[email fragment] Also: ADJECTIVE ALERT: by way of keeping tabs on the alumni yesterday I watched an "Inside the Actors' Studio" featuring Natalie Portman, wherein she talked of her Israeli birth, of what it was like to play Anne Frank on the stage. Then, in the final psychological-questionnaire that James Lipton always rattles off, she reported her least favorite sound to be that of European police sirens ("WEE-WAA WEE-WAA WEE-WAA") because they always freak her Jewish self out, sounding, as she put it, "all Holocausty".

[emial fragment] Been reading The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman, which is an interesting argument but makes me feel like I'm DESTROYING WESTERN CIVILIZATION every time I turn on the TV. Also Shah of Shahs by this Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Jimmy Jo Joyce's Ulysses, which I have to admit I've given up trying not to be confused by.

[email fragment] John Donne RULESSZZZ!!! I got through half of Africa with his collected poems in my pack. Several of his last poems have been pretty helpful [...] And every time I end a letter with "Yours, etc." I'm specifically quoting his letters.

I keep meaning to read his "Devotions on emergent occasions" (whence cometh the line "for whom the bell tolls" etc.), which get the high recommend by Philip Yancey in Soul Survivor.

And, when I get to London again, to go to St. Paul's and see his tomb there -- he got up off his death bed and wrapped himself in a winding sheet to pose for the statue.

Death to Interesting! Well maybe not fully. For a while now I've tried to refrain from the i-word, mainly because it's often a bit lazy -- saying "oh did you see that article? It was very interesting" saves us the trouble of coming up with any sort of specific description. But more than that, it also exempts us from aesthetic and (more importantly) moral judgement -- allowing us to like something without having to explain why we like it, what makes it worthy of our attention.

There's a quote from Walker Percy's novel Lancelot where the narrator notes that in the past things and acts were judged on a continuum of Good and Bad, but now it seems like the moral scale runs instead from Interesting to Boring. Granted, the character who says it is something of a psychopath but still ...

And then there's this, from Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor:

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. "I look pale," said Byron, looking into the mirror. "I should like to die of consumption." Why? asked his tuburcular friend Tom Moore, who was visiting Byron in Patras in February 1828. "Because the ladies would all say, 'Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.'" Perhaps the main gift to sensibility made by the Romantics is not the aesthetics of cruelty and the beauty of the morbid (as Mario Praz suggested in his famous book), or even the demand for unlimited personal liberty, but the nihilistic and sentimental idea of "the interesting."

So there you have it, the condensed qualities of the interesting-obsessed: laziness, amorality, nihilism, and sentimentality. Take your pick.

[via This American Life's episode 97, "Death to Wacky"]

NYTimes:"When these modern machines arrived, Kiswahili came up with a quick word for something that didn't exist in our culture," said Clara Momanyi, a Swahili professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. "That was 'kompyuta.'"

But scholars subsequently opted for a more local term to describe these amazing machines, she said. It is tarakilishi, which is a combination of the word for "image" and the word for "represent."

The Swahili experts grappled with a variety of other words. How does one say folder? Should it be folda, which is commonly used, or kifuko, a more formal term?

Is a fax a faksi, as the Tanzanians call it, or a kipepesi?

Everyone seemed to agree that an e-mail message was a barua pepe, which means a fast letter. Everyone also seemed to agree that the effort they were engaged in to bring Swahili to cyberspace was long overdue.

Ahhh ... takes me back to my own senior-thesis researches. I'm glad to see the appointed experts are making efforts to balance westernisms and swahili-isms to make for a technical vocabulary that will be useful to the greatest number of people. Seems a bit better than the 1980s technical dictionary I was writing about.

[full article]

Radio Austraila/Pacific Beat: The Solomon Islands Education Committee is meeting in Honiara to decide whether to give the go-ahead to a new university. A company registered as Cornell University Solomon Islands has applied to establish a tertiary institution in the capital, although little is yet known about the types of courses on offer. The proposal comes less than a year after the now notorious King's University scam, which saw a small group of Indian students enrol in medical degrees, only to find that the university didn't exist.

[email fragment] Any contacts with Prof. Miroslav Volf down at Yale Div? I'd heard good rumblings about him from [magazine] and more recently [campus ministry] circles ... a couple Sundays ago I spent some time hunting up stuff of his Christianity Today had published, like the devotional he happened to be giving at a UN event the morning of 9/11, about reconciliation and Paul Celan ("dein goldenes Haar Margarethe / dein ashenes Haar Sulamith" [english trans.]) and the "Will to Embrace".

The Guardian: Indian farmers have come up with what they think is the real thing to keep crops free of bugs.

Instead of paying hefty fees to international chemical companies for patented pesticides, they are reportedly spraying their cotton and chilli fields with Coca-Cola.

[full text]

One of my favorite things about the New York Times website is the little weather line that runs right under the big "New York Times" flag. Specifically what I liked was that if you hadn't told the NYT database where you were located, the weather line was actually just a link to a page where you could add that info: "Personalize your weather", it said. I loved that little phrase so much that in 5+ years of near-daily use I never followed the link. For me it was way less important to know the actual local temp and precip than to be reminded that the Internet (which promises omnipresence and omnipotence) and the New York Times (itself offering omniscience) thought it sensible to suggest that my weather might actually be personalizable with a click. Well if you aspire to the attributes of God, why not?

Sadly, the little joke is finally over: sometime in the past few days they switched the default to just tell you whether it's raining in New York.