Sulky

August 10, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Inertia has begun to weigh down my willingness to go places. We skipped the Minnesota Hobby Bee Keeper’s picnic last night. I don’t really want to go Running Aces, a harness track somewhat near Andover. Why would I want to in the first place, you might ask?

My grandpa, after whom I am named, Charlie Keaton, had harness horses and was a railbird, never missing a Kentucky Derby. My uncle, Riley Keaton, kept harness horses and raced them, though he didn’t drive. My cousin Richard Keaton, keeps harness horses and, until a bad accident, actually drove the sulky, too.

So, you could say it’s in my blood. But the percentage doesn’t seem to be very high. I’m not a horse person, though Kate, at times, is. She attended Camp Holloway in Minnesota, a camp where young Iowa girls learned to ride. That was also where she first encountered Irish Wolfhounds.

Neither one of us are gamblers, though I will play the very occasional game of poker. Still, might go.

I like to do my work during the day then wind down at night, watch a little tv, read, write. That sort of thing. When my schedule is full, Sierra Club legcom in full voice and meeting once a week, touring on Thursdays at the MIA and translating my chunk of Ovid for my Friday session with Greg, my tutor, I seem to have more energy, greater willingness to challenge the home focused inertia. Odd, I know. Now, when life is less demanding, any attempt to get me out of the house may well be met with, “Oh, c’mon. Not tonight. I have TV to watch.”

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Politics

Repeal the Renaissance

August 10, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

I’ve found major points of agreement between myself and my congresswoman, she-who-would-be-president Michelle Bachmann. She considers the Renaissance a major problem for Christianity. The Enlightenment, too. I see it that way myself. Of course, we do disagree on the significance of these facts.

Yep. Michelle and the Calvinist theologian Franklin Schaeffer along with a Schaefer acolyte “Nancy Pearcey, a prominent creationist whose recent book is “Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning” have found each other and God is good.” But the rest of the modern era, unfortunately, isn’t.

Having attended a liberal Protestant seminary and worked as an ordained Presbyterian for 15 years (a church founded by the Calvin, John), these are waters with which I am very familiar. Schaeffer and Pearcey (maybe the problem is in the way they spell their last names?) have discovered a dark secret in Western history. The Renaissance, taking its cue in part from the Copernican revolution which put paid to the Ptolemaic universe with the earth–and therefore man (no gender weasling allowed here) and therefore God–at its center, went on to place increasing emphasis on humans, hence humanists and humanism, and on this world not the next.

This showed up in art which began to veer away from the medieval dominance of the church as patron and in so doing began to look backwards to the ancient Greeks and Romans, too, focusing on the human body and the natural world. These evangelical fundamentalists are not wrong in their history of ideas. This was the point where Western culture began to turn away from medieval scholasticism. It is, too, the field from which the Enlightenment grew, perhaps, from Bachmann’s point of view, much like the Thebans, a warrior line of thought sprung from the dragon’s teeth of Renaissance humanists.

The Enlightenment in its turn closed the door for good on the ancien regime, that hold over of papal theocracy, divine right of kings and the Great Chain of Being. Or at least I hope it did.

The rise and rise of those who would return us to the dark days of Scholastic reasoning (an oxymoron in some ways) and a theocratic view of government with the Bible as the basis for our very own version of the Sharia portends a possible governmental assault on the last 500 years. This is, in its own way, the Christian version of the return to the Caliphate so dear to the hearts of Islamic extremists like Bin Laden.

Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth

August 9, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Much of yesterday and today spent amongst the Latin text of Metamorphoses. I translated ten lines of the story of Pentheus. In my effort to peek behind the curtain of translation I have learned several things already, even at my very modest skill level. First, the choices translators make have far more range than I imagined. Words have shades of meaning, grammar often can’t be translated and the biases that the writer of the original text brings complicate matters, too.

In Ovid, for example, I have noticed, very obviously, how Roman his slant on the Greek myths is. He plumps up Latin virtues and denigrates the Greeks. This does not make for a friendly representation of the Greek myths. In fact, I’m beginning to suspect now that Ovid’s work is not only atheistic, but anti-Greek. None of this challenges the beauty of his language or the compelling nature of the stories he tells, but it does set them in a different context than I found when I first read this work.

