Monthly Archives: July 2008

Art and Culture, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

What Does It Mean To Be An American?

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85  bar falls 29.75 0mph E  dew-point 66  sunrise 5:53  sunset 8:44  Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

The hangover from the docent program continues.  We have to do an Africa check-out tour with two partners.  We each prepare three objects, then share the information and come ready to present any of the objects.  This is a sort of multiple choice test, I guess.  All of us have favorite areas in the museum and less liked areas.  I love the Asian collection.

The African collection does not excite me.   I’m not sure why.  Africa as a continent and African history, especially pre-colonial Africa have fascinated me since college when I took several courses related to these areas as well as African anthropology.  Contemporary African politics also hold my attention.  The art does not.  There are pieces that are, for me, exceptions.  The Ife Shrine Head.  Kente cloth.  The Magadelene Odundo reduced black ceramics.  The gold weights.  The female sculptures.  The rest does not draw me in.  This is me, I know, for many find these objects stunning, even path breaking when it comes to representation.

Still, I have to do this check-out tour and I will.

The drive in was unremarkable, though notable for its reduced heat from the Texas weekend.  On the drive back I encountered several drivers in a row who had not yet graduated from the real world driving class we all take each day.  Left me with a short fuse.  Again.  On me.

Switched for a third time the Woolly meeting idea.  First was permaculture.  Second was your media stream.  The third, and final one is this:  What does it mean to be an American?  When did  your feel your most patriotic?  Least? Who is your favorite American author?  Painter?  Poet?  Poem?  Book?  Painting?  Does America have a manifest destiny?  How do we or should we fit into the global reality?

Family, Memories, Travel

Scene of the Crash Bar-B-Q

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78  bar steady 29.79  1mph SE dew-point 65  Sunrise 5:53 Sunset 8:44pm  Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon
This is a few of the 50+ Ellis clan who attended the 2008 reunion at rest on the back porch of the Baker’s Texas sized house and property.

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The reunion entailed a good deal of eating and the usual amount of what have you been up to.  A few of the more memorable updates for me follow.

Jean Cate’s son Jeff and his Brazilian wife, Danielle, move to Brazil in two weeks for at least ten years.  They’ve lived in the states for some time, but after the birth of their beautiful son decided he needed immersion in Brazilian culture.  Jeff doesn’t speak Portugese, but said he’s gonna right to work on it.  The impact of the line of demarcation effects our family.

Many people had retired including Dan McGregor who, this September, will watch from the side lines as school starts without him in any of his many coaching assignments:  basketball, football, tennis, golf, and several others.  We were all a good bit grayer than the last time I attended the reunion in 2000.

Jane (Stephens) ran a family meeting in which Aunt Dorothy and her husband Harley Brown were remembered.  They both died over the year since the last reunion.  Aunt Dorothy had a phenomenal memory, all agreed, recalling family facts long after others had forgotten them.  She died at 100+ intellectually sharp up till the end.  “She proved you’re never to old to learn.  Yeah, And never to old to get married!”  She and Harley married when she was 90 or so.  Harley was a world recognized expert on riffle beetles.  Riffle beetles capture oxygen and work with it below water.  He was a fun and funny guy.

We agreed to have the meeting next year the third week in July, place undecided.

I became interested in Ellis history.  We all know a good bit about the Spitler side of the family, but not much about Elmo Ellis and his family.  Apparently Lloyd Ellis, son on Henry Ellis, Elmo’s brother, has come the last few reunions and has some considerable history.

A few stories reveal a good bit.  At one point Elmo and Jenny gathered their children on a train from somewhere in Oklahoma where Elmo had work as a farm hand.  Their destination was Mustang, Oklahoma, sort of the family seat of the Ellis and Spitler families.  In Ada, Oklahoma Grandpa Elmo got off the train and none of his children saw him again save for Uncle Charles.  He had a glass eye, losing one eye while fighting a grass fire.

Those who knew him a bit said he was charismatic, charming, but “never got down the working thing.”  He was a rich kid who ran through a sizable inheritance.  Family.

