Category Archives: Letters

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Humanities, Letters, Translating De Bello Gallico, Travel, World History

Scottish Independence? Yes.

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Lughnasa                                                                               College Moon

The global market in television programs, which has increased its reach now that aggregators have entered the market, offers insights into other cultures. I’ve found a clue about the English/Celtic divide in one of them.

Kate and I have converted our television viewing to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime as I’ve mentioned before. A knock on effect (as the Brits would say) has been an increase in watching BBC shows: Waking the Dead, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Line of Duty and others whose names I can’t recall. We’re currently watching MI-5, a long running show that features Britain’s internal security service, a combination of the CIA & the FBI.

It’s interesting as drama. They have us on edge at least once during most shows. It’s equally interesting as a reveal of stereotypical British views, especially of other countries. The Americans are loud or devious or arrogant, or, often, all three. The French. Well, they’re French and can be dismissed pretty much.

The Celts have representation on the show mainly through the IRA which MI-5 portrays as ruthless, blood-thirsty and callous. Which mirrors exactly the Irish attitude toward the English, their long time occupiers. The Welsh show up occasionally and the Scots appear mostly through the Glaswegian accent which I’ve learned to recognize.

The other night Harry Pearce, head of MI-5, made a remark about the Celts. I’m paraphrasing: Oh, you know there’s no such thing as a Celtic race. Doesn’t exist. This is an ethnocentric point of view, one which posits English culture as the norm (not really a big surprise in that attitude) and uses it to dismiss the cultural roots of the Celts.

Culture does not equal race, never has. Race, in fact, is a nonsense phrase in terms of the homo sapiens gene pool. Yes, people discriminate on their folk understanding of race as discernible by skin color, but genetically? The differences that do exist (and they are minor) have no correlation to racist typologies.

One clear marker of culture has always been language. Find a different language from your own and you’ve usually found a different culture. All the Celtic lands have some form of the Celtic language as their historical tongue: Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic chief among them though there are variations on the Isle of Mann, Brittany (Briton) and Galicia (a Celtic province in Spain’s far northwest). Probably Cornwall, too, but I’m not sure about that.

Then, there is the matter of history. The Picts (Scots), Welsh, Irish, Manx and Cornish were the indigenous people of the British Isles. Yes, they were immigrants likely, too, sometime after the culture that built Stonehenge and before the Roman and Anglo/Saxon invasions, but the various tribes of the Celtae were in place long before the Anglo/Saxons, the direct ancestors of the English.

The English have a subdue, occupy and rule mentality that did not begin in the days of the British Empire writ global. No, it began, like most good empires do, close to home. The Scots held off the British (and the Romans, Hadrian’s Wall) the longest, succumbing only after a Scottish king, James Stuart, inherited the British throne, but Scotland has a long, long history of self-rule, the longest of all the Celtic lands.

Harry Pearce of the television show MI-5 had it partly right, there is no Celtic race (no black race or yellow race or white race or brown race either), but the bald attempt to dismiss the Celtic reality, its long and distinctive history and culture, is not, again as the British say, on.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters, The Move, Third Phase

A Little Bit Crazy

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Lughnasa                                                                    College Moon

Mircea Eliade’s journals. Abraham Maslow’s journals. A biography of Dickens. A West Point set of maps for modern warfare. An atlas. Then, two. Three. Several Alan Moore graphic novels: V for Vendetta, the Watchman, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Jung’s Red Book. Some egyptology texts. Cardboard mouths consuming my library, eating the books one at a time.

Tried listening to other sorts of music but outlaw country suits my packing mood. Gotta be a little bit crazy to sort through a collection gathered over a lifetime, especially crazy to jettison some of it. Outlaw country is a little bit crazy and not demanding on the listener.

As I pack, I fantasize about what I will do with this one, and that one, and those once they reappear, undigested by the cardboard. I’ll finally sit down and just read this one. Learn more about Alan Watts and Nikola Tesla. Tracking down changing national borders and following them backwards through time. Working to solidify my understanding of Egypt’s influence on the Minoans and the Greeks. All those projects, large and small. Touching these tools, not different really from hammer and screwdriver, ripsaw and router. Makes me ache to use them.   (David Roberts)

Great Work, Letters, Poetry, World History

They Say It’s Your Birthday

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Summer                                                                                     Most Heat Moon

“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.” 
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

A good while back I sat down and wrote a list of my saints. These are writers, political activists, artists, naturalists, poets, film-makers, scientists, philosophers and others who have influenced my thinking, moved me toward various arenas of action. They are my mentors.

