Monthly Archives: February 2010

Art and Culture, Asia, Sport, World History

Latin and Asia

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Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

Kate and I reviewed our work on chapter 5 in Wheelock this morning.  Then 2,000 words on the novel after the nap.  Workout.  Sierra Club legcom conference call.

I’ve been reading my fourth Qiu Xiaolong mystery, The Red Mandarin Dress.  These are Chief Inspector Chen novels, set in today’s Shanghai.  They are interesting mysteries, but even more, they are a window into the struggle between the Maoist era and the contemporary one, a period when revolution ruled the land transformed into one in which to get rich is glorious.  These are not easy transitions and they have happened in the blink of an eye in the long history of China.

Asian art and asian culture, especially Chinese history, philosophy and literature have, for a long time, had my attention.  In my volunteer work at the MIA I have been allowed to indulge my interest in Chinese, Japanese and South Asian art.  This has led to more and more time with asian history, especially Chinese and Chinese poetry.  A casual tinkerer in these vast domains, I have only skimmed the top of a way of life radically different from our own, Western culture, yet, even with its differentness, still more like us than not, the human experience inflected, not the human experience transformed.

As I’ve watched the Winter Olympics, it doesn’t take a scholar to notice that its largely a northern hemisphere event.  Yes, there are the odd Australians, New Zealanders, but for the the most part it’s North America, Europe and the Asian countries.  Just another way in which we are more like than unlike.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Gonna Take That Wild Last Ride

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Imbolc                                         Waxing Wild Moon

Back at the novel today, 1,800 words.  There’s an uphill struggle to get back in the groove when I let a week or so slip by with no work on it.  Like navigating the turns in the fast luge track at Whistler, I get stuck at the start, but once the momentum picks up, I can dive into a chicane with confidence.  Back at it now headed down the track.

Self confidence is so fragile, at least for me, and I expect for many of us.  If I could graph mine’s rise and fall even in the course of a day, it would mimic a wild stock ride, selling up at one moment, then a run and a price in sudden decline.  And then the reverse.  Again.  Even now.

Example.  I came downstairs feeling pretty good about getting back to the novel.  Granted I skipped exercise tonight to keep on writing, but overall that felt good.  Then I went on Amazon’s website to check out an author Mark Odegard recommended, Dan Simmons.  Sure enough, he’s doing stuff enough like what I’m trying to do to make me nervous.  He’s already sold a lot.  I haven’t.

Now there’s a steadier core that chugs alone just underneath all this oscillation–the ego worried about its reception in the world–and that core is the one that, walking the garbage and recycling out tonight under a gorgeous waxing wild moon, reflected that no matter how gifted and accomplished, we all die, then sink away into oblivion.  Yes, a few don’t–Homer, Socrates, Qin Shi Huangdi, Confucius, Emily Dickinson, Boadicea, Teresea of Avila, Pancho Villa, Montezuma, Geronimo, Einstein, Chopin, Bach, Da Vinci for example–but the bulk of us, the 99.999999% of all who have ever lived, live in the best way we can, then slowly fade, first in body, then in memory, then we’re gone.

This one knows that the best life is the one we live on our own terms, not on borrowed hopes and dreams and not judged by externalities.  At 63 the core has become stronger and stronger, often balancing the ego’s surges and falls before they happen, but it is not yet dominant, at least not all of the time.  The devil of expectations still sticks a pitchfork into my ego every once and a while.  Predictably, my ego squeals.

If you have a chance tomorrow night, go outside and look at the moon around 9:00 pm if the night is clear.  The moon sat up there in the sky tonight, Orion off to its southeast, other stars around it like diamonds around a fat, lustrous pearl.  A work of art that needs no hand, but satisfies the eye.

Family, Memories

Remembering Dad

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Imbolc                           Waxing Wild Moon

The year moves forward, sun higher in the sky, temperatures inching upward, some snow melting, though  piles of slowly melting hard pack, driven to curbs and driveway ends, darkens and begrimes the landscape.  A bright February sun catches a light snowfall, refracts it in mid-air, giving the day a sparkle, as if a glitter queen shook her hair in the heavens.

The winter olympics continues, too, with this sport and that.  I liked ski cross.  It looked fun.

Today is the anniversary of my father’s death in 2003.  The dead, to paraphrase somebody, are not in the past;  they’re not even dead.  No, nothing metaphysical here, I’m referring to the fact that those important to us take up lodging in our memories, in our inflections and in our perspectives.  We sometimes see the world literally through their eyes, hear things with their ears, interpret something with their sensibilities.  This happens during their lives, of course, but it also continues on past their temporal death.

