Category Archives: Friends

Friends, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

A Fed? LOL

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43  bar steady  29.47 11mph  NNE  dewpoint 42 Beltane

                Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Well, ok then.  The reader who wondered about my hydroponics is not a Fed.  LOL they said. 

It is a weirdness about the Web that we can connect directly with people, yet know nothing about them.  The weirdness compounds when we realize the people with whom we come in contact in this way, we don’t know at all beyond a few words on a computer screen.  In the case of comments on a website or a blog like this one the stakes are, for the most part, low, but when you consider the apparent number of people who meet up in person after such interactions. 

All this reminds me of Alvin Toffler and his book, Future Shock.  I still remember many ideas from that book because he was a good phrase maker.  High tech, high touch is the one that comes to mind here, but in a slightly different vein than Toffler’s.  His version was that the more we connect through technology, the more we will want to see each other in person.  I believe that’s true, but I’m on another tack here.  High tech, high touch heightens the need, the desire for personal interaction, yes. It produces that desire–the original sense of eros in the Greek, the desire for human contact–in a situation we have not evolved to understand.

We are animals wired over hundreds of thousands of years to read the language in another person’s eyes, the way they hold their hands, the set of their neck, the wrinkles and twitches of the mouth.  Though we are often wrong even with those cues, at least in face-to-face encounters we have a chance to assess, to ponder.  Words on a page are not the same.  Not even close.  It may be that we have a sophisticated reader’s intution about how language reveals the author, but that’s a game often got wrong by critics, so how good can we be?

The point is this, words without flesh, disembodied words put us at a disadvantage.  We can’t judge the intent of a phrase, the reason behind a conjecture.  This has led to the all too familiar problem of flaming where some unhappy soul takes this anonymity and uses it to vent, often just to vent.

Toffler also described Over Choice, a situation where we face more decisions about more matters than we can handle with anything approaching wisdom.  This applies to people we meet through the electronic ether, too.  The reader interested in hydroponics might be a valuable interlocutor, one whose journey with indoor gardening might supplement and enhance my own.  And vice versa.  Or, they could be, as I speculated, a law enforcement officer hiding behind the web’s anonymity.   Because it is my nature to trust first and question later, I accept the response to my speculation at face value; but, I have no face.  Therein lies the dilemma.

We must evolve some method, some means of reading people we meet on the web.  I suppose that’s what Facebook, Youtube, Myspace propose to accomplish, but there it is often meeting people to be meeting people.  And those social networking sites get gamed, too.  An endless loop. 

Enough on this.  I have to get to work writing my piece for the Muse.  It’s taken an odd turn.  Wonder how it will finish?

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Deeply Skeptical of Industrializaton and Technology

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42  bar falls 30.10 3mph WNW dewpoint 22 Spring

             Last quarter Moon of Growing

Into St. Paul today.  Preached (sort 0f) at Groveland.  I say sort of because the presentation consisted of me telling jokes about Unitarian-Universalists and the group discussing their meaning as it relates to UU identity.  This comes from a technique dredged up from those long ago years in anthropology.  Joking behavior, according to anthropologists, helps determine group boundaries.  And so it did.

The discussion that ensued was better than I could have hoped.  It was heartfelt, honest, sometimes bordering on painful.  The latter emerged during a discussion of UU discomfort with faith, with the act of vulnerability.  This leaves UU’s, as the discussion went, with a blank spot when confronted with grief, crisis. 

On the way home I stopped at Cheapo on Snelling and loaded up on mindless action films, the kind I prefer to watch when I’m working out. 

During lunch I finished Princess Mononoke again.  It is a wonderful, complex and beautiful work that gives pause.  It would be perfect to show at the same as Lord of the Rings because both Tolkein and Mizasashi are deeply skeptical of industrialization and technology, yet also unflinching in representing the contradictions and trade-offs as not black or white.  Tolkein seems more either/or than Mizasashi, so I prefer Mizasashi’s take on thing.

