Category Archives: General

Art and Culture, General

The Learning Curve(s)

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28  75% 25% 2mph SSE  bar 29.78 falls windchill 27 Yuletide

            Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon

A day with two tours.  Nice kids from Island Elementary in Shoreview.  Once again my questions and preparation left me as I got on the floor.  Guess I’m gonna need to prepare cheat sheets for the questions–to review just before the tour.  I tend to remember the details about the piece, but not the questions I planned to ask. All part of the learning curve.

Listening to Tom Wolfe’s new book, I Am Charlotte Simmons. It’s about college life today.  If it’s accurate, and I don’t have any reason to doubt it is, it must be an intimidating time to be a college student.  So much sex and pressure for grades.  Oh, wait.  Wasn’t that the same college I experienced?  All kidding aside the picture it presents is drastically different in some ways, yet so familiar in others.  I’m enjoying listening to it, but I liked the Alan Greenspan book, too.

Family, General

One Day Down, 364 To Go

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0  72% 23% 0mph WNW bar 30.64 steep rise  windchill -2  Yuletide  New Year’s Day

                              Waning Crescent of the Cold Moon 

A day almost gone in the New Year. 

Kate and I now have a weekly Skype call with Jon and Jen and Ruth+.  + being the one who comes.  This is weird because it means we have a video phone call, our picture and voice shows up there and their picture and voice shows up here, all in real time…well, almost real time.  Ruth says, “All Right.”  “Ma.” (grandma)  No. (snow) Bye. and so on.  All delightful and all wonderful, as if done for the very first time ever in the history of child development.  She’s a cutie, a blond Jewish Norwegian who lives in Colorado.  The mixing pot stirs on.

Worked out, watched a Japanese movie and an Arctic Tale and the Descent.  Three movies.  A holiday.  All pretty different.  Samurai and Shogun, sword and kimono.  A poignant tale of Arctic babies:  a walrus and two polar bears affected by the warming of the Arctic Ocean.  The Descent is a horror movie and a good one.  It left me squirming and wincing.   Made by the director of Dog Soldiers.

The morning I spent exegeting, then interpreting Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  What a tale.  Important for our time, yet hundreds of years old.  

Happy New Year.

General

The Beauty of Folded Metal Blades

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20  87%  27%  omph  ESE  bar29.95 falls windchill 20 Yuletide

                Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

Kate and I bought ourselves a new knife set for the holidays, Japanese knives made of beautiful folded metal.  Boy, are they sharp.  My fingers bear the proof.  The slightest contact with skin and these knives cut.  Of course, that is the point (or the edge); still, I wonder how long it’s going to take for me to learn how to use them well?

Watched the Patriots beat the Giants.  A battle down to the end.  Randy Moss looked great, just as I remembered him.  He floats up, puts out his hands and the ball gravitates toward him.  I should say, almost as I remembered him.  In this game he blocked.

A quiet time now, meditative.  The windows which during the day show me 7 oaks now reflect back the rooms interior.   The night can bring us to our inner selves, reflected back in the mirror of a calmed soul, a soul often too busy in daylight busyness, focused on the world outside the window.

Family, General

The Stomach Has Its Desires

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 22  85%  26%  0mph  NNE  bar 29.97 falls  YuleTide

          Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

 Excerpt of a poem by William Stafford, Choosing A Dog

Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don’t really want you to know —
it’s too grim or ethereal.

And sometimes when they look in the fire
they see time going on and someone alone,
but they don’t say anything.

Bill Schmidt sent this poem along from Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac.  It is a touching work, especially for those who live their lives in the company of dogs.

A morning filled with errands.  Took packages for New Years to the Anoka Post Office.  It’s sure easier to mail stuff now than it was a week ago.  Geez.  Practically walked right up to the postal clerk.  One clerk, on the other end of the counter, bald head and heroic biker beard, helped a man set up a General Delivery account.  I looked at the man, fiftyish with black hair laid flat on his head.  His used trench coat sagged with the bow of his shoulders.  His pants looked polished from wear and the boots old.  What had happened in his life?

At the library I donated several Teaching Company courses on audio tape.  As I walked in with the sacks, I began to think about libraries, how important they’ve been to me at each stage of my life: a refuge in an Indiana small town, a place of scholarship during college and my two post-grad degrees, sources of reading material when my funds were low and most recently a source of audio books.  There are two places in this world where I’ve always felt comfortable:  Catholic churches and libraries. 

