for a month, tomorrow. First to the North, then to the South, then to the MLA, then back to Baltimore for another installment of the intersession course on musicals. But first: a month (a month!) in Cali.

Plane reading: "Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett" by James Knowlson. And a semester full of physics labs that need to be proofread. And a checked bag full of student portfolios. And several applications. Whoever said you’re not supposed to take work on vacations never met me. Still, hoping to catch up with friends, and get some down time before the return to teaching and the final semester of the MFA (and its incumbent Madness of Thesis.) I am looking forward to this trip very much.

Now if only this whole "packing" thing were as easy to do while sleeping as blogging is…

"On this day, the day he was assassinated, what I remember is the night we both cracked up drinking tea.

They say teenagers laugh at the drop of a hat. Nowadays I see many teenagers sad and angry with each other. John and I were hardly teenagers. But my memory of us is that we were a couple who laughed."

– Yoko Ono, "The Tea Maker," NYT,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/opinion/08ono.html?_r=1

"Unlike the cryptic social and professional mazes of real life, puzzles are reassuringly soluble; but like any serious problem, they require more than mere intellect to crack.

“It’s imagination, it’s inference, it’s guessing; and much of it is happening subconsciously,” said Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of “The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life.”

“It’s all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos,” Dr. Danesi said. “And once you have, you can sit back and say, ‘Hey, the rest of my life may be a disaster, but at least I have a solution.’ ” "

– NYT, "Searching the Brain for the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving," (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/science/07brain.html?src=me&ref=general)

…when we say that many things are, approximately, springs? Well, as you learned (or will learn) in Calculus II, any function in the neighborhood of a point can be approximated by a Taylor series. The same is true for a force: a force is just a function, typically of coordinates. The first term of interest in a Taylor expansion is the linear term. Any system with a force linear in displacement behaves like a spring. This is why many things can be approximated by springs."

…to a first approximation, springs."

the prospect of the West Coast fills me with overwhelming joy.

"Christensen and Neary have also had to contend with the very daunting conditions of sustaining art in Southern California — a place famed for welcoming every kind of creative expression without supporting anything for long."

– LAT, “Los Angeles Ballet on upswing in its fifth year,” via ArtsJournal.

People.

"The months that followed were hard for Melville. He tried valiantly to secure appointment as a U.S. consul in Florence, Italy, but never stood a chance. In March, he even traveled to Washington to advance his cause, and waited in a very long line to shake the hands of the new president. He was possibly the worst self-promoter of all time, and said nothing to Lincoln, though he admired him (“Old Abe is much better looking [than] I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow — working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord”). Later in the visit, he sat in the park opposite the White House, “sunning myself on a seat,” and noticed that the shrubbery was starting to bud. Then he tried to get into the Washington Monument and failed. He was a middle-aged man, next to a half-finished obelisk, with no idea where he or his country were headed."

Ted Widmer, NYT, "Misgivings," http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/misgivings/

Rare is the human backside that hasn’t found solace and support in Mr. Day’s most famous creation, a molded polypropylene shell fastened to an enameled bent tubular steel base that has become familiar seating in schools, churches, offices, auditoriums, home patios, kitchens, dens, bedrooms and basements around the world.

– NYT on death of stackable ‘Polychair’ designer Robin Day. Via AJ.