Friends, General, Weather +Climate

Slicing and Dicing. Chopped. Simmered.

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46  br steady 29.67 2mph ESE dewpoint 44 Spring

                     New Moon (Growing)

A light, but steady rain falls.  A cold rain.  The pre-emergent and the cygon I applied yesterday will get a chance to work themselves thoroughly into the soil and around the Iris rhizomes.  As the rain melts the remaining snow, I will have a few spots left to hit with the pre-emergent, but not many.  I’m ahead of the curve this year and hope to stay that way with regular, not too lengthy garden sessions.

A full stomach is a great aid to grocery shopping.  The list and only the list, so help me Martha.  And so I did.

Back home I made lunch, watched the first episode of Battlestar Galactica’s last season (I recorded it Friday night.  Love that DVR) and loaded the dishwasher.  After lunch I got out my Golden Plump chicken, read the directions for CNS on the back, and then began slicing and dicing carrots, celery, onions.  Saute the veggies.  Then 10 cups of water, Paul Prudhomme poultry seasoning, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for an hour and a half.  Underway.

While doing that, I also made a green salad since I had the carrots and celery and onions out already.  A few strawberries bought a week ago had that soon to rot look, so I chopped and diced them, too (I was in a rhythm.) and put them in plastic containers with a cutup orange each.  So there.  Domesticman to save the day!

A nap  now.  Naps on rainy days, cool rainy days.  A wonderful thing.

Art and Culture, Friends, General

Bloggers Need Union?

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51 bar steady 29.68 2mph SSE dewpoint 36 Spring

                    New Moon (Growing)

Don’t know whether you caught the article in this morning’s paper about bloggers.  It seems bloggers are the new cottage industry, working at home at piece rate, grinding out post after post after post in a grueling 24-news cycle that, this article claims, often leaves little time for sleep or food.  In fact, the premise of the article was that there might be a new cause of early death.  Blogging.  Yikes!

Here I am, doing two to three posts a day most days, eating and sleeping and exercising, plus living a life.  Not to mention that I blog for free.  In fact, I pay for the privilege since Kate and I rent webspace from the nice folks at 1&1 Internet.  There’s also that 6.99 a year for the domain name, ancientrails.com.  OK, the price is cheap, especially for what we get, but still.  This article said some people make as little as $10 a post.  As little.  I could pay my entire internet overhead with 3 posts, maybe 4.

Oh, well.  If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing cheaply. 

This is more of a point than I make it sound.  The garden.  My novels and short stories to date.  Touring at the Art Institute.  None of it pays a dime, at least so far.  Yes, I did make $80.00 last year doing tours after hours at the MIA, but that hardly counts.

None of this discourages me, but it does make me wonder if I could find a nice patron who’d like to hype ancientrails and pay me, too.  Wouldn’t turn it down.  Unless it interfered with my editorial prerogative, of course.

Paul Douglas, who mentioned this website in a recent Star-Tribune weather column, got released from WCCO.  Several people wrote him notes.   He deserves it.  He’s a creative guy and a Minnesotan through and through.  Doesn’t sound like he’s gonna line up for unemployment either.

Groceries this AM, then making CNS (Jewish penicillin) for my ailing docent colleague, Bill Bomash.  He’s the guy who broke his femur in five places.  The class will provide a few meals for him and his wife over the next few weeks.

Art and Culture, Friends, Weather +Climate

Simple, Straight-Forward Human Decency

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30  bar steady 29.83  5mph N  Dewpoint 29 Spring

                  Last Quarter Moon of Winds

“Let us all be thankful for today, for if we did not learn a lot, at least we learnt a little. And if we did not learn a little, at least we did not become ill. And if we became ill, at least we did not die. So let us all be thankful. – Buddha, attr.

