Category Archives: Writing

Colorado, Latin, Translating De Bello Gallico, World History, Writing

Emerging

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Imbolc                                                                        Settling Moon II

The loft is slowly coming together. One section, the workout space, is close to its eventual configuration. It still needs the pull-up bar. After that it will be as I envisioned it. Doesn’t mean it won’t change after I use it for a while.

The books, as I’ve said before, are clustered and now await built-in bookshelves. As the bookshelves go up Ruth and I will organize them. All my art is, for now, still in boxes or rolled up in tubes. Until the wallspace is more defined, I’ll not be hanging or placing anything.

The IKEA standing desk still needs it work surface brought up from the garage. The twopieces are very heavy. Jon is going to build a round wooden table as a project space. He recommends Paxton Lumber as a source for the table top. This is a national chain owned by Bill Paxton’s family. (actor)

Storage space for office supplies is non-existent right now, so that’s a future project. Filing, which I thought I’d get started over the weekend, I’ll get to this week.

Aside from tweaks though, I’m ready to get back to a regular workout and translation schedule since the remaining work here will be some time in the realization.

 

Memories, Writing

Trailhead: Ancientrails, 2005

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Winter                                                    Settling Moon

Ten years ago last November I visited Singapore, Bangkok and Siem Reap. My sister and I spent a fascinating morning at the American Club in Singapore watching the election returns over bacon, eggs, pancakes, grits. Bush II won the election, kicking off my Southeast Asian odyssey with a tragedy of historic consequence.

(Had the thought yesterday that the Bush clan is the Duck Dynasty of American politics. Still seems like a good one.)

After Singapore, I spent a couple of days in Bangkok, then flew to Siem Reap, Cambodia, the jumping off spot for visiting Angkor. Angkor was a revelation to me. An ancient Hindu culture, the Khmer, built temples, each erected by a god-king, over a huge area. Unfortunately, I’d left my blood pressure medications back in Bangkok, so, instead of lingering for the last days of my trip in Siem Reap, I had to return to Bangkok.

While there, running across the street to dodge the infamous Bangkok traffic, my right foot fell into sewer obscured by the nighttime darkness. Severed my Achilles tendon as I ran forward, wincing in pain.

In February of 2005 I underwent surgery for repair of the Achilles. Recovery required two months off the leg, so I decided to start a blog. Ancientrails was the result. Ancientrails began on February 1st, 2005, less than a month from now.

Over the course of this eleventh year of Ancientrails, I plan to revisit matters that interested me on some of the days during those ten years.

Here’s a bit of post from January 3rd, 2007:

“Back to Docent class today.  Ann Isaacson gave a masterful lecture on a difficult subject, the decorative arts.   She has a grasp of technique and detail in these matters that is impressive.

It was good to see the class again.  It provides two essentials for a long life:  learning in a new subject, and new friends.  I still feel lucky to have this chance and look forward to touring and further art  history research.

On another artistic note I headed over to Northern Prairie Tileworks  to see about the cost of using hand made tiles for  our fireplace surround.  Kate and I saw these guys at the Arts & Crafts Expo at the State Fair grounds last fall.

Roger and another man who worked there were helpful.  It looks like we can afford this one accent piece and I’m glad.”

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

The Last Presentation

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Samain                                                                                     Moving Moon

A piece on social justice I’ve been writing , a presentation for Groveland U-U on December 14th, has been harder than usual. Usually such presentations form over a period of time, I write them, present them and forget them. This has been my pattern for the 22 years of occasional presentations there.

Two key elements have made this one more difficult. It will be my last, probably my last such presentation anywhere and certainly my last to Groveland. And, it was originally to be reflections of my years of social justice work, mostly in the Twin Cities.

When I tried to do a summing up, a sort of lessons learned, failures and successes as examples, it came out wooden. Too focused on me, too summary, not really coherent. Then, I thought, ah. What is it that creates a need in some of us to work for social justice, to attempt to move the levers of power in such a way that they benefit others?

That one felt too psychologized, too small.

What I ended up writing is no valedictory speech. It’s neither summing up nor 360 205370_10150977727553020_150695969_npsychologizing. It is, rather, about choice, about existentialist living.

It finishes with this:

We’ll end with another instance, perhaps a change that will come into your life as it already has in mine. Grandchildren.

I don’t want to say that grandchildren are at the center of my life because they’re not, though they’re pretty damned important. I do want to say that being with our grandchildren, Ruth and Gabe, 8 and 6, gives me a clear focus on the future, that is, the world in which Ruth and Gabe will grow up, in which they will have children and in which they will grow old.

I know, as you probably do, that it will be a much warmer world and one with more erratic weather and changed food production systems. It will be a world in which the current gap between the 99% and the 1% will get wider. Just taking these two instances, as I look at Ruth and Gabe and, at the same time, at that future, those gazes will inform the political choices I make now. Perhaps that’s true for you, too.

