This Feministing post talks about how 70% of American women think wives should take their husbands' names and 50% think it should be a legal obligation. I was surprised to read that the law has intervened in cases where the husband wanted to take the wife's last name, where the parents wanted to give their child the mother's last name, and even where the parents wanted the child to have a hyphenated last name.
While I'm not sure I trust these numbers, I have been surprised how the people I went to school with who get married take their husband's last name. My one friend explained to me that she thought it was a nice way to express her love. I'm not sure how I feel about this--it would be if she told me she thought staying home with the kids would be a nice way to express her love. While it is nice that she loves her spouse so much, I would hope that she considers more than just her desire to please him when making such a decision. Especially since changing one's name often has more permanent effects than exiting the workforce for one to n years, it is a pretty big sacrifice to take someone else's last name.
Maybe in second grade I thought for two minutes it might be cool to be Mrs. So-and-So, but the idea of changing my name doesn't make too much sense to me anymore. Also, while I see how deciding on a single name (rather than a hyphenated name) for the children in a family might make their lives easier, in this day and age the choice of propagating the man's name seems fairly arbitrary.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Friday, August 07, 2009
Analyzing data is the new cool thing
According to this NY Times article, studying statistics/social sciences is the new cool thing because of the explosion of data that has come from all of the things going on on the internet. Apparently Google has been hiring people with social sciences backgrounds to try to make sense of all of their data. It's cool that the people with the money now have (what I would say is) more direct motivation to pay people to have at it with data*. This almost makes me regret not doing something cooler with my life, like studying anthropology.
* Analyzing data has always been cool to physical and social scientists, but there hasn't always been a lot of money there.
* Analyzing data has always been cool to physical and social scientists, but there hasn't always been a lot of money there.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Cooler temperatures more conducive to sleep
An article backing up the claim I often make about cooler temperatures being better for sleep.
I love my feet
I was amused to find a New York Times article about how most people don't take sufficiently good care of their feet and are embarrassed about it. Though I used to wash my feet every night, I can't say I'm among the responsible few who moisturize my feet every day. Maybe it's because I'm a runner*, but despite my general negligence I actively love my feet.
* According to the article, runners and other athletes are more likely to love their misshapen feet.
* According to the article, runners and other athletes are more likely to love their misshapen feet.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Language may shape thoughts
Sharon Begley has this nice Newsweek article about Stanford professor Lera Boroditsky's research on how language might shape thoughts. Some examples: the gender of nouns in different languages seem to affect perceptions of the entity associated with the noun; people have a better memory for colors if there are distinct names for different shades; speakers of a language with different words for two concepts often have an easier time distinguishing between them.
From a previous blog post, you might have seen that I am very interested in this sort of thing but don't have much background.
Also, I love Sharon Begley.
From a previous blog post, you might have seen that I am very interested in this sort of thing but don't have much background.
Also, I love Sharon Begley.
Fair sentencing for crack and cocaine
I'm a little late in posting this, but I was reading a back issue of Newsweek and found this nice article I agree with about disparate sentencing of crack vs. power cocaine*.
Brief summary: The problem has been that crack cocaine dealers receive disproportionately long sentences compared to dealers of power cocaine. According to the article, "If federal prosecutors convicted you of peddling five grams of crack, you got the same five-year minimum sentence as someone dealing 500 grams of powder." This differential sentencing has hit black communities particularly hard because they tend to use crack more than cocaine. Cose urges the administration to change this "dimwitted" policy and focus on more real drug problems, such as abuse of opioid painkillers.
* This is a subject about which I have occasional and only moderately well-informed but strong opinions.
Brief summary: The problem has been that crack cocaine dealers receive disproportionately long sentences compared to dealers of power cocaine. According to the article, "If federal prosecutors convicted you of peddling five grams of crack, you got the same five-year minimum sentence as someone dealing 500 grams of powder." This differential sentencing has hit black communities particularly hard because they tend to use crack more than cocaine. Cose urges the administration to change this "dimwitted" policy and focus on more real drug problems, such as abuse of opioid painkillers.
* This is a subject about which I have occasional and only moderately well-informed but strong opinions.