This snow is serious.  The rocks in the garden have white cloaks and look as if they will disappear once again.  The winds stay high and the accumulation has weighed down the trees.  Vale and Breckenridge may have powder, but in the late spring we have heart attack snow.  Heavy, wet, voluminous.  Still pretty.

I love the quote attributed to the Buddha.  Put that together with Grandpa’s, “You come from nothing and the purpose of life is to make something from nothing.” and you have a complete philosophy of life without all the dreary textual criticism, dogma and fancy dress.

A docent colleague has organized a food service for Bill Bomash who broke his femur in five places while vacationing in Brazil.  This kind of simple, straight forward human decency is enough.  It allows us to make something from nothing and, as Grandpa said, that’s the purpose of life.   

Friends, Garden, General, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Politics

Plants and a Particular Location + Gardener = Dialogue

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40  bar falls 30.27  6mph  SSE  dewpoint 24  Spring

          Last Quarter Moon of Winds

Ah.  Can you feel the sigh?  A weekend with no outside obligations at all.  I plan to do clean up, plant some more seeds, read, maybe watch a bit more of the NCAA.  How about that Davidson, huh?  Took out Wisconsin.  That’s a student body of 1,700 versus one of what, 30,000?  I will read chapter 3 in the Permaculture design book for sure, perhaps polish off a novel or two, maybe start writing one of my own.  I have an idea that’s been bouncing around for some time now.

Tonight at 5PM I get to celebrate Chinese New Year again with the CIF guides.  I look forward to this each year, this one especially because I’ve done my homework on China and Japan over the last few months.  Saw MingJen, who organizes this event, on Wednesday at the Naomi Kawase film, The Mourning Forest.

If you can, would you write Hillary and tell her to get out now?  We need a chance to even up with McCain and a bitter end to the Democratic primary race just lets him have the field to himself.  I don’t have anything against Hillary, in fact she and Obama are about a horse apiece politically, but Obama has won the field, has the delegates and deserves his chance.  Hillary will have another shot.  She’s established that a woman can run as a serious candidate, a remarkable and historic achievement in itself.  Nothing in the feminist revolution demands that women win all contests or get all the jobs. 

Snow continues to retreat in our yard, but slowly.  As in years past, the Perlick’s grass is almost fully visible, while ours remains under 6-8 inches of snow.  They face south, we face north and that makes all the difference.  Spring comes to our property about a week later than theirs, weird as that is. 

On Thursday I followed the dog tracks in the snow and went out to check on my trees planted last spring.  Some animal, either rabbits or deer, have eaten the tops of them down to the garden hose I put around them as protection from mice.  I didn’t think tall enough up the food chain.   These were the trees I planted nearest the area we call the park.  Further north, also on the eastern edge of our westernmost woods, another group of oaks, white pines and Norway pines look like they’ve done well over the winter. 

This is the nature of gardening.  Try this and it works.  Try that and it doesn’t.  Listen.  Repeat what worked, change what didn’t.  Plants and a particular location engage the attentive gardener or horticulturist (as I’m beginning to think of myself) in a constant dialogue as shade patterns change, seasonal sun shifts become more understood, rain falls or does not fall and various cultivars and seeds prove well suited to the site or not.  This dialogue is multi-lingual as one party communicates in one language and the other has to translate, but it is true discourse as each can alter the others ideas.      

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Up At 5AM and Hard At It

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33  bar steep fall 30.11  6mph N  windchill 33

    Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

Boy is my sense of time screwed up.  Got up at 4:30AM for the bathroom.  Went back to bed.  No sleep.  Waited.  Still no sleep.  So at 5AM I got up, went downstairs, opened by John Weber collection catalogue and tried to figure out what to do next.  This was difficult because I had put my notes for the tour in the carrier I take when I go into the museum.  That location didn’t occur to me until ten sleepy minutes had gone by shuffling this paper and that trying to locate the item I needed to finish the tour.  Those notes.

