Watched the inauguration and just finished enjoying the Celebrating America Show. It was a festival of joy celebrating all America. Artists of all genres and traditions performed and celebrated the great Americans, average Americans who have been working to feed, heal, and serve our nation. We have two choices. We can embrace the good. We can embrace our diversity. We can embrace the work and service we need to conduct to bring our nation back. We can embrace the peoples and other nations of the world as we share the planet with the fellowship of humanity and our will is not supreme. Or we can be the mob, embracing grievance, embracing violence, brandishing symbols of hatred past and present. I am choosing the America I watched tonight, where the various hues of our cultural mosaic were on display and celebrated. I am choosing the America where Presidents Bush, Clinton, and Obama, political opponents, stood together pledging to work together to rebuild Amer...
On Friday, took a one-hour ride on a jukung, a traditional wooden Indonesian boat to the Gili Islands, a popular destination for divers and partiers and laid-back expats. First stop was Gili Trawangan, the biggest and most lively of the islands, though COVID has turned Gili T, as the locals call it, into something resembling a ghost town. Then we motored to Gili Air. It was even emptier. However, I liked it much more than Gili T in that it is much more rustic in its commercialization and somehow it seems as though the place is carrying on in a fashion as it may have existed before tourist development started to take place in the 1980s. Off the shallows of Gili Air, my guides took me snorkeling. No photos, I am afraid. I had enough of a challenge figuring out how to deal with my mask and snorkel and float suit and fins to worry about photography. After I took to the water, I learned why my guides had been carrying a bottle filled with chunks of bread around with them in the b...
I experienced another wonderful month of reading, six books in all. Five of them were quite magnificent. The Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was probably my favorite. It's a novel that was a finalist for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. It's a philosophical novel of family, religious faith, identity, and science and one women's struggle to understand them all as they apply to her tragic life. It would take a 1000-word review to do the book justice; I would simply say that I highly recommend it and it's a book worth seeking out. Very different, but as good as Gyasi's novel is: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. It sounds peculiar: it's a hybrid history/novel retelling the story of crucial discoveries in quantum physics. It's a book that disorients the reader in that, for the first half, it is extremely difficult to determine where fact ends and fiction begins. Ultimately it is a caution...
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