tuannyriver

I speak with my hands!

I just had a really good semester in the classroom, the best at Pepperdine. In the first two years, I had some good classes and even three or four great ones: “great” means you cannot ask for more. But for each semester there was at least one class out of three or four (depending on the semester) that was average at best or, at least once in my first year, quite sub-par. Well, not this fall. If the third time is the charm in trying most things in life, then the third year might be my charm in full-time teaching.

WP_003290 (1) — *Annual outing at the Getty Villa of first-year students in Great Books*

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December 27, 2015 0

Song of war #1 – Một Mai Giã Từ Vũ Khí (Farewell to Arms)

There are different ways to build a top-ten list. The way I employed for this list is twofold: pick the top song, then poke around to see if I could build a sensible list leading to this song. When I first thought of this list, I knew right away which song I’ll put at the top. My decision was pretty firm. It grew firmer when I made an important discovery that, as far as I know, has never been made by anyone before.

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December 24, 2015 4

Song of war #2 – Đêm Nguyện Cầu (Night of Prayer)

Belief in God tends to be strong for people living amid warfare. It is hardly a surprise then that prayer finds its way into music written during war. It was surely the case with popular music in South Vietnam.

Since this is the week of Christmas, it is worth mentioning that one the most popular South Vietnamese albums is filled with prayer. It is the third album of the fine series Sơn Ca (Birdsong), and the title is simply Giáng Sinh: Tình Yêu và Hòa Bình: Christmas: Love and Peace. It features some of the biggest names in the Saigon music scene at the time: Thái Thanh, Khánh Ly, Thanh Lan, Giao Linh, Lệ Thu, Anh Khoa, etc. (A recording from Elvis Phương would have completed this A-list.)

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December 23, 2015 3

Song of war #3 – Du Mục (The Herd)

467268678 — *Refugees in Saigon, May 1968 ~ pc Stripes.com*

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December 17, 2015 1

Song of war #4 – Hãy Sống Giùm Tôi (Live for Me)

It is not easy at all to choose a couple of songs from Trịnh Công Sơn for any list of ten songs about the Vietnam War. The first of his five albums in the Sing for the Vietnamese Country series – Hát Cho Quê Hương Việt Nam – is a masterpiece that must be listened from top to bottom. It is not a surprise that both of my selections come from that album.

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Hãy Sống Giùm Tôi – Live for Me or Please Live For Me – is perhaps the simplest composition in the entire album: musically, perhaps; linguistically, definitely. It took me, what, all of six or seven minutes to translate the lyrics – half of the time on two or three lines.

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December 16, 2015 2

Reading about food & drink #2

rockwell_want — Norman Rockwell, “Freedom From Want” (1943)

Here is part one.

“As nearly the same time as the discovery of alcohol,” writes Fernand Braudel in the first of his three-volume work on capitalism from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century,

Europe, at the centre of the innovations of the world, discovered three new drinks, stimulants, and tonics: coffee, tea, and chocolate. All three came from abroad: coffee was Arab (originally Ethiopian); tea, Chinese; chocolate, Mexican.

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November 25, 2015 0

Reading about food & drink #1

This two-part reflection was inspired by my Great Books classes in the last two years, and by this photo from my Pepperdine colleague Donna Plank. Norman Rockwell’s classic illustration “Freedom From Want,” which I showed in the American history survey class last week, reminded me to finish these posts before Thanksgiving. Gobble gobble!

Plank students — Donna Nofziger Plank’s first-year seminar Faith & Reason, Fall 2012 ~ Students take a break from discussing Plato’s *Symposium*. Later they would have pears when discussing Augustine’s *Confessions*.

With two exceptions, all of my non-academic jobs have involved foodstuffs to some extent.
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November 22, 2015 0

Song of war #5 – Căn Nhà Ngoại Ô (The Suburban House)

Here is the list so far:

10. Quê Hương Chiến Tranh
9. Tám Nẻo Đường Thành
8. Đưa Em Về Quê Hương
7. Đó! Quê Hương Tôi!
6. Tình Thiên Thu của Nguyễn Thị Mộng Thường

The toughest choice for me is the fifth one. It didn’t take me long to settle on the songs above – or the fourth, third, second, and top songs. (Two of the top five belong to Trịnh Công Sơn; can you guess which songs?) For the fifth spot, I wanted to continue on the theme of romantic love and loss from selection #6. I thought of several possibilities.

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November 19, 2015 2

Initial thoughts on “Terror in Little Saigon”

Grading and other obligations kept me from watching this documentary when it was first shown on PBS last week. But I read the written narrative on the ProPublica website (which isn’t a transcript of the documentary but shares the same materials), and finally watched the documentary online last night. Here are some thoughts after watching it.

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