The Poet as Buddhist Computer Geek
Meditation Note
My head is a house
With a hundred billion hipsters
Snapping their fingers
To bad jazz
Teaching as Seeing
I’m teaching a five-week Saturday morning class for local high school students on “creativity and imagination.” I’ve got a great group of thirteen teenagers who have self-selected or been encouraged by a guidance counselor to take this class in “creativity and imagination” and they seem engaged and happy to take part, though many are shy [...]
Vietnam Seems Far Away
Vietnam seems very far away at the moment. It’s below zero here and I’ve been running for ten days to catch up from . . . being in Vietnam. In a few days’ time I’ve gone from the leisurely life of a poet in a tropical clime to being a professor of literature living beside a frozen [...]
Observation
Sitting in LAX waiting for the redeye to JFK. I haven’t experienced any delays because of increased security. Hanoi’s Noibai Airport was not crowded today and everything worked smoothly; Taipei was no problem, either, though they were doing random searches after clearing the gate and before getting on the plane. And LAX was all right, too, [...]
House of Nem
Gender Roles in Vietnam
My friend Hien and I were walking around Hanoi today and we stopped in a children’s clothing shop so she could look for a jacket for her nephew. While she was shopping I took the two photos below. As in the US, the training begins early, from infancy, really. [Click on the images for bigger [...]
Notes on the Hanoi Literature & Translation Conference
The main business of the conference concluded today and most of the delegates went off to Ha Long Bay, but since my flight out is early Monday morning, I didn’t accompany them. I hate group travel and probably would not have gone along in any case. There was a huge buffet dinner last night hosted [...]
Vietnam News Report on Translation Conference
The local press has been following the conference very closely and even I have been interviewed three times by journalists. Here is the only English language report I’ve found so far.
The Full Ceremonial Monte
Attended the opening ceremony of the translation conference this morning — hundreds of people in the new, monumental National Convention Center. There was dancing and singing and speech-making and then lunch. I met a lot of the writers — American and Vietnamese — that I’ve corresponded with over the years, or seen in passing on [...]
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