Friday Five: Life is a Verb

At RevGalBlogPals, Jan writes:

Jennifer recommended this book, which I got because I always value Jennifer's reading suggestions. The author of Life is a Verb, Patti Digh worked her book around these topics concerning life as a verb:

Say yes.
Be generous.
Speak up.
Love more.
Trust yourself.
Slow down.

As I read and pondered about living more intentionally, I also have wondered what this Friday Five should be. This book has been the jumping off point for this Friday.

1. What awakens you to the present moment?

Lying in the hammock looking up at the trees, working in the garden, petting the cat, focusing on my breathing, and so much more

2. What are 5 things you see out your window right now?

Hanging baskets of flowers, my car, strawberries and blueberries, roses, the composter

3. Which verbs describe your experience of God?

Embrace, create, laugh, love, play

4. From the book on p. 197: Who were you when you were 13? Where did that kid go?

The 13-year-old loved playing basketball and swimming, enjoyed school but was a bit of a troublemaker, was intrigued by spirituality of all kinds, wanted to live in harmony with God, and had just decided to go into ministry because of the involvement of MLK and his clergy colleagues in civil rights issues. The kid’s still here, though is often forgotten because of all the institutional issues that she never dreamed she would need to deal with. Part of my summer goal is to give up some of the adult that’s gotten in the way and get more of that kid back .

5. From the book on p. 88: If your work were the answer to a question, what would the question be?

How do we make the world a bit more just and kind (because God is reflected in everything/everyone around us)?

Bonus idea for you here or on your own--from the book on p. 149:

"Go outside. Walk slowly forward. Open your hand and let something fall into it from the sky. It might be an idea, it might be an object. Name it. Set it aside. Walk forward. Open your hand and let something fall into it from the sky. Name it. Set it aside. Repeat. . . ."

Buddakan

Friday evening we ate at Buddakan, 16^th St and 9^th Ave, to celebrate Dan’s 25^th birthday.  Dan had asked us to pick some place to eat that he and his friends would remember afterwards.  We’d gone through Zagat’s and come up with a few places but none of them seemed right.  Then Kathy emailed Jon and he suggested Buddakan, an Asian fusion restaurant, saying it was hard to get a reservation for eight that quickly but that he knew the chef and so would see what he could do.  He texted us the night before to say we were set with 7 pm reservat

ions that evening.

            We got to 16^th and 9^th but didn’t see the restaurant. The corner looked like a black box with no windows on it.  Then we noticed the imposing, ornate black doors

 and stepped through into what looked like an elaborate hotel lobby where we “checked in”.  We turned around to find a very noisy, crowded bar with lots of tables, at one of which Jon and his fiancée Ilona were already waiting.  Dan and his friends arrived a few minutes later and we were led down a main set of stairs into an imposing, ornate room

 with the middle of the room set up much like a table d’hote, with people being added to the table as they arrived. Nicely for us, we were led past the very busy main room into the quieter “Golden Library”, where the walls are lined with what look like glowing (law) books and seated at a private table. 

We were told to ignore the menu, that the executive chef, Lon Symensma, would choose what we’d be served. (Symensma had previously worked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and I’d loved eating at both Vong’s and Jean-Georges’ so I figured that boded well for the food—and I was right!.) 

After Dan and his friends ordered fruity cocktails and Jon and Ilona got some saki, the meal began.  First served was yellowtail with a garlic soy sauce (and perhaps some wasabi since Kathy and Ilona found it spicy while Becca, Brandon, and I didn’t).  After that came two kinds of vegetarian dishes—edamame dumplings and then a dumpling that was made to look like little orange carrots.  This was followed by the best shrimp toast I’ve ever had.    But then my favorite part of the meal came out—crispy soft shell crabs with nice fluffly light rolls (though the name doesn’t seem to do them justice) to put them on.  They were delicious.  Becca and Ajuna, both of whom were reluctant to eat them because of the shells, even enjoyed them.  Next was boned Peking duck served with a plum sauce, scallions, cucumbers, and paper thin pancakes to eat it on.  Everyone seemed to love them.   By this time we were beginning to feel full, but the waiter insisted that the chef had a few more things in mind and put down sea bass wrapped in steamed cabbage with ginger and scallion oil—yummy!  Then “soup” was served—a duck and noodle soup.  Then the “entrée” came out—a pork, sausage, and eggplant dish with side dishes of califlower mixed with pork in a chili-garlic sauce and amazing vegetable rice with coconut curry foam.  We were stuffed and couldn’t eat all of it. 

