But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flaw,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

-- Wm. Shakespeare

When dreams do show thee me

All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

-- William Shakespeare, Sonnets

Australia Day

Today is Australia Day (Jan 26th) - where all celebrate our convict heritage and pretend to be all patriotic. Having a BBQ in the apartment (well, on our balcony) with heaps of people coming over. Tomorrow should be pretty quiet and Monday is a public holiday (for the Australia Day holiday). What to do - muck around with computer stuff - maybe do some writing. Or maybe sleep and waste my whole life away.

Love Surviving Anything

"I had thought when I adored him as tho he were a god that love could survive anything but I begin to think that there are certain insults to human dignity that one should not survive"

-- Margerie Lowry, personal journal, in University of British Columbia archives, as quoted in "Day of the Dead", by D. T. Max, page 80, The New Yorker, December 17, 2007

A Clear Breeze

Happy in the morning
I open my cottage door;
A clear breeze blowing
Comes straight in.
The first sun
Lights the leafy trees;
The shadows it casts
Are crystal clear.
Serene,
In accord with my heart,
Everything merges
In one harmony.
Gain and loss
Are not my concern;
This way is enough
To the end of my days.

-- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

Novels Written on Cellphones

See this: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html?_r=1&ex=1358485200&en=0b46d32f7c7d037c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

The new ways to continue to create never cease to amaze me ...

Thumbs Race as Japan's Best Sellers Go Cellular

TOKYO — Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, "The Tale of Genji," a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Links to Japanese Sites:

Book Uploading Site of Starts Publishing

Orion, a Cell Phone Novel Site for Goma Books

The Novel, "If You"

Mika's blog

Enlarge This Image

Ko Sasaki for The New York Times

Rin, 21, tapped out a novel on her cellphone that sold 400,000 copies in hardcover.

Of last year's 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists, touching off debates in the news media and blogosphere.

the BIG question

This one is rather interesting: http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_index.html

The Edge Annual Question — 2008

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?"

165 contributors; 112,600 words

Some rather interesting speculations skating across a superbly diverse range of disciplines and interests - very renaissance and worth some discussion.

Some versions containing everything in one document are located at http://www.bilyendi.com/misc (be careful - they are large files).

song lyrics

Now this is a good entry: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/01/write-a-hit-son.html

I especially like the lines Scott wrote:

"She had runaway eyes and marshmallow kittens.

My heart heard a dream like ten thousand gay mittens."

The concept of lyrically rhyming gibberish is great - David Bowie's cut-up concept - based on work by William S Burroughs and later copied by Kurt Cobain - but, I suppose, many others

And you would think it would be so easy - except you read the comments by the blog readers where they try to write their own two lines worth of lyrics and you realise that 95% of them totally suck (and I mean, really really suck big big time) and the ones where they don't totally suck you realise that they have just quoted a song or lyric already written (the "your latest trick" entry for example) or something very similar.

So, even though it is supposedly irrelevant, random and gibberish, producing a work of art is still surprisingly difficult.

Meditation or Distractive Disturbance

In any circumstance good or bad, abandon
All hope from Buddhas and give up
All fears of suffering in Samsara.
Recognize that hope and fear are the
Magical display of your own mind
Of Primordial Purity.
Remain in the state where there is neither
Perceiver nor object of perception.
Let go into the immaculate space
Of Great Perfection beyond
Meditation or distractive disturbance.

-- Tibetan Scroll

Manna

A weird little story but rather interesting take on how some things could transpire:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Bass

For some awful god-forsaken reason, I find this one of the funniest XKCDs that I have seen (http://xkcd.com/368/)

Next year?

The clouds of sunset
Gather in the western sky,
And over the silent silvery Han
Rises a white jade moon.
Not often does life
Bring such beauty.
Where shall I see the moon
Next year?

-- Su T’ung-Po (1037-1101)

Prescience of Mortality

I was going for a run this morning, listening to Rammstein through my earphones and running along a main street on the footpath and thinking that at any time a person may drive out of the driveway of one of the apartment blocks there and hit me when I was running across the driveway and then I would be thrown onto the road in front of the speeding traffic and I would be royally squashed by a car or truck - stone dead. And the thing that I thought about was that then there would be no way for me to write and nobody would know that I was dead and that people would get upset that I hadn't responded to emails.

Crazy the things you think about when you are running along the street in one's middle years - because, of course, the issue of one's own mortality is now always strongly in the forefront of one's thoughts. (Well, not all the time, of couse, I don't want to sound that maudlin, but, as for most people, it is something that is there front and centre in their lives - or, at least, should be, in some manner, having to have to be dealt with).

Bitter Sweet Contemplation Of Another New Year

It is so interesting to contemplate new years coming at one at this age. A bitter-sweet combination of having been there and done that, totally, over and over in one's life (the same old work with the same old issues and stupidities that have to be dealt with), mixed with a healthy dollop of hope about new experiences and new opportunities opening up with new stages in one's life.

A delicate balancing act at this stage in our lives I think - it is a completely different mix when you are younger and when you are older than this. One of the beauties of living - that there are so many unique and interesting stages in ones lives that can never really be known about before experiencing them (for all the reading and talking that one may do with others about what they have gone through and how things work, the vast chaotic complexity of the universe means that your individual experience of having to live through a "stage" (so to speak) is exactly that - your unique individual experience. It has special elements all of your own - which obviously have a relationship to what others have gone through, but may still be subtly different enough to make you have to pay attention to work through what it is all about.

And the other thing is that if you spent ALL your time researching exactly how you should deal with a certain stage in one's life, then you would not actually be doing any living in that stage of one's life - which sort of defeats the purpose (but, indeed, is one of the ways that some people deal with certain stages in their life - for some people, it is their whole life). So, as a consequence, because one is not fully researching every little nuance that somebody may have documented about a certain stage or experience or life event, then one simply has to live through it oneself and work out, for oneself and by oneself, what to do about it all.

That is the beauty of art - so many people can express what is the same universal story (a love story, a tragedy, etc etc) in so many different forms - they experience the situation and feel the need to express it in their own unique and individual experience - even though, for instance, they could read Tristam and Iseult, or hear Tristan und Isolde, or see Romeo and Juliet, and connect with a similar experience.

Redit orbis in orbem

Who so desireth to know what will be hereafter, let him think of what is past, for the world hath ever been in a circular revolution; whatsoever is now, was heretofore; and things past or present, are no other than such as shall be again: Redit orbis in orbem.

-- Raleigh, Sir Walter

Siegen kommt nicht vom Liegen

Siegen kommt nicht vom Liegen

-- German Proverb


(Success doesn’t come to the sleeper.)