Relationships are bad for health
Here is a New York Times article I could cutely use to support my view that relationships are harmful to one's health. The article, titled Divorce, It Seems, Can Make You Ill, discusses a study that shows people who have been divorced or widowed have poorer health, which the study measures by looking at rates of chronic health problems. Unfortunately, this article is sensationalist and good for nothing more than generating conversation. One of the only reasons I mention it is because it fits in with my general view that relationships can cause particularly traumatic experiences.
The article does a lot of scientific wishful thinking about why it is that divorced or widowed people might have more chronic health problems: well, having a spouse is good for you because they can take you to the doctor, but the end of a relationship is usually traumatic, so perhaps this is why you never recover. The article cites a couple of other studies: one that shows people taking care of loved ones with Alzheimer's experience telomere shortening, and one where married couples' physical wounds take longer to heal after conjugal discord. While this information is all interesting and good, it seems rather narrow-minded to focus just on relationships: divorce, death of a spouse, and fighting with a spouse don't seem to be on a different level than other traumatic life events such as losing one's job, losing one's home, or fighting with a peer. A logical set of other studies to mention are the ones showing positive correlations between traumatic life events and/or depression and chronic illness. From those studies we might conclude that the results of this study are either obvious or confirm the hypothesis that relationships tend matter enough to have the potential to affect one's stress levels.
Anyway, the fact that I wrote a whole blog post on this shows that even when articles about studies are not that useful for furthering scientific knowledge, they are useful for generating (perhaps useless) conversation*.
* Although it is important to recognize the flaws of such articles!
The article does a lot of scientific wishful thinking about why it is that divorced or widowed people might have more chronic health problems: well, having a spouse is good for you because they can take you to the doctor, but the end of a relationship is usually traumatic, so perhaps this is why you never recover. The article cites a couple of other studies: one that shows people taking care of loved ones with Alzheimer's experience telomere shortening, and one where married couples' physical wounds take longer to heal after conjugal discord. While this information is all interesting and good, it seems rather narrow-minded to focus just on relationships: divorce, death of a spouse, and fighting with a spouse don't seem to be on a different level than other traumatic life events such as losing one's job, losing one's home, or fighting with a peer. A logical set of other studies to mention are the ones showing positive correlations between traumatic life events and/or depression and chronic illness. From those studies we might conclude that the results of this study are either obvious or confirm the hypothesis that relationships tend matter enough to have the potential to affect one's stress levels.
Anyway, the fact that I wrote a whole blog post on this shows that even when articles about studies are not that useful for furthering scientific knowledge, they are useful for generating (perhaps useless) conversation*.
* Although it is important to recognize the flaws of such articles!
Monday, July 27, 2009
Merits of young coconuts
I have recently discovered the amazing joy of eating young coconuts. You can buy them at grocery stores (as un-fancy as the Redmond Safeway) and you can eat them by hacking off the top, drinking the coconut juice, and scraping the insides to get at the coconut jelly. Coconut juice is supposed to be an amazing post-workout beverage because of its electrolytes. It is also supposedly very nutritious: full of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, so it can't hurt to drink it in general either. Since first discovering the joys of eating young coconuts last Saturday, I have had a total of 4. ;) This must be love.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
MTV's 16 and Pregnant
There has been some hype about MTV's 16 and Pregnant, a reality show featuring 1-episode stories about pregnant teenagers from across America. They show clips from the teens' lives from the early stages of pregnancy to a couple of months post-birth.
I watched this show out of curiosity and because I wanted to make sure that it wasn't making pregnancy seem too cool*; I was satisfied to find the show to be interesting, somewhat realistic about the difficult aspects of teenage pregnancy, and not disgustingly voyeuristic**. I watched one episode: one about Farrah, a cheerleader estranged from her baby's father and one about Amber, a girl who moves in with her 3-years-senior boyfriend after discovering she is pregnant. Both girls commit to raising their babies; while this is not a choice I would make, perhaps especially because this is not a choice I would make, I found it interesting to see the preliminary execution of these decisions. The show satisfies my curiosity by seeming to do a pretty good job of conveying a (sensationalized, MTV-ized) sense of what it may be like to be 16 and pregnant.
