Fall New (Thanksgiving) Moon
Had a couple of days in a row where the writing didn’t happen. This and that. Now I have to finish my critiques for the writing group Monday night. Critiques are difficult to do well, at least for me. Superior Wolf continues to grow in size though. It’s at 60,000 words now, 2/3’rds of the way toward my goal of 90,000.
We went to see Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. A long movie and a dark one. As friend Tom Crane said, it’s a good movie, not a great one. A bit slow in the beginning and a bit scattered near the end. It has a grandpop as a central, heroic character.
Set in 1943 and 2016 the holocaust is the background. The grandfather is from Poland where, “There were real monsters.” The Home gets bombed by Nazi bombers. The grandfather and his son, a lead character, Jake, can see the Hollows, short for holocaust Ruthie said, but no else can.
Afterward we ate at a Brooklyn style pizza joint.
Ruth is filling out her application for the Denver School of the Arts. The application process includes an audition sometime in January. She’s going for fine arts. Ruth is a printmaker, a painter. She draws well, too. I really hope she gets in. She needs peers, other kids with her level of talent, intelligence and curiosity. Otherwise, she gets in trouble. Grandpop did, too.
Gertie is doing well. She’s a rascal and can’t keep her long, prehensile tongue from snaking up onto a plate without permission. Rigel bounds in the car when she can go. Most of the time she sits up in the back, looking this way and that. And Kepler, serious Kepler, watches and listens. Barks and growls. He also does athletic food catches.
Brother Mark wanted to know if there were images of my new knee. This is a generic image that shows the components of a common knee prosthesis. Total knee replacement is an increasingly good procedure and all of the anecdotal data I’ve come across has been positive. To be able to walk easily, get in and out of the car without pain, exercise, hike with Ruth and Gabe, sleep with less pain medication, and build up my endurance will be wonderful. December 1st.
Ruth wanted to see the Queen of Katwe, the story of a poor Uganda country girl who became a chess champion. So we did. It was a good movie, not great; but, its almost all black cast reminded me of Luke Cage, which also has an almost all black cast. I have been and am suspicious of the idea of appropriation* as bad, but these two media pieces have made rethink it.
Having said that I found myself intrigued with both Luke Cage and Queen of Katwe because they had almost all black casts. The voice of the characters, the setting, the narrative drive had an integrity, a cohesiveness different from a white dominated movie or television program. The vulnerabilities, tensions, outright conflicts reflect immersion in Uganda and Harlem. They help open up a world, a way of being, a certain thrownness, as Heidegger put it, that is well outside my white, male, middle class, small town Midwest USA experience.
However. The notion of silos, common in critique of bureaucracies, corporate or governmental or academic, seems to me to apply here, too. Silos are self contained domains, segments of a differentiated work place. The easiest place to see silos is in academe where biology and physics occupy different departments, often different buildings, and usually do not communicate. The internal culture of the military makes it secretive while congress wants transparency, the EPA is a separate agency of quasi-cabinet rank, so it is separate from the department of Agriculture where many matters of critical environmental concern receive attention. The critique is that while the silos differentiate and protect, the world is not so divided. Biology and physics operate within each organism. In the world as it is, Federal Superfund sites, under the administration of the EPA, interact directly with farms and municipalities. There was no bureaucratic barrier between the toxic waste pouring from the Gold King Mine and the waters of the Animas River.
