Random Notes

The Nike of Wellness

2007-07-14T05:22:42Z

From 'Talk of the Town' in The New Yorker of July 9, 2007 :

"Global Spa Summit at the Waldorf-Astoria (is) fostering "thought leadership" in the forty-billion-dollar-a-year spa industry. One of the keynote speakers was Steve Case, the co-founder of America Online. He now owns a spa in Arizona called Miraval, whose motto is "Life in Balance".

In his address, Case said, "Four years ago, I was pushed out of my comfort zone by the revelation of how to transform industries in need of change. ....It was a profound moment. I found balanced living, We are the modern healers. I don't just want to feel better. I want to be better. ...Remember when the man who started Nike was selling his sneakers from the back of a truck? I want that unique collaboration between real estate and spas. Destination spas! Wellness must go beyond just the facial and the massage. We are building what I call 'the Nike of Wellness"

Newyorker notes that "Gerald Levine, Case's partner in what was then AOL Time Warner, "has also made a second carreer of self-improvement, running a holistic mental-health institute in Los Angeles"

This is what the world really needed - The Nike of Wellness. I feel better already.

Upgrade

2007-07-08T20:16:03Z

Just finished the upgrade to 3.35. The upgrade itself was painless, but getting Stylecatcher to work work with my site the new stylesheet to apply correctly to the archive was a frustrating experience. Right now, most things seem to be working the way they should; although my links and About section are obviously wiped out. I would bring them back in on a later date.

Before Sunset

2007-07-08T09:00:06Z

We used to have an attic in our ancestral home which did double duty also as the worship room. As a kid, during my summer vacations, I used to find all sorts of interesting knick knacks browsing through stuff in there. These days, for apartment dwelling, moving-house-every-other year kind of people like us, only our old laptops can yield such pleasures ...

I saw this movie over a year back. I quite liked it. I had loved its prequel even more. It was a terrific film.

I had downloaded these images from somewhere or other at that time; I wanted to include these on a post about Before Sunset. But I stopped blogging soon after and forgot all about these until found them again this weekend while trying to organize my laptop.

Radio play scripts

2007-02-18T19:40:43Z

BBC World Service is holding its tenth International Playwriting competition (for radio play scripts). The last day of submission is April 30, 2007.

Open source software

2007-02-17T18:44:53Z

30 essential pieces of free software. I have just started using Songbird and Foxit .

Orhan Pamuk

2007-02-17T18:39:15Z

It seems that Orhan Pamuk has become fearful about his safety in Turkey and has apparently moved to New York.

His Nobel lecture - My father's suitcase - is here.

The Decemberists

2007-01-30T03:21:52Z

Terry Gross interviewed Colin Meloy of The Decemberists in NPR today. Good stuff.

Assorted time management tips

2007-01-29T00:22:58Z

From John Quiggin on Crooked Timbers. I really liked tip 3:

(It) is particularly relevant for people prone to distraction, which obviously includes all of us here. My core business is producing academic journal articles (and the occasional book). In this business, it�s easy to drift along, reading lots of interesting stuff, making notes, and imagining you are making progress, but not actually getting anywhere. So in homage to Taylor and Stakhanov, I discipline myself by setting word targets. I try to write 500 to 750 words of new material every day. 500 words a day might not sound much, but if you can manage it 5 days a week for 40 weeks a year, you�ve got 100 000 words, which is enough for half a dozen journal articles and a small book. So, that�s my target. If I haven�t written enough one day, I try to catch it up the next day and so on ...

(Greg Mankiw gave the same advise).

Tyler Cohen has some suggestions on Speed Reading

Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers. I start ten or so books for every one I finish. I don't mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it. I am ruthless in my discards.

Also this:

Do the most important things first in the day and don't let anybody stop you. Estimate "most important" using a zero discount rate. Don't make exceptions. The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.

(More time management tips here)

The cooling world

2007-01-27T16:19:36Z

Frosty E. Hardison, a 43-year-old computer consultant and an evangelical Christian "believes that a warming planet is 'one of the signs' of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day". And he has managed to put a spanner in the plans for showing 'An inconvenient truth' in her daughter's school.

The local school board is now hunting for a documentary that will give an opposing perspective so that they can have balance.

Raising money for Orphanages

2007-01-23T10:09:35Z

"The novelist Natasha Radojcic, has partnered with writer and publisher Allison Weaver in a project with two purposes: raising money for orphanages and running a literary magazine. For a $5 donation, you can contribute to the cause and--maybe--get published, too.(... accepted manuscripts will be paid a minimum of $200--that�s a pretty decent return on investment.)

You can read the details at Fernham. This looks like a really good cause to support. Do note that I dont know any of the people nvolved.

By the way, happy new year to all my long suffering readers.
I am going to start blogging again from this month.

