Category Archives: Art and Culture

Art and Culture, Memories, Woolly Mammoths

Robert Bly

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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, Politics, Writing

Psyche’s Politics

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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, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Literature, World History

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

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85  bar falls 29.79  3mph NE dew-point 55  Summer, hot and unpleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly has an interesting article titled, The Burden of the Humanities.   I want to add a cadenza, a riff of my own to this Big Band music of the intellectual sort.

The first part of this article that caught my attention was the question of definition.  What are the humanities?  An obvious follow-on question, and the thrust of the article, is: Why the humanities?

I come to this topic from some hours now of researching the growth of Unitarianism and Universalism in Minnesota.  The connection is not obvious, but it is real.  In Minnesota Unitarianism, at First Unitarian Society, the general topic of religious or secular humanism got its launching pad into public debate and debate within the Unitarian-Universalist Association. This came from the powerful preaching of the Reverend John Dietrich who regularly filled the Garrick Theatre with over a thousand attendees.  A former Reformed Church clergy he experienced a gradual evolution of his views away from Reformed Calvinist doctrine.  In a heresy trial in that denomination in 1911 he was found guilty and defrocked.

Dietrich lifted the term humanism from an essay by Frederick Gould, published in the pamphlets of the British Ethical Society.  In that essay Gould proposed a new definition of humanism, one not rooted in the Renaissance understanding.  He proposed humanism as the “belief and trust in the efforts humans make.”

This new definition of humanism tried to put itself on the same intellectual path as science.  Here is a snippet from one of Dietrich’s sermons, one defining his own religion:

“So I take for my authority in religion the actual facts that have been discovered by science.  Beyond these facts which have actually been observed and verified, we really know nothing; and I make no assumptions which are not warranted by these facts.”      My Religion, John Dietrich, FUS 1929, p. 5  Published in the Humanist Pulpit, Vol. 3

The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, influenced by Dietrich in content, reinforces this apparent marriage of humanist thought and the then triumphal march of science and reason.

I’ve gone on a bit here about this because it is important to separate this now common understanding of humanism from the question, What are the humanities?  The answer to this question, I believe, turns the definition and the defining of humanism away from science and toward those realms of knowledge found in the classics of East and West, the artistic output of both East and West, and the philosophical and religious systems of both East and West.  That is, the question of what it means to be human can be answered only in a very narrow way within the science of say, physical anthropology or gross anatomy or human evolution.  Here the human is a physical entity shaped by the process of natural selection.  This is not wrong, it is right and necessary; but, it is not sufficient.

What it means to be human is found in the lived experience of humans.  That is, we are what we have been and what we have been shapes without defining what we can become.   How do we know what we have been?  We read the Grand Historian on the Qin and Han dynasties.  We listen to karnatic music.  The plays of William Shakespeare come to life before our  eyes.  Tolstoy helps us understand humans in War and Peace.  The cave paintings in Lascaux and the Cycladic figurines of the Cyclades both reveal aspects of a human response to lived reality.  The Winter Count of the Lakota and the great urban areas of London, Istanbul, or Rio De Janiero do the same.

The knowledge base of the humanities is broad and deep; it requires years to become fluent in even a small part of its study, yet it is precisely among the paintings and plays, the music and the poetry that we can rethink the human project and find old resources for new questions.

Thus, if I were to redefine humanism, I would say:  “an appreciation for what it has meant and what it now means to be human, an appreciation gained best from the cultural products of humankind over the millennia of our existence.”

Art and Culture

I’m Happy to Report

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Older Americans May Be Happier Than Younger Ones
–

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 14, 2008; A04

Many times in science, research studies point in conflicting directions. Part of the challenge — and the fun — of watching science is to try to sort out lines of intersecting evidence hidden amid a welter of confusing data.

In recent months, however, several studies have produced a stream of evidence that mostly points in the same direction, and also happens to overturn one of the most stubborn American stereotypes: the belief that this is a land whose gifts, charms and joys flow mostly to young people.