(The Woolworth Building.  It opened twelve days after dad’s birth.  It was the tallest building in the world until 1930.)

If I see a  person with too much flab (me, these days, for instance), I can hear Dad say, “He likes his groceries.”  In quick train there is, too, his advise about weight loss, “Push-ups.  Push ups away from the table.”  I can feel his scowl when pictures from the sixties appear in the newspaper or on tv.  He didn’t think much of the politics or the movement persons of those days.  Unfortunately for our relationship, I was one.

When I sit down to write, especially here, I feel the ghost of my father, Curtis, hovering over my shoulder.  He is a benign angel in this case.  I fancy my writing style here takes a certain amount of its defnition from his frequent  column, “Small Town, USA.”  When I’m in the other room, working on the novel, I’m reminded of his ambition to charter a boat, sail the coast of Mexico, then write a book about the trip.  He never made it, WW II got in the way.  He never wrote a book either.

So, according to one school of Jungian thought, I write books to fulfill my father’s dream.

He was a man of his times, liberal in his  social politics, virulently anti-communist and suspicious of both patriotic zealots like the John Birch Society and the anti-patriots like myself of the 60’s and 70’s.  His father abandoned his family, Dad never did.  He was there, day in day out.

So, his body no longer walks the earth, but his mind, his dreams, his biases and his humor still does.

Bees, Garden, Our Land and Home, permaculture

Garden Theme for 2010: Consolidation

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Imbolc                                       Waxing Wild Moon

At this time of year gardeners begin to develop x-ray vision, seeing through the snow, ice and frozen  soil and imaging the greening.  Those of us who rely on memory more than paper try to envision what we’ve got in the ground, sort of the botanical base line.  Perennial flowers and plants, which make up the bulk of our terraced gardens, have an established presence.  We add in some annuals as the spirit moves, sometimes we divide existing plants like hosta, hemerocallis, iris, Siberian iris, liguria, bug bane, dicentra, aster.  Once in a while we plant new bulbs.  None last fall, for example, but that gardensenscence09probably means some this fall.

(pic:  where we left off last fall)

This part of the garden requires work, but not as much as the vegetables and the orchard.  I count it is a known quantity.

The permaculture additions, of which we have made several over the last three years, are still new to us, requiring attention and learning.  This year, I’ve decided, will be a consolidation year.  Nothing new, making what we have work as well as we can.  That means planting vegetables in two categories:  kitchen garden for eating throughout the summer and early fall and vegetables for storage over the winter:  potatoes, garlic, parsnip, carrots, greens, squash  those kind of things.

There is a good bit of work to be done repairing Rigel and Vega’s late fall destruction.  That won’t be repeated because we have a small fortune in fencing around the vegetables and the orchard, but I lost heart last fall and didn’t get the netaphim repaired and earth moved back into place.  That awaits in the spring.

In mid-March I have the bee-keeping class and this year I have the same consolidation idea for the bees.  Establishing the hives as permanent parts of our property.

We do have a couple of smaller non-garden projects that need to get done.  I dug the fire-pit two years ago, but with all the fun of the puppy’s last summer never got back around to it.  It needs finishing.  I also want to turn the former machine shed into a honey house, a place to store bee stuff and to process the honey.  Of course, we actually have to produce some first.

Art and Culture, Cooking, Humanities, Letters, Sport

An Andover Olypmics?

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

The winter olympics could have been held in Andover this year.  If we had any mountains.  We’ve had snow and cold, the key ingredients.  Also, Lindsey Vonn and her husband could have stayed in Burnsville instead of Olympic Village, maybe gotten a few runs in at her home hill, Buck Hill.

Well, it’s the olympic world’s loss.

(Yayoi Kusama
Untitled, 1967
Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York)

Kate made my/our favorite cookies today.  She also made chicken schnitzel and a warm potato salad with sweet onions last night.  Boy was that good.  All that and she cooks, too.

Chapter 6 of Wheelock is under my belt and Kate’s working on it right now.  We’re skipping this week so she can catch up.

I don’t have a tour this Friday, but I do have a Legcom meeting on Wednesday and the docent discussion group tomorrow, focusing on how to discuss contemporary art.  This conversation will be led by an educator from the Walker, a connection made by Allison.  Should be a big help for the contemporary art exhibition:  Up Until Now, coming later this spring.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Letters

Whee!

