Category Archives: Writing

Art and Culture, Writing

A Grand Tour

Leave a comment

Imbolc                             Waning Wild Moon

I took folks on a Grand Tour at the MIA this afternoon, seeing objects from the historical period 1600-1850.  I expanded the Grand Tour idea and took it beyond the confines of Italy and France to include North America, Africa and Asia.  The folks on the tour, five, Allison and four women together, and I traveled the world in a little over an hour.

One of the women, an ICU nurse at Southdale, said of Lucretia, she looks she’s trying to stabilize herself.  This from a person who sees people in extremis every day at work.  I’m inclined to believe now that Lucretia is stabilizing herself.  This same woman, a practical woman of science and data, she described herself this way, has a son who has begun to study the Middle Ages.  She seemed a bit puzzled by his choice and wondered about just what the Middle Ages were.  Allison gave the group a pitch about bringing in friends for tours and she wondered about organizing a tour of medieval art, to learn more about what her son had chosen to study.

The tour at 1 o’clock breaks up the day though and I got a late nap and didn’t get on the treadmill until 6 pm.  The writing this  morning was fine, but the time was too short.  When I  write I like to have a clear morning and time for a nap in the afternoon.  Not so today.  I’m now over 50,000 words into the new novel, which should be about midway.  Revision and changes along the way could change that of course.

Letters, Writing

An Author New To Me

Leave a comment

Imbolc                               Full Wild Moon

An unusual day for me.  Up early, I got downstairs and had my 1,500 words in before 11:30.  I fed the dogs and began reading a short story, Duel, by Heinrich von Kleist, a German writer.  I read a remark about his work, that it was among the best in the German language, probably the best in the 19th century.  The writer of the article compared Kleist to Borges and said though that the author closest to him was Franz Kafka.  OK.  Borges and Kafka are two of my literary gods.  Kleist never wrote anything longer than a novella, didn’t leave much at all, a few short works, some plays and some anecdotes.  Someone collected them in one book.

This guy amazed me, as he would anyone, by the density and length of his sentences; yet also he impresses with their clarity and the fact that each phrase pushes the story further, not only further, but in a direction not predictable from what has gone before.  This story is maybe 12 pages long, but I didn’t get far in it, so mesmerized was I by his language.

Kate brought home lunch.  We ate.  I took a nap that knocked me out of the nuclear moratorium hearing today at the capitol.  I find myself increasingly unwilling to go into town for single events in the afternoon.  I wish it weren’t so, but there it is.

Then I worked on my 1600-1850 tour and this and thatted around until I missed my exercise.  I almost never miss exercise and never when I have the time.  Yet I did tonight.  It felt very transgressive.  Anyhow, I’m done with the night and we’ll start over tomorrow.  One good thing about exercise and me is that I have been at it long enough that missed nights, even missed weeks don’t throw me off.  I get right back up and start again.

Humanities, Letters, Writing

Books

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                Waxing Wild Moon

Bill Schmidt made me aware of this video:  Muslim Demographics.  He included the link to it within the Snopes website: http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/demographics.asp.

If you’re not familiar with Snopes, it tracks down information on claims made in videos, e-mails, the news and attempts to determine the truth or error in them.  In the case of this video, apparently by an evangelical Christian group, Muslims take over the world due to superior birth rates.  If you know anything about demographics, you would distrust the claims in the video on face value, but Snopes makes clear why the claims are alarmist rather than accurate.

Not to steal a march on them, but the biggest error is the assumption that high birthrates in the Muslim community, where they exist, will remain the same.  Increased income and the education of women depress birth rates, for example.

Books.  Gotta love’em.  Can’t live without’em, even with the Kindle.  I had some money saved and our mutual budget kicked in a third and I bought the entire Grove Dictionary of Art on sale.  It came yesterday in five boxes, each of which weighed 36 pounds.  Heavy, man.  They now have pride of place on the top shelf of a three tier bookshelf to the left of my desk.  I feel smarter already, just having them close by.

As I moved books around to accommodate them, I took note of those areas in which I have long term interest:  the enlightenment and its affects on contemporary life, especially politics and religion; our relationship with the planet and our particular places in it; poetry, China, Japan, India, mythology, fairy tales, art history, philosophy, transcendentalism and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the history of religion, water, war, American history, especially the Northwest territory, Asian art, magic, gardening, the Renaissance, spirituality, travel, Jungian psychology, the intelligence agencies, science, especially the history of science and ways we celebrate the apparent flow of time.

OK.  It’s broad, I admit.  But it’s not everything in the world.  I do have specific interests.  Just a number of them.

Some day I’ll explore those areas in depth, greater depth than I’ve achieved so far, anyhow.


Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Gonna Take That Wild Last Ride

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                         Waxing Wild Moon

Back at the novel today, 1,800 words.  There’s an uphill struggle to get back in the groove when I let a week or so slip by with no work on it.  Like navigating the turns in the fast luge track at Whistler, I get stuck at the start, but once the momentum picks up, I can dive into a chicane with confidence.  Back at it now headed down the track.

Self confidence is so fragile, at least for me, and I expect for many of us.  If I could graph mine’s rise and fall even in the course of a day, it would mimic a wild stock ride, selling up at one moment, then a run and a price in sudden decline.  And then the reverse.  Again.  Even now.

Example.  I came downstairs feeling pretty good about getting back to the novel.  Granted I skipped exercise tonight to keep on writing, but overall that felt good.  Then I went on Amazon’s website to check out an author Mark Odegard recommended, Dan Simmons.  Sure enough, he’s doing stuff enough like what I’m trying to do to make me nervous.  He’s already sold a lot.  I haven’t.

Now there’s a steadier core that chugs alone just underneath all this oscillation–the ego worried about its reception in the world–and that core is the one that, walking the garbage and recycling out tonight under a gorgeous waxing wild moon, reflected that no matter how gifted and accomplished, we all die, then sink away into oblivion.  Yes, a few don’t–Homer, Socrates, Qin Shi Huangdi, Confucius, Emily Dickinson, Boadicea, Teresea of Avila, Pancho Villa, Montezuma, Geronimo, Einstein, Chopin, Bach, Da Vinci for example–but the bulk of us, the 99.999999% of all who have ever lived, live in the best way we can, then slowly fade, first in body, then in memory, then we’re gone.

This one knows that the best life is the one we live on our own terms, not on borrowed hopes and dreams and not judged by externalities.  At 63 the core has become stronger and stronger, often balancing the ego’s surges and falls before they happen, but it is not yet dominant, at least not all of the time.  The devil of expectations still sticks a pitchfork into my ego every once and a while.  Predictably, my ego squeals.

If you have a chance tomorrow night, go outside and look at the moon around 9:00 pm if the night is clear.  The moon sat up there in the sky tonight, Orion off to its southeast, other stars around it like diamonds around a fat, lustrous pearl.  A work of art that needs no hand, but satisfies the eye.

Dogs, Family, Humanities, Letters, Writing

The Week So Far

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                       Waxing Wild Moon

Another day in the world of ancient Rome.  Translation continues to be fairly easy for me, though there are certain cases that give some trouble.  So far my learning has kept pace with the chapters.  I hope that continues.

Kate got pretty weary at work on Monday.  She saw too many patients.  She’s rebounded today, though and I think that’s a good sign for the future.

Kona, our largest whippet, has a fancy yellow bandage on her right rear leg after having what we believe is a benign growth removed yesterday.   She also has a water resistant sleeve over it, the Medi-Paw, that allows her to go outside.  A good thing.  Like most dogs I’ve known she simply ignores whatever discomfort she’s experiencing and does most of what she did before.  I was laid up for two months plus after my achilles surgery.

Now a bit on the novel.  Decided I had to start writing again, even though I’m revising, too.  I feel too disconnected from its flow.  Revising is important, but it doesn’t feel like an organic part of the process for me, at least not yet.

Family, Health, Weather +Climate, Writing

Frosty Saturday

Leave a comment

Imbolc                              New Moon (Wild)

Outside temp is 11.6 degrees and the dewpoint is around 9.  With them so close together, we have two phenomenon at once: more hoarfrost as the water precipitates out on shrubs, tree limbs, fences, porch rails, then freezes and fog.  Visibility is low here and the same conditions which create hoarfrost makes roads slick.  An odd combination.  We also have what looks like snow, but I think is actually flakes forming near the ground as cool air freezes water vapor.  Fog is a cloud on or near the earth so we could be witnessing outside what usually happens in the skies above us.

After printing out 40,000 words of new novel (redundant), which represents all I’ve written so far, I decided this was a good time to revise, go back, get familiar with its arc again after a week off.  That’s underway now.

It’s also Saturday, grocery day.  I can go any day of the week I want, but my patterning about grocery shopping on Saturday is very strong.  I know it, but don’t change it.

Kate has finished her second week of work.  She has come through them in much better shape than pre-surgery, yet she is not without pain.  Her neck bothered her last night and her hip has grown progressively worse.  She thinks digging the Celica out of the snowbank last week did some damage, so she’s not taking any of this as too bad a sign just yet.  She is visibly better than before, her face less tight at the end of the work day and her movements less stiff.  Still, as she says, she’s rather retire.  Soon.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

Not Known To Self

Leave a comment

Imbolc                             Waning Cold Moon

“It is clear Charles, you know where you are going, and knowledge is the fuel.”   a fellow Woolly

Have you ever heard of the Johari window?  Here’s a graphic that illustrates it.  The white or open box represents common information shared between yourself and others who know you. The reddish brown box contains the stuff of which you are aware, but have shared with no one.  The third box is the one I’m interested in here, the green box.  It contains material not known to you, but known to others.  This is information to which you are blind for one reason or another, yet is apparent to at least one other.

