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  • “If it’s not at Brookshires or Walmart, we can get it in Tyler.”

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    68  bar rises 29.75  0mpn ENE dew-point 63  Sunrise 5:53  Sunset 8:45pm  Summer

    Last Quarter of the Thunder Moon

    As you can tell by the lawn mower postings, I’m back from Texas.  No handy computer down there.

    Confession:  We had no problems with the airline.  I loved the plane, a small Embraer with a single aisle and two rows, 2 seats to a row and plenty of legroom.  Left and landed on time.  Since we didn’t check anything, no extra fees.  Carrying no electronics and all the liquid stuff in the handy quart bag so security was as painless as possible.  The rental car was cheaper than advertised and we got a PT Cruiser which was at least an interesting compact.  This experience was enough, given my basically positive experience on the flights to Hawai’i, to make me rethink my “never fly unless absolutely necessary” pledge.

    With two of us along things always go smoother because we can divide traveling chores, so that’s part of it, but, in the end, it was ok.  Not pleasant.  Barely worth the cash.  But OK.

    We spent the weekend encased in East Texas heat and humidity.  97-99 during the day, cooling down to around 80 at night.  Since we were not hiking or picking peaches, it was ok, but both Kate and I find the heat enervating, unpleasant at best.  The Bakers, Carol and Charyn, have a huge home on considerable acreage outside Mineola, Texas.  A former executive for Bell Helicopter, Carol exudes a charming, Texas style hospitality.

    Once, long ago, I took a train through east Texas on my way to visit Uncle Charles, Aunt Berta and their daughter, Charyn.  This was at least 50 years ago, but my memory of it is fresh because the pine trees and the hills surprised me then, just as they did this trip.  When you leave Dallas and head out toward Mineola, the road takes you through flat, reddish tan countryside.  Somewhere around Grand Saline (yes, a big salt deposit there.  I asked.  Morton has a big mine.) the flat begins to roll and the reddish tan countryside has forests of pine and oak.

    The drive on Highway 80 runs through Forney, Terrell, Willis Point, Grand Saline, Elmo, Fruitvale and Mineola.  On beyond Mineola 80 hits Big Sandy.  I love the names of these towns.  There are fruit orchards along the way, peaches, apricots and others I could not identify.  Even with the salt and the fruit and truck farming, these towns all look worn and tired, as if the promise of the past had not quite come to life.

    Mineola is different.   It has antique stores and quaint restaurants, Mineola Mercantile, for example, which is a restaurant and stuff store.  This is a small town like Long Lake, Stillwater, even Anoka surrounded in the countryside by large properties protected with iron gates protected by keyed locks.  Horses are everywhere which helps explain the iron gates.  This is the good life far enough from what they call the metroplex, Dallas/Ft. Worth, that the people who live here can feel rural with many of the comforts of upper class life.  This includes a Brookshire grocery which is equivalent to a Minnesota Bylery’s.

    Carol and Charyn said, “Anything that’s not at Bylery’s or Walmart we can get in Tyler.”

    I’ll report some more on the reunion tomorrow.


    Family Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • The History of Ideas

    Posted on by Charles 2 Comments

    75  bar falls 29.90  0mph ESE dew-point 60 sunrise 5:49  sunset 8:49  Summer

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    The mayfly lives only one day.  And sometimes it rains.    George Carlin, RIP

    Freud, Marx and Hegel expelled from school.  The article to which the first sentence here links refers to the strange disappearance from the college curriculum of these three seminal thinkers in psychology, economy and philosophy.

    Here’s an e-mail I sent to its author:

    Hello, Mr. Jacoby,

    In 1965 I began the study of philosophy with the pre-Socratics, moved onto Plato and Aristotle, and then on toward the present.  The early study of philosophy excited me so much I chose it as my major.  The methodology, the history of ideas, has remained with me as the most important intellectual tool I have.  When I switched schools, I entered a school dominated by logical positivists.  The most important and interesting questions of philosophy, questions which mattered to individuals and to public discourse did not matter to this department.  I left philosophy behind, sad that it refused to engage matters of ontology, values and beauty. 

    I write to you because I felt then what the gist of your Chronicle of Higher Education article suggests is a contemporary problem.  It is a problem with its roots, I believe, in the logical positivist and linguistic analysis movements which tried to align philosophy with the scientific method.  There would have been nothing wrong with this as an adjunct discipline, but the arrogant dismissal of metaphysics, for example, for reliance on what I would call a shallow epistemology gutted philosophy of its humanist core.

    This same attempt to bring economics and psychology into the scientific realm, and sociology too for that matter, has identical problems.  The quantifiable in these disciplines is fine and produces important insights, but, again, the core of these disciplines, with the possible exception of economics, is humanistic, not scientific. 

