Author Archives: wombat

My brutish love of poetry, part 2

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In 1920, Marianne Moore wrote a poem that begins: The Fish wade through black jade. You can immediately see that this poem plays with line breaks and structure and is not about meter and rhyme. Yikes, free verse. What is … Continue reading

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My brutish love of poetry, part 1

I never studied poetry the way I studied other subjects. But I love it, poems stick in my head for years, I can recite a few, and sometimes reading a poem colors my thoughts for hours. Since I don’t know … Continue reading

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Musical cross dressing – Bill Evans and “I love you Porgy”

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Trio performance Here is a link to the Bill Evans Trio playing “I love you Porgy”. I bought this on vinyl years ago. Recently I had to chance to play “I love you Porgy” with some friends. And I thought … Continue reading

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It’s a boy thing

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I like boy things. When I hear about explosives and magnets and highly nauseating g-forces I am drawn like a moth to flame. I once spent a week in Mumbai hanging out with an engineer who designed ship propellers. You … Continue reading

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One and a half lingual

When your mother tongue is not your mother’s, you grow up with an echo. In our house, English was the official language, the language of information transfer. Cantonese, my parents’ first language, was the language of emotion and of secrets. … Continue reading

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My favorite feminist film

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Is also my favorite film. And believe me, coming up with a fave is not easy for me. I don’t think I could come up with a favorite book. This film, When A Woman Ascends The Stairs, stands out because … Continue reading

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Viva le vélo

I wrote a novel for twelve year olds that features bicycles. The novel is set in China in 1902, when the bicycle was a fairly new technology. Many key features of the modern bicycle were present in the 1902 bicycle. … Continue reading

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Math Problem: from 2007 Colorado Math Olympiad

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The problem: Each cell of an 8×8 chessboard is filled with either a 0 or a 1. Prove that if we compute the sums of the numbers in each row, each column, and each of the two diagonals, at least … Continue reading

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Chekhov’s Rabbits

The first time I fell in love with Anton Chekhov was when I read “The Darling” and other short stories. The second time was when I saw Wallace Shawn play Uncle Vanya in a movie. And the third time was … Continue reading

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To 80s Hong Kong Pop With Love

In the 80s, in June, when I was in graduate school, a friend called me up and asked if I wanted to make an impromptu trip from Berkeley, California to Vancouver, BC. He wanted to drive up and see his … Continue reading

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