Of course, 16 and Pregnant has the expected cringe-worthiness in that the footage is extremely edited to convey what MTV wants to convey. An example is that they portrayed Farrah's mother as "controlling" and "hot-tempered" for telling Farrah to get her life in order and for fighting with her about wanting a car while she could barely afford the baby. I had found her to be surprisingly supportive of her daughter's decision to keep a baby, especially one fathered by a boy whom Farrah found too immature to even inform of the baby's existence. I also found it amusing that she was fully made up for the delivery even though her water broke at 2 am. :o Despite this, it is still interesting to dig through the layers and imagine what these teens' lives might actually be like. As someone who went to a small all-girls school where I didn't know any pregnant teens and had a deep fear of teen pregnancy, sex, pregnancy, and the opposite sex instilled by even more fearful parents***, I find teenage parents' lives fascinating.
One interesting question is how much being on this reality show affects the lives of these teen parents. From the shows I watched it seemed like the girls, their families, and other people in their lives were trying hard to keep it together and be supportive; no doubt being on TV had something to do with that. Perhaps this helped set a more solid foundation for something with an otherwise tumultuous beginning.
Given that this is a reality TV show about pregnant teenagers and that it's on MTV, it is much less terrible than I initially anticipated. They have some of the episodes online, so if you find yourself in the same situation of wanting to watch something while ironing clothes, I would recommend checking this out.
* It seems that Angelina Jolie has made pregnancy cool. When I used to read trashy magazines in the gym, they would have at least one spread of pregnant celebrities. Teenage girls seem to think it's cool to be pregnant--in the extreme case there was that girl on Maury and there was the pregnancy pact.
** My threshold for what is acceptible is probably way too high, thanks to reality TV pollution of ambient voyeurism.
*** I used to wake up with nightmares about being pregnant or about knowing pregnant people even though I rarely even saw, let alone interacted with, non-faculty, non-family member males.
I watched this show out of curiosity and because I wanted to make sure that it wasn't making pregnancy seem too cool*; I was satisfied to find the show to be interesting, somewhat realistic about the difficult aspects of teenage pregnancy, and not disgustingly voyeuristic**. I watched one episode: one about Farrah, a cheerleader estranged from her baby's father and one about Amber, a girl who moves in with her 3-years-senior boyfriend after discovering she is pregnant. Both girls commit to raising their babies; while this is not a choice I would make, perhaps especially because this is not a choice I would make, I found it interesting to see the preliminary execution of these decisions. The show satisfies my curiosity by seeming to do a pretty good job of conveying a (sensationalized, MTV-ized) sense of what it may be like to be 16 and pregnant.
Of course, 16 and Pregnant has the expected cringe-worthiness in that the footage is extremely edited to convey what MTV wants to convey. An example is that they portrayed Farrah's mother as "controlling" and "hot-tempered" for telling Farrah to get her life in order and for fighting with her about wanting a car while she could barely afford the baby. I had found her to be surprisingly supportive of her daughter's decision to keep a baby, especially one fathered by a boy whom Farrah found too immature to even inform of the baby's existence. I also found it amusing that she was fully made up for the delivery even though her water broke at 2 am. :o Despite this, it is still interesting to dig through the layers and imagine what these teens' lives might actually be like. As someone who went to a small all-girls school where I didn't know any pregnant teens and had a deep fear of teen pregnancy, sex, pregnancy, and the opposite sex instilled by even more fearful parents***, I find teenage parents' lives fascinating.
One interesting question is how much being on this reality show affects the lives of these teen parents. From the shows I watched it seemed like the girls, their families, and other people in their lives were trying hard to keep it together and be supportive; no doubt being on TV had something to do with that. Perhaps this helped set a more solid foundation for something with an otherwise tumultuous beginning.
Given that this is a reality TV show about pregnant teenagers and that it's on MTV, it is much less terrible than I initially anticipated. They have some of the episodes online, so if you find yourself in the same situation of wanting to watch something while ironing clothes, I would recommend checking this out.
* It seems that Angelina Jolie has made pregnancy cool. When I used to read trashy magazines in the gym, they would have at least one spread of pregnant celebrities. Teenage girls seem to think it's cool to be pregnant--in the extreme case there was that girl on Maury and there was the pregnancy pact.