The studies show that when you check on how happy people are at various ages, the elderly generally come out ahead.

Since 1972, researchers have conducted 50,000 detailed interviews with Americans. The questions of the General Social Survey are repeated year after year to enable researchers to detect trends and to make comparisons among groups and to see how the same people changed over time. One asks whether they are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy.

“One important finding was people who were biologically older are happier than younger adults,” said Tom W. Smith of the University of Chicago, who is the director of the General Social Survey.

The study, conducted by researcher Yang Yang at the University of Chicago, used the granular detail of the survey to eliminate the possibility that older people seemed happier because they were raised in a generation that was taught from an early age to be content with its lot. Rather, Yang found, in research published in the American Sociological Review, those older than 65 had not always been happy. It was being older that conferred the contentment that many of them reported.

“It is counter to most people’s expectations,” said Smith, who spoke about Yang’s paper because she was not available. “People would expect it to be in the opposite direction — you start off by saying older people have illnesses, deaths of spouses — they must be less happy.”

Smith said he and other colleagues had also examined the phenomenon from a different perspective, by asking people about their problems — including physical ailments, problems with relationships, losing a beloved family member and becoming the victim of a crime. Smith found that older people reported a larger number of health problems but tended to report far fewer difficulties overall — fewer financial, interpersonal and crime problems.

The younger adults, Smith said, had less trouble with their health but had many more of the other kinds of predicaments, and those, in the long run, tended to trump their better health.

Yet another study, Smith said, looked at job satisfaction among people of different ages and again found that those who kept working past age 65 had the highest level of job satisfaction — going against the stereotype that older people keep working mostly because they can’t do without the money.

“A lot of people think of people working in their 60s and 70s as trapped in their jobs. Most of the people who continue working are people who like their jobs,” Smith said. “Most older workers work because they enjoy their jobs; those who did not were mostly able to retire and pursue other things. In 1960, the old were the poorest segment in America, and they have become less poor over the last half-century.”

The studies present an interesting puzzle, said Catherine Ross, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Yang’s finding that older adults are generally happier than younger ones seems superficially at odds with many studies that have found that older people are at higher risk for depression and other mental health problems.

In research published this year in the journal Social Science & Medicine, Ross and co-author John Mirowsky, also at UT-Austin, used data on 1,450 people who were asked in the General Social Survey how often in the previous seven days they had felt any of a range of emotions: blue, sad, lonely, anxious, tense, excited, embarrassed, ashamed, content or serene. Some of the emotions were positive, and some were negative. Simultaneously, some emotions, such as anger, were active, while others, such as serenity, were passive.

In line with Yang’s findings, Ross and Mirowsky found that advanced age was positively correlated with feeling positive emotions. But the researchers also found that being older was negatively correlated with active emotions. Older people, in other words, had both more positive and more passive emotional states.

“A lot of research in different areas finds the elderly have higher levels of depression, so it looked as though mental health was bad among the elderly,” she said. “What this study does is say, ‘Yeah, it is not that the elderly have negative emotions, but that when they are negative, they are passive.’ ”

Older people reported more loneliness — a negative but passive emotion — but they also reported much more serenity, a positive one.

“The reason we think the elderly have higher levels of depression is not because they have higher levels of negative emotions but that they have higher levels of passivity,” Ross said. “If the problem is having lower levels of energy, maybe the answers lie in increasing levels of energy, like reading a book or taking a walk — mental and physical activity — taking a bike ride or a yoga class. The sadness part may not be a negative emotion but a manifestation of the energy level.

“Young people — the very people we think from the stereotype are best off — in fact have high levels of anger and anxiety and also high levels of depression, compared to middle-aged adults.”

Younger adults were far more likely to have financial worries, troubled emotional relationships and professional stressors, she said.

“The image of youth or young adulthood as the best time of life is probably not an accurate stereotype.”

