Category Archives: Literature

Garden, Literature

Quack Will Inherit the Earth

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42  bar steady 30.28  0mph WNW  windchill 42  Autumn

Waxing Gibbous Blood Moon

That damned quack.  It has begun to overtake our new plantings.  So, purity to the wind.  If it warms up to 60 degrees, we’ll hit it with Roundup.  Then again.  And, probably, given the tenacious qualities of quack grass, again quackgrass_rhizome2300.jpgnext spring.

Over the years I have become a grudging fan of these hardy herbaceous plants, the weeds.  Without sophisticated gardening intervention they thrive; in fact, they often thrive in spite of it.   They are true survivors and give succor to anyone worried about humankind’s ultimate effect on the planet.

Herbicide us.  Nuke us.  Poison Gas.  Plague.  Quack grass and creeping charlie will soldier on.  I have not yet read The World Without Us but if it’s honest, it will tell the tale of a world dominated by weeds.  Only they will not be weeds anymore, since a weed is a plant out of place.  No, The World Without Us will be quack world, dandelion heaven, creeping charlie nirvana.  Long may they reign.

Until then, however, I want to get the damned stuff out of my young orchard.

Right now I have no Sierra Club responsibilities, except my last rounds of stranger phone calls ever.  I have no tours for which I have to prepare.  My sermons have left the computer and entered the world.  So for the next week or so I can devote myself to finishing up gardening chores, cleaning up my spaces infected with piles and perhaps catching up on a bit of reading.

Speaking of that, I have a recommendation for those of you who like literature and mysteries:  The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, by Swedish author Steig Larson.  A smart mystery and an intriguing look into contemporary Swedish life.

Literature, Weather +Climate

Reading

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82  br falls 29.82 2mph NNW dew-point 63  sunrise 6:22  sunset 8:02  Lughnasa

Waning Gibbous Corn Moon

Started “The Street” last night. It is by Ann Petry.  I found it while hunting for good books on the novel.  A literature professor recommended it as a gritty, realist account of life in Harlem circa 1947, or post-WW II, a neglected work of genius.  After the first chapter, I can see she was right.  It is literally gritty, opening with a young woman looking for an apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue in a vicious wind that throws dust and sand from the gutters into her eyes.  She wants the apartment to save her brother, Bub, who is 8, from her father’s girlfriend who gives Bub gin.

Further into “Maus” and it continues to amaze me, not only with the detailed account of the author’s father and mother and their extended family during the years preceding WW II and the war years, but with the uncomfortable honesty with which he portrays his father and his second wife, Mala.  This contemporary honesty seems to underwrite the veracity of the European story.

Late afternoon and the sky has become cloudy.  The transpiration cycle bundles moisture from the plants and the soil, the lakes and rivers and pumps up, up, up until it meets the air transports dew point.  It then goes in to clouds and, if conditions are just right, thunderheads form and the water returns, perhaps to the same place, perhaps somewhere else.

Art and Culture, Literature, Woolly Mammoths

Reading the OED

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90  bar steady 29.83  0mph NNW dew-point 59  sunrise 6:18  sunset 8:14  Lughnasa

Full Corn Moon  moon rise 2053  moonset  0816

The salmon is in the house.  So is the shrimp.  And ice.  Plus beer, NA, diet pop and bottled water (for entertaining purposes only).  We have the leaves in the dining room table, the first time since we bought the table a year ago.  It’s long.  Really long.  Kate has the triangle of refrigerator, sink, stove cordoned off and wants no helpers in there.  I don’t think anybody will fight her for the privilege.

Who said late August had no heat.  Not this guy.  With 90 and dewpoint at 59 outside dining stretches the Minnesota tolerance limits.  Good thing we have air conditioning and tables inside, too.

Got an Amazon order.  A couple of things that look fun.  Reading the OED, a guy who read the entire OED in one year.   Also, the Landmark Herodotus, an annotated version of the Histories.  There’s something about history and  historiography that fascinates me.

