At Wesleyan's 2009 commencement, Anna Quindlen reminded graduates of Samuel Beckett's bold proclamation, "To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now." Instead of tidying the mess, or assuring graduates that things were not as messy as they appeared in the chaos of that May, she simply said,

We leave you a mess. And I won’t apologize for that. Instead I want you to see it for what it is: an engraved invitation to transformation. Certainty is dead. Long live the flying leap.

A long-time fan of Anna Quindlen's, I especially loved that last declarative: long live the flying leap.

And so, here goes my flying leap. As I travel to Japan, back home to run my first math camp for middle-school girls, and then to France, I will be flying in more ways than one.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Marseille, c'est le pop.

Had a lovely trek to the beach today, many kilometers away. It was windy, and much sandier than Nice, with lots of people doing lots of extreme sports. Sometimes I like to do extreme things, but today I was happy to alternate between watching others, and reading my wonderful book, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, which paints a remarkably detailed picture of India on the heels of partition. (...1474 pages worth of a picture. The inscription at the beginning, attributed to Voltaire, reads: "The secret of being a bore is to say everything.")

At dinner last night, I got into a conversation with my waiter about how much he loves Marseille. I mentioned that I had been to Nice, and that I preferred Marseille, to which he responded, "Nice, c'est la musique classique. Mais Marseille, c'est le pop. E le pop vient du corps." (Nice, that's classical music. But Marseille is pop. And pop comes from the body.)

I quickly glanced at the tome that had been my dinner companion, turned to my pithy waiter, and replied: "Je suis absoluement d'accord."
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