Mike Simpson, a former petroleum engineer and owner of an oil and gas services company he recently sold, gave me some tips on looking up information about our land in Pecos County.  He thought the fact the guy wanted to buy the land meant he knew something, too.  The oddity is that the best website is the Texas Rail Road Commission which handles all oil related permits for the state.  They apparently also control all matters related to trucking. Go figure.

Before I sign off today I wanted to mention a couple of other interesting sights along the way to Mineola.  There were 2 Beer Barns.  At the Beer Barn there are two truck sized drive through bays, somewhat like a coin operated car wash.  The trick here is that you can drive in, buy your beer by the case, or, as the sign said, Get Kegs To Go and they load it in your vehicle.  You don’t have to get out.

At a major intersection on Highway 80 there was a vendor wagon with a sign that read:  Scene of the Crash Bar-B-Q.

Family, Memories, Travel

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

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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.

GeekWorld

Violent and Elegant

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73  bar steady 29.86  0mph NNE dew-point 68  sunrise 5:50 Sunset 8:49  Summer

Last Quarter of the Thunder Moon

Ever wonder about people who spend $2 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water?  Try spelling Evian backwards.  George Carlin, RIP.

Ancientrails will go dark for two days, Friday and Saturday, with a probable posting late Sunday.  Unless, that is, I find a spare computer in Texas and get a chance to post, but I’m not counting on it.

The reason?  No computer on this trip.  Three days away, minimal luggage with the fees for checking baggage, and the old laptop we have is too heavy.  Also, the time frame makes for a compressed week-end with family, the focus.

A Few Seconds of Panic by Stefan Fastis recounts a sportswriters time as a walk-on place kicker for the Denver Broncos.  This book at least seems to present a detailed picture of what life is like for the players.  It is a hard life, filled with psychological and mental challenges as well as physical ones.  It is also well-remunerated if you can make it into a starting role and addictive emotionally.

Football and I have a strange relationship.  On the one hand I want to understand it, understand it as the intellectual, chess-like strategy game it is for those who manage it; on the other hand, I feel weird about liking football, as if I violate the intellectual’s code of honor (necessary to staying in the secret club) by my interest. I know, this is my problem for sure.

The players also fascinate me, violent and elegant, they have an archetypal presence, athletes who risk it all each week for as long as they play. They are, too, spoiled children, at least by report, dependent on a phalanx of specialists who handle everything from dalliances to drug charges for them.  There is, also, the often hidden, but apparently real, physical downsides of life after football: early dementia, constant pain, physically abusive behavior and sometimes drug dependency.

With the trades the Vikings have made in the offseason at least 13 Sunday afternoons will have a familiar activity.  God, I’m glad we bought that big TV.

See you on the Sunday flipside.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Garden, Great Work

The Heart of What Ails American Culture

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75  bar steady 29.84  0mph NE dew-point 68  Sunrise 5:50  Sunset 8:59pm Summer

Last Quarter of the Thunder Moon

A Deborah Madison recipe I used this noon called for tomatoes, beet greens, oregano, olive oil and garlic.  The beet greens came from the golden beets I picked just before the lunch.  The oregano from Kate’s herb garden.  We had a couple of dried garlic bulbs. I thought they had not differentiated. but I decided to use it as it was.  When I peeled back the white, papery layers over the bulb I found cloves.  This meant  two things.  I had enough garlic for the recipe and the garlic in the bed could be harvested now.  The dish was great, but the cloves excited me.

There is no reason why growing garlic bulbs with cloves should excite me so much, except it entered my head early in the gardening season–last September.  They grew throughout the winter and were ready to harvest in July, just as the cultural recommendations for it said.  Their taste is more intense and more sweet, at least this variety.  I planted three.

In the furnace room, hanging from green gardening twine are four bunches of garlic bulbs.  Set aside from them are the largest 2 bulbs from each variety.  They will go in the ground in late September or early October to produce more garlic for next July.  Kate will take a large head from each bunch out to Jon and Jen so they can have garlic in their garden.  They too will be able to harvest the largest heads and plant from them.  This chain of living things, nurtured and in turn nurturing, is the true great chain of being.