But I did find them.  As a quiet spring snow began to fall outside in the dark, I entered again the world of the Heian poets, the Shining Prince Genji and the floating world of courtesans, no theatre and elegant costume.  Japan and China are strange and distant cultures for most Westerners so entree into their world does not come without some struggle, some setting aside of preconceived notions. 

Over the last three years in particular I have worked hard to get a handle on the historical context in both Japan and China.  I’ve worked harder on China, but Japan has had some time from me, too.  As so often happens in the life of the mind, eventually the heart begins to follow and somewhere along the line I went from interested to captivated. 

It was easy then to begin comparing poems used in the poetry competitions, mythical contests in which cultured Japanese matched poets from different eras, then matched two of their poems that seem to have resonance.  The competition was not between the two poets in question of course, but among the Japanese who created the matches.  It would be like, say, putting Robert Frost’s “Snowy Evening” against one of Emily Dickinson’s darker pieces, Wallace Stevens and Coleridge. 

So it went for two hours until the dogs began to whine and I let them out of their crates, fed them and began my own breakfast.

After breakfast I caught another hour and a half or so of sleep, then drove into the Common Roots Cafe where the docent book club gathered to discuss the (apparent) lack of religion/spirituality in contemporary art.  I guided this discussion, but I’m afraid I didn’t conceive a way to do it fruitfully.  We had a lot of conversation, though, and I think we may have gotten greater clarity from it than was immediately obvious. 

It was Tom Blyfeld’s 80th birthday.  He celebrates his 56th wedding anniversary on Friday.  He mentioned the doctor who delivered two of his children, a man 90 something who has great-great grandchildren. Amazing.  He will celebrate his 65th wedding anniversary.  These are numbers unattainable by most of us in the divorce generation.

Tonight is the celebration of St. Patrick’s day at Frank Broderick’s.  He bought the meat last Friday.  His table always groans with meat and potatoes and cabbage.  I look forward to it each year.

Art and Culture, Friends

Aramaic and the Democratic Primary Race

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28  bar rises 30.06 5mph N windchill 28

    First Quarter Moon of Winds

Yesterday I had tours with a group of 4th graders from Hastings and 1st graders from Apple Valley.  Though these tours don’t race the intellectual engine, they are fun.  These kids are thoughtful, attentive and excited about the art that they see.  It refreshes my eye each time I do one of these tours because the kids see things I don’t see and make conjectures about the works that don’t occur to me. 

An example of the latter is a discussion I had with the kids from Hastings about the Fanatics of Tangiers.  Delacroix painted a Sufi sect as it engaged in an ecstatic dance to reach the wisdom of their saint.  (BYB-Fanatic is ethnocentric, not to mention xenophobic, but it is the name of the painting.)  The kids looked at the sect and imagined that the group surging foreward through the streets (the sect) might be being chased by animals; or, perhaps the people who stood around had sent an army to the crowd’s village and chased them back here. 

Another great thing about tour days is the opportunity to connect with docent classmates and to make new friends from among the docent corps.  Today Stacy, Careen, Annie, Sally and Wendy were there.  They reveal, among them, the infinite variety our species takes, even among those who appear so similar.  All white, all well-educated and with one exception upper middle class at least, these women vary a lot in their personal details.  Stacy’s husband runs and owns a business recharging ink cartridges while she works at a Lutheran church in various capacities.  Careen is a Quebecois, an architect and a physician’s spouse like me.  Annie’s husband is from Lagos, Nigeria and contracted malaria while there.  Annie’s adopted.  Sally is a retired trainer and organizational development person whose daughter almost drowned in a ferry sinking off the coast of Thailand not too long ago.  Wendy has bright kids, and married an Italian.  She’s works on her conversational Italian for trips to the see the in-laws.

Lunch with Frank.  We went to the Black Forest where we were the only customers in the dining room except for a couple at the very far end next to 26th Street.  We both had sausages and we both knew better.  We talked about travel, serious illness, Aramaic and the silliness, if it weren’t so damned serious, of the late stage Democratic primary race.