Donating these courses made me consider charity.  Charity always makes me think of Frank Broderick who seems to incarnate charity.  I always feel less than in the presence of his generosity to others, less than because that’s not what I do.  Then I thought, wait a minute.  I’m not Frank Broderick; I’m Charlie.  Charlie’s generosity focuses on his passions:  art, libraries, dogs, gardens and, for some reason I can’t quite define, water.  These are the places where my volunteer energy, cash and other resources go.  And that’s just fine.

After this, groceries, where my stomach spoke to me down each aisle.  Each time I saw an old food friend like cheese or chips or Kashi cereal my stomach growled and I felt deprived.  The stomach has its desires, its attachments and communicates them; but, those are attachments learned over years of a certain kind of eating.  The process I’m in now is one I’ve gone through before, reeducation.  I’m reeducating my stomach to growl for lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes.  To speak to me of yogurt, right-sized portions and sourdough bread.

A morning full of errands, and, of learning more about myself.  A good morning.

General

Minneapolis and St. Paul and Seattle, the Northern Sunrise for Literacy

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24 81%  26%  0mph  N  bar30.22 rises  windchill23  Yuletide

          Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

Allison found this good news about reading, at least here in the Twin Cities.  The twilight’s pall hangs over the rest of the land, but not in these places according to Jack Miller.

Residents of Minneapolis and Seattle are the most bookish and well-read, according to results from a new survey released today of the most literate American cities. 

The survey focused on 69 U.S. cities with populations of 250,000 or above. Jack Miller of Central Connecticut State University chose six key indicators to rank literacy. These included newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment and Internet resources.

Overall, the top 10 most literate (and wired) cities included:

1—Minneapolis, Minn.
2—Seattle, Wash.
3—St. Paul, Minn.
4—Denver, Colo.
5—Washington, D.C.
6—St. Louis, Mo.
7—San Francisco, Calif.
8—Atlanta, Ga.
9—Pittsburgh, Pa.
10—Boston, Mass.

Minneapolis, Seattle, Pittsburgh, Denver and Washington, D.C., have made the top 10 every year since 2003, when the survey first launched.

General

Techno-Lust Satiated: For Now

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26 82% 26% 3mph WNW  bar 29.97 steady  windchill25  Yuletide                       Waning Gibbous Cold Moon

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions–as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
  – Friedrich Nietzsche

2007 saw the Ellis-Olson household become late adopters in two of the more dynamic techno-revolutions abroad in the land.  Last month we got a, wait for it, second cell phone!  That means we now have, like many, three phones: A daddy phone, a mommy phone and a just because we trust Qwest so much phone.  Then, this morning I went over to Ultimate Electronics and after some back and forth over price bought a plasma TV, a receiver, five speakers and an HD-DVD player.  Due to some weirdness about Money Market checks it will be a week or so before it arrives in our house, but then it will be 24/7 movie watching for this electro-cowboy.  Of course, that conflicts with all those hours I spend writing and working out and giving tours and eating and such, so I’ll have to pick something to give up.  Sleep, maybe?

Next post will comment on an interesting article, Twilight of the Books, a New Yorker piece on the decline of reading and the rise of what they author calls, the second orality.  Some disturbing implications.

General

A Quiet Christmas Eve

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16  88%  23%  0mph E  bar 29.99 falls  windchill16   Winter

                           The Full Cold Moon

Lydia brought some gifts over from the Perlicks, a bottle of wine and two first day covers and whole sheets of stamps, Kate’s with a dreidel and mine with Dell Superheroes.  Got us pegged.

Finally, I’ve found a combination of Core Performance workouts that combine strength training, flexibility and balance with demanding cardiovascular.  Feels good to have a solid base and now a new workout.

Kate and I ate a nutrisystem dinner, read for a couple of hours, then she went off to bed. 

We’re due for more snow on Thursday and Friday.  The ole snowblower’s getting a workout and we haven’t even the new year.  This snow fall was light and fluffy, powder.  A pure joy to blow and shovel. 

General

Winter Well and Truly Begun

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8 78%  25%  0mph SW bar 29.86 steep rise winchill 8  Winter

                        Full Cold Moon

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.  Christmas will come to a snowy world here in Andover, a white landscape for the celebration; the moon on the crest of the new fallen snow does give a lustre of mid-day to objects below.