** My threshold for what is acceptible is probably way too high, thanks to reality TV pollution of ambient voyeurism.
*** I used to wake up with nightmares about being pregnant or about knowing pregnant people even though I rarely even saw, let alone interacted with, non-faculty, non-family member males.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Dangers of the cloud
Courtesy of Joe: a New York Times article on the downsides of cloud computing in terms of privacy etc. While I am more enthusiastic about the cloud than Joe is, I think it's important to consider these issues.
Top ten from college
I figured I now have sufficient distance to write about college with some perspective and sufficient distance that I should write thing down before I forget. Below I list a heterogeneous collection:
* Yao Yu, the most fun CS partner I've ever had. She was taking operating systems, programming languages, AI, and another class at the same time while being a teaching fellow for algorithms, so she slept very little. Despite this we had a lot of fun staying up until the milk trucks came out (approx. 4 am), spending some of this time watching videos of Yevgeny Pleshenko skating and Yevgeny Kissin playing Rachmaninoff. (Love Russians; love Yevgeny's.)
** Boloco is an "inspired burrito" place. Without exception I would order a chicken teriyaki burrito, light on the teriyaki sauce, with hot sauce. On days I was feeling particularly good I would also get a mango smoothie. That was the life.
- Third Eye Blind at Yardfest ('07): singing along to every song with Dara Blume and others! There was Boloco and some substances involved. (Was this when they first released Motorcycle Driveby?) A close second is Ben Folds at Yardfest ('06).
- Senior week: everyone's existential angst manifested itself into fervent desire to drink and be merry. Six flags, senior soiree, last chance dance, and the booze cruise were all great times.
- Senior spring in general: all of my roommates were done with our extracurriculars and we spent a lot of time bumming around the room together, talking about everything, asking if we can still order late-night takeout from the Hong Kong and eat on the floor when we're 40 (or maybe that was just me). We also had the massive ambulatory parties that migrated from restaurant to cafe to bar, sometimes stopping by Berry Line along the way (or again, maybe that was just me).
- Not sleeping very much junior spring. There was a combination of taking Principles of Programming Languages (thank you, Norman Ramsey!), working with Yao*, and being a teaching fellow for intro CS that led to little sleep and much fun. There was a lot of CS, a lot of Yao, and a lot of Boloco**.
- Freshman week: wandering around meeting people; wandering around being lost; wandering around looking for parties in the quad. What fun!
- Interning at Google Santa Monica, summer 2007. There was a lot of beach, a lot of food, and a lot of reading. (Also a lot of playing with cool Google infrastructure, but my lips are sealed!) This is when I became a foodie and a beach lover. Also when I developed an admiration for and fear of the social power of C++.
- Foreign Cultures 48: The Cultural Revolution with Roderick MacFarquhar. What a class (what a core!); what a man. Professor MacFarquhar was possibly the best lecturer I've ever had: he is this awesome ex-Parliament member who had been a journalist in China during the Cultural Revolution. I fell asleep in this class once per class but I absorbed all the material anyway. A great part was trading my semester's notes for sushi with a friend, only to have the friend discover that my notes were dominated by ellipses from where I fell asleep. :)
- Robocup World Cup '06 in Bremen, Germany. This is when I fell in love with the German food lifestyle: grease and beer, mmm. It was also a fun trip with Kristina, Jie, Andrew, Geneva, et. al.
- PRISE in Boston, summer 2006. This is when I first started appreciating Boston; it's also when I first started running a lot. <3
- Annenberg, our Harry Potter dining hall where all freshmen eat and where visitors are forbidden to enter. Dinner at 6 was such a fixture in my life that I refused to schedule anything else around it; so many of my friendships started with meals there. There was also a while freshman year when I made my friends sit on one side of the table facing the door so we could people-watch, since it was the last time we could potentially see everyone in our class in one place. :)
* Yao Yu, the most fun CS partner I've ever had. She was taking operating systems, programming languages, AI, and another class at the same time while being a teaching fellow for algorithms, so she slept very little. Despite this we had a lot of fun staying up until the milk trucks came out (approx. 4 am), spending some of this time watching videos of Yevgeny Pleshenko skating and Yevgeny Kissin playing Rachmaninoff. (Love Russians; love Yevgeny's.)
