You should really just follow me on Tumblr. :)

http://caitlinthinks.tumblr.com/

Piano nerding

Igudesman and Joo - Rachmaninov had big hands.

Antarctica

Gorgeous photo series from The Atlantic. Why is there so much magic in untamed places?

Oh yeah, I have a blog...

Has it really been more than three months? Yikes.

Songs I'm digging:

- Identity Cards - Grieves

- Cover Your Tracks - Young Galaxy

- Sleep All Summer - St. Vincent and The National

- Veteran - Dessa

Articles:

- Mind vs. Machine - a great article about the Turing Test, how machines imitate people, and what it means to be human.

- The Wolf At Our Heels: The Centuries-Old Struggle to Play in Tune - good for musicians and music nerds. If you're interested in how music works, what it means to play in a key, and why different keys have different sounds, despite being defined by uniform formulas, give this a read.

- The Elements of Clunk - thoughts on a new type of bad writing. The problem is mostly with efforts to fluff up prose to make it seem more impressive.

Etc.:

- Date A Girl Who Reads

- Poem: A Word On Statistics

I wish I could write like this.

Billy Collins: The Great American Poem

If this were a novel,
it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train
or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And, as the pages turned, you would be told
that it was morning or the dead of night,
and I, the narrator, would describe
for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

and what the man was wearing on the train
right down to his red tartan scarf,
and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,
as well as the cows sliding past his window.

Eventually - one can only read so fast -
you would learn either that the train was bearing
the man back to the place of his birth
or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

and you might just tolerate all of this
as you waited patiently for shots to ring out
in a ravine where the man was hiding
or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

But this a poem, not a novel,
and the only characters here are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a few more lines,

leaving us no time to point guns at one another
or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.
I ask you: who needs the man on the train
and who cares what his black valise contains?

We have something better than all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will hear
as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

I once heard someone compare it
to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat
or, more faintly, just the wind
over that field stirring things that we will never see.

Gettysburg

Great speech, great animation, great video.

(Gettysburg Address from Adam Gault on Vimeo.)

A few thoughts

I don't usually use this blog for personal reflections, but it's two in the morning, and why not? First of all, a song:

I'm beginning to realize the extent to which comfort plays a dominant role in my decision-making process. I still live with my parents, despite being a senior in university, because it's comfortable. I haven't pushed myself to make close friends at school, because that's uncomfortable. I stuck stubbornly to my plans of going straight to graduate school next fall because school is comfortable. I haven't committed to learning to how to drum, or how to play bass, because really - it's uncomfortable to stretch myself. And I certainly haven't chased any big dreams. It's natural to shy away from what's unfamiliar, but that impulse is tied to fear - fear of the unknown, fear of mistakes, fear of failure.

But fear is the mind killer, and a life that isn't lived boldly isn't much of a life. Radical, life-changing moments don't happen when you're sitting on your couch, they happen when you're out pushing yourself, and the limits of the possible. I'm not content with an average life.

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary." - Cecil Beaton

"But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture past them into the impossible." - Arthur C. Clarke

"Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no whenever you don't want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you are doing here. Believe in kissing." - Eve Ensler

"Who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight... men of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. And in all these, having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us, so that apart from us they would not be made perfect." - Hebrews 11:33-35, 38-40.

"For God has not given us a spirit of fear (timidity), but of power and love and discipline." - 2 Timothy 1:7

Music to hum to

Some sweet, mellow jams.

The writing process

Unfortunately, this is all too accurate: How to Write a Paper in College.

Titanic

This article discusses the latest revelation in the story of the sinking of the Titanic, and touches on the difficulty of drawing lessons from that event.

"The Cold Truth," by Morgan Meis

Jazz and film

No such thing as too much Miles:

Also no such thing as too much Bergman.

This book is not just about a whale

Whoever poisoned my mind by saying Moby-Dick wasn't worth my time was dead wrong.

"At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintance. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn that is - which was the only way he could get there - thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself."

What's stuck in my head

Can't get enough of Dessa. This song could be my anthem, which is why it's the one I'm linking, but I also highly recommend The Chaconne and Mineshaft II. And the whole album, really.

Soccer and politics

Recommended: Football Against the Enemy, by Simon Kuper.

Neat exploration of the relationship between a global sport and global politics. I hope someday I get grant money to go do research as fun as this.

Underappreciated

This band shouldn't be overlooked.

Essay - politics and religion

Suggested reading: one of my favorite essays, The Politics of God by Mark Lilla. Sketches the path of the development of western thought, and the relationship between religion and politics in our familiar paradigm. Woven throughout is a neat discussion of the philosophical differences between East and West, and why that especially matters in the modern context, when America has put interactions with the Middle East on the top of the priority list.

Excerpt: A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

Literary crushes

While in Guatemala, I spent a good stretch of time in a little used bookstore owned by an American ex-lawyer called Carlos. The fruits of this time, other than some very good conversation, were beat up copies of Locke's treatises on government, and Dostoevsky's The Idiot. I will never stop loving Dostoevsky. Or Prince Myshkin for that matter.

"Gracious me, what a fuss you make!" cried Princess Belokonsky, with annoyance. "You're a good fellow, but you're absurd: someone gives you twopence and you thank him as though he had saved your life. You think it's nice, but let me tell you, it is disgusting."

Villagers

Liking this.

Travel recommendation

Guatemala. Just go.

(Pictures from Semuc Champey and Volcan de Pacaya)

Save lives; give blood

I donated a unit of blood this morning. Check out the facts and links below about blood donation, and please consider donating as well.

To support the 4.5 million+ people who need blood every year in the U.S., including accident/trauma victims, surgery patients, cancer patients, and many more, the Red Cross needs to collect millions of units of blood. An estimated 43,000 pints of blood are used every day in the United States and Canada. Currently, only about 10 percent of eligible donors give blood annually. The Red Cross estimates that if one percent more of the U.S. population gave blood every year, blood shortages would disappear for the foreseeable future.

If you're 17 and older (or 16 with parental consent), you can donate blood as often as 6 times a year. The entire 4-step process takes about an hour: a few minutes to register and wait for your turn to donate, a short physical and questionnaire to determine eligibility, the blood donation process (about ten minutes long), and 10 to 15 minutes for recovery, while drinking juice and eating cookies.

Check out the overview of the donation process, eligibility requirements, and enter your zipcode here to find donation centers and blood drives near you.