 

 

Family, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

Business and Writing

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Samain                                                                              Moving Moon

Out to Keys for our weekly business meeting. Kate gets decaf, having been up since 5:15 with the dogs. I get caff, having gotten up at 7:00. We go over the weekly numbers, our financial situation and the calendar. Talk about the move while silverware clinks against ceramics and Pam, our waitress in a sequined red t-shirt with Disney characters and her name outlined in the shiny stuff, fills our cups with a two-fisted maneuver, a pot of decaf and one of regular.

Across from us sat a couple, cute trollish in type, older with white hair, jowls. Her with a scowl and him with Coke bottle thick black glasses. They didn’t talk.

Back home after that where we went over our lists of things to do. Mine included deploying the bagster, a final check of closets, sheds, drawers, cabinets, packing the downstairs bath and remaining art. Kate had on hers checks to the painters and the stager among other things.

Downstairs I wrote a second version of my presentation for Groveland on December 14th. It’s title and theme now comes from a short work by Kierkegaard, Purity of heart is to will one thing. A complete refocus.

Now. A nap.

 

Memories, Writing

A Forgotten Work. Forgotten By Me.

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Samain                                                                    New (Moving) Moon

I discovered a novel I forgot I had written, the Well and the Cross. How weird is that? I remembered Even the Gods Must Die, The Last Druid, The Temple, The Phantom Queen and Missing, but the Well and the Cross? Not at all. Think I’d better take some time after the move and reread them.

Boxing them up, hefting the pages reminded me that I had actually done the work. It felt good.

A bit left here, in the study, then I’m out into the files. Out of the study until it’s necessary to load the cargo van that Kate will drive.

Memories, Minnesota, US History, Writing

A Man, A Monument

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Lughnasa                                                            College Moon

IMAG0657Third Monday of the month. It’s been the Woolly meeting night for years, over 25. Bill Schmidt suggested we visit a memorial related to war, a memorial in a neighborhood park in northeast Minneapolis, right on the Mississippi behind the old Grain Belt Brewery and its wonderful castles of yellow brick. The memorial is in an odd, very out of the way location, almost as if its hidden. And it is a monument to the effect one man can have on history.

That one man is Woolly Mark Odegard, a Vietnam War Veteran, who became part of this project and as part of it shaped its content in important ways. When the group gathered to consider it began, all the veterans wanted to honor the war and their service. This is after all the public script about how to notice veterans. We honor the historical event, the war, and their participation in the war. But Mark knew there was more beneath the public script.

When probed, the veterans admitted that war was ugly, painful and often confusing. Mark said the monument should show that side of war, too. He got this element added by interviewing veterans from various wars and putting their quotes on marble stelae along with historical facts about the war. Commenting on the Spanish-American War one man said, when the fighting against the Filipino’s began he realized the war “was about greed.” Unusual and telling language at a war memorial.

Each stelae is a slab of black granite with text acid etched into it and a face above it IMAG0661bronzed from living subjects, when possible veterans from the wars memorialized. Mark suggested that the monument start with the Dakota war in 1862 since that was the first war with Minnesotans serving. To particularize it further Mark suggested that the stelae have the number of Americans who died and the number of Minnesotans.

(Mark next to the Vietnam War stelae topped by his face in bronze.)

This monument will be in place for a long, long time and Mark’s effort to personalize war through the words of veterans will bring an element of realism to a too often romanticized human endeavor.

 

 

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Music, US History, Writing

Unasked Questions

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Lughnasa                                                                   College Moon

A project, perhaps the smooth beast rising from the deeps, keeps coming at me, jostling me, prodding me to imagine it into being. I’m not ready to go all the way there yet so let me set down a few bars, perhaps really only a jumble of notes not yet ordered by staff and clef.

1. American art. Here would be American works that found their muse in the West as it came to be in the minds of a young country. Here the work of the Hudson River School, the Ash-can School, Wyeth, Homer and Hopper, even Ed Ruscha, artists whose work clawed away at the truth underneath the bones of American life and culture. Warhol and Pollock and Rothko, too. Morris Louis. Photographers like Anself Adams and Walker Evans and Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman and Edward Weston. Seeking the American through our art.

2. American music: jazz, Copland, Gershwin, Ives. Seeking the American in our music. Seeking the sounds that issue from the various rivers that make us an ocean.

3. American thinkers like the American Renaissance, like Dewey and James, Wills and Veblen, DuBois and Douglas. What is our manner of thought, our direction? Our ideas that tear away at the fabric of this country, peaking behind it, looking for its connective tissue.

4. American literature: Melville, Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain, Poe, Lovecraft, not just the luminaries here, but the dark lights, too. Probing, seeking for the through line from the first immigrants to the most recent, how they wove their lives together. Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser.