** Boloco is an "inspired burrito" place. Without exception I would order a chicken teriyaki burrito, light on the teriyaki sauce, with hot sauce. On days I was feeling particularly good I would also get a mango smoothie. That was the life.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
On biking
I got a bike shortly after coming to Seattle and have been figuring out the deal about biking around. I've been biking to work and to the store; yesterday I took my first long bike ride on some trails (maybe about 22 miles; it took me an embarrassing 2+ hours)*.
After some thinking, some observation, and some more thinking I realized I am a public menace. First of all, I go on the sidewalk a lot, which is apparently illegal in most cities. :( Secondly, when I go in bike lanes sometimes I go opposing traffic, which is also a terrible thing.
Since I had started doing both of these things after watching other people, I wanted to share this in case you are also a public menace. :o
* I have two questions: 1) how do you prevent the seat from being extremely painful? 2) how do you deal with being hunched over for so long?
After some thinking, some observation, and some more thinking I realized I am a public menace. First of all, I go on the sidewalk a lot, which is apparently illegal in most cities. :( Secondly, when I go in bike lanes sometimes I go opposing traffic, which is also a terrible thing.
Since I had started doing both of these things after watching other people, I wanted to share this in case you are also a public menace. :o
* I have two questions: 1) how do you prevent the seat from being extremely painful? 2) how do you deal with being hunched over for so long?
The food situation in Seattle
I haven't yet extensively explored the Seattle food situation, but a cursory investigation reveals that it is pretty good. In particular, the quality of the "bar food" and the diversity of their menus has been impressive. Some places I've been:
This past weekend I attended Bite of Seattle, an annual food festival where local restaurants have booths. There was a really cool alley where you paid $10 and got to try samples from 7 different fairly nice restaurants (Salty's, Cellars, etc.); I am glad I saved room for that but the samples were not big enough to determine whether the restaurant was actually good. I also got to eat a coconut, which was really great.
- Barolo - a nice place to get a drink and eat some really good food. (Check out the menu on the site!) They supposedly have multiple happy hours where things are half-priced; when I took advantage of this it was pretty great.
- Feierabend - a great German restaurant. You know how I'm a sucker for a nice German meal with beer. (Unfortunately I no longer eat red meat, so the German food experience is significantly less enjoyable.)
- Table 219 - a great, well-priced place to eat and people-watch. I had a really good special: red snapper over cucumber salad with some sort of curry.
- Elysian Brewery - a nice place to get a beer with some good (healthy!) bar food. I had a great mushroom reuben sandwich with a good chicken lemon grass soup; my friend had a great tofu salad on soba noodles.
- Random Asian in Redmond - there are a lot of pho places and random Japanese/Korean places are here. I've been to a couple and they are pretty good.
This past weekend I attended Bite of Seattle, an annual food festival where local restaurants have booths. There was a really cool alley where you paid $10 and got to try samples from 7 different fairly nice restaurants (Salty's, Cellars, etc.); I am glad I saved room for that but the samples were not big enough to determine whether the restaurant was actually good. I also got to eat a coconut, which was really great.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Impressions of Seattle
Seattle has been really cool so far*: there is a lot of water and it is surrounded by "big" nature. (On clear days you can see Mt. Rainier in the distance, a pink cartoon mountain stencil in the sky.)
Here are some things I've done up to now**:
* I have been here for 3 weeks now.
** I owe most of these plans to one Ms. Jennifer Nan. <3 span="span">
Here are some things I've done up to now**:
- Go to Bollywood night at the Baltic Room, which is happening every 2 weeks this summer.
- Get a bike. :)
- Go to the Pride Parade.
- Help set a world record: most zombies in one place at one time!
- Watch the 4th of July fireworks from Bainbridge Island from a sailboat sailing from Shilshole.
- Attend an amazing Decemberists concert at a local park.
- People-watch on Capitol Hill.
- Go to the Space Needle.
* I have been here for 3 weeks now.
** I owe most of these plans to one Ms. Jennifer Nan. <3 span="span">
Dublin in a nutshell
I was in Dublin a couple of weeks ago for PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation conference); what I saw of the city was the important landmarks (that you can get in any guidebook) between Trinity College and the Guiness brewery*. These are about a couple of miles apart, so it is a good day's walk to walk around Dublin between those parts. In between you'll pass by a bunch of churches, Grafton Street (the commerical district), some museums**, and some parks. Further out is the jail; I have heard it is cool and has lots of historical value. If I had more time I would have liked to see that.