Art and Culture, Literature, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Wading in Your Media Stream

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61  bar steep rise 29.96 2mph NNW dew-point 45   Summer night, nice

                              New Moon (Thunder Moon)

I’d forgotten the all consuming nature of writing a novel.  It goes to bed with you, advances into your dreams and wakes up with in the morning.  Plot ideas, twists, character developments, inconsistencies, new characters.  All aswirl.  The novel bumps up against daily life, takes something from it, gives something back, a loop, a mobius strip.  Feedback.  A neuro-net firing and firing and firing.  It’s fun, a wild ride while its cookin’. 

There are plateaus.  Superior Wolf landed on a plateau about 6 years ago, struggled to get off it a couple of times, then settled back down to rest.  Jennie’s Dead has been on a bit more of an up and down ride. She’s in storage now, but I can sense her wanting to break out now that her brother has begun to get legs, take strides.

Somehow, as happens in my life, momentum has increased.  Both the velocity and the mass have kicked up at the same time, calling back into action skills set aside long ago.  The Sierra Club work will require a good deal of time.  The novel needs constant nourishment.  So does the garden.  These three alone would be a good deal, but I also have a sermon to write for September that will take at least a week of research, if not more.  I’ve also agreed to take on managing the Docent Book Club and my term for that starts this month.  Then there’s that pesky Africa check out tour.

Right now this all feels good.  Blood flowing, mind working.  And I’m sure it will feel that way for a good while, probably on into December, then I’ll feel a need for a let down again.  Right now, though, I’m jazzed.

My Woolly meeting is in August this  year.   I sent out the following e-mail so guys could prep for it.

Hi! Your Media Stream:  This is the water from which you take much of your intellectual nourishment.  What is it?  The radio stations to which you listen, TV programs you watch, movies you see, books you read, magazines and newspapers you take or consult.  I-Pod fare, music at home.  Any media, in short, that you use for either entertainment or education. How will we organize the meeting?  Like this—please bring a book you are reading right now.  Please bring a book you consider important and formative for you, perhaps one read long ago.  Bring a copy of your favorite magazine.  Be prepared to let us know your favorite radio program, TV program (if any), movie (again:  current and from the past) and newspapers.  We’ll set music aside for this evening, but it might be fun to pick up again at some point as both Scott and Frank have led us to do at retreats. The physical objects themselves are important, so please bring whatever you can.  2 books and 1 magazine at least.  If you can jot down your favorite radio program, TV program and movies (past and present) and newspapers, I will collect your lists and send them to Bill to publish on our website. What’s the point?  To dip into each other’s media stream for a bit, to hear why we like the books, movies, programs, newspapers and magazines that we choose.  I imagine five-ten minutes each of sharing, then a round of conversation about what we’ve heard.  This is for fun and to expand our grasp of who we are.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, World History

Miles and Miles of Flat Sameness

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66  bar steady 29.92 0mph N dew-point 58  Summer night

Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

The drive into the MIA this afternoon was the first time I’d driven any distance since the long trip to Alabama.

Sheila gave a walking lecture on the African check out tours.  She showed pieces in Egypt, then the Nok figure, the Ife Shrine head, the Benin head.  She spoke briefly about the linguist’s staff, the kente cloth, the elephant tusk and the leopard. It was a usual well-informed presentation.  Sheila knows the African collection in some depth.  She tried to provide so-called Pan African ideas, but I didn’t find any of them unique to Africa.

Africa, like Asia and North America, is a land mass, not a cultural designation.  It has, like Asia and North America, a bewildering variety of indigenous peoples, colonial adventures, global corporate interests and all this mixed now in the stew of politics referred to as developing nations.  Seeking for identifiers by continent,  across Africa, for example, is like seeking for unity across Asia or North America.  It is a category mistake.  Continents do not have cultures, people do.  To maintain that somehow Algiers and Tunisia share a common cultural underlayment with, say, the Zulu or the Ashante or the Tutu or the Masai attempts to shoe horn disparate peoples in a too tight continental shoe.

Kate and I watched There Will Be Blood tonight.  This is a powerful movie with mythic overtones.  The push for oil, the mania required to build an oil company or a church, the violence of men competing for power and money and the interlocutor of the barren land combine in a peak at the roots of contemporary American society.