    Your article reminded me of those long ago days when I moved on to anthropology.  The dismissal of historical perspective leaves us with the need to reinvent all those old arguments and to approach their resolution without the aid of some of humankinds most creative thinkers.  Too bad.

    As I grow older, history looms ever higher and higher in my intellectual pursuits.   As I said in the e-mail to Mr. Jacoby, the history of ideas, learned during classwork for my philosophy major, has informed everything  I do.  I gravitate naturally at this stage of my life toward the historical record.  Where did that word originate?  How has it been modified over time?  Where did this artistic movement come from and what questions did it try to answer?  What are the roots of the so-called New Age thinking?  Why are not its current proponents interested in its intellectual history?  What is the source of liberal and conservative political thought and how does their history help us modify them to fit present needs?  Why is the issue of climate change such a problematic one?  What in the history of humanities relationship to the natural order created such a situation?

    These are the questions that get me up in the morning, that drive my decision making about what to do with my time and how to direct my own work.

     

     


    Great Work Memories Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • Robert Bly

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    69  bar steady 29.91  2mph NE dew-point 63  Summer, cooler and cloudy

    Full Thunder Moon

    Today is a busy day for me.  Two trips in to the cities.  The first to my old workout haunt, Minnehaha Falls.  Every morning rain or shine, winter or summer I did a fast hike through the trails along the Mississippi ending with the stairs going up to the parking lot that abuts the falls themselves.  Today the docent book club planning session.  We’ll see how many folks turn out.

    Later, the Woollies at Jim Lenfesty’s house.  Mark and Elizabeth housesit for Jim, at least they have these last two years.  Since it is right across the street from Roberty Bly’s, Mark invited him again.  Last time he came with a cream pie that had three slices out of it.  He’s a bit of a curmudgeon, but then so am I.

    Shower.


    Art and Culture Memories Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Psyche’s Politics

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    70  bar steady  29.87  0mph NE  dew-point 62   Summer, cloudy

    Full Thunder Moon

    In Kavalier and Clay, the book by Michael Chabon I referenced a few days ago, the author often talked about art and artists.  At one point he referred to the “…necessary self-betrayal of the artist.”  This was one of those phrases that slipped right under my mental fingernail and caused some pain.  I knew what he meant.

    Writing is of no value if the writer plays it safe, stays inside the lines, never transgresses boundaries.  Coloring in what other people have defined as the picture on the page adds nothing to the human experience.  When our frailties or our biases or our inner logic are on display the skin limits of self get pushed aside and others can get a peek.

    I read an interesting definition of art as a person turned inside out.

    A flurry of domestic activity yesterday.  Though all of the budget watching, bank going, grocery shopping activities undergird our daily lives, still, they leave me feeling as if little got done.  I’m suspicious of this as male acculturation, that is, the chores do not count as masculine work, but even this suspicion does not cross out the emotional response.  This quote from a few days ago sums it up:

    “Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” – Edward R. Murrow

    The recovering alcoholic never leaves my side.  The recovering racist struggles on a regular basis with instant opinions formed on the basis of skin color or accent.  The let down after a day of domestic work reveals the sexist role divisions imprinted deep in my own psyche.  Kate also points out that I always drive.  Too true.

    Recovering may sound like a dodge or an excuse, but it is not.  The often derided politically correct comes from those of us willing to engage in the inner struggle with the cultural assumptions we have inherited.  What recovering admits is that acculturation is forever, just like addiction.  There will, in other words, always be parts of me that diminish cooking, cleaning, balancing the checkbook as unworthy of my time.  This in spite of the many times and the many ways in which I have learned this is not true.  There will always be parts of me that attach secondary characteristics to skin color or age or sex.  There will always be parts of me that trade on the unearned advantage I get from being white, male and American.

    My responsibility as a conscious adult lies in owning up to who and what I am, then choosing a different response.  I may not be responsible for the sexist acculturation I received growing up, but I am responsible for the choices I make when it raises its head.

    This willingness to throw one’s self into struggle, not for a day or a week, but a lifetime infects the people effected by the creative turmoil of the 60’s and 70’s.   Certainly others of other times, too, but the immersion in those days when the old ways were no longer viable, but the new ways had not yet arrived created a mass of people who came to question their basic assumptions about reality; question assumptions about realities so intimate as the nature of love, the immediate reaction to another, so often unquestioned.  This struggle brought politics to the bedroom as well as the boardroom, to the kitchen counter as well as the lunch counter, to the front room as well as the class room.

