Winter Cold Moon
Focus on writing. All the best hours. Really dig into it. Revise. Rewrite. Write. Market. Put stuff out there, in the world.
Hang with the Latin. As a hobby, in off hours.
That seems to be where I’m headed. The museum? May have to go. Still noodling.
Winter New (Cold) Moon
Still parsing the change that happened over the last year or so. It may have something to do with Kate’s retirement. Allina and medicine as practiced there made her so unhappy. With that out of her life she’s a different woman. That may have had more effect on me than I imagined. Perhaps relieved in me some of the emotional carrying charge I had as spouse. Not sure. Just speculative.
It may also have been the soul clarifying advance into life past 65; life lived with an existential awareness of death, rather than an abstract one. Thinking about the third phase and its opportunities did lead to understanding what I wanted to do. What only I could do. And the necessity of putting myself behind those efforts as much as I can.
As that picture has become more filled in, I find myself focusing on three things: writing, art, Latin. That’s not to say that the garden, the bees, reimagining faith won’t get any effort from me. They will. But the good time, the time when I work best now belongs to those three. It also means that I’m going to shun picking up any other responsibilities in the near and medium-term future.
And of those three, writing is the focus: completing the Tailte trilogy, reworking the five other novels I’ve written, polishing some short stories and getting further in three novels I’ve got well started but left hanging. If things go well with the Tailte trilogy, I have more books in that world. It’s a rich vein.
Getting older. Getting clearer. Getting more determined. That seems to be the direction.
Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
How’s this for irony? My Latin tutor, Greg, and I conduct our sessions on the phone. Have done for three years now. Yesterday I had read out a line from the Loeb translation of a sentence we were having trouble with and I waited. Nothing. That had happened before so I hung up and called him again. His phone picked up. I spoke. Nothing.
Well, then, he called me on my cell phone. The landline works better for an hour or so of tutoring, so we usually use it. I answered. I spoke. Nothing. We traded attempts back and forth until Greg sent me an e-mail. Was my phone on mute? No, I e-mailed him back. Weird.
We continued for a while, then we decided to scrap the session and move into January. He e-mailed me later and said that both his and Ana’s phone had had the same problem. AT&T.
Anyhow this tickled my funny bone. Trying to learn how to communicate with a long dead poet in his own language, two of us, speaking a common language, couldn’t communicate because the technology prevented it. When we switched to e-mail, on which we could communicate, we could not use it for continuing our communication focused on Ovid.
Winter Moon of the Winter Solstice
Ohhh. Not exactly a headache, but a brain sensation similar to muscles after an intense workout. Stretched to capacity. Used. Up. After a gnarly sentence with five phrases including 4 subjunctives, one participle and a partridge in a pear tree. Even with all the application I could muster the middle two phrases still eluded me. Sometimes, after this kind of experience I go back the next day and things become clearer. I’ll try tomorrow.
Next. An interval workout with resistance. All of me will be stretched by the end of the day.
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Went through several verses of Jason and Medea, brain began to ache. Stopped. I have time on Friday to discuss the parts I didn’t get. Greg says the real way to advance in translating is to read, read, read. Which means translate, translate, translate. I can see it, but I have to pace it. It’s fun, but it’s also hard.
I’ve trimmed back my schedule, only outside the house commitment I have now is the MIA. And, of course, the Woollies. Since I finished the Mythology course on Sunday, that means I have almost ten days with very few interruptions. That means I can focus and work the way I find best, mornings hard at it and afternoons for clean up.
Kate’s sold more of her work to the store in Anoka; she plans to set up an Etsy site with my help and will apply tomorrow, too, to a consignment store situated next to the Red Stag. She’s having fun. Energized. Retirement has been good for her. I’m glad.
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
All day today in Jason and Medea, Ovid. Two more full days before my time with Greg on Friday. A little creaky. To be expected. Still, got through four verses plus. Into a groove. Not a fast groove, mind you, but a groove nonetheless.
Samhain Fallowturn Moon
Boy, my Latin was not working for me today. Like I had elephants tugging to keep my thoughts from surfacing. I failed to go back over it, to check my work. Over confident, I guess. Anyhow, felt slow, thick. Not a good feeling. It does, however, make me want to double down, get more consistent with my work.
Kate’s been gone yesterday and today at a supportive care cme (continuing medical education). She’s prepping for what we’ll need, hopefully a couple of decades from now. She wants to renew her medical license when it comes up in three years and she has to have some number, I think 75, of hours of continuing ed to qualify. Keeps her head in the world of medicine though she’s very happy that her body is out of it.
Gertie continues to improve, bouncing with a three-legged, then a tender fourth legged, gate. She’s decided to ignore the plastic cone on her head so she just barrels into doors, gates, people, furniture. This means she’s feeling better and that’s good; it also means she’s cranking her nuisance quotient up a notch. Not so good.
Samhain Fallowturn Moon
Listened to a brief lecture on the Delian Hymn to Apollo, then checked my work for my time with Greg this morning. I’m trying to learn transformational grammar to use as an aid to translating. I don’t have it down. Yet.
Fall Fallowturn Moon
Sometimes Latin lessons leave me feeling further advanced, more knowledgeable, other times, like today they leave me with my brain tied in knots. Tight knots. I’m sure that means I’ve spent extra hard energy learning. I keep telling myself. Learned a new way to diagram sentences, using Noam Chomsky’s now passe transformational grammar. I’m not sure why it’s passe, but it looks useful to me.
Keep reading. That’s what Greg says. It all becomes clearer if you keep reading. I believe him; it’s worked that way for me so far. It’s just that it’s harder stuff now that needs to become clearer.
I’m continuing to plug away at revising Missing. As I go, things unravel and have to be rethreaded or dropped altogether. Yesterday I cut the initial scene and it all flows much better in the first chapter now. The story itself continues to emerge as I revise. Funny, that’s what they say happens, but I’m experiencing it now. So, if I can get that first chapter humming, then there’s the second one. And so on. BTW: I’m a bit over half way through on the revision, but as I work sometimes I get lead to other parts of the book that need help.
Kate and I just watched 127 hours. A gritty, intense movie made more so by its factual base. When I lifted the DVD out of the player, I turned to Kate and said, “This is as close as I want to come to this experience.” Since cutting the cable, we’ve watched more movies together.
Back on the treadmill today, cranking it up a bit, trying to shake off the detraining the last three weeks or so have accumulated.
Fall Fallowturn Moon
Knee deep in the Aeneid this morning. So far I find Virgil more of a challenge than Ovid, but I suspect that’s because I’ve accustomed myself to Ovid’s style. That means the translating goes more slowly. Part of the reason lies in the very helpful text, a commentary well known among classicists as Pharr’s.
(Dido and Aeneas (detail), by Pierre-Narcisse Guerin (1774-1833)
He has vocabulary and textual comment all on the same page, a tiny bit of text, around 4 verses or so, then the words not on the common word list (a pullout at the back, which I tore out long ago and spread out above my work) and below that a verse by verse exegesis, focused largely on grammar, but throwing in the occasional bits of Virgil and classical studies lore.
In the grammatical explanations Pharr often refers to a grammatical appendix number 1 through 400+, covering both the common and the not so common permutations of Latin grammar. Since I’m far from facile with the grammar, this means a fair amount of paging to the back, reading, figuring out how the reference relates to the text, then using it in my translation.