Watched 10,000 BC on the recommendation of a friend.  Well, the anachronisms were many: iron, boats, buildings, captive mammoths and the story line fed on coincidence.  On the other hand the Woolly Mammoths and the Sabre Toothed Tiger were very real.  A mish-mash of times, cultures and continents.  Just what I thought when I was the first ads.  In fairness, the same friend watched There Will Be Blood on my recommendation.  He thought it was too violent and the lead character, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, a poor guy with whom to spend a couple of hours.

There Will Be Blood is a mythic movie of great power.  It speaks to the heart of what ails American culture and it speaks the truth.  The truth is neither pretty nor easy and the film knows it.  It is uncomfortable, but that it is different from bad.  10,000 BC is an entertainment and it works sometimes and not others, but it is not mythic, either in truth or in story.

Woolly Mammoths

The Half Wit

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From Woolly William Schmidt

Subject: The Half Wit

A man owned a small farm in Saskatchewan.

The Saskatchewan Provincial Wage & Hours Department claimed he was not paying  proper wages to his help and sent an agent out to interview him.

“I need a list of your employees and how much you pay them,” demanded the agent.

“Well,” replied the farmer, “there’s my farm hand who’s been with me for 3 years. I pay him $200 a week plus free room and board. The cook has been here for 18 months, and I pay her $150 per week plus free room and board.

Then there’s the half-wit. He works about 18 hours every day and does about 90% of all the work around here. He makes about $10 per week, pays his own room and board, and I buy him a bottle of bourbon every Saturday night. He also sleeps with my wife occasionally.”

“That’s the guy I want to talk to…the half-wit,” says the agent.

“That would be me,” replied the farmer.

Art and Culture, Garden

A Flower Symphony

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75  bar falls 29.89  0mph N  dew-point 59  Sunrise 5:49  sunset 8:49  Summer

Last Quarter Thunder Moon

The garden speaks.  Last month, when I dug up my first garlic, it was not a head, but a single large clove.  What the?  Back to the garlic culture book.  Descaping?  Oops.  I forgot to take off the flower and seed forming stalk. It suppresses bulb formation.  Now, a month later after I descaped, bulb formation proceeds.  I do not know whether it will get where it would have, but I just pulled up one garlic bulb that looks pretty well defined, though not completely.  The individual cloves are not yet distinct, though their formation is clear.

The tallest corn is now well over 6 feet high.  No tassels yet.  The beans have begun a very productive season and the onions are ready to dry.  After we dry them, we can story them in burlap bags in the furnace room.  The squash and watermelon have demonstrated their power to dominate territory.  Our garden paths and boulder walls are in danger of disappearing at some points.

The Cherokee Purple tomato plants have fruits that have begun to turn a dusky red, shading now toward purple.  So far I have not noticed a tendency to disease which can be a problem growing heirloom vegetables.   I plan to save seeds and heads of garlic since these vegetables will breed true and not separate into warring varieties as most hybrids will.

The lilies continue their quiet fireworks.

I have had this idea for a long time about a flower symphony.  Each flower would get a lietmotif, as in Wagner, each color would have a note or a phrase.  The whole piece would have a somber, quiet opening, andante, for the slumber of winter.  Then an agitato as the ground breaks loose with the warmth of spring and, in their bloom succession, the flowers emerge, their leitmotifs varied by color phrases, until we pass out of the spring flowers into the early summer blooms.  This third movement is tranquil as the garden settles into its summer patterns, again the leitmotifs ordered by bloom time and varied by color phrasing.  The fourth and final movement returns to andante as the asters, the fall blooming crocus, clematis and mums emerge, then die back.  The final movement stops for a bit, then a presto sequence of lietmotifs, then grave, ending with bassoon, bass drum, and bass viol.