I also got to experience Dublin pubs, which I discovered close fairly early (11 or 12) on weeknights. Late drinking supposedly occurs mostly in the Temple Bar, a neighborhood of bars.
It was cool to see the Dublin of James Joyce; it was also cool to discover that James Joyce is all over Dublin.
* This is actually a cool place; at the top you get a good view of the city, labelled (on the windows) with quotes from Joyce relevant to the landmarks (and generally relevant). The Guiness in Dublin is supposedly the best you'll ever have; I'd believe it.
** You see more museums if you take a somewhat meandering route that involves some looping.
I also got to experience Dublin pubs, which I discovered close fairly early (11 or 12) on weeknights. Late drinking supposedly occurs mostly in the Temple Bar, a neighborhood of bars.
It was cool to see the Dublin of James Joyce; it was also cool to discover that James Joyce is all over Dublin.
* This is actually a cool place; at the top you get a good view of the city, labelled (on the windows) with quotes from Joyce relevant to the landmarks (and generally relevant). The Guiness in Dublin is supposedly the best you'll ever have; I'd believe it.
** You see more museums if you take a somewhat meandering route that involves some looping.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Children (Voluntarily) Without Clothes
A cute New York Times article about when it is appropriate to allow kids to run around without clothes. While I think nudity should be more desexualized than it is in our society, it is currently the case that nudity is closely related to sexuality. Allowing children to run around naked could help desexualize nudity, but it could also leave the children confused and frustrated when they become too old and have to start wearing clothes. As someone who wasn't allowed to leave her room until fully dressed (and sometimes with 5+ layers!), I would have certainly appreciated more time to run around with fewer clothes.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Evolutionary psych: take with a grain of salt
Newsweek's Sharon Begley has this very nice article* about why one should be wary of results evolutionary psychology. The reasons Begley gives for this are 1) the assumptions made by many evolutionary psych results are shaky, but people don't often question them because they believe/want to believe them and 2) the claims made by evolutionary psychologists are often untestable and have been proven false by examining people living primitively today. (She gives great examples, debunking the myth about men liking women with 0.7 waist/hip ratios and others; see the article.)
As someone who had recently gotten into what Begley calls "Pleistocene just-so stories" that people like to believe because they are interesting and sexy, I learned to be more wary of the premises of such "results." As evolutionary psychologists are model builders, it is important to recognize that these are models whose assumptions should be rigorously questioned.
* It is surprisingly insightful and nice for something as mainstream as Newsweek. It was so good I considered writing to her; I also considered jumping up and down.
** I found Miller's The Mating Mind a fun read.
As someone who had recently gotten into what Begley calls "Pleistocene just-so stories" that people like to believe because they are interesting and sexy, I learned to be more wary of the premises of such "results." As evolutionary psychologists are model builders, it is important to recognize that these are models whose assumptions should be rigorously questioned.
* It is surprisingly insightful and nice for something as mainstream as Newsweek. It was so good I considered writing to her; I also considered jumping up and down.
** I found Miller's The Mating Mind a fun read.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Reading recommendations: Chinese people
All of these books are great reads. :)
Cultural Revolution:
Cultural Revolution:
- Wild Swans (Jung Chang) - an autobiographical family history of three generations of women, the first of whom was married to a warlord (I think) and the last of whom grew up as the daughter of somewhat powerful officials during the Cultural Revolution. Grounds a lot of the context one learns about Chinese history surrounding the Cultural Revolution.
- Red Scarf Girl (Ji-Li Jiang) - an autobiographical story of a girl who was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution and had to participate in in Red Guard. I read this when I was around the age of the narrator (12) and it put a lot things into perspective.
- Mao's Last Revolution (Roderick MacFarquhar) - I have not read this whole book but I took a course from Roderick MacFarquhar, who was an amazing lecturer (and amazing person!). (This is the best course I have ever taken--the lectures and readings were unparalleled.) After becoming a reporter in order to go into government, he ended up in China during the Cultural Revolution and became a major Chinese history scholar. I admire how he has tried to get a good picture from all sides with respect to the cultural Revolution and he is able to convey this information in an interesting and clear way. (He was later a member of British Parliament.)
