Pieces. Each reflecting an image, a truth. But always only a partial proof. And not like a jig saw puzzle: The fragments cannot be put together, the whole cannot be re-created from the parts.
It frightens us when we see it in raw form in the overtly insane, but we know it to be universal human fate: to have to put together our world with the fragments we can find.
Welcome to Reflections in a Cracked Glass. This blog has two functions: It’s to update you on what I’ve added recently and it’s a place for thoughts that aren’t full essays but are thoughts on one subject or another.
Something a little different: Atypical pain
Added a short essay on the aftermath of Katrina, Irene, and Sandy. It’s a reflection on what we do and don’t seem to learn from these momentous acts of nature that our human hands seem more capable of exacerbating than resolving. We seem to come together, under the impact of the disaster, but all too quickly go back to regarding our fellow humans as competitors for limited resources rather than our companions in the struggle to progress as a human community.
Rarely do you hear something proudly touted as “Version 1.0.” I remember being told “never buy the first model of anything.” I defied this dictum and bought a Dodge Omni in 1978. (If you don’t know me, yes, I’m that old!) A mechanic, who’d been able virtually to earn a living on the costs of repairing my car alone, said to me: “They call it an Omni because they got every part from a different country.” He wasn’t kidding either, everything seemed like it came from somewhere different and had been put together by someone who didn’t know very much about cars.
So defying the dictum of never call anything 1.0, that’s what this is Version 1.0, the first incomplete, if also completely imperfect, version of my writings, Reflections in a Cracked Glass.
Oh, I’ll keep writing, but I feel a sense of completeness, of having touched the bases I wanted to, with the addition of the essays on socialism, and on the role of trajectory in artistic creativity.
If you’re new to this site, pick an essay and see where it takes you.
Gianni Rutchik
long time admirer of Kilgore Trout
I enjoy doing crosswords, particularly NY Times Thursday, Friday & Saturday. I also usually do Emmet Quigley’s challenging Monday puzzles. Sometimes you get stuck on an answer. You don’t want just find out (Googling is soooo easy…) but you’d love a hint to get you unstuck. So, if you want to see some hints-not-answers, here you go. To be honest, the point of this xword blog is to attract word-centric readers who might, just might, be interested in checking out the essays of my blook.
Update, 2014-11-20: After about a month of doing this which was mostly fun, I’m not updating the crossword blog currently. I still enjoy doing crosswords regularly, but it my real interest lies in the essays more than the blog. So I’m “on hiatus” from blogging the NY Times puzzle for a while. If you’re the kind of person who would enjoy a hint now and then, though, shoot me an email through the contact page and I’ll pass back to you an occasional hint. — Jon Mack
Added new essay developing on the teaching of creativity. This essay has been gestating for a long time. Think its time to hatch has come.
I’ve been working on this essay for quite a while. Here we are in the midst of electing a new president and it’s as though socialism only exists as what Obama doesn’t want to be accused of being. Well, he isn’t. But it still shocks me that our battle continues to be not to lose rights we thought we’d won long ago, rather than how we can move forward. Capitalism, on a global scale, is falling apart, but is a socialist alternative seriously considered? Rarely.
Check it out: Why Socialism Matters
(A Spanish translation of this article will be available soon.)
Sometimes I get so scared…
There were rumblings today about Iran possibly being willing to negotiate about their “nuclear program.” I try to forget that Israel is poised on the verge of starting a war like we have never seen before, a war horrible beyond imagining. But here is the New York Times saying that some suspect that Iran is only trying to “buy time,” two weeks from the U.S. Presidential election in proposing talks.
Buying time? Two weeks? Are we really that close to Israel attacking Iran, with or without U.S. immediate military support?
While Obama and Romney spar, far more like prizefighters than statesmen. Are these the men, and the men and women around them, who will decide our fate?
It terrifies me.
My directorial debut: A ten-minute tear jerker in the 10-Minute Play festival at the Actors Theatre Playhouse in West Chesterfield, just across the river from Brattleboro.
The age of the universe
The conventional way of describing the universe, saying “a little under 14 billions years old” has struck me for a while to be wrong: that the Big Bang happened about then. Now ,Oct. 12, 2012, we can see it right on Google. It’ll pop up with 13.75 billion years quicker than you can change a channel with your remote:
But as best we understand it today going back to Einstein says that time is tied up with mass, that mass warps time. How we understand gravity today is based on this, in fact. So we sometimes may hear the expression “time loses meaning as we go back as far as the origin of our universe.” As mass became denser and denser as we understand the universe was at its birth, then time also ceased to exist in the way we understand time today.
So the universe went from a point outside of time as we know it to time as we think we know it today, how long was the time when time had no meaning? A minute, a second, an eternity? Just as that question has no meaning, neither does the 13.75 billions year figure.
I’m sure that I wasn’t the first to say it, but seeing divorced couples fighting particularly over children, years later, evoked this from me: “Marriage is temporary, but divorce is forever.”
Of course I know that some divorced couples get remarried. That just proves the point. A marriage may cease to be but the relationship remains. ‘course one could argue that all of this just proves marriage, happy or not, together or not, is forever.
Coming soon: an article on socialism and an article the importance of trajectory in the teaching and learning of art.
