In Pursuit of Mysteries

Books Make Odd Bedfellows

I generally read several books at once. Usually this is a work of fiction (or two) and then a non-fiction work such as a history text or a Buddhist work. Recently, with the time on my hands from the holidays and not feeling well, I’ve been attempting to finally finish The Baroque Cycle of Neal Stephenson (or “Mount Stephenson” as friends and I have called it before). It is the only thing of his that I’ve never finished though I’ve read and re-read the first half of it a couple of times. (This is actually not unprecedented as I must admit that I’ve never managed to finish The Two Towers or even start The Return of the King.)

The other book that I’ve been reading during the last few days is What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. The latter is (obviously) about the intersection of the sixties and the beginnings of the later PC revolution in computers. It is not a topic that I knew much about though I’ve known a bit of the general history from working in the industry all these years. The number of computer engineers influenced by and involved in the counterculture and the way it shaped their work is rather new to me, though I’ve read at least one of the popular essays on the topic in years past (such as Stewart Brand’s We owe it all to the Hippies).

The weird thing is the interaction between the two books in my own head. The Baroque Cycle deals with the underpinnings of the Enlightenment and, eventually, modernity in the creation of things like economics and the underpinnings of commerce with paper money, banks, credit, etc. Many of its characters are natural philosophers, like Isaac Newton. As an entertaining series of books, there is much strangeness and adventure. This winds up contrasted, as I switch books during the day, with various once-straightlaced engineers dropping acid and looking at the (then) giant computers as having the potential to augment the human mind and the eventual creation of the information age. It makes for an interesting contrast during reading. It’s geeks, geeks, geeks all the way down in both the fiction and the non-fiction.

I’m trying to think of what non-fiction book I should continue with after finishing Markoff’s book as I’m mostly through with it. I have at least another 1,000 pages of Stephenson’s trilogy to read so I will need a counterbalance. I simply cannot spend an entire day reading Stephenson without needing to break it up with something else.

I do recommend What the Dormouse Said if you have any interest in the antecedents of personal computing and the culture that gave rise to it. Stephenson, I generally recommend as well, but this trilogy is noted for being rather heavy going, even if it is rewarding to read.

Learning Japanese

As part of my ongoing Academic work, I need to know Japanese. This is especially true if I am accepted into the doctoral program at the Graduate Theological Union. Since there is a while until this program starts, I’ve been working on self-study of Japanese. It is definitely slow going to self-study a language and I’m going to have to take some classes during this next year to accompany it. The time involved in learning a language is a bit daunting. It takes a regular commitment to it and then you have to find a way to use it.

I’ve never had great fortune with languages but I’ve never received the impression that I’m overly challenged by them (it isn’t like a deficiency in ability as much as time and motivation). Like almost all Americans, I have had little need to learn a language other than English and limited opportunity to use one if I did learn another language. While many languages are spoken because of the immigrant nature of the American population, as someone who is not a member of a recent immigrant community, the only languages that I hear day-to-day are English and Spanish.

For the self-study of Japanese, I’ve been using some books but also trying to find podcasts and other audio resources (like JapanesePod101) to help. Of course, I have a fine selection of Japanese language films. I’m sure that there are resources out there that are unknown to me.

I know that some of my friends who read this (here or in the places where I mirror my blog) have studied Japanese, both formally and through self-study. Others have done the same with additional languages, I am sure. I’d love to hear about strategies or resources that have worked well for people, especially for Asian languages.

R and I do have a good friend with a Japanese degree who lives locally and I have thought about getting him to tutor me once a week. I’m sure it would make a big difference and it is the kind of thing that I’m happy to pay someone to do. I’m not convinced that most of the classes available to me would actually be more effective than that.

My eventual need, more than conversational Japanese, is the ability to read Japanese texts, specifically ritual texts within Tendai and Shingon Buddhism. These will be in modern Japanese, not the Sino-rific Classical, luckily. Given the variety of writing methods and traditions in Japan, this is a pretty fair challenge in and of itself. The ability to understand and speak is pretty much a bonus on top of my reading requirements.

iBreviary?

I found this article in the San Francisco paper today. Apparently, the Vatican has officially endorsed an iPhone application, “iBreviary,” for Catholics. The article states:

The application includes the Breviary prayer book — in Italian, English, Spanish, French and Latin and, in the near future, Portuguese and German. Another section includes the prayers of the daily Mass, and a third contains various other prayers.

[...]

Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Social Communications, praised the new application Monday, saying the Church “is learning to use the new technologies primarily as a tool or as a mean of evangelizing, as a way of being able to share its own message with the world.”

As hardcore as the Catholic Church is about its traditional ways of doing things, this is surprising to me. Recently, the pope has publicly condemned various aspects of the Internet and online culture. I guess it isn’t all bad from their point of view but I wouldn’t have expected the official endorsement of an application of this sort.

I’ve actually been using an iPhone application, SotoTimer as a meditation clock recently. My time sense isn’t the best when meditating, which I do largely alone, so I like to have a clock on a timer. I don’t want to see it running (so it doesn’t distract me) so I like to have it out of the way. My iPhone is a pretty good solution for this as I can just set it down when I come in and ignore it. SotoTimer has a nice quiet set of chimes which allows you to differentiate sitting and walking meditation and you can set it to just vibrate (which is easy to hear in a quiet room). It is available here.

It would be nice to have a good application for displaying the various daily practices, which include the chanting of different sutras, as well. That would be an analogue to the iBreviary application of the Catholics above. Currently, I use a book with color coded bookmarks to flip back and forth between sections. I’m not sure if using an iPhone or an iPod Touch would be more distracting or less (leaving aside the fact that I need to turn off its ability to receive phone calls at such times).