Apparently the price has dropped.

Not only that, the types of materials that can be used to print has expanded. It’s not just metal (can you imagine melting down your jewelry and printing some new piece you like better?) or plastic (woo-hoo! silly desk toys on demand!) but it has become cellular. Like creating body parts cellular.

Lisa Harouni says it’s a manufacturing revolution. Check it out:

The flag flies over the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

Looking out towards Turtle Island off the coast of Oahu.

Bali Hai called to us from a restaurant on Kauai.

At Haleakala National Park on Maui I look down at the cinder cones.

Girls hula in ti leaf skirts at a luau on Maui.

My family sailed into the sunset on that catamaran. I stayed on shore, where I don’t get seasick.

A lone palm tree stands in Kona on the big island of Hawaii.

A traditional Hawaiian royal residence stays in the background at Puuhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park on the Kona coast.

Tiki stand guard. We took care not to put any in our suitcases.

The kind of lava called pahoehoe is common on the big island.

At the painted church on the big island, Hell is found even in paradise.

At Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Oahu everyone stops to watch the sun set into the Pacific.

I’ve been reading (off and on) from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It’s wonderful, and I mean that in the classical sense that it provokes wonder within me.

I hated Milton in college. Hated him. He bored me because I didn’t understand him. I can tell I didn’t understand him because I’ve been reading my handwritten notes on the pages of my college text, and they’re completely off. And now, because I’ve read so much and so broadly over the last few years (although I haven’t written much about it) I hardly need any of the real footnotes as I read.

His poem flows. I’m reading it aloud to hear its rhythm and its lushness. It is both beautiful and touching, and I can see how it influenced C. S. Lewis. I believe he based Screwtape on this poem, and I know he wrote a preface to Paradise Lost that forms its own book. I know this because I have that book. But I haven’t read it yet.

The story starts in the middle, as good stories do. Fallen archangel Satan and his fallen angel warriors are in hell and recounting their battle with God and heaven. They are debating whether or not to force war again, given that it seems impossible to defeat God, or if they should try subtler means. By Book Two, the pandemonium (a word Milton made up — it means demon council) has agreed that they will go find a new creation they’ve heard will happen and see if they can convert its creatures to their side so as to gain revenge upon God. The creation is Earth, and its creatures are humans.

Satan is the only one willing to take on the task. He secures his leadership by doing so. Beëlzebub is second in command — he is not synonymous with Satan. The other leaders are the early gods Baal, Mammon, Belial, and the gods of Olympus, because Milton saw them as leading mankind away from the one true God.

The demons’ perverted logic is present throughout. Satan says, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.” What he says to support his argument is that everyone in heaven will want to be the king because the higher up one is, the greater the glory, and so the desire for glory will create internal strife among the angels. Meanwhile in hell, the higher up one is, the greater the torment, and therefore no one else will want to supplant his leadership. Ergo, reigning in hell is superior.

I love lines 249-255 from Book One, so much so that I want to commit them to memory. Satan justifies his fallen state. He will be creator within his own dominion.

…Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and then, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor, one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. How many times have I thought that? Externally my life is good, and yet so often I have lived in hell within my mind, so much so that I’ve wondered if torment exists only here on earth and that we don’t need a parallel dimension for that. My thoughts on the afterlife is that it’s all or nothing, literally. We are with God or we refuse him and turn away, and the opposite of God is nothingness, not torment.

I don’t think my opinion aligns with Catholic doctrine, and my opinion is subject to change.

In the first two books of Paradise Lost there are negative parallels to the positives of the trinity and Creation. Satan pulled his own daughter out of his body, which parallels Eve from Adam. He has an only son by his daughter, a perverted parallel to Jesus from God. The power of threes: one third of the angels of heaven are fallen. And there are others, but I can’t remember them specifically.

Milton says there are nine kinds of angels, with top being the archangels and bottom being cherubim and seraphim. I can’t remember all the in-betweens, and I don’t really know what the difference among them is. Some are guardians of Heaven, and others are guardians of people on Earth, I think.

Milton originally studied to be a clergyman in the Anglican Church. He studied broadly and in at least four languages: English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He traveled throughout Europe in his youth and got to know, among others, Galileo and Cardinal Barberini, a friend of Galileo’s who later became Pope. Milton was profoundly anti-Catholic in his later adulthood, and I don’t know why. He became a lawyer and then a politician, and wrote many treatises, mostly in Latin. His poetry was in English.