Many do not like programmatic music and I understand why, being a fan of Mozart and Bach, both abstract and interested in following the music’s own logic, not an outside one.  Even so, I offer this because it is the way I see the garden now after so many years.  The flowers emerge, bloom, dieback and another group, adapted to a slightly different season, replace them.  These movements are like a symphony in my mind.

Great Work, Memories, Politics, Writing

The History of Ideas

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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.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Our Land and Home, Travel

A Certain Inner Doldrum

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68  bar steady 29.98 0mph SE  dew-point 56  Sunrise 5:48  Sunset 8:50PM  Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

Thump.  Thump.  Pause.  Thump.  Thump.  Thrudda Thrudda Thump.  Bang.  Thump.  Thump.  Most of the time it is quiet here.  At night the quiet becomes complete, with the exception of tonight.  One of the neighbors must have had left overs from the 4th.  Strange sounds at night make you wanna know what’s going on.  Kate went out back and I went out front.  Saw nothing.  Either of us.  Both of us concluded fireworks.  A suburban July nighttime mystery.

The tone of my last few posts has trended down.  My inner barometer falls, not steeply, but it does fall.  Why?  Midsummer blahs.  The whole weight thing.  A certain inner doldrum.  Maybe a change in my spiritual life.  This is the realm of melancholy, not depression, and it usually precedes a creative period.  As I fall deeper into my interior, it is as if my gifts and energy fall with me, not in a negative sense, but as preliminary to a harvest.  When I pull inward, my outer affect often declines, but the interior feeling is that of gathering my resources, marshaling them into a coherent whole.

The weather in Minneola, Texas has 97 and sunny as a theme for the three days we will be there.  97 is cooler than past reunions.  The last time I headed to Oklahoma for an Ellis reunion it was 107 the whole time I was there.  That’s hot.  We’ve gotten notes about what to bring to help defray the cost of food for 36 adults and a gaggle of kids.  Charles Paul, that’s me, gets a pass, but Kate and I will pick up something once we get there.

It just dawned on me yesterday why my name was Charles Paul or CP on both sides of the family.  My dad’s brother was my Uncle Charles and my grandfather Keaton was Charles Keaton.  A diplomatic choice of names by mom and dad, but it left each side with a need to differentiate between two of us.

Family, Travel

Enchanted

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77 bar falls 29.99  0mph NE dew-point 60   Sunrise 5:48  Sunset 8:50pm  Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

The caterpillar does all the work; the butterfly gets all the publicity.  George Carlin, RIP

On Friday Kate and I take off for Texas.  The idea of flying leaves me cold, though after 2 long trips in June, driving does not seem much better.  At the moment traveling has a lugubrious feel, I want to stay home.  Work on the UU history.  Read about novels.  Write Superior Wolf.  Tend to the garden.

Every since our flight back from Istanbul, long enough ago that I can not recall the dates right now, flying has had a curse on it for me.  9/11 and the subsequent security measures only reinforced the curse.  Partly as a result of the shutdown and general suspicion engendered by 9/11 airlines went through a rough patch financially.  Their attempts to dig themselves out of the hole only made flying that much more unpleasant.  Long flight delays.  Sitting on the tarmac for hours.  No food.  After all that, the price of oil skyrocketed.

Flights, at least once delayed, have disappeared.  Layoffs and mergers.  Money for checked bags, for using frequent flyer miles.

This is a downhill slope that happened to coincide with my disenchantment.  Before Istanbul flying did enchant me.   I loved to fly when I worked for the Presbytery and in the years after with Kate.  Getting to the airport signaled the beginning of something special.  Read, eat, watch the earth slip by below.  It was magical.

Today I dread even a short flight to Texas.

Every once in a while I get into to a travel doldrums.  Like now.  I decide I want to explore Minnesota, maybe Wisconsin and Ontario.  Or Anoka County.  The metro area.  Or just stay home.

Still, family means showing up as I wrote before and it is my turn to show up at the Ellis family reunion.  So, we’ll take a plane ride, riding on a jet plane.  But, I will be back again.