Poets yes, of course. Whitman, Silliman, Dickinson, Moore, Oliver, Berry, White, Collins…a long, long line of persons using words as scalpels to flense the fat off the American soul and leave it bloody, but bared

These are the source material, the Americanness. And yes, I need more women and yes, I need more variety, but this is a long project, perhaps the last project, one focused on who we say, show, play that we are. Theater is not there in the list. Neither is invention. Nor war. Nor democracy. Nor politicians. Nor sport. Probably should be.

This is too nebulous, too diffuse, too broad. In danger of being too shallow, too thin on the ground to matter. Maybe so. Or, maybe it’s just a search for the roots of my Self, its American roots. Not sure yet, like I said.

Humanities, Translating De Bello Gallico, World History, Writing

A Celtic Neo-Renaissance?

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Lughnasa                                                                                           College Moon

Two matters Celtica in my life right now, causing my early writing interests in things Celtic and ancient to resurface. The first is Caesar and his commentary on the Gallic War. There is, in fact, a Roman gauze thrown over the lives of the Celts, first by Caesar and Tacitus, then by that other world dominating super power, the Roman Catholic church. After the Romans left around 400 or so A.D., the Roman church filled in behind them.

It was these two literate oppressors who recorded both the religion and folkways of the Celts. There is, as you can imagine, considerable disjunct between the likely reality of the Celts and their description by people looking down from positions from authority. Especially in the case of the Catholics who combined power with a demand to change the old ways.

The second is the upcoming vote, on September 18th, on Scottish independence. The English, in some ways the political and national extension of both the Romans and the Roman Catholics into the contemporary world of the British Isles, overthrew Celtic lands (Wales and Ireland) and later merged with Scotland.

They first took Wales, which never managed to govern itself as a nation, divided too much by its steep mountains. That was Edward I, Longshanks, in 1284. In 1536 Henry VIII took Ireland and, ironically, tried to supplant Catholicism by sending over Protestants. That is, members of the Church of England, a church created by his famous conflict with the Papacy over his failed attempt to find a wife who would give him a son. Then, in 1707, through a dynastic inheritance by the Scottish king, James Stuart, of the throne of England, Scotland joined England.

Over the course of the last century and this one those bonds have become loosened, first by the Irish struggles, not entirely over even today, and the independence movements in Wales and Scotland. The Welsh movement has not got much momentum, but the Scottish one seems to be gaining favor with the country. If Scotland shakes loose, we might see again a more recognizable Celtic culture with both Ireland and Scotland looking both back to their roots and forward to their own, independent futures.

 

Colorado, Poetry, Writing

Poetic and Chaotic

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Lughnasa                                                                New (College) Moon

Things to do in Colorado: write poetry. Read about the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Charles Wright. He sits in the same place, sees the same view and has done for over 30 years. While there, he notices his moods, captures them in his way.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written poetry regularly, a very long time. Over 45 years. Then, all I’d written got stolen along with my 1950 Chevy panel truck, a favorite vehicle that truck. It had three on the column, a sticky clutch and burned oil. Somehow, though, it stole my heart, just like that blue Volvo station wagon and that red Toyota Celica.

Somebody stole it, or else I parked it while drunk and never remembered I owned it. Coulda happened like that, too, I suppose. Life was like that back then in Muncie, Indiana. Poetic and chaotic and political. Another college memory, coming under the college moon.

(could be it. now if that file of poetry is still under the seat.)

So anyhow I think I’ll find a study in the mountains with a window where I can put a table and a pad of paper, a mechanical pencil. And I’ll sit there, noting what passes beyond the window and within my mind, jotting it down, see what the mountain air conjures.

The other kind of writing, this blog, fiction, I can do at a typewriter (oops, there’s an anachronism. I meant, keyboard.) but poetry has been manual for me, maybe because I started writing poetry before I knew how to type. I learned typing in high school, my senior year.

You know, I’d like to have that Chevy panel truck back. Wonder if whoever took it is done with it now?

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, The Move, Writing

Walk In Free

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Letting go. Retiring. Easing up. Yes, the pedal has lifted up from the metal and the car has begun to slow down. And that’s a good thing. Letting go of the expectations, admitting they were not met and saying damn the consequences has lifted a large weight off the shoulder of my psyche. Retiring it. Shrugged off and glad to have it gone.

Does this mean I’ll stop writing? No. Does it mean I’ll stop writing novels? No. It does mean that I no longer have my self’s forward progress attached to the results. And, you might say, about damned time. Maybe so.

Why is all this bubbling up right now? The move. As the stuff of my work gets winnowed, I can see the bones of my ambition more clearly. The skeletal support of my dreams are familial, horticultural, intellectual, classical and creative. The flesh and bones will be grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law, wife, friends, plants, ideas, translations and more novels.

Failure does not mean stop. Vanish. Extinguished. It does not mean failed. No, it means redirection, recollecting, revisiting. This move has given me the freedom to shrug my shoulders, let the load fall to the way side. I want to walk into Colorado free to live a life given to that place, those people, that time. Now I can.

Going west has always had an element of reinvention, claiming another facet of life. May it be so.