My first two tours of the new academic year have come in over the transom.  4th graders from Lakeville who want to see things Made In America and an MIA patron who wants a tour with an emphasis on Korea.  Be good to strap back into the harness and pull a wagon or two.

I’m off to sweep the patio and arrange furniture.

Faith and Spirituality, Literature, Writing

Dark Energy

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67  bar rises 30.17  0mph NNE dew-point 58  sunrises 6:15  sunset 8:19

Whole Corn Moon

“We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter, we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the beauties of Emerson is his immersion in the rhythms of the natural world.   Any farmer, any gardener, even any denizen of the farmer’s markets has a visceral sense of the way human activity changes with the seasons, at least in temperate latitudes.  Once the growing season begins, and for a bit before it does, our attention begins to move outside.  At first we watch temperatures, frost dates and the warming of the soil.  Then, we begin to watch for plant emergence, the ephemerals.  Once spring is in full gear with last frost date past, the growing season begins in earnest.  This means we are outside, working.  In this work we express, as Emerson subtly suggests,  our confidence as changers of the world.  We plant corn here and corn grows.  We plant tulips there and color blossoms.

Then, when the all the plants save the ancient firs and pines have begun to die back and the vegetables have given their harvest, we turn back toward the inside, reading and crafts and puttering in the workshop perhaps, or focusing on our work for pay.  As the nights grow longer, as they do even now, we light our fires and gather in our modern caves, lights on against the dark.

Still, I part company with Emerson a bit at the end of this quote.  The night, as it grows longer and deeper, heading toward the winter solstice, the heart of mid-winter, encourages creativity.  The metaphor of the day goes from verdant field to fecund womb.  As we slow, pull in our senses and live more in our interior, seeds planted long ago begin to sprout.  The novel we muttered about while weeding the tomatoes begins to demand a place in our lives.  The child we wondered about in the spring begins to insist, pushing us toward family.  The painting influenced by the play of light on brown and withering plants takes on shape and color.

Hecate. Persephone. Jesus in the tomb.  Osiris scattered among the reeds.  The rebel angel in Pandemonium.  The shadow within our own psyche.  All these are night time, dark energy forces.  Their energy often sublimates when the external world draws us; but when winter or melancholy strikes,  they can draft upward, burst out into full awareness and with their explosive power drive us either toward self-destruction or acts of creation.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Literature

Colma, California City of the Dead

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69  bar falls 29.80 1mh SSE dew-point 53  sunrise 6:11 sunset 8:25  Lughnasa

Waxing Gibbous Corn Moon    moonrise 1816  moonset  0130

Finished Alive in Necropolis. A fascinating book, part ghost story, part coming of age story, part police procedural set in Colma, California.  Colma, California is not just anywhere; it is where San Francisco chose to bury its dead.  There are way more dead people in Colma’s 17 cemeteries, 1.5 million, than citizens, 1, 280.   This one I read almost straight through.  It kept what John Gardner calls the fictive dream alive.

Feels good to have read the last two nights rather than watch TV.  I might let it become a habit.  I love fiction, write fiction.  That’s not to say I don’t pick up non-fiction, in fact, I do.  Quite a bit.  Some folks I know rarely read fiction.  I rarely read non-fiction books through in the same way I do novels.  I tend to treat them as resources, reading them more in the manner of college reading.  I seek the big ideas, the general arc of the argument.  Sometimes, I’ll finish them, but rarely.

Kate is home, the night is pleasant.  The kids are healthy, the grandkids, too.  And the dogs.  The gardens productive and the flowers are beautiful.  A good now.

Garden, Literature, Writing

Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei

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79  bar steep drop 29.95  0mph S dew-point 54  sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30  Lughnasa

First Quarter of the Corn Moon   moonrise 1326 moonset 2226

Each day of the Olympics I will post a poem from a famous Chinese poet.  Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei are the three most admired T’ang dynasty poets.  It is so easy to forget that this last century is only a tiny portion in the sweep of Chinese civilization.  In all the sturm und drang about the rise of China the fact that China has risen and fallen many times over the last 5,000 plus years often remains buried.  That’s right, 5,000 years of a continuous culture, sometimes dominant, sometimes ruled by foreigners, many of whom embraced Chinese civilization.