I think it’s interesting that his one epic poem came out of him after he went blind, which means that he wrote it entirely orally. And of course, traditional epic poems were all oral. That may be why the sound of it is so beautiful. It doesn’t rhyme, usually, and the meter is all over the place, and yet the meter corresponds to the lyrics and gives them greater power. It is its own music. And I can see it, when normally I only hear what I read.

That’s what I’m getting out of Paradise Lost through Book Six. The entire piece is twelve books, but the Fall doesn’t happen until Book Nine. I plan to venture into Eden and witness the Fall in the near future.

But because free books brought me into an auditorium in the basement of the Texas State Capitol in the fall of 2010, I had an experience that was astonishing. Dr. Verghese began to speak. And as he did, the audience fell silent. All squeaking of seats, rustling of bags, clearings of throats ceased as we sat transfixed. The man transcended charisma. He transcended brilliance. He spoke, and we listened, feeling as though something were shifting inside of us.

This summer Dr. Verghese did a TED talk in Scotland about what he believes should be the future of medicine. It’s about going back to the past. It’s about recognizing that we, the patients, are not automata to be examined by machine. It’s about recognizing that the doctor-patient relationship is a personal one. The power of technology does not replace the power of human touch.

I invite you now to listen to what he had to say.

That’s me in the center, dressed as the camel. I was not quite four years old, and it was my pre-school’s Christmas pageant.

I *loved* that camel costume. I mean LOVED it. Of all the costumes my extraordinarily talented mother ever made, this one is my all-time favorite.

Mom put newspaper in the camel body to stiffen it and yardsticks in the back legs, and would you believe that when I walked those back legs would walk with me.

For real. It was awesome. I really feel that I cannot overstate the awesomeness of this camel costume.

Other kids tried to climb on the camel back. I wanted to carry them around. That didn’t work so well. I guess the costume would have been awesomer if I could have done that.

But still, seriously awesome.

Look at the Christmas joy on my little face as I sing a carol. The next year I was the Virgin Mary, and I was bummed out because I wanted to be a camel again.

I didn’t need Christmas as an excuse to break out the camel costume. I wore it at my fourth birthday party.

The little girl in the background is Heather. She was five years old, and she was the daughter of my aunt’s then-boyfriend. Heather didn’t like me. Probably her dislike was not really of me but rather of her dad dragging her to his girlfriend’s niece’s birthday party. That’s probably the reason she was mean to me.

But maybe she was just jealous because she wasn’t a camel.

I had to share this series because it cracked me up so much.

Picture this: Christmas, 1971, Austin, Texas. Newlyweds invite their parents over to open Christmas presents in the small, white, frame house they’ve dubbed “the honeymoon cottage.” The young husband is a technology geek, and this year he has some money to spend. He’s going to get his parents something nice.

“Oooh!” says his mother. “What can this be?!” Dad silently and absent-mindedly tears off the wrapping paper, not pausing to fold it carefully so that it can be re-used for future gifts. Off-camera the young daughter-in-law shakes her head sadly.

They open the box.

“What the hell is this thing?” Dad asks. Mom is bewildered and disappointed. The box had been big enough to contain a porta-crib. So much for the grandchild announcement. Three months of marriage already, and nothing.

“Look, Dad,” their son points, “it’s a stereo.” Dad puts his hands on his hips and harrumphs. The son continues, “You know — like a gramophone, but it has two speakers. See, the sound is split onto two separate tracks and each speaker plays a different track, which gives you a three-dimensional audio experience…” he trails off.

“See, Dad, it explains about the equalizer right here on page 32A of the manual…”

“Hmph,” says Dad, as he hitches up his trousers, “well…thank you, kids.” Mutters…”What the hell am I going to do with this thing?”

And 39 years later the son gets an iPod touch for Christmas from his own kids. Which he doesn’t use.

The struggle continues.

The End

Not that I’ve seen any improvement in my attempt to read Kant.

If you didn’t see the 1992 movie (or just need a refresher), the plot goes something like this: in 19th-century Mexico, during the revolution, 15-year-old Tita falls in love with her handsome neighbor Pedro. When Pedro asks Tita to marry him, their love is thwarted. Her mother (Mamá Elena) will not permit the marriage because Tita, as youngest daughter, is bound by family tradition to be her mother’s handmaid until Mamá Elena’s death. Pedro decides to marry Tita’s older sister Rosaura instead so as to live in the same household as his beloved. This brings about many complications, as you might imagine.

Throughout the novel and movie is an underlying theme of cooking. Tita’s emotions are expressed through the food she makes, and everyone who eats her cooking experiences those emotions. The guests leave Pedro and Rosaura’s wedding weeping after eating the cake Tita baked, for one example.

