2003 in review (sort of)

[nibot]

In the tradition of last year's film and book list:

As best I can reckon, I saw twenty-five films this year: Smilla's Sense of Snow (01-?), Dream with the Fishes (01-10), Man Bites Dog (2003-10-26), Lost Highway (David Lynch, 02-22), Koyaanisqatsi (02-26), Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 04-23), Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 03-22), Y tu mamá también (03-26), Donnie Darko (03-27), But I'm a Cheerleader (04-05), Adaptation (05-02), Capturing the Friedmans, Big Lebowski, Samurai Fiction, Bruce Almighty (saw it in Poland), Kill Bill, Mathporn!, Blue Velvet (David Lynch), 1900 House (BBC Series), Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon, Seabiscut, Yossi and Jagger, Les Triplettes de Belleville (12-23), and The Fellowship of the Ring. I'm becoming more and more of a David Lynch fan.. I'd like to find the time to watch the Twin Peaks series, and, of course his other films. (I haven't even seen Eraser Head yet.) Enjoyed the 'Hannibal' series quite a lot, and I think there's something special about Smilla's (maybe just because it was set and filmed in Greenland) and Dream with the Fishes.. Oh yes, we mustn't forget Y Tu Mama Tambien. I think Roman Polanski's Macbeth is a great treatment of that, perhaps driven by the crazy events in his life. If I'm feeling indulgent, maybe I'll get myself a Netflix subscription in the coming year. Then again, really, who has the time? The UC Berkeley Media Resources Library is still at my disposal, too.

In the literary department, I read a lot less this year than last, and my reading was dominated by the reading for English 117B, covering the latter half of Shakespeare's life. It was a great course, actually. I really enjoyed it... I even got an A on one of the two papers, too. (-: For that class I read Troilus and Cressida (02-04), Othello (02-11), Measure for Measure (02-20), King Lear (03-04), Macbeth (03-13), Coriolanus (04-10), and The Tempest (05-01). I'm sure I was supposed to read a few more, but it's rather easy to fall behind in the reading.

It seems the only non-Shakespearean fiction I read was Norwegian Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery (02-05) (in English translation) and the far less recent Beowulf (acq 01-16), in the new translation by Seamus Heaney. Solitaire is an enjoyable read of light philosophy and playful fantasy, and it's set (largely) in a quaint village in the Swiss alps, so who's not to like it? As for Beowulf, there's just something magical about the concise prose — I wish I could read it in Anglo Saxon.

On the nonfiction front, I read half of the currently vogue The Botany of Desire (then had to return it to BPL), followed by The other side : journeys in Baja California (Judy Botello). It was nice to read about those primordial apple forests in Khazakstan, and the true history of Johnny Appleseed; thanks to Michael Polen for the good book. In Switzerland I read The Tower of Babel (McWhorter) and found it to be quite dull — he spent chapters belaboring points that I considered obvious, while accepting as obvious assertions I considered quite dubious ("Language is a very complicated thing, so it's therefore probable that it only evolved once. End of story.") By some funny chance I found a weatherbeaten copy of The French (de Grammot) on the streets of Berkeley, which provided me with some small insights and amusements while traveling through that country. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Joan Didion) I received as a graduation gift from krazyaces. At first I took some exception to Didion's ideas, but they've since grown on me. Imagine my surprise to learn, upon my return to Berkeley, that Didion was speaking here the very next day? I wrote that up as Joan Didion: Berkeley Girl. Bringing down the house is a rather poorly written account of some MIT students who made millions through sophisticated card counting in vegas and elsewhere. It interesting, but at the same time, it isn't.

One of the most interesting books, and by far the most socially relevant, I read this year is Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets: Memoirs of the Pentagon Papers and Vietnam.

This year I slept in thirteen countries and travelled on thirteen airplanes. I also paid a visit to the capital for the first time and found it to be a rather pleasant place. What can I say, it was a good year. Road trips to Imperial County (Salton Sea, Algadones Dunes, Anza-Borrega), to Humboldt and Oregon with Nadia, and most recently hotspringing in Baja with Diane. I flew to Boston and my friend Andrew just back from China; together we bussed around the east coast; thanks to Maya to showing us around DC. The summer of course was full of little adventures in Switzerland and France; and thanks go to Brano, Kubo, Pawel, Tanja, Meelika, Erik, Nils, Martin, Owain, and Mikael for putting me up in Bratislava, Krakow, Riga, Tartu, Tallinn, Uppsala, Luleå, and Lund.

I graduated on August 15th with a B.S. in EECS, and made a lot of progress on some goals during the year, such as getting a paper published, learning some more language (Esperanto in this case!), making progress in writing a compiler, and getting good grades. Some things didn't work out so well, mainly that my efforts to get a math degree too were thwarted by the administration despite strong arguments until I finally gave up. I made a lot of good new friends, like Kenny2 and the CERNies. At the end of the year I applied for graduate school in physics at nine campuses, although the process is at times confusing. My current thinking is that maybe I'll just pretend to be a student still, here at Berkeley...

Some noteworthy journal entries from the year:

1. dichromatic perfect colorings of the square
2. babylon, synthetic
3. stanley hall become stanley hole
4. summer days are here again
5. could be fiction (or, boy meets girl, loses book)
6. nomadicity has its downsides (or, leaving oscar wilde)
7. greetings from geneva
8. peace, love, and particle physic(ist)s
9. tomsawyering the rhone
10. journey to point five
11. cute pictures of me and kenny and me and liz
12. danish women's cycling olympic team
13. thoiry lightning
14. warm nights in geneve
15. searching for suisse
16. notes from the test-beam
17. krakow diary
18. vilnius diary
19. lithuanians believe in magic
20. la vita latvia
21. direkt från lundagård (a long walk to sweden)
22. late nights at the berkeley cyclotron

The one labelled direkt från lundagård (a long walk to sweden) is my favorite

Comments

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Interesting to see how you describe the most noteworthy posts of the year. I may also replicate your feat of managing to visit NYC, Boston, and DC in one trip, but with the addition of Princeton and Providence. I'm currently researching cheap busing (http://www.blacktable.com/gillin031105.htm).

[nibot.livejournal.com]

I think I generally selected them more for noteworthiness of the writing than of the events. I wanted to bring to light those that would be most entertaining to read, while sort of providing a cross-section of the year.

Good luck on your travels!