A bit later I sat down and began entering their birthdays onto my Google calendar so I could acknowledge them at least once a year. That’s why my calendar for today, July 12th, has three names on it: Julius Caesar, Henry David Thoreau and Pablo Neruda. What an odd threesome, a Roman general and the first emperor, a New England Renaissance naturalist and writer, a socialist Chilean poet.

Someday I plan a post that will feature most of my saints, a blog version of the Book of Saints, only these will be mine, an idiosyncratic list with very few outright religious folks on it.

Humanities, Letters, Science

Border Patrol

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Summer                                                          Summer Moon

A contemporary philosopher and novelist, Rebecca Goldstein, defends philosophy as a discipline whose task is “…to render our human points of view ever more coherent.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 14, 2014. In order to do that she says, in the same article, that philosophy must patrol “troubled conceptual borders.” 

This perspective attracted me. A discipline that walks between worlds, the worlds of physics and that of biology, say, or that law and justice, literature and culture, anthropology and privacy or of worlds within worlds, say, between baseball fans and football fans, or materialist scientists and vitalist scientists. It is, as used to be said, the queen of the sciences.

Her examples in the article are abstruse, philosophical all, but her point extends well beyond the the lives of the mind and into the streets. Who negotiates the place between color theory as a branch of optics and the application of it by a painter? Who walks along the lines Wagner proposed long ago, those lines attempting to make a wholistic art form, one using music, painting, literature, poetry, acting all in one, a meta-art? Who mediates between the anti-free will and the free will camp in the borderlands of psychology, experimental psychology and neurology?

Long ago in my college days I found sort of border realm thinking very attractive. I took psych theory, anthro theory, soc theory, philosophy and might one day have gotten around to econ. My interest lay in the roots of these disciplines, in their founding ideas, how those shaped their work, limiting them while defining a discipline’s proper area of study. These areas of thought still fascinate me though I have less opportunity to investigate them.

Not even sure what I’m saying here, just throwing up a flag that says, hey, I’d like to talk more about this.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters, Translating Metamorphoses

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

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Beltane                                                                         Summer Moon

Got to thinking about the standing on the shoulders of giants meme. It’s a great contribution of Isaac Newton, a quotable polymath and giant like last century’s Albert Einstein. The more I thought about it though the less satisfied I was with it.  [Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (Poussin, 1658)]

It introduces a necessary humility to any advancement in human thought, emphasizing the debt owed to the past. But. It seems to me a forest works better.

The giants of the past remain just that. The General Shermans, the Methuselahs of the forest, but they protect the growth of new, younger saplings and smaller giants who grow up among them. They are nourished from the same soil, in the case of Newton and Einstein, western civilization, and they don’t disappear under a long chain of legs and heads and shoulders, but remain in their place, already tall, eternal and the guarantors of the forest itself.

Too, I can easily imagine my own journeys into these groves, wandering among woodlands growing since the days of classical Athens, old kingdom Egypt, republican Rome, the Renaissance. And consider Newton. Perhaps the mythical apple tree of his life might have been the Islamic scientist Averroes.

This ancestral forest lies just beyond the edge of this material reality, its sylvan nature dependent no longer on the laws of physics but on the memories of the future. We are its caretakers, responsible for its continued health.

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Letters, Politics

Media Diet

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Beltane                                                            Emergence Moon

My media diet. A while back, maybe 5 years or so, I heard an NPR piece on the concept of a daily media diet. It’s simple. What do you read, listen to, watch during the course of an average day? Yes, it probably changes from one day to the next, but it’s also got some bones that stay in place most days. Since the question of information sources came up at the Woolly meeting-not everyone gets their news from or trusts the NYT for example-I decided to raise this media diet issue again.