We spent a quiet evening at home, reading and watching the Vikings, frustrated again.  Perhaps they’ll pick their game up next week.  We’re into the the second week of the nutrisystem and I’ve gotta say it seems like a good plan.  The only negatives so far are that some of the food isn’t great–not bad, but not great–and I still get hungry late in the night.  Like right now.  The upside is that Kate has lost 4 pounds and I’ve lost enough to not feel squished into my jeans anymore.  I’m going to weigh myself at the end of the 1st month and the end of the 2nd.  I do feel lighter, better.

After Christmas we come to our version of the Mayan’s five useless days at the end of the year.  These have always been days when I’ve chosen to focus research on a topic of special interest.  This year it will be immortality.  There is this novel that keeps trying to get born and it has something to do with immortality although what I don’t know.

This is a special time for me, a time to think, to consider the year past and the year to come.  I love the snowed in , cold outside feeling.  It’s just right for this kind of inner work.

Art and Culture, General

Art and Snow at the Beginning of Winter

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                            jjwsolstice250-0.jpg 

A Winter Solstice shot by Jim Johnson from the plains near Hecla, South Dakota

18 73% 28% 0mph windroseWNW  bar 29.87 steady windchill17   Winter Solstice

                          Winter began at 12:08 AM this morning

A bit of refinement on the arts and literature ideas from yesterday. The overarching idea is this:  some works of art included literature, usually poetry but not always.  In those instances it is clear that for the artist the written material had critical importance to the piece, otherwise, why include it?  In other instances, the image or sculpture gives form in print, painting or three-dimensions to a specific moment, either in story or in history.  Again, for the artist the textual base for the piece has to inform the work, so knowing the work, especially as it was known in the artist’s time and to the artist seems as important as understanding the piece itself.  Also, painting and sculpture and prints were never the only art form of their day; insteady they existed in an artistic milieux that not included fellow workers in the plastic arts but also poets, novelists, musicians, architects.  We often see reference to architecture in art history books, but very little reference to literature.  This last point becomes even more important as we move into the impressionist era and beyond when artists often wrote proclamations, began to intentionally blend their work with poetry and some moved into performance.

These are ways in which literature is important to the field of art history and therefore our job as docents.  The use of other books, about artists and movements and particular works, is another intersection between art and literature.

A light snow.  The snowblower moved out of the garage with its usual growl and eagerness to eat snow, then throw it.  Temperatures have begun to trend down again after a brief warmup.  I’ve done some additional moving, but I think today, certainly tomorrow will see the end of the bookcase/exercise equipment reshuffle.  That means I’m ready to move onto learning about hydrponic gardening and planning the vegetable gardens for next year.  Looking forward to it.

General

The Fog of Everyday Life

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35  54%  34%  7mph  windroseENE bar rises dewpoint20 First Quarter of the Snow Moon    Holiseason

The great tragedy of Science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas H. Huxley (1825 – 1895)

Whenever I read something about war, especially from a general staff perspective, this observation comes up:  “A battle plan never survives contact with the enemy.”  This represents several attitudes at once.  Humility, in that no plan can entertain every contingency created by others with free will opposed to it.  CYA, in that it provides cover for even the bad plan, for it too will not survive contact with the enemy.   Hopefulness, in that it apparently assumes that despite this problem, somehow, things will come out ok. 

A paraphrase might be, no plan survives contact with reality.  That is to say, no intellectual effort, a non-dimensional rendering of a complex, 4-D world, can guide us unerringly in the nitty gritty of daily life.

                                     Reality is a crutch for people who can’t cope with drugs.
                                                       – Lily Tomlin

All this explains why I’m not done with my tour.  The cursed enemy of groceries and filing and e-mails were ugly facts, real obstacles that rose up and overwhelmed my plan.  In days gone by I would become anxious about this, troubled.  Now, I’m merely frantic.  I have all the stuff out, I’ve done most of the objects before, and I’m bound to know more than the high school students.  This all provides me with the long ago experience of college when a report or test was imminent and other ugly facts like beer and women and politics had crossed my path and torn up my plans.

At some point in all this mental milling around, I come back to this, “This is why you’ve not done more with your life.  You bum.”  This occurs especially when I read about someone like Jacque Barzun who, at age 100, just published his 38th book.   If I publish one a year from now till my 100th birthday, I could just catch him.  Well, I guess there is still time. 

Next comes:  Oh, geez.  Come on now.  You love your life and realize how lucky you are.  How grateful you are for what you have and for what you’ve been able to do with your life.  Then, I nod, get up and go work out.  Out, out, damned fact.