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Imbolc                                    Waxing Wild Moon

Here’s a revelation it’s strange to have this late in life:  I enjoy learning for its own sake.  Now I knew that at one level or another before, it’s true, but here’s what I’ve just learned.  After I finished my workout this evening, I went back to working on Latin translation.  At first I approached the Latin like school, do the work, get it right, then do more work, get it right.  So on.

But tonight as I sat there puzzling out the meaning of the sentences and the word endings, I realized I was having fun.  This was no longer a goal oriented, hoop-jumping exercise, but something I simply enjoyed.  Like, I don’t know, playing checkers or basketball or chess or dancing.  Strange, huh?

Maybe it’s always been this way for me, I don’t know.  It feels like a secret, something I shouldn’t tell, but there it is anyhow.  At 63.  There’s always something new around the corner.

Kate and I had an African evening.  We finished the first season of the HBO series, The First Ladies Detective Agency.  We read all these quite a while ago.  The casting for the series is spot on and seeing the Botswana setting makes the stories come alive even more strongly than in the books themselves.  After we finished the last episode, we watched Duma, a story of a South African boy and a cheetah he raises from a cub.  It has the usual boy reluctantly returns animal to the wild, the animal comes back for one last hug sort of plot line, but with some unusual depth added by his long journey from Capetown back into the bush with Duma, the cheetah and a man he meets in the bush.  Both of them are well worth  watching.  Not my usual dark fare, but good anyhow.

Humanities, Letters

What Good Is Philosophy?

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Imbolc                            Waxing Wild Moon

“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.” – Bertrand Russell

In spite of what I said yesterday I have listened to the opening lectures on of a history of philosophy course.  In the first lecture the professor teased out three notions of what philosophy is:  1.  A search for answers to the perennial questions, 2. A love of wisdom and 3. A quest aimed toward the unknown.

Each of these makes sense to me in their own way, but it is the 3rd idea I want to explore.  Russell’s quote nails it so well.  In this understanding of philosophy the discipline performs the early thought experiments, theorizing and critique out of which grow many others.  Science and the scientific method grew out of early philosophical speculations about the nature of reality, such speculation goes back to the very beginning of Western philosophy in the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece.  Once regular methodology and empirical data begin to define a new discipline it pulls away from philosophical thought into its own domain.  Psychology is another example.  Theology put philosophical rigor in service to Christian faith.

The ongoing rhythm of philosophical investigation leads to many answers to the same problem.  This in turn leads to skeptical thinking which observes that many answers to the same question does not make sense.  Then a consolidation occurs which often develops into a cohesive new line of thought.

A good example of this process going on right now involves the philosophy of mind.  At issue is the nature of consciousness, the existence or non-existence of free will and the nature of the self or the individual.  Pretty fundamental matters, especially when we consider what it means to be human.  The back and forth of philosophical speculation in these areas courses past the limited tools we have for empirical investigation into the brain.  Some people say we will never solve the problem of consciousness because the investigation requires consciousness  itself.  I’m in this latter camp.

All I wanted to observe here is the interesting result of philosophical speculation:  disciplines develop and move away from home, leaving philosophers once again wrestling with the unknown.

Art and Culture

An Arty Day

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Imbolc                                        Waxing Wild Moon]

The museum had lots of visitors today.  Many, the ones I toured among them, were there on a school outing.  Others, a surprisingly large number, came for the foot in the door show.  Foot in the door is an installation done by the museum every 10 years.  Any one in the state can enter an object so long as it fits in a one foot by one foot by one foot cube.  If you work meets that test, you’re in the show.

That makes for a scene like one I witnessed at the ticket counter.  An older man and his wife came up to the counter.  He said, “I’ve never been here before, but my son has a piece in the museum.  I want to go see it.”  He said that with a feeling of pride.  A lot of the people going through this show looked to me like first time museum goers.  I overheard a woman say in the gallery, “A person that knew about art could tell.  Some of these people have real talent.”  She was right.

Foot-in-the-door fully occupies two large galleries, a smaller one and still spills out over into the halls.  There is so much to see that three or four visits would only give you a first pass.  A treat.

The kids I toured today from St. Francis were a Spanish class and wanted to see Spanish art.  On both tours, though, I took them to foot-in-the-door, too.  These are living, working Minnesota artists, many young folks.  I told them if they wanted, at the next show, they could have a piece in the show.  They loved the crazy variety.  The boys were taken by the fact that there was .45 revolver entered.  They took pictures of it with their cell-phones.  Another kid liked the alarm clock.  Still another liked, as I did, a cubic foot of broken eggs glued back together.