Your media diet is important because it is your intellectual nourishment. What you take in through various media may be grouped: information, news, education, entertainment. In terms of informing ourselves we all need a balanced diet, but research shows that instead we have narrowed our range of inputs, often tailoring them to our preconceived views. This is dangerous and, like a varied diet is good for the body, so is a varied media stream good for the intellect.

I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. I’m going to put down my media diet in as much detail as I can muster. If you have the time and inclination, I’d love to see yours.

Daily:  Minneapolis Star-Tribune print, New York Times online, Star-Tribune online, Wired online.

Magazines(print): New York Review of Books, The Economist, Wired, Dwell, AARP, Funny Times, National Geographic*

 

Most days: online e-mail subscriptions Foreign Policy Situation Report, Big Think, Brain Pickings, DeLancey Place, Beacon, Gizmag, Chronicle of Higher Education, Scientific American, Tablet, PCMag, Trendland, Nieman Lab, Economic Policy Institute, Think Progress, various other Foreign Policy.* Poem-a-day.

Most days:  Accuweather, NOAA, MPR Updraft and Paul Douglas weather online.

Websites:  Cool Tools, Perseus (Latin text of Ovid), various political websites, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Art Museum, MIA (and others less often like War on the Rocks, Small Wars Journal, USAF Journal, Internet Movie Data Base, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, Slate

Museums: The Walker, the MIA, rarely the Russian Museum, the Science Museum, the Minnesota Historical Society

Radio: MPR News, Classical and KBEM Jazz (only when driving and not often then anymore)

Music: little during the average day except as above

Television: Kate and I watch a couple of shows on Huluplus. I might pick up one more plus whatever I have on while I exercise.

Books: I may look at several books during the course of an average day. These days many of them relate to Latin, Ovid, the Metamorphoses and translation. I’m also reading material on emergence, the Arabian Nights and Colorado.

Usually I read one book for leisure at a time until finished. Right now I’m reading a Brian Sanderson fantasy novel. This kind of reading usually happens later in the evening.

*Both the subscription e-mails and magazine subscriptions can overwhelm me and my time. It’s a balancing act to get useful information while being able to maintain forward motion of projects like writing and translating and gardening.

You might have plays, concerts, dance performances, clubs to add to your list. We do occasionally get out to these, but much less often than when we lived in the city.

 

Humanities, Latin, Letters, Writing

Home

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Spring                                                                                New (Emergent) Moon

Since listening to the TED talk I posted below, I’ve been trying to decide what my home is. Certainly writing is a contender. Two or three times a day I sit down the computer and pound out a post for this website. I’ve written novels and short stories over the last twenty years plus all those sermons over the last forty. When I need to clarify fuzzy thinking, I head to the keyboard, trusting the One Who Types as less addled than the One Who Only Thinks.

The other contender is scholarship. I’m hesitant about this one, since it seems the realm of the academic and I left the academy long ago. Still, I translate Latin, take the MOOC courses and follow up, stay in touch with the literature in several fields: hermeneutics, biblical scholarship, ecologial thought, climate change, certain sub-disciplines of philosophy like aesthetics, pragmatism and metaphysics, neuro-science and classical literature. And, perhaps more telling, I approach life with the mind of a scholar, critical and analytic, wanting to be confident of my data, my sources, always pushing toward synergy, toward new ways of thinking.

These are not, of course, exclusive.  The writing requires research and research requires writing. Perhaps my home is the liminal zone between writing and scholarship.

Humanities, Letters, Literature

Does Great Literature Make Us Better?

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Beltane                                                                  Early Growth Moon

Does Great Literature Make Us Better?  NYT article you can find here.

I’ve read great literature off and on my whole life, starting probably with War and Peace as a sophomore or so in high school.  I’ve also read a lot of not great, but not bad either literature and have even written some myself.  And, yes, I’ve read some distinctly bad literature, but not on purpose.

A formative experience in my reading life occurred in my sophomore year of college when I took a required English literature class.  Before taking the class I had given serious thought to majoring in English.  Then I had whatever his name was for a professor.  He told me what the books I read in his class meant.  He also claimed, proudly, to read Time Magazine from cover to cover each week as a form of discipline.  (That would have been discipline for me, too.  Punishment.)