    There is bravery here, foolishness, too; but, it is the foolishness of the wise fool, willing to risk self for the sake of the other.


    Art and Culture Memories Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • Trust in the Land

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    76  bar falls 29.85  1mph ESE dew-point 60  Summer, sunny headed toward hot

    Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

    “Over 200 LEED-certified new homes are being built by the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation under the auspices of…Dudley Neighbors Inc., Boston’s two-decade-old community land trust — a burgeoning affordable housing strategy where residents buy the homes but not the land underneath, thus reducing the price.”   This from the Land Institute website yesterday.

    Another memory jogger.   25 years ago I worked in a small University of Minnesota and hospital dominated neighborhood of Minneapolis called Cedar-Riverside.  A grand plan for very dense housing proposed by Keith Heller, a UofM economics professor and Gloria Segal, a Minnesota DFL heavyweight would have buried the community with housing for more than 25,000 people.  That would have meant fitting a city the size of Andover on a plot of land that is a small neighborhood by Minneapolis standards, a plot of land those 25,000 + would have shared with Augsburg College, St. Mary’s Hospital, Fairview Hospital, and the University’s West Bank campus which included the Wilson Library, two towers of classroom space and a performing arts center.

    Citizens of the neighborhood fought back, filed an environmental impact lawsuit, a notion then in its infancy, and won.  The settlement of that lawsuit provided the neighborhood with several million dollars to use in developing the community at a level consistent with the residents wishes.  We pursued several innovative community development strategies in those days.

    Among them was a land-trust.  This was well in advance of the land-trust referred to in the Land Institute quote.  It worked like this.

    We developed different housing options, mostly townhomes, all as co-operatives, that is, resident managed and jointly owned.   These were limited-equity co-ops, meaning you paid a small fee up front to join the co-operative, usually around a $1,000 and when you moved you sold your unit back to the co-op and received your fee back in return.  This idea had two positives from a community development perspective.  First, it allowed low-income people entree to a self-governing living situation (no landlord or they became the landlord).  Second, it discouraged speculation in the individual units which would make the units affordable over time.

    The land-trust was a guard against a problem that had occurred in the 70’s in some cities. Community based developers would build low-income housing units as co-ops, then turn the whole project over to the co-operative.  As time went by and the property values increased, the co-op and its land would become more and more valuable.  Eventually, a for-profit developer would make the co-op and offer they couldn’t refuse and the co-ops would sell out.   This removed the housing from the ranks of affordable housing, defeating the original purpose in its construction.

    The landtrust prevented that in two ways.  First, the land was  held in trust by a third party, usually a land trust corporation controlled by a community development corporation or the community development corporation itself.  This made every transaction for the whole a three party negotiation with the land-trust holding veto rights.  Second, a clause in the contract stipulated that if the land ever was sold, it triggered a penalty which equaled the interest on all the years since the projects completion.

    A secondary aspect of the land-trust was its ability to lower the overall cost of the housing by taking land out of the total development equation.

    No good deed goes unpunished, however, and I imagine the good folks in Boston will find similar problems to those that have developed in Cedar-Riverside.  Turns out everyone wants a piece of the increase in home value pie.  Tenants became incensed when all they got back was their original fee instead of an inflation or value multiplied amount.  Co-ops also vary a good deal in the people who come to share responsibility for them.  Sometimes general management was an issue, too.  Still, in my mind, the land-trust remains a sound tool for developing and maintaing housing affordable to all.


    Great Work Memories Politics 📎and tagged

  • A Summer Night

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    69  bar rises 29.80 0mph NNW dew-point 57   Summer night

                         Last Quarter of the  Flower Moon

    A soft summer night has fallen.  As age piles on, the magic of summer nights seems to disappear, like the Other World of the Celts disappeared long ago from this world.  As a boy, there was always hide and seek, army, watching and catching fireflys, sitting on the steps of other kids in our kid dense neighborhood on Monroe Street.  The night time in those days did not end the day’s play; it provided another arena, one of darkness and stealth. 

    Hiding behind bushes, creeping along on your belly to get close enough to run and kick the can before being tagged, those games got an increased intensity at night.  Play like that has vanished it seems, occluded by the television, the computer and  busy schedules, even in the summer.

    I had no schedule in the summer, no music lessons, no sports leagues, no advanced this or that.  Instead I would get up and consider how to spend the day.  Would we go the field and build on our fort?  Ride bicycles down the hill by the Meyer’s house?  Maybe baseball over at the Carver’s?  We might get a wagon and collect pop bottles, take them downtown to Cox’s supermarket and redeem them for ice cream or comic book money.   We swam at Beulah Park pool.  In the afternoon around 3pm I would deliver my paper route.  Go to the library.  Read at home.

