Daily Archives: February 4, 2008

Cinema and Television, General, Politics, World History

Ten Thousand Schools

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29  87%  26%  5mph NNW  bar29.89 rises windchill25  Imbolc

                  Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

Saw Scarlet Johanssen talking to a group of Minnesota students tonight.  She’s pushing Barrack.  The political firestorm that will sweep the nation tomorrow will have a brushfire here in the Minnesota caucuses.  It remains to be seen whether a strong youth turnout for primaries and caucuses will  translate into votes in November, but I find the youth surge a hopeful phenomenon.  Maybe we’re getting back to a situation where the politics of compassion, not compassionate conservatism, and the politics of economic justice, not unjust foreign policy will prevail.  It’s got my vote.

The snow petered out, a dusting only after the vigor of the mid-morning.  Things did get freshened up.

Watched an anime on the Science Fiction Channel.  Saw why Miyazaki is considered an anime god.  This stuff is much more slapdash, also has a slasher feel to it without the grace of the samurai or wu shu movies like Crouching Tiger. 

I seem to find myself digging deeper and deeper into ancient China, especially the Warring States period when Taoism, Confucianism and Legalism plus many others–the Ten Thousand Schools–emerged.  It is also the time of the Qin unification and Qin Shi Huang Di fascinates me.  After the Qin the Han dynasty began and lasted for four hundred years or so, one of the first golden ages of China.  Later, the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties would, each in their own time and in their own way, count as golden ages, too.

Travel, Weather +Climate

Mulberry Trees in Armenia

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31  91%  26%  3mph N bar29.80 steady windchill29  Imbolc

              Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

This snow has a lot of different forms: sleet, snert, wet snow, less wet snow.  At least it didn’t plug the snowblower.  As I followed the snowblower down the driveway and back up, I had these background/foreground visions:  background–I’m layered up, in swiftly falling snow and operating a loud orange machine; foreground–I’m sitting on the lanai of our oceanview room in the Westin looking out toward the western horizon of the Pacific ocean as the sun begins to set. 

The snow makes the transition from Minnesota to Hawai’i a nice contrast. 

Getting stuff done today and tomorrow since on Wednesday I leave for Dwelling in the Woods.  My day without the guys I plan to snowshoe and read about Taoism, prepare for my workshop.  During the retreat I plan to snowshoe at least once a day. 

Picked up some dried mulberries today at the co-op.  Sweet, but not local.  Not hardly.  From Turkey.  It just occurred to me that I read an article this afternoon about silk scarf makers in Armenia, next to the Turkish border.  They had a historic industry, but the Armenian genocide wiped it out.  This town had just received a grant from the EU to grow, mulberry trees!

Memories, Travel

The Moratorium Years Didn’t Work Out so Well for Me

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29  90%  26%  5mph NNE bara29.84  falls windchill25 Imbolc

                 Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

In spite of the fact that this is Minnesota, how soon we forget, I had REI all to myself this morning.  Monday morning shoppers scared back into their easy chairs by, gasp, SNOW.  OK, I did think about turning around and heading back, then “I am a Minnesotan and I am not afraid,” soared through my mind and on I drove.  Slippin’ and slidin’ to the mall.  Just like when I was a kid and we had to walk four blocks all the way downtown to buy a pair of shoes.

Anyhow, a helpful young lady, blond and cheerful, quite normal except for the hoop through the right nostril, which, I suppose, makes her normal in that world formerly inhabited by adults now over 60, guided me through the hiking/walking show selection process.  The first pair pretty much fit me, though they were a little snug.  Then, “Oh.  These are a women’s 8!”  Wouldn’t you know?  Still we did find an appropriately masculine pair of Keens, “They started out making water shoes so they know slick rock.”  One of the problems in hiking Hawai’i is water slicked rock;  I’ve learned this with bruised ankles more than once.

Nearer to  home at the Anoka Co-op I went searching for Minnesota cheese (Bongards, in this case) and Minnesota bread (oddly, Holy Land Pocket Bread, made in Minneapolis) for my presentation at the Woolly retreat.  Then, sliding my way back home.

All the while I listened to Tom Wolfe’s  I Am Charlotte Simmons.   Anyone who encountered college after academic stardom in a small-town high school, like me for instance, can identify all the over place with Charlotte Simmons, the little mountain girl from Sparta, North Carolina and a Presidential Scholarship.  Well, I never had a Presidential Scholarship, but there’s some connection, anyhow.  Wolfe has made a living out of closely observed novels of manners of our time, a sort of Dickensian project in hip, post-modern tongue in cheek prose.  This one may not be great literature, but it’s a great time-machine back to those magic years when everything seemed possible, if only you could figure anything out. 

Those moratorium years didn’t work out so well for me.  Instead of sticking to my guns or buckling down with heroic intention fortified by small town common sense and parental support, I got drunk, wasted, started smoking and wandered without purpose for so many years I don’t even know when I stopped.  Sigh.  Oh, I did fine academically, but not as well as I might have without the marijuana and hash–yes, I inhaled–the LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, beer, 151 rum, cognac and single-malt scotch.  I floated out of college and stayed afloat all through seminary and well into my first years in the ministry. 

Treatment.  Second divorce.  Flounder around.  Discover writing and Kate in the same year.  Now, in my final third of life, I’ve picked up steam and gotten the ole head and heart straightened out.  Thank Mother Earth.  Still, it is really better late than never.  I’m living proof.

Politics, World History

Castrate Him!

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26  87%  28%  2mph NE bar 29.88 steady  windchill23 Imbolc

                Waning Crescent of the Winter Moon

A good senate race has run under the radar of the Clinton/Edwards/Obama vs. Romney/McCaine/Giuliani primaries.  It’s a shame, too, since the Democrats have a real opportunity to win back a Senate seat.  I was skeptical of Al Franken, but it seems he’s run hard, straight and with serious intent.  I’m gonna support him on Tuesday, along with Barrack Obama.  I read a convincing article in the Nation that portrayed Obama as the only candidate with true left credentials.  Progressive is a weasel word, not least because Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt used it of himself and his movement.

If you enjoy the numbers and drama of politics, this has been a great year.  Lots of poll data, lots of actual votes and plenty of campaign back and forth without, so far at least, too much mudslinging.  Even a pinch of political junkie in your bloodstream would get you into the fray.

Wish for snow and voilá, it snows.  Six inches today they say.  Paul Douglas called this one.    

The perfect week shapes up for me:  up north for four days in a time of snow, home for a night and then off to the Sandwich Islands. 

Started reading last night in the annals of the Grand Historian, Sima Qin.  He’s a fascinating character. He inherited the task of completing the history of the Chinese people his father, also the Grand Historian, began.  Living in the time of Emperor Wu, a great Han dynasty emperor, he made the Emperor mad.  Apparently, at the time, making Emperor’s mad resulted in castration.  And, the usual response was suicide.

Sima Qin, however, felt he had a duty to finish his history so he lived for 21 more years, in spite of the indiginity.  His work is readable, at least in translation, and more than that, interesting.  Just ordered his volume on the Qin dynasty.

Now then, off to Maple Plain for some new shoes and to the coop for bread and cheese.