Meeting lots of people here in Tuebingen, I often get asked why I chose to study German, Dutch, etc, especially considering I have creative ambitions and no aspirations of becoming a translator or interpretor or professor or similar.
A Javanese proverb (that I found quoted in the same book I mentioned in my last post – Learning By Heart) sums up my reasoning quite eloquently:
When asked what makes a good dancer, the master replied:
First, to be a good dancer, one must know the music as well as the dance.
And what else?
To be a better dancer, one must understand the stories and be able to interpret the characters being portrayed.
Is there more?
The best dancer is the one who has all these things I have told you about and is a farmer.
According to the philosophy of the book Learning by Heart by Corita Kent (which will soon be republished! get it when it comes out, it’s great!), art is making connections and articulating them in ways previously unexplored or impossible.
So then, when we dream we are practicing this process, uninhibited. Dreams are “a condensation of images and ideas that share certain characteristics – not obviously connected”.
I like this idea very much and I think it’s very true. We dream up some very creative scenarios, so creative that they sound silly when scrutinised by our waking minds, but when we are asleep they are logical progressions from the seed ideas and emotions that begin the dream.
The inventor Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway, amongst other things, is now heading up a new effort to make highly sensitive and precise commercial prosthetics (inspired by Luke Skywalker’s prosthetic hand in The Empire Strikes Back, apparently). This video is fascinating:
This evening there was an international dinner at the language course i’m doing. Each student (or in small groups) had to prepare a dish from their homeland to share in a buffet. I couldn’t think of anything Welsh that I can cook, but someone suggested that I make something Greek since my mother is from the Greek part of Cyprus.
I immediately thought upon Daktyla, a sweet almondy treat that my mother and her mother sometimes make. My mother sent me a few recently by post and they were delicious… I shared them with Julia (my girlfriend) and Freekje (a mutual friend), and they were wild about them. So I thought I would try to emulate this satisfaction with the students of my language course, by making them Daktyla.
It was the first time I made them and so I think it was a great success that it even worked. They don’t look exactly like the ones mama makes but they taste almost the same. The biggest difference would be that mine were more crunchy, but I like that anyway. Above is a picture of my Daktyla before I covered them in syrup and below is the “after”.
They were delicious and tasted a lot better than they looked. Everyone was complimentary! Success.
If you want to make them, the recipe is here: Page 1 | Page 2
I disabled comments a while ago, due to the merciless influx of spam comments (currently over 8000 such comments still in the moderation queue from when comments were allowed).
Now I’ve re-enabled commenting, except that you need to register an account here in order to post.
TheSubmarineChannel has a collection of beautiful and innovative title sequences from movies. This one is amazing (the beauty of the universe; clocks; French people being beheaded – what more could you want?):
This is breathtaking and brilliant. A powerful but FREE software has been developed by Microsoft that empowers one to explore the chartered universe – in a way similar to how google maps lets you explore planet earth – and much more.
Oh, did I say it was a time traveling device? Technically it does allow you to explore time in the universe, as the images we have from the farthest reaches of the universe represent these areas as they were millions of years ago, as that’s how long it takes for their light to reach us.
worldwidetelescope.org is the official site, which currently only has a couple of “reactions to worldwidetelescope” videos.
I’ll have this little book to write down my creative ideas (below left). I’ll have this little book to note down what films i’ve seen and when. (below right)
I’ll have this little album to keep ticket stubs and bits of paper and souvenirs. (below)
The album is really shitty though. A scrapbook would be nicer.
I’ll have this blog to note down quotes, websites, videos I like, to write personal crap, to post my pictures and sometimes to write down my dreams.
Why write all this stuff down? I don’t trust my memory very much.