    As a teen-ager with a driver’s license, the night opened up even more possibilities.  There were dances in towns all around Alexandria, dances that happened each week on the same night, so we could go every night except Sunday and sometimes did.  Our dances were at the National Guard Armory, I don’t recall the night.  My friend Richard Lawson and I would get in the car and go somewhere the nights we didn’t work. 

    Richard died several years ago of wounds suffered in Vietnam. 

    Astronomy brings back the magic of the night.  I went into that world for a couple of years, but over time it lost its appeal; still, I loved it for giving me back the night. 

    It’s time for me to reclaim the night, the childhood magic and wonder.  It has become clearer and clearer to me that the secret to life is to retain as close a contact with the awe and marvel of childhood as possible.  For to them belong the realm of the sacred.


    Faith and Spirituality Memories

  • Visitations

    Posted on by Charles Comment

                                 65  bar rises 29.73  2mph WSW dew-point 49  Beltane, sunny

                                                           Waxing Gibbous Flower Moon

    The places I have visited stay with me, sometimes like ghosts, haunting my dreams and intruding on waking life.  Angkor.   Singapore.  Bangkok.  Ephesus.  Delphi.  Santorini.  Rome.  Pompeii.  Venice.  Florence.  Crete.  Delos.  Istanbul.  Bogota.  Cartagena.  Mexico City.  Merida.  Oaxaca. Vienna.  Salzburg.  Paris.  London.  Hawarden.  Anglesey.  Conwy.  Edinburgh.  Bath.  Cities and towns, states and countrysides in the US and Canada too many to name.

    Angkor drapes vines over me, inserts vast tree roots into my memories while the howler monkeys and the cicada scream.  It’s hot and it doesn’t let up, just gets hotter, too hot in the midday.  The stone rises and rises, carved by artists capable of rendering the delicate and ephemeral in stone.  The astronomical, astrological, theological pandemonium of it all causes reverberations deep in my soul, beyond my Self and down into my links with the collective unconscious.  I was there when the stone masons cut the block, shaped Vishnu turning the great turtle in the sea of milk.  My hand carved the apsara and fitted stones into the great western gate of Angkor Wat.

    Delphi sends music to me, pan-pipes and Apollo’s lute.  The cedar scented sacred way winds it way up the side of Mt. Parnassus past the Athenian treasury, up to the Temple of Apollo where the Delphic Oracle met questioners and answered their questions with questions deep in its subterranean precincts.  Here, too, is the omphalos stone, the center of the world.  The Castalian spring.  All round Mt. Parnassus are echoes of divinity, cries from the Pythian Games, honoring Apollo’s defeat of the cthonic serpent Python, still resound throughout the rocky hills.  The Delphi Oracle still speaks today and she says, “Beware, Stranger, of forgetting your past for in it lie secrets to your future.  Without your past you will wander the earth always an infant in your understanding.”

    Merida and the Casa del Balam, house of the jaguar, bring heat, heat so intense that as the afternoon rains came there was no relief, only a suffocating rise in humidity.  To escape the locals do much of their business in pre-dawn and dawn hours, sitting together in the main park around the confidenitales, small curved benches made so dating couples could sit beside each other, yet not touch.  Here Mayan women sell blood oranges in front of the Cathedral, their roots at Chichen Itza and Tikal, not Jerusalem or Rome. 

    Hawarden resonates with my genetic past.  On the trains in North Wales most of the people looked like they could be my cousin short, thin, dark eyes and hair.  The town with its residential library (where I stayed) and its brick and stone streets and buildings had Victorian written in its architecture, public and private.  It also had a bookish quality, an Oxford don would not have felt out of place.  The church graveyard, just behind St. Deniol’s Library, had slate markers covered with moss and huge trees hanging heavy bows over the graves.  Behind it the stone building of St. Deniol’s parish church sat calm and iconic.

    There are others, many others, but these places live within me, never absent.  They are the great gift of travel and one I cherish.


    Memories Travel 📎and tagged

  • The Generator Failed

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    60  bar falls 30.16 0mph NW dew-point 36  Beltane, twilight

                  Last Quarter of the Hare Moon 

     This story grabbed me.  See below it to see why.

    “MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – A woman who spent nearly 60 years of her life in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said. Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long machine since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old.

    Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working for the iron lung after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence near Jackson, about 80 miles northeast of Memphis, brother-in-law Will Beyer said.

    “We did everything we could do but we couldn’t keep her breathing,” said Beyer, who was called to the home shortly after the power failed. “Dianne had gotten a lot weaker over the past several months and she just didn’t have the strength to keep going.”