R K Narayan

2006-12-23T17:04:37Z

I forgot how pleasantly surprised I was to read this review of R K Narayan in The New Yorker until I read Amardeep's post on it.

In outline, �The Dark Room� has similarities to Richard Yates�s first novel, �Revolutionary Road� (1961). Both tell the sadly familiar story of a philandering businessman husband and a miserable homemaker wife. Yates documents the psychological steps�difficult childhood, disappointing adolescence, missteps in adulthood and marriage�that lead the wife, April Wheeler, to end her life. (In Narayan's novel), by contrast ... by novel�s end, Savitri has returned home to her husband, to serve him as before. There, she is no less miserable, no more fulfilled. Nothing changes. For the Western reader accustomed to the psychological novel of action and outcome, such a story can seem oddly unsatisfying. Western novels about women whose lives are denied free exercise of will�Anna Karenina; Emma Bovary; Lily Bart in �The House of Mirth�; Florence Dowell in �The Good Soldier�; Edna Pontellier in �The Awakening��have often charted a progression of cause and effect that makes comprehensible, even inevitable, a woman�s final, metaphorical flight to the river. But in Narayan�s world, while there is the same impulse to slough off one�s bonds, it is always without outlet. Indeed, in Narayan�s early novels .... all try to flee their frustratingly narrow lives by running away from home, but, like pigeons to their coops, they cannot help returning. In their very form, these novels, in which conflict finds neither psychological justification nor narrative resolution, register �Indian problems� with a cartographer�s watchtower remove: Narayan is showing us the shape of a people being strangled by the contour of their land.

On a completely different note, this is the reason I appreciate Kieslowski's ouevre so much. Like many Indians from a certain sociocultural background, Kieslowski seemed very Indian in his pessimistic outlook in life - yet he was deeply humane.

Zoe Heller

2006-12-19T13:27:53Z

Here is a somewhat mischievous interview with Zoe Heller in Morning News:

RB: Both of your children are girls. What are your aspirations for them?

ZH: ..... One of the big arguments I am having with their father is whether I should want them to be, really for lack of a better word, cultured. Should I want to transmit to them the things that are important to me? Like reading, or certain kinds of classy music. All that stuff, right? And he says the thing you want to hope for is that they are not at all intellectual. Because what does intellect give you except unhappiness. Intellectually unhappy. What you want most for them is that they are� ...Happy. And honest and decent .."

Marjane Satrapi

2006-12-14T04:30:44Z

Marjane Satrapi now has a blog.
(via Laila Lalami)

You can find some links about Persepolis here.

Fl�neur

2006-12-10T19:22:33Z

Wikepedia entry:

"Fl�neur" is a French word. A fl�neur is a detached pedestrian observer of a metropolis, a 'gentleman stroller of city streets', first identified by Charles Baudelaire. The word has no exact equivalent in English. The concept of the fl�neur is important in the work of Walter Benjamin, is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity, and has become meaningful in architecture and urban planning.

Around 1850, Baudelaire began asserting that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, in Baudelaire's phrase, 'a botanist of the sidewalk', an analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric. Because he coined the word about Parisians, the 'fl�neur' (the one who strolls) and the 'fl�nerie' (the stroll) are associated with Paris and the kind of pedestrian environment which accommodates leisurely exploration .... Walter Benjamin adopted this concept of the urban observer both as an analytical tool and as a lifestyle. ... His fl�neur is an uninvolved but highly perceptive bourgeois dilettante. Benjamin became his own prime example, gathering his social and aesthetic observations from long walks through Paris. Even the title of his unfinished Arcades Project comes from his affection for covered shopping streets.

But then there is Wiktionary, its sister site, which says its a Dutch word:

flaneur

1. A person who likes to parade about town in order to be seen.
2. (Flemish) A saunterer; a lounger.

The world around us

2006-12-09T22:49:22Z

From the NYT review of The Best Intentions:

This is the hard-core problem of all collective action. Nations act not to do good for others, but to do well for themselves � and no wonder. It is their blood and treasure that must be spent. And when it comes to �peace-keeping� or �peace-enforcement,� the United Nations has yet another problem. All humanitarian tragedies � Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur � are also power struggles between tribes, governments and insurgents. So what are the Blue Helmets supposed to do?

James Campbell of Guardian describes a passage from Philip Gourevitch's book on Rwanda

At one point, the blue-helmeted soldiers began shooting dogs which were roaming the streets and feasting on corpses. Gourevitch writes: "After months during which Rwandans had been left to wonder whether the UN troops knew how to shoot, because they never used their excellent weapons to stop the extermination of civilians, it turned out that the peacekeepers were very good shots ... The UN regarded the corpse-eating dogs as a health problem."