CHIANG MAI. Three words that I find recycling in various repetitions: "fascism,” "facts" and "fake.” I'd like to take these words on one by one and suggest that in our attempts to do the right thing, be might be doing...
CHIANG MAI. The thing that I fear is the repetition of sameness in thinking, an ongoing dialectic of conservatism and liberalism. If this election has taught us anything it’s that “thought,” in the sense of a zeitgeist of thinking, had become ossified,...
WALNUT CREEK. Count me in as still shocked. Several of my friends predicted a Trump victory but I did not. I thought we’d be here thinking in a different set of realities, about a different kind of fight and set...
WALNUT CREEK. Much has changed over the past 10 months. In fact, those months constituted one of the most challenging periods of my life. But somewhere, within the imprecise duration of spring turning into summer, I found myself in a...
BEIJING. Here are a few photos from today's class exercise in blocking and character action. I ask the students to visualize the movements of their characters and to set up their blocking in the two- and three-dimensional area of the...
MILAN. I've arrived at Malpensa Airport far too early for my flight to Athens. Time enough to do some writing...
BEIJING. The dissertation is nearly done and I am days from submission. I have to get back to work, so I’ll write more soon. But just for fun, below is the final paragraph of the document. Without reading what came...
SAN FRANCISCO. I’m in the city for a week on a visa run. I just dropped off my application and have to wait four days to get my passport back. My regular hotel in North Beach gives nice discounts for...
CHIANG MAI. Yesterday I completed my 100th reading for my dissertation since becoming ABD. (It also marks just over a year since I became ABD.) I can be meticulous about projects such as this, so when I finished classes last...
CHIANG MAI, THAILAND. The film Her by Spike Jonze plays with two intertwined journeys: Hers is from innocence to transcendence. His is from heartbreak to love to heartbreak to hope. Considered from a strictly narrative “hero’s journey” framework, hers is the archetypically...
KRABI. As we think, we are inexorably negotiating our own fragmented consciousness. We live always in two times—the pre-reflective now of experience, and the reflective then-that-is-recalled of possible understanding. Both are always with us, but we tend to give our...
