New Landscapes
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. (Proust)
A friend of mine is reading "How Proust Can Change Your Life," and he posted the above quote with a comment about how he needs to remember this since he tends to crave new landscapes. And so it is with me. When I'm traveling, a steady stream of words flows from my head to my hand, but finding inspiration in the quotidian, that is a challenge.
In What I Talk About... (previously mentioned here), Murakami writes about the characteristics one needs to become a novelist. The most basic requirement is a certain amount of native talent. After that, one should possess a strong power of concentration, and the discipline to sit down at a desk for hours at a time to write. Fortunately, the latter can be developed. (I need to work on that.)
Two weeks ago, I pledged to blog daily for the month of November. Now it turns out that I will not be able to fulfill that commitment. Tomorrow afternoon I'm flying to Istanbul (not Constantinople), Turkey. If all goes well, I will soon regale you with curious tales of new landscapes.
Park Life
Last week when I was in Sunnyvale, Izumi took me to a park. We saw mallard ducks, coots, a sun-bathing turtle, and (I think) one very tame white heron.
Linguistically Speaking
I've been spending a lot of time in the kitchen lately, cooking this and baking that, and while I do, I've been listening to History of the English Language. It's a lecture series by John McWhorter, an American linguist currently at Columbia University. The series title is a bit of a misnomer as it is in fact more of a broad survey of language and linguistics. McWhorter is an engaging speaker, the topic one of interest to me. I'm currently listening to lecture #21 of 36, which is about language mixing, specifically grammar, and draws from examples like the impact of Dravidian sentence structure (subject-object-verb) of South India on the Indo-European languages of the North, and Media Lengua of Equador, which combines Spanish vocabulary with a Quechua grammatical system.
McWhorter is not a prescriptive grammarian, rather he sees language as a living, breathing, evolving thing, and he is emphatic in distinguishing between the spoken and written forms. Most of the several thousand languages around today still exist only orally. The written versions are a different, fairly recent phenomenon altogether.
Last week's NY Times Book Review has an essay on recent changes to the Japanese language brought on by the ubiquity of cellphones, blogging, email, etc. Some changes include the classically vertical language becoming horizontal and people losing the ability to hand-write complex characters (think spellcheck). And of course there is the relentless infiltration of Engrish words (often creatively used) into the vocabulary.
The impact of cell phones goes way beyond texting (of which young Japanese were surely early adopters,) with something called keitai shousetsu 携帯小説, or cell phone novels. These are actual novels and short stories meant to be read on mobile phones. Earlier this year I read Miura Shion's Mukashi no Hanashi むかしのはなし, in which it is revealed, at the end of the first in a series of interlinked stories, that the narrator has typed this story on his cell phone. At the time, I found that absurd, but according to this essay, five of the top ten best-selling books in Japan in 2007 were written on cell phones. Huh?
BICYCLES!
I love the fuzzy red pipe cleaners.
Sunday Run-ins
Another splendid day in the City by the Bay, so this morning V and I rode our bikes out to the Embarcadero for another waterfront run (this time on the East side). We parked near Townsend Street, not far from AT&T Park (home of the SF Giants) then ran along the water, under the Bay Bridge, beyond the Ferry Building, past Pier this and that, then turned around and came back.
Here I'd like to note that I ran into three acquaintances this morning. First I saw neighbors, a couple, from my apartment-sitting gig in Noe Valley last year. They were right around the corner from where I live, visiting friends in the neighborhood. Then I passed another friend-of-friend on The Embarcadero itself as I was finishing up my run. Since I probably know about a couple dozen people in the city all told, that's rather remarkable.
Crissy
Though it is rather foreboding when it's cold and windy, nothing beats Crissy Field on a warm, sunny day like today. So when V suggested we head there for a run early this afternoon, I was all for it. Just this week I returned to a regular running schedule after having broken my toe way back at the end of July. (The toe still stubbornly refuses to heal completely, but I've decided to just ignore it for the time being.)
Though we live only about 3-1/2 miles from Crissy Field, there is no quick and easy way to get there from here. Road work on Divisadero made the drive over extra long, over half an hour. I could run faster than that!
But it was worth the drive. And many, many other people seemed to think so as well. Always popular with runners, cyclists and dog companions, today it was especially crowded. We parked at the end of Divisadero and ran the 2+ miles out along the bay to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge (touching the hopper hands) and back.
Along the way, there's a plaque on one of the bridges that reads "This is dedicated to those who find this place a beautiful place to dream."
(Note: not my photos)
The Real Forbidden Fruit (Or, The Mighty Quince)
This afternoon I made compote from a few of the quince given to me by my friend Izumi when I visited her on Tuesday. Her Sunnyvale house has a tree in the yard. The fruit looks a bit like the guava. It smells delightful. Most varieties are too tough and sour to eat raw, but they make lovely jam. A syrup made from the fruit is said to be good for the throat. The Japanese for quince is karin 花梨, written with the characters for flower and pear, and indeed it is a relative of apples and pears.
It's said that the fruit described in the creation story, the one that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden, was in fact a quince. Elsewhere, the fruit makes an appearance in "The Owl and the Pussycat," where it is eaten, famously, with a runcible spoon.
