Daily Archives: May 15, 2008

Friends, Literature, Writing

Current Literature

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59  bar steady  29.90  0mpn WSW dewpoint 44  Beltane

            Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

A mediocre night at sheepshead, but we had a lot of laughs anyhow.  Bill Schmidt cleaned up the nickels tonight.

While driving back and forth I finished I Am Charlotte Simons, a 2004 Tom Wolfe novel.  It’s reviews are all over the map and I can see why.  On the one hand it is an arresting look at college life in the Ivy league.  On the other hand the characters never reached very deep into my soul.  It was long and brimming with detail, a novel of manners of a sort.  I’m glad I “read” it. (Listened to it.)  Don’t know if I would have finished it as a read.

Another writer who has my complete attention right now is Richard Price, author of Clockers and Lush Life.  I finished Clockers a few weeks ago and bought Lush Life last week.  I’m part way into it.  This guy writes dialogue with an ear like no body I’ve read before.   In Clockers he channels inner city drug dealers and homicide detectives with equal credulity.  Lush Life continues this same kind of street savvy attention to speech and mores, this time on the Lower East Side in New York.  Clockers was set in New Jersey. 

Both of these guys, in different ways, reach into a segment of American life only a few of us witness.  Of the two, Price’s work has the ring of authenticity while Wolfe’s is satirical and just a bit off key.  Still, I enjoy both authors and am glad to have them on the scene.

I returned, last night and today, to a novel I’ve fooled around with since 2001, Superior Wolf.  It has possibilities. 

Travel

Road Trip

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71  bar falls 29,90 0mph W dewpoint 35  Beltane, sunny

                   Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

A day with no garden work for me.  This 61 year old body needed some downtime.  Some movement exercises, 40 minutes on the treadmill and I’m good.

Kate planted annuals and has ideas for grass and petunias that sound good.  I have to amend the soil first.

Tonight is Sheepshead.  We’ll see how I do this time.

Kate and I have discussed the possibility of having Ruth come here for a week or so this summer. We’d like to get her started on regular visits to Grandma and Grandpas. 

The trip to Alabama has begun to take shape.  Looks like I’ll leave around June 14, stay in Selma for three nights–16-18, then I may head on out to Denver, crossing the deep south the whole way.  I haven’t seen Natchez or New Orleans since Katrina.  Road trip.  Road trip. 

Our Land and Home, Writing

I Think That I Shall Never See

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71  bar steady  30.00  1mph SSW dewoint 35  Beltane

            Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

A morning at the Rum River Tree Farm.  Kate and I went wandering among the trees up for adoption.  We looked at fruit trees for our orchard apple, plum, pear and cherry.  We also looked at some willows, Niobe for example, with a wonderful yellow gold bark.  Great accent trees.  The larch look great, too.  Both of these require a wet environment, so we might have to change our irrigation system around a bit.

River Birch clumps go for around $260.  I figure 3 or four would transform the lower part of our front yard into a shady grove.  One or two other trees, running up the slope, would follow the elevation.  Kate wants lanes of grass among the trees.  I want more trees, so I imagine we can come to a compromise.

We also will buy some tree lilacs, trees for our grandkids, planted in their honor.  All of this comes from the permaculture thinking.  I’ve added some to that page if you follow that part at all.

Now it’s 72 degrees outside.  This means it might be a good day for morels.  It also means some of those seeds we sowed will begun to germinate, some more of them, I should say.

Spent an hour last night editing Superior Wolf.  It’s a keeper, needs expansion, filling out and elimination of one whole story line, but it’s a good one.  So’s Jennie’s Dead. 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Literature

A Vivid Imagination

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59  bar steady  30.02  1mph WSW dewpoint 42  Beltane, sunny

                Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon 

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.” – Sir R. F. Burton

Burton is an interesting guy. He traveled the world and did a translation of the Arabian Nights.  He is, however, not much of a theologian.  His genes must have cascaded down to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.  They, too, seem to believe that if you betray your ignorance loudly, then others will agree.   All faith traditions are far more subtle, more nuanced that mere projection.  Do they each have their problematics? Absolutely.  Do the problems justify the kind of reductionist argument deployed by religions cultured despisers (to borrow the phrase from Frederick Schleiermacher)? Not at all.

The simplest argument against them is this.  Have you ever seen a love?  Have you ever smelled justice?  Yes, you have seen or smelled their physical manifestations, but have you seen the complex of emotions and judgment that produce them?  No.  Why not?  Because they are constructs of the mental world.  What constitutes the mental world?  Is it just the firing and stimulation of neurons?  Oh, how do you know?  Because the fMRI tells you so?  How does the fMRI tell you its information?  That’s right, through sight. 

I’m with Kant here.  The ding an siche, the thing in itself, is unknown and unknowable due to the mediation of the senses.   Therefore how Dawkins and Harris can claim to reach beyond their sensorium and know a negative is beyond me.  Does the trashing of their fundamental argument make them wrong?  Unfortunately, no.

By the by, if you’ve never read the Arabian Nights, The Thousand and One Nights, then you’ve missed something.  Find a complete edition because the Muslims who wrote it had a vivid imagination.  I mean, really vivid.