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 [...]

Gaston Bachelard, By Chance

I was reshelving a book in my office and noticed a volume on the shelf that I hadn’t picked up in a couple of years– a collection of selections from the work of Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie (edited by Collette Gaudin). I remembered being disappointed when I first got the book that it [...]

Reading the American Pragmatists

For the last couple of weeks I have been rereading Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, a work of intellectual biography that treats Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Pierce, within their social and intellectual context. It’s a wonderful book that holds up well to a second reading and this time I have [...]

Stone Age Flutes

Human beings seem to be inveterate makers of pattern, whether musical, visual, or verbal. The people who hollowed out the bird bones and cut holes at regular intervals were also making stunning pictures on the walls of caves and, I have no doubt, singing songs to their children and telling each other stories. All of [...]

Bouncing off the Walls (VN Diary No. 37)

This is my last day in Hanoi and the truth is I’m ready to go. I haven’t done much this last week except walk around the Old Quarter and buy presents for friends at home. Playing the tourist. It is of course very difficult if not impossible to get inside another place, another culture; but [...]

Reading The Idiot in Hanoi (I)

Note: I began this post almost a month ago, thinking to post a multi-part essay over the course of my few weeks in Vietnam, but I never got beyond what’s here. I still intend to finish the essay, but thought I’d go ahead and post this opening bit to give myself some motivation. I find [...]

Realism (VN Diary No. 35)

I’m not much of a Roger Cohen fan — he strikes me as an ideological opportunist, a flag blowing first one way then the other — but the dateline of this column attracted my attention, of course. The Quiet American is the best single piece of fiction about Vietnam you are likely to read (Tim [...]

And it’s Not a Dry Heat (VN Diary No. 31)

I’m in Hue now. This morning Lan’s friend (now my friend) Tran Thu Mai took me to a beautiful pagoda in the mountains northeast of Hue, then on a tourn of the Nguyen court’s citadel, where many of the palaces and temples have been beautifully restored. After a brief rest and cool down at my [...]

Limited Discourse (VN Diary No. 30)

I’ve noted before that it’s easiest for me to understand Vietnamese when I am inside a stereotypical situation like a restaurant or a taxi or a shop. Tonight I’m sitting in a “modern” cafe in HCMC where Vietnamese pop music is piped over a really good sound system and I find I can understand almost [...]

Situations (VN Diary No. 25)

Going around Hanoi and trying to speak Vietnamese (with my limited vocabulary and grammatical resources) has made me acutely aware of the social contexts in which language operates. In a restaurant, certain kinds of words and sentences are used; in a shop, different words and sentences. In fact, this makes it easier for me to [...]

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