Much of the filming was done near Marfa, Texas.  Marfa is the location of Donald Judd’s open air show places.  It is a unique town, a place a reporter for the Ft. Stockton newspaper told me is “Taos fifty years ago.”  She didn’t see this as a good thing.

The land in the movie is bleak.  Until my trip to Imperial, Texas a few years ago to see our land I hadn’t understood why people would say West Texas and shake their head.  It is mesquite, sand and rattle snakes.  In a few places, for a time, there was oil and natural gas.  There is a stark beauty to it, a beauty similar to the high plains, miles and miles of flat sameness, broken at the horizon by low mountains and foot hills.

More garden work tomorrow.  Get the red car, too.  The heads were delayed at the machine shop.

Art and Culture

Ramblin’ On

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81 bar falls 29.98  1mph SE dew-point 47  Summer, hot

Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

Give me the beat boys and free my soul, I want to get lost in your rock and roll and drift away.  Talk about rock anthems.  I heard this on the way into the MIA today and it had me pounding the roof.  Music can take your spirit and yank it around, up and down, deep into the past or put you right in this moment.  Just before I heard Give me the beat, the dj(are they digital jockeys now?) played Somebody to Love.  Man, that one always throw me right back to college.  Grace Slick, lsd, radical politics, sex and, oh yeah, classes.

Once in awhile I get into a golden-oldie phase (now that I’m becoming a golden oldie myself).  This often results in the purchase of CD’s.  Nobody buys them anymore except us old folks who were dragged kicking and screaming from the vinyl disk.  The ironic thing of course is that the younger generations do not buy CD’s, but they do buy vinyl disc.

So I have Surrealistic Pillow, the Jefferson Airplane’s first album.  I also have 3 disc collections of Janis Joplin, Bob Dyland and Joan Baez.  I have not, for some reason, purchased any of the Beatles or Led Zepplin or the Doors, all favorites of mine at the time.  There’s a Dead album or two.  In general though the lectures from the Teaching Company or the audio books from the library take up the car time now in which I listened to music.

I attended the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for over 20 years.  I met Kate there, but we haven’t been for many years.  Sleep comes  too easily in warm, dark places with soothing music.  Then there’s the drive.  This means that my life is unusually music poor right now.

Art and Culture, Garden

Descaping the Garlic

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76 bar steady 30.05  0mph NW  dew-point 46  Summer, hot

Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

The heirloom tomatoes we have growing, started from seed inside, required more support.  They have sent out thick branches from the central stalk, already within a tomato cage.  As fruit develops on them, they will sag and break or their fruit will dangle on the soil, going rotten before we can pick them.  At the same time, a few daisies had decided on a straggly path toward the grass, so I put support around them, too.

The garlic. Sigh.  I harvested four garlic plants yesterday.  They had not grown into large, juicy bulbs as I had imagined, but instead looked like large green onions, very large.  I read the culture instructions again.  I had forgotten to cut back the scapes, a curly stalk that shoots up from the center of the main stalk.  It carries the flower.  Allowing it to get much more than 10″ long discourages bulb production.  Makes sense.  If I’m gonna propogate by seed, why bother storing energy below the soil.

In a belated attempt to make up for lost ground I descaped all the garlic and will let the remaining plants sit in the soil a while longer, though I suspect my fantasy of large garlic bulbs grown in my own garden will have to wait until next summer.   All of gardening is a constant experiment, learning this from the plant, then that from the soil, again the message of the sun, then the gentle language of rain.  Like intimate relationships gardening requires close listening and a willingness to admit when you have erred.

My first visit to the MIA since May comes today when I go in for a refresher on the Africa galleries.  We have this one last check-out tour to give.  After it, we will be able to give tours of Africa only if requested.  I’m looking forward to getting back to the museum after a good time away.  No tours for me until September and I’m glad, still I miss the constant interaction with the art and the folks around the museum.