These kids really took to cubism and surrealism, grasping quickly the rather tricky shift in artistic purpose that these two art movements put into the world.  It surprised me some, but they really enjoyed the quirky nature of synthetic cubism and the irrational nature of surrealism.  Both fit the teenage moment.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Letters

Back Into the World of Art

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Imbolc                                   Waxing Wild Moon

Kate and I didn’t get a chance to check our work before getting on line with Greg, the Latin tutor.  It showed.  Turns out doing this together has a great learning benefit for both of us.  Makes me think retirement with this gal’s gonna be fun.

The continuing ed at the MIA has left something to be desired lately.  It used to feature art historians, visiting curators, folks like that, now it’s often education staff or something related to process not content.  There’s nothing wrong with the education staff, but they did the docent training.  At the continuing ed events I like to hear outside perspectives, other modes of scholarship, punchy ideas.

Matthew Welch, the Japanese curator and the head of a curators at the museum, has those scholarly credentials and he takes great care to make his material useful for docents.  He was to give a lecture today on a piece of Japanese armor the museum purchased.  I drove in to hear him because I respect his work.  A lot.  Problem is, they canceled the event by e-mail at 10:45.  I used that time to prep for my tours tomorrow, got on the phone with Greg, then took off for the museum.

No lecture.  Turns out they had some leakage in the admin wing.  Not such a big deal in some ways, but the leaked happened onto Matthew’s computer.  He’s such a meticulous speaker and uses so many good slides that it wasn’t possible to do the lecture.  A shame.  We’ll pick it up some other time.

Spent three hours getting ready for my first tours since mid-December.  A group from St. Francis high school, just up Round Lake Boulevard about 7 or 8 miles from home.  They want Spanish art.  As it happens, I got assigned to start on the third floor on the east side of the building which means our Goya is the first painting I can use.  That means I move from Goya to the cubists and from the cubists to the surrealists, then onto the mannerists and, if I get that far, end in the baroque.

(El Greco’s Burial of Lord Orgaz)

Going that direction I discovered (for me) an interesting relationship between cubism and surrealism, major art movements at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, and the mannerists, a style situated between the high renaissance and the baroque.  The two more modern movements used Cezanne and African masks to jump away from illusionistic realism, that is, realism with perspective that attempts to fool the eye into thinking a 2-d image is 3-d.  Cubists took reality apart and put it back together from different perspectives, often using geometric shapes.  Surrealists wanted to peak inside the unconscious and  splay it out on the canvas.  Turns out the mannerists pushed off against the high polish and perspective of the High Renaissance, such masters as Raphael, Michelangelo and Da Vinci.  They turned away from vanishing point perspective, went for spiritual intensity (the unconscious?) and used elongated figures and asymmetrical composition to distinguish their work from the preceding period.

Someone else noticed this a long time ago, I’m sure, but it was fun to put it together.

Sport

Guts and Points

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Imbolc                                    Waxing Wild Moon

Lindsay Vonn under the wild moon in Vancouver.  What a performance.  I referred a few weeks back to Michael Jordan’s game against Utah in the NBA finals.  He had the flu, was obviously sick, but put up a triple double and da Bulls won the game.  This was better.

Vonn, skiing with a deeply bruised shin, plummeted down the 1.8 mile long, rock hard ice of the Olympic downhill course, favoring her right leg, favoring it so that she took the weight on her inside leg in turns and even skied the last several yards to the finish line on one ski.  Imagine the physics of that.  And won the gold.

I don’t know if anything in sport is actually heroic, but this run was a monster testament to the human spirit, the will to win and the ability to block out pain when in pursuit of a goal.  Her reaction at the bottom matched her run.  She jumped, squeaked, pounded her fists in the air, lay down, cried, ran to her husband to cry some more, smiled and made others smile and cry along with her.  And to think she learned to ski at Buck Hill.  Go Minnesota.

The flying tomato deserves a nod, too.  I don’t know whether snowboard half-pipe is a sport, but it’s certainly athletic and Shaun White, he of the long red hair and the dazzling smile, showed the heart of a champion.  He won the competition on his first run with a 45+ score out of 50 without laying down his public secret trick, a 1280 Double McTwist.  On his second run, when he could have coasted, instead he took his last run up the pipe to launch, execute and land this trick.  I saw it and I don’t get it, but the crowd and the judges did.  He got a 48.4 on his final run.  In other words, he increased his score after he had already won the gold.  An entertainer.