Journal of a Sabbatical

November 23, 1998

rich day

I took Wilbur to the vet for his rabies shot and we all lived to tell about it.

I met a former coworker at Athenian Corner for lunch.

MacLink Plus came. I installed it. I opened the hitherto unreadable e-mail attachment only to find it just said "graphic goes here" three times - and no graphic! The web is not seamlessly woven yet. People on PCs send me photos all the time with no problem but they are usually JPEGs or gifs and not embedded in Word or WordPerfect files. Oh, well.

I drove down to Providence to meet Nancy at the barnacle bus tunnel so we could grab a bite to eat and then hear the Brown gamelan ensemble. They blew me away. Live music fills my senses in a way that a CD can't, and this gamelan just overpowered my senses and took me beyond conscious thought. Afterward the players invited the audience up to look at the instruments, so we took a close look at how the metal keys are mounted over the bamboo resonators and also at the kettle gongs. Nancy wants to learn to play gamelan now.

The two guest dancers from Boston were very different. I don't know enough about Indonesian dance to know whether one was better than the other or how to compare the dances themselves. One of the dancers wore a burning stick of incense in her hair. I could see the thin column of smoke spiraling up toward the gods as she danced. The dance itself reminded me a little bit of Cambodian dance I'd seen in Lowell. Nancy told me that's because the Javanese were in Cambodia at some point in history and did influence the classical dances. There is so much in the world that I know so little about...