Art and Culture, Friends, Garden

A Bad Break

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68  bar steady 29.65  2mph  ESE  dew-point 56  Beltane, Sunny and sort of warm

                       First Quarter of the Flower Moon 

“Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.” – James Russell Lowell

My docent friend, Bill Bomash, fell 10 feet into a culvert at a mountainside home in Brazil.  He had gone there to visit a friend who had recently completed his new house.  I wrote about him a couple of months ago.  He had two weeks in an all Portugese speaking hospital after the intial orthopedic surgery because he developed an infection, not unusual when a lot of hardware goes into the bone.  This happened in January.  He faced six months of recovery when he finally got back to Minnesota in early February. 

Now this:

Hi everybody.  Well I got some disappointing news the other day.  I’ve been having more pain in my leg and when I went into the doctor he said that he thought the hardware in my leg was failing.  As a result, there was too much movement in the bone. I’m going into the hospital again on Monday for surgery to remove all the hardware and have a rod inserted through the bone to hold it in place. I’m afraid it’s pretty much back to square one.
    It looks like it will be quite a while yet before I can return to touring.
    I’ll get back to you with an update after the surgery and I have returned back home.

In a much more modest instance I had three months of recovery after surgery to repair my ruptured Achilles tendon.  It drove me nuts.  Six months after the initial break Bill now faces another six months of recovery.  Geez.

Off to Costsco for dogfood, then chainsaw Charlie will emerge and start whacking off limbs.  Of trees.

Art and Culture, Garden

An Appetite for Nutrient Fluid (not an alien)

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56  bar steady 30.05 4mph N dew-point 43  Beltane, sunny and cool

                          Waning Gibbous Hare Moons 

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci

Less is more -always; and explore constantly.  Mario Odegard, Viking Explorer and Woolly Mammoth

Up earlier again this morning to take advantage of the cool temps.  Amended the second tier bed close to the house where we have had problem after problem with growing things.  This time I added two bags composted manure and a cubic foot or so of sphagnum moss. 

It’s too shady for sun plants and too sunny for shade plants.  Gotta find something that swings both ways and can tolerate our winters. 

Meanwhile on the hydroponic front my tomato plant started from an heirloom seed now reaches close to the ceiling.  It’s a good 2.5 feet tall, headed toward its interior limitation.  It has several small yellow flowers, but no fruit as yet.  Yes, the tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable.  The astonishing thing is its appetite for nutrient fluid.  It’s going through about a gallon every four to five days.  When the fruit begins developing, I imagine its appetite will increase again.  The lettuce produces enough leaves every few days for a salad a meal for lunch and dinner.  Both the lettuce and the tomato plant are the products of one seed germinating, coming to maturity and growing its edible product.

Outside, however, if we were pioneers and our lives depended on the crop, I’d be seeking part time employment.  To pay for food next winter.  The cucumbers and morning glories I grew inside so well atrophied and died outside.  The three tomato plants, on the other hand, have done fine outside.  After puzzling over the difference for a week, it came to me this morning.  The tomato plants were in soil in pressed peat moss containers.  They had a much larger soil contained root system.   The morning glories and the cucumber were in smaller, compressed soil seed starting clumps.  That meant their root system was much more exposed, having grown in the nutrient solution rather than soil. 

The take away for me is this:  if I’m going to transplant it outside, start it in a larger ground ready pot with potting soil.  It’s a learning curve.

On the other hand, we do finally have several germinated seeds in the garden, too.  The Country Gentleman corn has begun its skyward journey as have the Ireland Annie, Dragon’s Tongue and another one I can’t recall.  We also have beets, carrots, peppers and onions, lots of onions, doing well.  We need a stretch of hot weather to get these puppies on their way.  So far they’ve been sluggards.

Though I’m signed out now for the summer, I’m headed into the art museum today for a noon tour.  Carol Wedin, a fellow docent who prefers Asian tours, called me, sick with a cold and asked me for help.  Sure.  She is a wonderful botanical illustrator/artist.

Kate’s off getting her nails done; Lois is here cleaning house and I’ve got to get in the shower to get ready for my tour.  Bye for now.