Len Symensma then came out to meet us.    While he chatted with Jon, Becca and Brandon had what struck me as a funny conversation.  Brandon is starting class at the French Culinary Institute soon.  After meeting Symensma, he said that his goal wasn’t to be a chef at a restaurant like Buddakan, but to be a cook for a private family.  Becca announced in response that that was a great idea-- she thought she’d like to have a private cook when she was through college.  Smensma asked whose birthday it was, went over to say happy birthday to Dan, and then left.

And then dessert began with a crying chocolate tart birthday plate brought out for Dan. 

It was beautifully done.  This was followed by seven other desserts, some of which I can’t even remember because after the eleven other courses I was so full.  The ones that stand out were what looked like an elaborate banana s’more (called a chocolate mille-feuille) with banana between pieces of crunchy dark chocolate and served with spiced chocolate ice cream; a coconut crème brulee served with a lemongrass ice cream; a chocolate peanut butter bomb (which seemed to be Ilona’s favorite),  a “slinky” that tasted like toffee or caramel, though I didn’t eat much of it, various fruit sorbets, and tea donuts served with vanilla bean ice cream.

The whole evening was truly memorable, putting Buddakan up above Xavier’s as my favorite dining experience.  Even Becca, who had complained bitterly about having to give up a Friday evening to go, was blown away by the experience and stopped complaining about how late we got back into Dobbs Ferry.  

Socrates Once Again

Next Monday is the first day of my summer session Introduction to Philosophy course.  One of the texts I used for years for that course is Robin Waterfield’s translation of Plato’s The Republic.  I’m not sure that Waterfield’s translation is the best in every way—its “chapter” divisions that differ from the traditional “book” divisions has been a confusing issues for many of my students, for example—but I’ve generally found it a translation that’s easier for my students to use than others that are available.  (I do give students the options of using a different translation if they prefer, though I tell them the positives of using Waterfield.)  Because of this ongoing use of Waterfield’s translation, when a friend gave us a gift certificate for books, I decided to use my share to get Waterfield’s new book Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths so that I could read it before starting the course.

While I can’t say that there’s anything radically new in Why Socrates Died, Waterfield does gather together much of the material found elsewhere in an organized and interesting way.  A lot of the book spends time putting Socrates’ trial in context of what’s been going on in the last third of the 5^th century. (In fact there are whole large sections of this book that don’t focus upon or even mention Socrates.) Waterfield discusses relationships between Athens and Sparta, the Peloponnesian War, the ongoing conflicts between oligarchic and democratic rule, the effects—such as plague, war, and poverty—that brought about social crisis, and the major players who were involved in each of these.   After spelling these issues out in detail, Waterfield explains how they were the driving force behind Socrates’ trial years after Socrates and his teachings were in their heyday.  His answer is in many ways fairly similar to that given by I.F. Stone back in the late 1980s but the context makes Waterfield’s theory of why this is the case clearer for those who don’t know Greek history than Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. It’ll be a good secondary source to which to direct students as they prepare arguments and witnesses for their modern trials of Socrates.

 

 

Angels and Demons

            The Friday it opened I went with some of my friends from Drew to see the film Angels and Demons.  It’s a movie in which I had a lot of interest since I’d used the book as a “text” for several years as part of a unit on science and religion.  I’d had the students sort out truth from fiction in the story and then debunk the parts that weren’t true, discovering what the real truths behind the false facts were.  