- Tea that Burns (Bruce Hall) - the fourth-generation Chinese American author traces his family's history in context of Chinese immigration to Chinatowns in the 19th century. A great way to learn about the history of Chinese-American immigration.
- Bound Feet and Western Dress (Pang-Mei Natasha Chang) - the American-born, Harvard-educated author writes a dual memoir about her great-aunt Chang Yu-I, a member of an important Chinese family, and her own struggles with discovering her identity as a Chinese American woman. The book talks a lot about Chang Yu-I's struggle to establish a place for herself as a Chinese woman in a changing world: she did not have her feet bound because she cried too much and her brother dissuaded her mother from continuing; she was part of the first modern divorce in China; she became the first woman vice president of a Shanghai bank. This book resonated with my own struggle to resolve my desire to preserve tradition with the fact that many traditional Chinese values devalue women.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Reading recommendation: Nabokov
This is the first post in my series of themed reading recommendations.
The topic of the day is Vladimir Nabokov, who, according to John Updike, "writes prose the way it should be written... ecstatically." I am currently reading Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, a tale of an incestuous pair of siblings, and it is one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had. While Nabokov's stories often feature strange fetishes (and always feature butterflies), the fetish he satisfies most is the one for words. Ada is clever, brilliant, and exhilerating. Nabokov writes of Ada and Van, lovers born to Marina, sister of Aqua:
Their immoderate exploitation of physical joy amounted to madness and would have curtailed their young lives had not summer, which had appeared in prospect as a boundless flow of green glory and freedom, begun to hint hazily at possible failings and fadings, at the fatigue of its fugue—the last resort of nature, felicitous alliterations (when flowers and flies mime one another), the coming of a first pause in late August, a first silence in early September.
If you are getting started with Nabokov I would recommend Lolita: it is his greatest work I've read thus far, for its use of language and the use of the unreliable narrator. Pale Fire is also a favorite; it is more funny than Lolita (and more clever) but less beautiful. My friend David likes his memoir Speak, Memory; I enjoyed it less than his other works for the same reason David likes it: it is Nabokov being a "real person" (and revealing more of a love for words--the original title was Speak, Mnemosyne.) All of these were originally written in English.
Nabokov was also quite prolific in writing novels in Russian; he translated all of them to English himself. I have not read many of these, but one I enjoyed was Laughter in the Dark. The opening passage captivated me:
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.
My friend Luke's favorite is Invitation to a Beheading, about a man sentenced to death for "gnostical turpitude."
The topic of the day is Vladimir Nabokov, who, according to John Updike, "writes prose the way it should be written... ecstatically." I am currently reading Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, a tale of an incestuous pair of siblings, and it is one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had. While Nabokov's stories often feature strange fetishes (and always feature butterflies), the fetish he satisfies most is the one for words. Ada is clever, brilliant, and exhilerating. Nabokov writes of Ada and Van, lovers born to Marina, sister of Aqua:
Their immoderate exploitation of physical joy amounted to madness and would have curtailed their young lives had not summer, which had appeared in prospect as a boundless flow of green glory and freedom, begun to hint hazily at possible failings and fadings, at the fatigue of its fugue—the last resort of nature, felicitous alliterations (when flowers and flies mime one another), the coming of a first pause in late August, a first silence in early September.
If you are getting started with Nabokov I would recommend Lolita: it is his greatest work I've read thus far, for its use of language and the use of the unreliable narrator. Pale Fire is also a favorite; it is more funny than Lolita (and more clever) but less beautiful. My friend David likes his memoir Speak, Memory; I enjoyed it less than his other works for the same reason David likes it: it is Nabokov being a "real person" (and revealing more of a love for words--the original title was Speak, Mnemosyne.) All of these were originally written in English.
Nabokov was also quite prolific in writing novels in Russian; he translated all of them to English himself. I have not read many of these, but one I enjoyed was Laughter in the Dark. The opening passage captivated me:
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.
My friend Luke's favorite is Invitation to a Beheading, about a man sentenced to death for "gnostical turpitude."
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