It is arrogant of us to judge China by our standards, standards that have stood nowhere near the test of time.  In China the collective always comes before the individual, at least that has  been true historically.  This is not to say that there have not been individualists in Chinese history.  Taoism tends to produce them, as does the famous literati system of rule by intellectuals.  Many painters and poets also walked their own distinctive paths.

Well, anyhow, China doesn’t need my defense.  I just want to add a bit from the depth of Chinese culture as we go through Olympics which often seem more about air pollution and human rights than sport.

Yes, I know.  This seems like a conservative position, but in reality it is a position informed more by anthropology and history, a position not too different from walk a mile in the other person’s moccasin.

I spent an hour or so this morning admiring the work of the Irishmen who dug ditches.  Put the shovel in the earth, push it down, lift it up, heave.  Repeat.  Not back breaking, but a workout.  I had a good nap.  The fire pit has begun to appear.  It will be deep enough for a fire when the Woollies come, though whether the area around it will be is another matter.

Art and Culture, Friends, Literature, Memories, Politics

More Radical Than Thou

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80  bar falls 29.66  0mph E  dew-point 76!  sunrise 5:55  sunset 8:43  Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

Jerry Stearns sent word that he worked with rebels in Central America and served a stint as a bodyguard for Rigoberta Minchu, the Mayan activist.  This reminded me, though I don’t think it was his intent, of the old game, More Radical Than Thou.

This was a game of gotcha and it drove the Everything Matters part of the personal is political.  If I, say, was a draft resister and an anti-war marcher, you might say that you planned to go to Canada.  If I planned to go Canada, you might say you were going underground.  If I said I was going underground, you might say, me too, but I’m going to bomb federal buildings, too.  This macho ratcheting up of the stakes in a round of how far can you travel away from middle-class morality and conventional politics lasted for a long, long time.

It was an aspect of movement politics in which I always felt one step behind, never quite outré enough.  I was back then, as now, stuck with this dipolarity, radical and conservative, both alive and well, never reconciled, perhaps irreconcilable. Come to think of it this same dipolarity might have been the tense spring that kept me going back to the bar for one more round.

Nowadays I cherish this peculiarity.  I can engage radical environmental politics, continue in my radical analysis of American society while loving the MIA and my docent role there.  I can continue opposition to conservative politics while loving the classics, poetry and faith traditions.  These two poles now serve as a creative edge for me, a sort of tectonic junction where volcanoes are born and subduction feeds the volcano.  Back then I felt the need to exist on only one end of the pole, rather than embracing the tension that came from them.

More Radical Than Thou pushed me to one end of the pole.  I ended up denying, repressing the conservative part of me that wandered art museums, read Ovid and Homer and yearned for a connection with God.  Seminary and a stint as a Presbyterian minister only reversed the pressure.  While I could affirm my love of biblical study and prayer, I felt constant pressure to be more radical, to engage in more and more radical political activity.   This change from one end of the see-saw to the other was no resolution either.

Only now, in these days when the introvert has settled into a quiet writing existence have I begun to live from both ends of the dialectic.  I can work as a docent amongst the fascinating details of art history while I the Sierra Club work blossoms.  I can write novels while I search nature and the American literary tradition for a pagan faith relevant to today.  Though the Jungian analysis moved far along this ancient trail, only unconditional love can heal these splits and I have found such love in Kate. We are soulmates.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Literature, Politics, Writing

Steamed Dumplings Stuffed With Yak

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78  bar steady  30.03  0mph ENE dew-point 56  Summer, warm and sunny

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

A trifecta.  In to Minnehaha.  Back to Andover.  In to Kenwood.  Back to Andover.  In to Sierra Club and the MIA.  Back to Andover.  Geez.  As I said, I gotta check with my scheduler.