It’s an entertaining book and movie. Mamá Elena is a wonderful (if one-dimensional) character, Disney-esque in her evil.

Back in 1993, when I saw the movie, Pedro’s actions and the smoldering heat between he and Tita all seemed reasonable. But on reflection, I think I was distracted by the beautiful Marco Leonardi.

Reading the book made something readily apparent: Pedro is an idiot. Not only was it completely stupid for him to marry Tita’s sister, but his constant stalking of Tita, who is trying to move on with her life, borders on creepy. And the poor girl gets no relief even after her mother dies; just when it looks like she’s found real love in Dr. John Brown, Pedro intervenes again. But he won’t leave Rosaura. Nope, Pedro’s going to play it both ways, and Tita, distracted by lust, continues to make poor decisions.

Still, it was fun to read this as a married adult instead of as the unattached, hormonal teenager I was when I saw the movie. Today I would take Dr. Brown over Pedro, thank you very much. He actually cares about Tita and is responsible and kind AND IS NOT MARRIED TO HER SISTER.

I did pick up some interesting Spanish in the course of reading this book. You know how we use an onion as a metaphor for the many layers of a person? The Spanish equivalent is lettuce and its many layers of leaves.

I read a lot of recipes in the book and descriptions of cooking, and one frequent direction was to squeeze broth or some other liquid through a thick cloth. The Spanish word for thick is tupido. Something that is thick es tupido. Someone who is thick is stupid, and the word in Spanish for stupid is estúpido.

Perhaps I’m making up that etymology by combining two words, but I doubt it. This isn’t like the urban legend that Nova is the combination of No va, meaning “it doesn’t go,” which is why the Chevy Nova failed to sell well in Mexico. (It did fine, sales-wise.) That would be the equivalent of claiming that women refuse to see a therapist because they are afraid of the rapist. If women refuse to see a therapist it’s because bitching about our problems to our girlfriends is much cheaper and more fun besides.

Not that there’s anything wrong with seeing a therapist.

Anyway, here’s a link to a Spanish website with a trailer for the movie. I can’t get a direct YouTube embedded link because the movie trailer contains nudity. If that isn’t an illustration of our cultural difference, I don’t know what is. Enjoy!

It is the start of a new school year, and so I am once again buckling down on my home study of the classics. I rarely blog about what I’m reading, but I am reading nonetheless. Sometimes I’m even reading things that are harder to comprehend than People magazine.

But I still love People.

This month my on-line reading group is tackling Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher who changed philosophy.

I don’t know how he did that, but that is what I’m told. I’m attempting to read his Critique of Pure Reason, and I’m finding it to be incredibly slow going. Here’s the opening passage:

Whatever the process and the means may be by which knowledge refers to its objects, intuition is that through which it refers to them immediately, and at which all thought aims as a means. But intuition takes place only insofar as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, for us human beings at least, when the mind is affected by the object in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) to obtain representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility…

It just keeps going on like this and getting more and more convoluted. I struggle through each word, and yet my mind is a sieve, leaving me with no memory of what I’ve just read. While I try to absorb each word of each line of text, my on-line group races ahead in their heated debate over this work. I’ve gotten to wondering if they’re all miles above me intellectually or just full of shit. I’m betting it’s some combination of the two.

I felt it necessary to refer to a YouTube video that someone from Three-Minute Philosophy put together using MS Paint for animation. It’s quite entertaining.

I am not alone in my opinion that this is tough reading. To quote directly from the introduction to my translation: “Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, though probably philosophy’s single most acclaimed work, has remained notorious for being obscure and excessively difficult more or less since the day it was published. It has driven some of the finest philosophical minds to despair, or even, owing to the bleakness of its doctrines as much as that of its prose, to the verge of suicide.”

I can’t see myself verging on suicide from reading Kant. More likely, I will put him down and pick up something else.

In fact, that’s what I decided to do last week. I wondered if maybe Kant was so unapproachable because he was German and I was reading him in translation. Those Germans create all kinds of crazy word combinations for which there is no English equivalent, words like zeitgeist or schadenfreude or welzschmerz.  (I can’t remember how to spell that last one, but it’s the one from which Steinbeck derived “Welsh rats.”)

So I thought, “Why don’t I try to read something in a foreign language that I kind of know and see if it’s any easier than Kant?” The only foreign language of which I have any grasp is Spanish, and the last time I studied it was in 1993. I can’t speak it particularly well, nor can I understand it spoken in real time, as opposed to veeeeery slowly. But as it turns out, I can read it.

