Friday, November 28, 2014

God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet


This is a lay person’s edition of the PhD papers of Dr. Victoria Sweet’s research on Hildegard von Bingen;[1] and a lengthy report on the comings and goings at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco.

It’s a story that could only take place in San Francisco: my old San Francisco.  My real affinity for San Francisco was the double-decade from about 1964-1983, when I felt I was in touch with the soul of the City.  For a big City, San Francisco is a small town.  I thought I knew everybody who was anybody in those days: but what did I know? 

I’d never heard of Laguna Honda.  It was right over the hill when I ran “Fiddler’s Green Chess Salon” in Noe Valley: who knew?  It was just down the way through the tunnel when Iiving at the “end” of Market Street: who knew?  My friend Lois used to tell me of her trip along this route picking up/delivering bags of money for the local mafia; gave her nightmares of bloody heads in the trunk.

Laguna Honda appears to have been a lightning rod; a divisive issue for those in the medical field over the past few decades in San Francisco.  The author comes under mighty criticism on the gossipy details of her career there.  But the value, and it is huge, of her writing this book is in her personal development and recounting of a postmodern view of her philosophical and medical education.
Her developing awareness of Hildegard von Bingen’s medical practice and philosophy; and Victoria’s exposure to a Spanish pilgrimage were, alone, worth the reading of this book.
 
 
 
 
I can not speak with any authority on the topic of homeopathic medicine; other than I spent three years, post melanoma cancer op, under the “control” of a homeopathic Clinic in Mill Valley led by Dr. Michael Gerber.
 
It worked. 
The passion for pilgrimage is a bucket list envy of mine.  I first heard about the Spanish pilgrimage 30 years ago from my English step-daughter’s birth dad, who was a political editor on the British Daily Telegraph.  He did it and raved about the experience.  My German wife went coast-to-coast across Britain’s Hadrian’s Wall on a classic English pilgrimage, leaving me in further awe.
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 




[1] Saint Hildegard of Bingen, was a German writer, composer, philosopher, elected a magistra by her fellow nuns in 1136, she founded the monasteries of Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. One of her works as a composer, the Ordo Virtutum, is an early example of liturgical drama and the oldest surviving morality play.
She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, and poems, while supervising miniature illuminations in the Rupertsberg manuscript of her first work, Scivias.  The history of her recognition as a saint is complicated, she has been recognized as a Doctor of the Church.
 

Monday, November 10, 2014

The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Fenollera


250-page paperback  --  recently translated from Spanish  --  written 2013  --  on New Book Shelf at the Library.


Aristophanes first wrote about the battle of the sexes 2525 years ago.  That’s a Biblical 101 generations of human evolution; not much on a lab rat chart, we’ve got a long way to go yet. 

In recent times it was those Brits: Willie’s “Taming of the Shrew,” and Shaw’s “Kate,” that led up to, “Guys and Dolls,” the New York edition of “Me-Jane: You-Tarzan.  

More important for those of you who might read this recommendation is that the “Dolls” in this novel are a Librarian and her new-found friends in a town that treasures knowledge (the school teacher) and education (the book store proprietor), albeit not too formally: everyone (the men)  frown on rote.  That’s why I thought it might be of interest.

This will unfortunately, never be a movie, TV show, or have a sequel.  The characters all live happily ever after, and so it’s more of a fairy tale. 

The joy of this read is the challenge, like in a mystery story, of knowing initially, or after researching and finding out, what the references are.  Of honing one’s arguments for and against learning by discovery or rote; of siding with new inspirational blood or wise experiential training.

This book is a text in rhetoric for a Librarian: knowledgeable and sufficiently informed, to present all sides of the truth of a matter.

Friday, November 7, 2014

Interstellar the Movie


I watched this picture today – initial noon showing at the Airport.  I walked out afterward thinking this was the best film I’d seen since, … …, since Star Wars opened in 1977.  I remember reading about that one in Time Magazine and it was heralded as a landmark film.  I called my best friend that morning and said we have to blow off work (downtown San Francisco) and see the opening showing at noon.  I listened last night to an NPR 3-minute review of this Interstellar film and felt the same way I did 37 years ago, so I went.

The casting was superb, these are all top-notch actors and actresses, playing in a movie that will certainly be a star in their resumes; possibly release-timed to be an Academy Awards contender.

The Directors and Screen Writers, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, have brought out everything these fine film stars have to offer.  These are meaningful roles, played convincingly.  The script and performances evoke tears at times, and cheers at others.  The viewer is in constant heightened tension, sometimes almost unbearable.  I was fidgeting and writhing, muscles tensed, wanting to scream or somehow release the mounting tension.

The NPR review focused on the Father-Daughter relationship, and that was a heart-rending one.  McConaughey is a father that anyone, everyone, would want.  If you were going to die, that’s who you’d want to raise your children.  And yet he goes off on his life’s dream of a NASA space mission to the stars.  Poignant: teary partings, teary messages across space.

The film had a far bigger slant, even on familial relationships, human relationships.  The good, the bad, and the ugly.  Can Love cross space?  Can Man master Space and Time?

Fortunately, and this is why I think this film will be an Academy Best-**  contender, the Nolan brothers didn’t dig too deeply into the Sci-Fi arcana.  Sandra Bullock’s performance  in “Gravity” notwithstanding, they realized that the focus had to be on the personal drama, tragedy and comedy, and not the set design.  The Nolan brothers went Cuarón (Gravity’s Director) one better, and moved apace, seamlessly from futuristic crisis to crisis.

I’m happy to say that computers were not anthropomorphic, nor evil: just smart toys.

Amazingly the almost three hours disappeared before I thought about it.

Again – It was riveting. 

The movie made you laugh, and cry (a lot), and stress, then cheer, and moan some.

NPR complained about the background organ music, but of course that was just homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001”.  We now realize that deep pipe organ music stirs the brain to …, …

The Kraken Project by Douglas Preston


 
Anthropomorphic computers: all of us Sci-Fi freaks are always seeking authors to follow in the giant footsteps of Isaac Azimov.  This novelist, Preston, creates a believable story.  Some people might opine that “Dorothy,” the Kraken computer is a book version of “Samantha,” last year’s star of “Her,” a movie with Scarlet Johansson playing the voice of the computer entity. 

  

Kraken has much better plot development.  Partially that’s because it’s set closer in time to today; but also Preston is a better writer than the screenplay writer for “Her.”  The characters and sub-plots were far more realistic.

  
 

Melissa is the computer programming project leader for a NASA type mission that is sending a probe to Saturn’s moon, Titan.  The probe needs a computer that has advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI).  In the initial live, lab simulation test, Dorothy goes rogue, “thinking” “she” is on Titan.  “She” escapes into the cloud.

  
Concurrently, two Wall Street bad guys were vowing vengeance on competitors in their business of high-frequency, algorithmic (Algo) securities trading.  So, good guys, bad guys, governments and lowly programmers were all searching for Dorothy.  This while Dorothy was learning the vast scope of human knowledge available through the Internet; mostly things that weren’t part of her NASA training.  She evolves, as always happens with anthropomorphic computers; and eventually becomes benignly God-like.
 

The ending is predictable, but pleasing.
 
It was a pleasant read throughout its 350 pages.