    Capt. Jerry Elston of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department said emergency crews were called to the scene, but could do little to help.

    Odell was afflicted with “bulbo-spinal” polio three years before a polio vaccine was discovered and largely stopped the spread of the crippling childhood disease.”

     I learned a couple of years ago that I spent some time in an iron lung during my episode with bulbar polio.  It was a shock to me.   Paralysis struck my left side and lasted for about a year.  I recall one event in an emergency room or an operating room, lights above my body, people in white working on me.  I saw all this from a spot up near the ceiling.  I know this sounds weird, but the memory has permanent residence in me.  The remarkable part is that no one from the family was in this  room.  Just me.  And the medical team.

    Seeing this story reminds me of all the others, like me, who were victims of the post-war polio epidemic.  Most of us made it through with little physical aftermath, but some died.  Some still wear braces.  Some required breathing support of one kind or another for their entire life.  It all seems so long ago, but this woman was exactly my age. 

    I wrote some today on Superior Wolf, about 1,500 words.  Moving forward.


    Memories Writing 📎and tagged

  • Turn the Radio On and Listen to the Indy 500

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    62  bar falls 29.74 2mph NW dew-point 35 Beltane, Sunny

                          Full Hare Moon

    Memorial Day is this weekend and we’re still stuck back in early April.  I can recall other chilly Memorial Days, but none with the degree of regular cool air this year has had.

    Since it’s Memorial Day, that means it’s Indy 500 time.  I’ll watch again this year.  The race used to take a liesurely 3-4 hours to run, now it routinely finishes between 2-3.  Though I found growing up in Indiana a strange experience, it left two indelible marks on my character.  I’m still fascinated with those big guys bouncing the orange ball up and down a hardwood floor.  I’m also ready, every Memorial Day, to turn into race fan for a day.

    I only went to the race once, with my Dad, in the early 60’s or late 50’s.  The Novi engine was a Dual Overhead Cam Supercharged V8 engine, a monster driven by Jim Hurtubise.  As it came out of the fourth curve, Hurtubise would hit the accelerator for the long main straightaway.  The supercharger would kick in and an internal combustion growl would echo off the seats and reverberate until the car was well past the starting line over half a mile away.  All of us who love the race, loved that engine.  It never won, not once, but it was thing of beauty. 

    Most Memorial Days I would go out to the family car with crackers and cheese, comic books and a coke.  I would turn on the radio and settle in to listen.  For the month leading up to the race the Indianapolis Star carried detailed sports page coverage and I saved those pages, too, including them in my cache.  I especially liked the rainy days when I could sit in the car, sheltered from the weather and listen to the roar of the engines as the cars hurtled around the track.

    China.  Burma.  A 7.9 earthquake.  A major cyclone with another brewing in the waters of the Indian Ocean.  Unimaginable suffering.  No.  Wait.  Katrina.  Iraq.  Not unimaginable, just far away.  Burma has Pagan, a city with 2,500 Buddhist temples.  It has Mandalay where the flying fishes play.  It has Rangoon, home of a gold topped stupa.  It also has a paranoid junta, more concerned with power than the people.  China’s Sichuan region, home to fiery foods and a unique brand of Chinese culture, mountains (the shan) and proximity to a collision between the Indian tectonic plate and the Pacific.  The folding creates the shan in China and the Himalayas.  It also slips, the enormous pressures of the earth’s mantle put out of joint and indescribable power releases, a spring in the expected stability of the ground on which we walk.

    There are advantages to a spot near the center of the North American tectonic plate, far from either the Atlantic or the Pacific.


    Memories Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • SuperMemo

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    62  bar falls 29.71 0mph SW dewpoint 57 Beltane

                      New Moon (Hare)

    It rained and the temperature dropped 13 degrees.  Mother nature at work.  In the cool moist air after the rain I planted onions, beets, lettuce and carrots.  I also transplanted 3 daylily clumps out of the flower bed I’m converting to vegetables.  Cool cloudy, preferable moist days are perfect transplanting weather.

    The earth smells rich, a loamy scent that arises only after a rain.  My Dad’s Aunt Rella, an early cancer patient, took an atomic cocktail and said it tasted like “the air after a June rain.”  An image that has remained with me all these years.

    I just started using a new program called SuperMemo.  It showed up in an interesting article in Wired.  This Polish memory researcher has developed this program that times repetitions of material you want to learn.  This fits some neurological model of the brain.  He guarantees 95% retention if  you use the program faithfully.

    I plan to use it learn art history, Chinese characters, horticultural information, folk tale and world history.  And probably, over time, other stuff, too.  This kind of thing excites me.


    Garden Memories 📎and tagged