Thanksgiving

Went out to visit a good friend of mine in New Jersey for Thanksgiving, and spent the time with him and his parents, and a couple of mutual friends. Got in late on Weds night, and slept in quite late that morning. Woke up around noon, and Pete’s mom made us breakfast around 1:00, which was great, except for the fact that we then had Thanksgiving dinner (which was outstanding) at 2:30, so I wasn’t nearly as hungry as I would have liked to have been. But that’s fine too, since we just had leftovers for the rest of the day and the day after, which is a huge part of what Thanksgiving is all about to me, just being able to eat great food at any time you want.
We went to the new James Bond movie that night, which was actually great. I wasn’t sure about Daniel Craig as Bond going into it, but I was totally buying him from the first reel. Slept in late again the next day, and we went for a hike that afternoon out to a the granite quarry in the picture. Funny thing was, we started out at about 3:00, and the sun had gone down by 4:30-5:00 ish, and we got a bit lost coming back. But, thanks to the well-marked Boy Scout trail, we were able to find our way back to the main path without needed to call mountain rescue in. Had another great dinner, then woke up early to come back into the city on Saturday morning. Worked out well, all in all it was a great time.
I also had a series of conversations with a friend of mine that lasted late into several nights over the course of the holiday weekend, and after I got back, that were extraordinary, and meant a lot to me. In my experience in life there is nothing else that compares to the sheer joy of simply connecting with someone, and sharing close fellowship with them.
Like I said, it meant a lot to me.

Casino Night

A few nights ago, the student council groups pulled together and put on a casino night, which I have to admit was absolutely a blast, and might be the best student event of the year. The venue was very classy, semi-formal dress was required, the food was great, they had a live band, it was just really very well done.
The entry ticket got you 200 chips to play any number of casino games (blackjack, roulette, poker, etc). I sat down to play poker, and had an amazing night. Of course, it helped that people were fairly inexperienced and playing loose, but I also caught amazing cards all night long. I never lost a showdown, knocked out three players, and by the time I was done had turned 200 chips into almost 2000. Now if only I could have cards like that when I’m playing for money …
The chips could be redeemed for a couple of different gifts, or for entry into a raffle for various prizes, among which was a flat screen TV and a couple of iPods. I didn’t stay for the raffle but I did spread some chips around to friends and my fellow players at the table, and picked up a $25 Starbucks card, which I enjoyed very much.
Only two complaints, and these are both from a semi-experienced poker player. They should have been running more tables; by the time I left, each poker table (which I’m guessing there were 4-5) had 10 players seated, and 10 more players waiting. Since Congress unplugged online poker, I think the council underestimated how popular poker would be. The other problem was fresh decks. At a casino, you switch to a fresh deck every hour, or sometimes even every 30 minutes, as the cards get beat up pretty fast. Here, each dealer had only one deck to last the whole night, which was just something I believe they didn’t think of. Given how much money they spent on the event overall, $20 would have gotten them an entire box of decks.
But, it was still a great evening, I had a really good time.
(The picture of course is not from the event; this is a screenshot of an online poker table. I had a friend who was going to send me some pictures from the event but he never got off his ass and did it … grrrrr …. )

Orhan Pamuk

I don’t expect most people to recognize this name right away. Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish author & artist who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature for his book Istanbul, which is a memoir of his time growing up in the city. I’m part of a student committee that is exploring some questions about what direction the undergrad curriculum should take in the future, and last Friday Mr. Pamuk came to speak with us, and give us his thoughts.
I hadn’t really been very familiar with him myself prior to this, but I knew he was an award winning writer, and besides I’m always up for hearing well-known people speak. It’s one of my favorite things to do, as well as being a benefit of going to this school. (So THAT’S what my outrageously expensive tuition is going towards, these world-class speakers!) I am pleased to say that I was not at all disappointed, and have included just a few highlights from the talk he gave.
-) He talked about in Turkey there being this very strange divide between the secular rich and the religious (mainly Muslim) poor, which grew in many ways out of the Enlightenment era. Leaders in Turkey saw the technological progress of the west and wanted to follow some of that, and so tended increasingly to see religion as an artifact of the poor. However, Pamuk talked about the fact that this isn’t wholly true, since the religion is still very much wrapped up in national identity there, and so politicians will still play to that as they campaign.
-) He also said that the east/west view of the city is really more of a pre-fabricated idea than a reality. Sometimes, both within and outside of Turkey, there is this view of the city as a place where the east and west meet (culturally), but he said many of the sensibilities expressed on both those sides have been present in the country for a long time.
-) He also expressed a number of thoughts about writing and as a writer that I appreciated deeply (being a writer myself). He spoke about this idea of the “morality of the writer”, which is something I’ve often thought of myself. He himself said that he wrote this memoir primarily as a work of art, not as a guidebook to the city. Now, he was smart enough to know that many people would see it that way, and so he said basically, you decide how you’re going to write it, and then be true to that, even as you’re aware other people will read it a bit differently.
And he talked about “all fiction being autobiographical”, and that “the core of your writing is always based on the core of your own experiences”. Both of these things are what I have experienced in my own writing, and what I feel makes my writing the best. So it was extremely heartening to hear some of these thoughts that I’ve had echoed by a professional writer who’d just won the Nobel Prize. I appreciated his time and his thoughts deeply.

The Garden Party

Went to an interesting event the other night. Anyone here familiar with a guy named Vaclav Havel? (pronounced Vas-lav, with an ‘s’ sound) Long story short, he’s a Czech playwright who was imprisoned by the communist government for the subtle but noticeable anti-communist subtexts of his plays. However, after the fall of communism, he ends up becoming the first President of the Czech Republic. He’s here at Columbia this semester as a scholar-in-residence.
I hadn’t been previously familiar with his work myself, but our Lit Hum class is covering one of his plays, The Garden Party, in our class. So this last Saturday, we went to a production of the play at Miller Theater, the on-campus performing arts theatre. And it was … very interesting.
The play wasn’t really a play per se, it was just a reading of the play; you can see all the actors in the picture, and they just remained seating in their chairs reading the play from notebooks. This made it somewhat less impressive than it might otherwise have been, especially given that this play is very much theatre of the absurd, so the lack of the props written into the play itself did detract from the performance. However, hearing people read the play and watching them interact did help the play make more sense than it did when I read it beforehand; some of the dialog is very circular and absurdist, so it’s hard to get a sense of what’s being conveyed. The reading did help with that.
The play was optional for my class, but I decided to go, and afterwards our instructor Professor Muller and the rest of us went and had coffee and talked about our impressions. I’ll make a separate note on that class some time, it’s really an amazing group, and we had a good time together that evening.
Oh, and by the way, yes, that is in fact Dustin Hoffman in the picture, fourth from the left (blue shirt drinking the bottle of water) Everyone was very excited that he was in it, but I have to admit, his performance was a bit lackluster. He didn’t seem to be trying very hard, or putting himself into the reading much. Everyone agreed over coffee that several of the other actors did much better jobs. But, it was cool to get a chance to see him.