            The good news and the bad is that the film has done some real editing and revising of the book.  It escapes what I think is the major flaw of the novel—its going downhill in the last third of the story by getting more and more unbelievable.  In the novel, for example, Brown has Langdon jump out of a helicopter that is very high up in the air without a parachute.  Improbably Langdon manages not just to survive but to land safely and conveniently in a river that allows him to get where he needs to go quickly.  The film eliminates that unbelievable situation with no cost to the basic storyline. Langdon just doesn’t go up in the helicopter at all.  The ending seems a bit more believable because of such editing. (Of course, the whole book is unbelievable because antimatter wouldn’t provide any of the threat that the film suggests it does, but it’s easy to lay that fact aside in order to enjoy the film.) 

Also in the interest of making a better film, a lot of the longer dialogues throughout the book are eliminated.  That includes the dialogues toward the beginning of the book between Vittoria and the priest-scientist  (who is also her father in the novel) who dies early on in the story and some of the dialogues between Vittoria and Langdon. Most of these dialogues are focused on the positive relationships that Vittoria sees existing between science and religion along with explanations of the ways in which the interweaving of the two have deepened and enriched her life.  While the dialogues wouldn’t work well in an action film—they’d cause long “talking heads” scenes—they’re part of what I found that made the book rewarding for my students.  Without them, the only relationship between religion and science that comes through in the film is negative one between Galileo and his colleagues and the Catholic Church.  While my students quickly learned that—as Margaret Wertheim points out so clearly in her book Pythangoras’ Trousers—this understanding of what happened at the Galileo trial is one that was created in the 19^th century but didn’t exist at the time of Galileo himself or for several hundred years afterwards.

The end result of all this editing is that the film makes for a better story than the book does.  And for those of us who have been to Rome, it's also fun to revisit the various places as the actors race around Rome going from one Bernini work to another. But the film wouldn’t work as well for an interesting exploration of attitudes to religion and science over the centuries.  For that, we’ll have to stay with the book instead.

Next to Normal

Sunday evening we went with a group of friends from out of town to see the play Next to Normal that’s currently at the Booth Theater and is one of the nominations for Best Musical of 2009. The play is by no means your typical musical but, or perhaps because of that, I think it deserves the award.  The basic story and song lines revolve around Diana, a bipolar mother who lives with the memory of her son who died as an infant, and the cost of her illness and grief in the lives of her husband, her daughter, and herself.    As Diana goes to therapists, flushes the prescribed meds down the toilet, tries to kill herself, and undergoes electroconvulsive therapy, Alice Ripley manages to take not just her family but also the audience on an emotional roller coaster ride. Aaron Tveit as the ghost son brings a huge amount of energy to a role that I would have thought would come across as unbelievable but, with his alternating sweet and evil character, works well.  Some of the lines in the dialogue are too mundane, rattled off like platitudes, and the ending is—at least to me—anything but satisfactory-- but songs like “I Miss the Mountains” and “I Am the One” more than make up for that, capturing the pain being felt, the damage being done, and the issues of freedom and duty the family struggles with.

The staging of the play is amazing.  The set is the outline of a house with walls that slide and flip and light up to change settings and moods.  And the music –which goes through a range from classical to country western to baby room’s music box—also helps capture the mood swings that the family –and the audience with it—goes through.  Despite the attempt to wrap up the issue at the end in an neater package than the issue allows, the play allows the audience to walk away with many of the confused feelings that everyone coming into contact with Diana experience.

 

D.Min. Graduation from Drew -May 17, 2009

How the World is Changing

There were a lot of nonmemorable college graduation speeches made this weekend

(including one I had to sit through at Drew University), but this speech by Eric Schmidt

(CEO of Google) is worth listening to. Schmidt does a great job of describing how the 

world has changed from the time when Boomers were in college to the current world of 

graduating Millenials/NetGeners and where it might go in the future. (Skip the first 2:45

minutes when Schmidt just praises Carnegie Mellon.)