About ten days have passed since I finished a run of acting the part of Henry Ford. Playing Henry Ford is not like playing Mark Twain. Samuel Clements, so far as his persona is concerned, was a wonderful man who sometimes said things that sounded crass, but weren’t, not really. Ford, on the other hand (in this Mark St. Germain play, Camping with Henry and Tom), is a fundamentally base man. He is very fucked up. I’ve played unpleasant characters before. Sometimes you feel like the people you act with take personally your role with them on the stage. Sometimes you feel like you are the nasty son-of-a-bitch you’re portraying.
When I played a nasty union boss in a Clifford Odets play, my friend and director told me something that he’d learned from a director he respected: “An actor shows his character flaws not by what he reveals on stage, but by what he refuses to allow to show.” I kept this in mind throughout doing Ford. But as much as it’s “fun to play a villain, a real prick and an asshole, it’s no bullshit that you do get some contact of some very dark places of oneself. As they say, it’s necessary to do that to get any reality to your character. Even so…
I wonder if this is fundamental to any artistic process: that both dark and light need to be explored. I think so. I think of a Beethoven symphony or Van Gogh’s Starry Night or James Joyce’s Ulysses or the poetic songs of Dylan and blues and jazz. In theatre, except where there’s a terrible struggle going on inside the character, there’s often the dark and light are dichotomized into different characters.
There’s the wonderful quote by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) that rumors of his death were “exaggerations.” I wonder if this is something that has happened to the power of the written word. I wonder if we have come to accept the notion that life has been reduced to postings on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube or 10-second television sound bites to the degree that the written word in the form of essays and books is irrelevant, anachronistic, the domain only of the most academicians and other “intellectuals.” Perhaps the death of the word has been exaggerated.
Perhaps the word is only badly injured, in intense need of rehabilitation, not altogether abandoned to the landfill of history. Perhaps it will rise like Lazarus. Because it is the word that makes us human. And, as much as we may admire the great apes and the infinitesimal bacteria, as much as we are ashamed of what humans have done in the name of humanity, we should also be proud of what we are: Thinking, choosing, curious beings. Beings who can express complex and wonderful thoughts to each other. Beings who can be moved by what we read, whose lives are affected by what we read.
There will always be diversions, ways for us not to think. Who can blame us? There are plenty of good reasons not to think, not to dig beneath the surface of the reality presented to us.
But there will always people who do think, who have not given up, who have not stopped trying to figure out how to make better sense out of this world.
I guess that’s why I write. And why I read.
Seems time to add some new things:
I’ve decided to add a couple pieces of “writing” that differ from the rest of my blook in that they make no attempt whatsoever to unravel the mysteries and frustrations of the so-called “real” world.
First, “Imaginary-world Game Notes”: I’m a big fan of a kind of computer game that’s rarely played these days: Imaginary-world puzzle games. The starting point for all these games is Myst. Video games seem to be almost exclusively of the shoot-em-up and blow-em-up these days, not worlds one can wander through at one’s own pace, trying to solve a visual (and occasionally auditory) puzzle. When these games first came out, I’m sure lots of folks solved them as a sort of “community,” sharing what they found out. I’ve worked on them on my own, resorting to on-line hints only when desperate. Few people apparently play these games very much, though I think Myst was a decent “hit” on the iPhone a couple years back. That’s where I found it. I’ve looked for ways to play games like this on the Mac and found that Myst, Myst II (Riven), and Myst III (Exile) can be made to work relatively easily on a Mac. I also found a fascinating game called Alida.
These are games for a particular kind of person: one with a fair amount of time and not in any big hurry to “solve” something. They create visual worlds that I’ve found engaging. If you’re into this kind of game, you might find it interesting to follow my journey. The trick is to learn just enough to get oneself “unstuck” without learning so much that there’s nothing left to solve. I make no guarantees. One person’s hint is another’s spoiler.
If you like Myst, though, I strongly recommend these games. They provided my with hours of useless amusement.
And this venture into the world of the purely fantastical wouldn’t be complete without my adding a couple of my attempts at Sci-Fi stories. The sad part of writing Sci-Fi is that one quickly learns that there are a thousand-and-one stories that follow the exact same idea and do a better job of it. Oh, well, here are my attempts. Hopefully you may find them entertaining.
At the same time, I figured I might as well start blogging my own NYT (New York Times) Crossword experience. I’m well aware that Rex Parker pretty much has this market cornered, but I personally tire of the combination of his occasionally bragging about how good he is (He’ll throw in, just often enough to make sure you know, how it took him extra-long – say, 5 whole minutes – to solve a puzzle most of us spend half a day on). Nor do I care much for his “critiques” of the puzzles. (Well, except when I found a puzzle particularly miserably hard and so did he!) But thought there might be some folks who’d like to hear some more or less random comments from a more down-to-earth solver like themselves. I’ll try to “cover” the Thursday through Saturday puzzles for a while and see what happens. This blog starts with this Saturday. Entries will generally be quick and dirty.
These categories, Sci-Fi, Imaginary-world Puzzle Game Notes, and NYT Xword notes make no pretense of being anything but what they are: diversions that amuse me.