Whether he represented English literature professors or not I don’t know, and I suspect now that he probably didn’t, but at the time I decided I could do the work of an English major without putting up with anymore of that kind of instruction.  I would read.  And I did and I have.

(Greuter Seven liberal arts  1605)

[That’s how I ended up in Anthropology and Philosophy for a double major.  Though I did have almost enough credits for a geography minor and a theater minor.  The theater credits were almost all in the history of theater, which I found fascinating.  The geography business came about because I was interested in the Soviet Union and, to a lesser exent then, China.]

Has reading Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Singer, Hesse, Austen, Mann, Kafka and all those others made me a better person?  Hell, I don’t know.  In the article quoted above I think the writer refers to an argument about liberal arts in general; that is, that studying the liberal arts makes one more able to think critically in a complex world and, therefore, to act with a higher level of moral sensitivity.

That the liberal arts and reading great literature teaches critical thinking is, I think, established.  They do this by the comparative method, familiar to students of anthropology and philosophy and literature and theology.  How does it work?  In the words of blue book essay tests since time immemorial, you compare and contrast.  By comparing this culture to that one, or this writer to that one, or this book to that one, or this period of philosophy to that one or this theological perspective to that one, a sensitivity to the variations in argumentation, in problem solving, in abstract analysis becomes second nature.

This sensitivity to the variations does not, I think, breed a more moral person, but it does produce a more humble one, a person who, if they’ve paid attention, knows that this solution or that one is not necessarily true or right, but, rather is most likely one among many.  This humility does not cancel out conviction or commitment, rather it positions both in the larger reality of human difference.

So, in the end, I don’t believe the case for reading great literature is to be made in its efficacy or lack of it in creating moral sensitivity, but rather in great literature’s broadening of our horizon and in the concomitant deflation of our sense of moral righteousness, perhaps, oddly, the very opposite of creating a more moral person.

 

Latin, Letters, Translating Metamorphoses

Coeptis

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Greg, my Latin tutor, and I have begun moving through Ovid with an eye to a possible commentary, noting where I have difficulty and where we both have trouble.  These are the kind of things that can be expanded on in a commentary, as both aids to future translators but also as educational tools to broaden an understanding of this particular work and Ovid in general.

It’s difficult to describe my level of excitement about this.  After spending so long getting ready, we’re actually doing it and I’m a full partner, not as skilled as Greg at Latin but I’m focused on Ovid and have a lot bring to the conversation.  My translations have begun to raise fewer and fewer flags and my choices bring a fresh perspective to the work.

It’s fun.  I know that must sound weird, but I really enjoy this.  It’s detective work, history, poetry, mythology, philology and straight out brain work.  Complex and a bit arcane, my favorite.

At this point I can actually imagine translating all 15 books, 15,000 verses.  Who knows?  I’m also expanding my reading to Virgil and Horace, perhaps some Catullus, too.  I need to know other Augustan poets and their conventions to better understand Ovid’s work.

Here’s another oddity in all this.  When I finish a session with Greg, every two weeks, I feel like I’m done with classes and all I want to do is relax, read something or putter in the garden.  This is an old, well ingrained feeling, put into place over many, many years of education.

Cinema and Television, Family, Latin, Letters, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate

Rainy, Gray, Blah

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Spring                                                                      Planting Moon

Moved books and sorted files.  Finishing up that long study and file reorganization, clean out begun some weeks ago.  Went out for dog food and got a hamburger at Culver’s.  They make a good burger.

Read some more Robert Jordan, now in the second volume of the Wheel of Time.  Watched three Supernaturals and one Danish show, The Eagle.  A lazy Sunday.

Did get started on Book I of Metamorphoses.  Not far.  Verbs pulled out and conjugated.  I checked the Perseus (classics website) text with the most scholarly text available right now and there was one small difference in the first four verses.  Started a word list which will feed into the commentary.

Needed a psychic bump today and Kate provided it.  What would I do without her?  I know it’s a canard; but, with buddy William Schmidt losing his wife Regina last year, it’s no longer something that has happened to others.

This gray, cold weather has many Minnesotans in a bit of a grumpy place, all of us waiting for daffodils and sun.  As Garrison Keillor said today, “The snow will melt.”  You betcha.