Katarina is an intern from east Germany, Jena.  We folded letters and surveys to candidates for Minnesota House races.  She’s a bright young lady whose lucky boyfriend lives here.  They both study political science and enjoy comparing US and German culture/society.  She gave the example of her parents:  “They have never worried.  They have no debt.  They live modestly.”  She said her mother was not allowed to finish high school in the old East German regime because her husband was a mathematics professor.  If you had an intellengentsia in the home, you also had to have a proletarian.  Odd logic, even for Marxists.

After doing the mailing, I called about half a list of candidates who received the survey by e-mail last Friday.  This was just a reminder call.  Margaret Levin cajoled me into making phone calls and I’m glad she did.  It wasn’t so bad.  Of course, these were all friendly folk, too.

Across the street from the Sierra Club is the Himalaya, a Nepalese restaurant.  It was noon, so I stopped in for steamed dumplings stuffed with yak and a tasty sauce.  The next course was a soup with potatoes, black-eyed peas and bamboo shoots.  Nan accompanied this dish.  Hmmm.  I enjoy finding these small ethnic places and sampling cuisine from countries I have not visited.  Food is one of the fastest ways into a culture, even faster, because more immediate, than language.

I discussed purchasing a Nepalese thangka with the owner.  When I said I would like a Yamatanka, he said, “Oh, you like Yama?” He stuck his tongue out and down, Yama’s typical presentation. “Yes,” I said.  “Scary.”  I’ll speak with him about it again when I go in to the Sierra Club political committee meeting next Wednesday.

Before I went to the Sierra Club, I stopped at the Northern Clay Center and picked up a small plate.  It is my intention, over the next few years, to replace our Portmerion with unmatched pieces from many potters.  This is the fifth or sixth acquistion so far.

Each quarter I define a retreat.  It can be brief, three days or so, and it can be long, like the stay in Hawai’i.  I find I need to punctuate my normal routine with these caesuras or I get stale.  This habit began when I was in the ministry and I’ve found it a good carry over, so I’ve continued it.  Here’s my retreat for the fall quarter:

7/22/08   No traveling for this retreat.  I will take two weeks and stop writing, stop using the internet (except for the blog and e-mail) and study books on novel craft.  In this retreat I will create a reading program and a writing program that will guide my work for the next ten years.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Literature, World History

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

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85  bar falls 29.79  3mph NE dew-point 55  Summer, hot and unpleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly has an interesting article titled, The Burden of the Humanities.   I want to add a cadenza, a riff of my own to this Big Band music of the intellectual sort.

The first part of this article that caught my attention was the question of definition.  What are the humanities?  An obvious follow-on question, and the thrust of the article, is: Why the humanities?

I come to this topic from some hours now of researching the growth of Unitarianism and Universalism in Minnesota.  The connection is not obvious, but it is real.  In Minnesota Unitarianism, at First Unitarian Society, the general topic of religious or secular humanism got its launching pad into public debate and debate within the Unitarian-Universalist Association. This came from the powerful preaching of the Reverend John Dietrich who regularly filled the Garrick Theatre with over a thousand attendees.  A former Reformed Church clergy he experienced a gradual evolution of his views away from Reformed Calvinist doctrine.  In a heresy trial in that denomination in 1911 he was found guilty and defrocked.

Dietrich lifted the term humanism from an essay by Frederick Gould, published in the pamphlets of the British Ethical Society.  In that essay Gould proposed a new definition of humanism, one not rooted in the Renaissance understanding.  He proposed humanism as the “belief and trust in the efforts humans make.”

This new definition of humanism tried to put itself on the same intellectual path as science.  Here is a snippet from one of Dietrich’s sermons, one defining his own religion:

“So I take for my authority in religion the actual facts that have been discovered by science.  Beyond these facts which have actually been observed and verified, we really know nothing; and I make no assumptions which are not warranted by these facts.”      My Religion, John Dietrich, FUS 1929, p. 5  Published in the Humanist Pulpit, Vol. 3

The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, influenced by Dietrich in content, reinforces this apparent marriage of humanist thought and the then triumphal march of science and reason.