I bought this book several years ago with the idea that I would re-learn Spanish. At the time I got about two paragraphs in before giving up on it. But I’ve been reading tough stuff for two years now. My brain has been buffing up. So I gave it another shot.

And this shocked the hell out of me: I read it in three days. The entire thing. By the end I didn’t even need the English/Spanish dictionary anymore. It was absolutely insane, like some hidden part of my brain that I had forgotten about suddenly re-emerged. In fact, it re-emerged as some kind of super-brain, because I was never able to read a Spanish novel even when I was studying Spanish.

Unfortunately, this does not mean I can speak Spanish any better. Nevertheless, I feel like a new world has been opened to me because now I know I can read not just English works in their original state, but Spanish works as well.

While this is very exciting, I’ve discovered that being able to read Spanish has not made reading Kant any easier. So the dilemma: which of these do I tackle next?

I’ve never read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, but I do know of its reputation as a fantastic piece of literature and the progenitor of magical realism. And now I feel like I can tackle it in its original form.

I will try to slog through Kant, but I have a feeling I will be turning to Márquez before long.

I want to blog later about some interesting things I learned from Laura Esquivel’s book. I hope I will be able to remember them long enough to write them down. Wish me luck.

My friend Kathleen informed me that she once belonged to a book group composed of lawyers who made their book choices exclusively from  recommendations in The Economist. They read things like a biography of Potemkin.

Google tells me that this could be a) a Russian nobleman, b) a Russian myth similar to Puss in Boots that has resulted in the phrase “Potemkin village,” a group of facades made to fool visitors into thinking a large town exists, or c) a Russian battleship. Which Potemkin they read seems both irrelevant to the point and boring besides. (Actually, choice B seems kind of cool, but I digress.)

When she suggested, flippantly, to the group that her choice would be to pick a book recommended in People, they were disgusted. Thus, her cue to leave the group. And I applaud her choice. People who don’t like People are insufferable.

I keep The Economist as a bathroom reader, by the way. I have a subscription because I got one free with airline miles and I find it amusing to read what the Brits have to say about us. But it’s dry, dry stuff, to be absorbed one tiny article at a time and tossed out well before I’ve finished it. The only thing it has going for it is clever headlines, and those don’t even apply to all of the articles.

The Euro crisis? *Yawn* I want to know the latest on Brangelina.

People magazine, on the other hand, is absorbing from start to finish. Besides Wired, it’s the only magazine I’ll read cover to cover. Is it the photos? The gossipy nature of celebrity life? The 9th-grade level writing? The heartwarming stories that show up midway through an issue?

I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t have to deconstruct People. I just like it, and I’m not embarrassed to admit it.

It does not suck.

If you’re not familiar with The Incredible Shrinking Woman, it is a 1981 comedy starring Lily Tomlin, a suburban housewife whose exposure to the unfortunately-named Sexpot perfume causes her to shrink slowly until the point of disappearance. Charles Grodin plays straight-man as her advertiser husband. (I mean straight-man in the classic comedy sense — the setup for the comic in a duo, like Martin was to Lewis.) Ned Beatty also stars, providing comic relief that is far more reined-in than his hilarious role as Otis in Superman three years earlier. And it needed to be subtle because Lily Tomlin rules this movie, playing not only the shrinking woman but her nosy neighbor, and, in a tiny cameo, reprises her role as Ernestine the telephone operator.

This cameo provoked great curiosity from my children. “What is she doing?” they asked, as Ernestine sat in front of a telephone switchboard and unplugged a line. “Why is that funny?”

We waited until the end of the movie to talk with them about the ancient history that had a) telephone switchboards, b) telephones with cords and dials on them, c) something called “long distance”, and d) a telephone monopoly that resulted in high expense, a low-quality product, and poor customer service.

After the history lesson we proceeded to YouTube (something they’ll no doubt have to explain to their own children as ancient history) and found some old Laugh In sketches of Ernestine. We loved this one:

But Tomlin delivered the coup de grâce to The Telephone Company with her hysterically funny ad on Saturday Night Live. “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re The Phone Company.” You can catch it on Hulu at:

The technology has changed, but the humor still translates. My kids and I laughed until our sides hurt. I’m glad to have the internet because I never could have shown them the movie or the sketches without it.

And the best part is: now they sing the lyrics to “Galaxy Glue” with me! Life would go to pieces without Galaxy Glue.