This comment from a Woolly falls in the blind box for me.  Or maybe not.  A bit hard to tell.

It did make me reflect.  If someone else thinks where I’m going is clear, why would they think that?  Do I really know where I’m going?  Why is knowledge the fuel?

Here’s what came to me, after rolling the idea around for a week or so.

Long ago, perhaps in adolescence, the notion of a liberal arts education became central to my personal project.  How did it get there? It may have been my parents, could have been teachers, might even have been a minister, perhaps all of these plus things I read. The notion of a broad and deep education in the humanities, an education that began at least by the time of college.  There exposure to the great ideas, to the breadth of the human experience, to literature, art, music, theatre would open up a way of perception.  Perception that would inform life, even create a life.

There’s a lot more to this, but I’m tired.  Later.

Aging, Humanities, Letters, Writing

Back To School

Leave a comment

Imbolc                                  Waning Cold Moon

The snow has stopped.  Our neighbors, the Perlich’s, had relatives visiting today with snowmobiles which they happily drove on the Perlich’s lot.  I hope it was to make Greg feel better.   By city ordinance snowmobiles cannot come below a street about a mile north of us, but in this situation I won’t complain.

Chapters 2 and 3 in Wheelock completed.  That means I’ve copied declensions for 1st and second declension nouns, taken a shot at learning them, but count on repetition over time to cement the case endings.  I’ve also read about grammar, syntax and word order.   Then Wheelock has sentences from Latin writers like Horace, Catullus, Phaedres.  My job is to translate them.  At the end of the Latin sentences are sentences in English to be translated into Latin.  After this, once for each chapter, there is a paragraph, again from a Latin man of letters.  Today it was Horace.  I don’t recall yesterday’s.

This work demands nose to the grind stone type studying.  Create flash cards.  Review flash cards.  Copy declensions.  Use declensions.  Learn grammar.  Use grammar.  Translate from and into.  It feels like real studying, which it is, I guess.

So far, I like it.  A lot, actually.  In fact I’m a little surprised at how much I like it.

The novel  keeps on spooling out, nearing mid-way or somewhere close.  I plan to write on it during the retreat using my handy net book and my take along keyboard.  I suppose I’ll study some Latin there, too.  Very appropriate at a Benedictine monastery where Latin is still a living language.  Sort of.

Family, Writing

Kate

Leave a comment

Winter                                             Full Cold Moon

Kate goes back to work on Monday, February 1st.  Right now I believe she’ll do ok.  Her hip injections–cortisone–have helped.  Her neck has been fine during this period, but she will have to return to odd angles while looking into young eyes, ears and throats.  The computer ergonomics in the office are not ideal for her either.  She’s gotten more and more exercise in over the last few weeks and I hope that means that her stamina is sufficient.

We’ll take it, as they say, a day at a time.

I wish I didn’t have the Woolly Retreat coming up over the weekend, but she’s not working weekends, at least not right now, so there will only be Thursday and Friday nights when I’m not here.  Of course, if she experience difficulty, I’ll give it a miss.

The novel keeps on coming.  In retrospect I think it was the novel that kept me up the other night.  Since I write without much of a plan, it’s quite easy for me to write myself into a corner, or to realize that early ideas, some woven into much of what I’ve written, no longer work.  Both happened with this one.

Since I’m nearing what will be the middle of the book in number of words, the arc of the story has to reach a certain dramatic point here and I had to fiddle with a good bit of the already written material to make that possible.  Part of the change, inevitable really, involves pruning excess characters, locales and plot lines.  When I did this, I reduced the plot lines to three, much easier for a reader to follow.  I also created a key  plot point that will allow all these plot lines to converge further along, and I hope, diverge again as I set up the second book.

Family, Writing

Oh, Boy! The truck jack is in!

Leave a comment

Winter                                         Waxing Cold Moon

Hacking away at the keyboard.  I’m up to 32,500 words and still chugging along, having fun.

Good news!  The truck jack we ordered came into Carlson Toyota.  That means I get to go out in the garage, jack up the truck and remove its left front tire and take it over to Carlson for repair.  Then, reverse the action.  Big fun.  At the same time I can disassemble the garage door opener replaced last Friday.  That way the trash will pick it up.  Oh, and while I’m out there I may as well disassemble all those boxes.

Kate’s back from seeing Dr. Bewin.  He’s her physiatrist, the doc who treats pain, recommends physical therapy and acts as her overall signal caller when it comes to degenerative disc disease.  The bursitis, which he thinks also has some tendinitis and myofascitis as companions, is, according to him, difficult to treat.  Cortisone injections and increased anti-inflammatory may help.