Last month, feeling crushed by the political debacle of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, Lona and I went to the opening of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, the first performance of the 2018 – 2019 season at the Kennedy Center. I was looking forward to a special evening at an opera I love. Once [...]
2018 Frankfurt Book Fair Last week I was bedazzled by the masses of people and hundreds of thousands of books at the Frankfurt Book Fair, reputed as the biggest book fair in the world. Six huge buildings located at the Messe exhibition grounds were packed with booths of publishers from all over the [...]
An early draft (deleted later) of my novel, Jellyfish Have Eyes, started with the discovery of a letter in which Ricardo, a champion of basic science, bemoaned rotting in jail for the dubious felony of using government funds to perform basic research considered irrelevant. Ricardo blamed the “Relevancers” – a faceless, abstract group – for [...]
The other day, I read excerpts from an amazing novel called Erewhon by Samuel Butler, published first anonymously in 1872. I was intrigued by the title, which turns out to be the name of a fictional country meaning “nowhere” spelled backwards with the letters “h” and “w” transposed. The novel is a satire on Victorian [...]
“What are you thinking of?” my friend asked me, when I was sitting silently. “Nothing,” I answered. Then I qualified my response. “Really, nothing.” “Really?” he challenged me. Did I really ever have no thoughts, an empty mind? I don’t think so, although meditating Buddhists may not agree. Even when my mind seems blank, I [...]
The butterfly effect – very small events having a major effect on seemingly unrelated major events at a later date – is hard to appreciate fully due to the apparent lack of connection between the happenings. The term was coined by Edward Lorenz drawing from a metaphorical example of the details of a tornado arising [...]