I’ve gone on a bit here about this because it is important to separate this now common understanding of humanism from the question, What are the humanities?  The answer to this question, I believe, turns the definition and the defining of humanism away from science and toward those realms of knowledge found in the classics of East and West, the artistic output of both East and West, and the philosophical and religious systems of both East and West.  That is, the question of what it means to be human can be answered only in a very narrow way within the science of say, physical anthropology or gross anatomy or human evolution.  Here the human is a physical entity shaped by the process of natural selection.  This is not wrong, it is right and necessary; but, it is not sufficient.

What it means to be human is found in the lived experience of humans.  That is, we are what we have been and what we have been shapes without defining what we can become.   How do we know what we have been?  We read the Grand Historian on the Qin and Han dynasties.  We listen to karnatic music.  The plays of William Shakespeare come to life before our  eyes.  Tolstoy helps us understand humans in War and Peace.  The cave paintings in Lascaux and the Cycladic figurines of the Cyclades both reveal aspects of a human response to lived reality.  The Winter Count of the Lakota and the great urban areas of London, Istanbul, or Rio De Janiero do the same.

The knowledge base of the humanities is broad and deep; it requires years to become fluent in even a small part of its study, yet it is precisely among the paintings and plays, the music and the poetry that we can rethink the human project and find old resources for new questions.

Thus, if I were to redefine humanism, I would say:  “an appreciation for what it has meant and what it now means to be human, an appreciation gained best from the cultural products of humankind over the millennia of our existence.”

Art and Culture, Literature, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Wading in Your Media Stream

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61  bar steep rise 29.96 2mph NNW dew-point 45   Summer night, nice

                              New Moon (Thunder Moon)

I’d forgotten the all consuming nature of writing a novel.  It goes to bed with you, advances into your dreams and wakes up with in the morning.  Plot ideas, twists, character developments, inconsistencies, new characters.  All aswirl.  The novel bumps up against daily life, takes something from it, gives something back, a loop, a mobius strip.  Feedback.  A neuro-net firing and firing and firing.  It’s fun, a wild ride while its cookin’. 

There are plateaus.  Superior Wolf landed on a plateau about 6 years ago, struggled to get off it a couple of times, then settled back down to rest.  Jennie’s Dead has been on a bit more of an up and down ride. She’s in storage now, but I can sense her wanting to break out now that her brother has begun to get legs, take strides.

Somehow, as happens in my life, momentum has increased.  Both the velocity and the mass have kicked up at the same time, calling back into action skills set aside long ago.  The Sierra Club work will require a good deal of time.  The novel needs constant nourishment.  So does the garden.  These three alone would be a good deal, but I also have a sermon to write for September that will take at least a week of research, if not more.  I’ve also agreed to take on managing the Docent Book Club and my term for that starts this month.  Then there’s that pesky Africa check out tour.

Right now this all feels good.  Blood flowing, mind working.  And I’m sure it will feel that way for a good while, probably on into December, then I’ll feel a need for a let down again.  Right now, though, I’m jazzed.

My Woolly meeting is in August this  year.   I sent out the following e-mail so guys could prep for it.

Hi! Your Media Stream:  This is the water from which you take much of your intellectual nourishment.  What is it?  The radio stations to which you listen, TV programs you watch, movies you see, books you read, magazines and newspapers you take or consult.  I-Pod fare, music at home.  Any media, in short, that you use for either entertainment or education. How will we organize the meeting?  Like this—please bring a book you are reading right now.  Please bring a book you consider important and formative for you, perhaps one read long ago.  Bring a copy of your favorite magazine.  Be prepared to let us know your favorite radio program, TV program (if any), movie (again:  current and from the past) and newspapers.  We’ll set music aside for this evening, but it might be fun to pick up again at some point as both Scott and Frank have led us to do at retreats. The physical objects themselves are important, so please bring whatever you can.  2 books and 1 magazine at least.  If you can jot down your favorite radio program, TV program and movies (past and present) and newspapers, I will collect your lists and send them to Bill to publish on our website. What’s the point?  To dip into each other’s media stream for a bit, to hear why we like the books, movies, programs, newspapers and magazines that we choose.  I imagine five-ten minutes each of sharing, then a round of conversation about what we’ve heard.  This is for fun and to expand our grasp of who we are.