him as able to “distort reality”. Be it the keynotes or the Stanford speech, Jobs never fails to keep a 2 hour technical talk both entertaining and inspiring – certainly not an easy feat. What makes his speeches special is the extra human touches he often adds through jokes, mockery, self reflection. The overall friendly and casual atmosphere really exemplifies the Apple corporate image.
Back to the book itself. The story of Jobs and Apple is told in linear fashion and certainly most of it might already sound familiar to Apple followers…e.g. how Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs made phone feud devices at the college dorm room and sold them for as high as $100, how Apple was founded in a garage, how the Apple II, LISA and Macintosh came to be and so on. Here, the young Steve is portrayed as an irrogant tyrant who shows no consideration to his friends, colleagues and families, and remained so even in his latter NeXT and Pixar days. What turned his character over seemed to be marriage and family life, however this part of the book obviously falls short: some more recent interviews or research could have made the last few chapters much more enjoyable to read.
In summary, most of this book is fascinating and informative, and I respect how credits were given to the many people who were dismissed or ill-treated by Steve. However, the last few chapters seem incredibly rushed and filled with unnecessarily repeatitive praises like “…and Steve Jobs has done it again and conquered another industry!”, which grew old after a while. Although the 2005 January keynote was mentioned, the material was shallow and bereft of any thoughtful anaysis. A real shame.
Here are some unique stories that surprised me:
- Steve Wozniak apparently got short-changed after all the hard work he put in for Job’s Breakout game.
- Jobs flew to India for a spiritual journey and spent months searching for “gurus” for advices.
- Jobs is a devoted vegetarian and follower of Zen: even his marriage ceremony was held in a Zen style.
About kenshin03
Linkedin profile
bookmarked
- Tell No One - On DVD October 15th December 8, 2011
- Santa Clara Adult Education / Homepage October 22, 2011
- How Google's Self-Driving Car Works October 20, 2011
- ai-class.com - Notes of Lesson 1 and 2 October 16, 2011
Recent Comments