I read a great passage by Mary Oliver:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my armsWhen it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if i have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t wan t to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world
This was a quote i found on Chris Anderson’s – the author of The Long Tail – and it refers to how search will be done in the future. The short popular stuff will be pre-loaded results by humans, the medium will be populated by friends and the obscure long tail is found by algorithms. The quote from the blog post is:
“The short head will be human, the fat middle social and the long tail algorithmic” Still, that single sentence is worth another book. I won’t write it, but I’ll bet someone else does.
It is an interesting way to think about it. Of course, it is all ad-supported and it does make a good case for Mahalo.
The poet Billy Collins once observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. This it too bad. With that in mind, i thought i’d post one of my favorite poems that i like to read at the beginning of every new year. It’s Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road:
AFOOT and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
I got from this blog (KMR’s):
“You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”
-J. Krishnamurti, Indian philosopher (1895-1986)
Below is a great speech by the poet Dana Gioia to the Stanford graduating class of 2007….
Stanford Commencement address by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (June 17, 2007)
Good morning.
It is a great honor to be asked to give the Commencement address at my alma mater. Although I have two degrees from Stanford, I still feel a bit like an interloper on this exquisitely beautiful campus. A person never really escapes his or her childhood.
At heart I’m still a working-class kid—half Italian, half Mexican—from L.A., or more precisely from Hawthorne, a city that most of this audience knows only as the setting of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown—two films that capture the ineffable charm of my hometown.
Today is Father’s Day, so I hope you will indulge me for beginning on a personal note. I am the first person in my family ever to attend college, and I owe my education to my father, who sacrificed nearly everything to give his four children the best education possible.
My dad had a fairly hard life. He never spoke English until he went to school. He barely survived a plane crash in World War II. He worked hard, but never had much success, except with his family. When I was about 12, my dad told me that he hoped I would go to Stanford, a place I had never heard of. For him, Stanford represented every success he had missed yet wanted for his children. He would be proud of me today—no matter how dull my speech.
On the other hand, I may be fortunate that my mother isn’t here. It isn’t Mother’s Day, so I can be honest. I loved her dearly, but she could be a challenge. For example, when she learned I had been nominated to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she phoned and said, “Don’t think I’m impressed.” Continue reading “It's not all technology – the arts matter too (Dana Gioia)”
I was given the book Independence Day by Richard Ford to read by a friend of mine. It’s a great read and very well written and i liked it a lot. I do feel some odd similarities to the main character, Frank Branscombe. He has a pragmatism towards life and love that i can relate to. While of course we differ in a lot of ways – he being 45 and divorced with 2 children vs. me 30 and not ever been married – i was curious to see what he would do on every page to see if i would react in the same way. In some ways it reads like a guidebook about how to survive as a middle-aged man. On others it’s about the quest to achieve continuity and self-actualization in everyday life. Frank’s life has had its ups and downs but he’s non-apologetic and pretty agreeable as a character.
Some of my favorite quotes:
Sally (FB’s quasi-girlfriend): you just want everything to seem perfect and everybody to seem pleased. And you’re willing to let seem equal be. It makes pleasing anybody be an act of cowardice
This is a huge trait of FB in the book and is definitely MPL material. This is what i do. Interesting….
Sally: You’re too smooth from one thing to the next. I can’t keep up with you very well.FB: I think i’m just more at ease in the mainstream. It’s my version of the sublime.
Sally: And you’re also very cautious, you know. And you’re non-committal. You know that, don’t you? I’m sure that’s what you meant last night by being beyond affection. You’re smooth and you’re cautious and you’re noncommittal.
FB: My judgments aren’t very sound, so i just try not to cause too much trouble. But when i feel something strong, i guess i jump in.
Sally: Or you seem to anyway
The book is also just about FB and his thoughts about life. Some random passages:
I’ve been a fan of Matt Damon since Good Will Hunting and he’s continued to rock since then. Here’s a link to a pretty good interview with him. One of my favorite parts is when he talks about how he takes roles where the character doesn’t say much. He references a quote from Clint Eastwood:
apparently he got a script, read it, came to the first rehearsal, handed the script to the writer and almost all of his lines were crossed out. Clint said, ‘It’s such a great script’, and the writer said, ‘But you crossed out all my lines.’ Clint said, ‘I crossed out your lines because now I don’t have to do any work. I know what my character is thinking’.”
This is only slightly related, but i read this quote about The Departed
Matt: (on working with Jack Nicholson) I have a lot of funny stories, but I like this one. Marty [Martin Scorsese, director] called me up and said, ‘Jack had some ideas for your scene tomorrow. He’s going to wear a dildo.’ So I thought, ‘Uh, okay.’ I thought he was joking, but he actually did! I was impressed at how obscene he was willing to be. With Jack, you expect the unexpected.
The first motion in the Continental Congress for independence was made on June 4, 1776. After hard debate, the Congress voted unanimously, but secretly, for independence from Britain on July 2. The Congress reworked the text of the Declaration until July 4, when the 12 colonies voted for adoption and released a copy signed only by John Hancock, President of the Congress, to the printers.
John Adams the unofficial whip of the independence-minded, wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776:
He forgot to mention beers, bbq’s, baseball games and fireworks – but otherwise he pretty much nailed it
Also, a song for today: Independence Day by Ani (click here)
Why go out tonight? How about 25 reasons why….
I love this quote from Tim Berners-Lee, the man responsible for the World Wide Web. He’s a low profile genius who never profited from his invention. I often think about him when i talk to my investment banking friends, or other people who are placing monetary gain over what really makes them happy. This is a quote from his book Weaving the Web which is a pretty good read if you’re interested in how the web came about, what the original thoughts were about it, and how it’s survived attempts by private industry (Microsoft, IBM, etc.) to control it.
People have sometimes asked me whether i am upset that i have not made a lot of money from
the Web. In fact, I made some quite conscious decisions about which way to take my life. These I would not change – though i am making no comment on what i might do in the future. What does distress me, though, is how important a question it seems to be to some. This happens mostly in America, not Europe. What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person’s value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money. That suggests disrespect for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology. Core in my upbring was a value system that put monetary gain well in its place, behind things like doing what i really want to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s sights on cash rather than on things that will actually make them happy.
