Deep Thoughts

Despite being a bit lonely, I was dynamite this weekend:
  • Poked around a bit with Perl 6 and wrote down some thoughts.
  • Shopped for Mom's birthday.
  • Picked up my newly matted print, and got this cool sharpie drawing down at the Saturday Market.
  • Wrote a simple interpreter in Haskell.
  • Wrote a really bad song. I play bass, organ, and sing. Heaven help us.
  • Started reading No Plot, No Problem and I'm really excited about NaNoWriMo. I'm leaning towards Dinosaur Cowboys, but it's still early to commit to a plot.
  • Checked out a bunch of books about experimental music and they way we think. I'm reading this great collection of interviews with composers called Talking Music.
  • Spent a bunch of time at the coffee shop.

I came across two really interesting ideas today. The first was in the John Cage interview in Talking Music. He writes "Well, I would think quite a lot of people in India feel that music is continuous, it is only we who turn away. This is a cliche in Indian thinking and, surely, in Indian experience."

The other came from an interview with "net artist" Mark Napier that I re-read today. "The symbolic structure of language allows us to navigate in a map of the world rather than the world itself. We can't say what the world 'really' is because we would have to use words to say what it is and then we're back to the mapping and representing of things with symbols. To experience the world 'as it is' requires a direct experience without words. Nobody operates this way once they learn language, unless they engage in meditation, or take the right combination of drugs, or perhaps fall out of a building."

posted on: 09/18/2005 | path: /life