Also, I have a huge amount of respect now for the early humanists who took up these texts from their ancient past–by the Renaissance Ovid had been dead almost 1,500 years–and had to puzzle out translations with little in the way of aids like commentaries or literary historical work.

There are a lot allusions in this book and I’m sure in all the others, too, that simply make no sense to me. Progeny of the dragon’s seed, for example, doesn’t immediately translate to Theban for me, yet the image is obvious if you remember that Cadmus, Actaeon’s grandfather and featured in this third book of the Metamorphoses, is the one who sowed the dragon’s teeth, grew an army and with its five survivors founded the city, Thebes. Oh. Yeah.

Aging, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Travel

Senescence

August 9, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Walked in the garden alone. Yep, it’s an old time spiritual, much loved in the churches of my youth. It also describes my morning turn among our vegetables and in our orchard.

The garlic has come out already. The potatoes have a while yet to go. The beans have gone from green bean material to soup beans, waiting now for the pods to dry on the vine. A few onions remain, as for the tomatoes, there are a lot of possibilities, but as the weather cools, will they ripen? In the orchard we’ve had more productivity than any year so far, a few cherries, lots of currants, many dropped plums, but a few now maturing on the tree. The apples, in their plastic sandwich bags, have begun to swell on the honeycrisp tree, but on the other, a green apple, they’re not a lot bigger than when the bags went on in July. Our blueberries came and disappeared into the mouths of birds.

The wild grape harvest looks like it will be a big one this year. These vines are everywhere on our property, but the ones that produce the most fruit hang in dense layers over the northern fence that fronts our orchard. Picking the wild grapes usually marks the end of the gardening year here at Artemis Hives and Gardens, at least the food gardening.

The fall flowers of course begin to bloom then, the asters, the mums, the monkshod, the clematis. It’s also the time to plant bulbs, tulips and daffodils, lilies and croci. It is, too, the time that the garlic bulbs harvested in July, yield up cloves from the largest bulbs for planting. I like planting the garlic in late August, early September. Garlic is a counter culture crop, sown in the fall and harvested mid-summer.

Senescence has fascinated me for a long time. Earlier in my life the process of degradation that rotted wood, turned leaves into humus and prepared more soil got my attention. An early interest, I suppose, in the great chain of being (note the lower case here, less Scholastic, more Great Wheel). Now I’ve noticed another key aspect of senescence; it is the time of harvest. Yes, in the plant world, the dying of the plant’s above earth body follows or is in step with the giving of its fruit. That is, aging produces

This is also the time when gardening begins to wane in interest for me. My energies now turn to novels, research for tours at the MIA, preparing for the fall issue selection process at the Sierra Club and the upcoming legislative session.

Now, too, the cruise, which begins in October, looms closer and the loose ends for it need to be tidied. The Brazilian visa. New luggage. Check the clothes. Rent a tux. (yes. I’m gonna do it. 3 formal nights a week on the cruise. i’ll pretend it’s halloween every one of those nights. i’ll be some seriously weird expatriate Muscovite on the run from Putin’s secret police. something like that.)

Great Work, Politics

Natural Disasters on the rise in the United States

August 8, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

“This has been a devastating year,” National Weather Service director Jack Hayes said. “Natural disasters are on the rise in the United States,” he noted, including records for heat, tornadoes, floods and fires, and with the bulk of hurricane season still remaining.

So. The economy has tanked. The climate has raised hell, at least that’s one explanation that the right wing might find congenial. Much warmer in that theological realm. And, it might well have come up first through Texas and Oklahoma, seems possible to me.

Then. Our political parties stumble over themselves in making ridiculous policy, then bending the knee to the most extreme right wing and apologizing for not having made worse policy.

If these are the end times, it will be because the Great Spirit got so distracted from laughing at our self-defeating ways that She forgot to run the universe.

Consider that the natural disasters Jack Hayes refers to are probably caused or at least dramatically reinforced by human action. Then, consider the all to0 human disasters in Washington, Rome and Athens.

If shooting ourselves in our collective feet were an Olympic sport, we’d all be medal winners and hearing our national anthems over and over again.

It is also human that our Asian brothers and sisters, especially the Chinese, see all this as evidence of the inevitability of their rise. Well. Probably not. World history shows the rise and fall of great powers to be a rule, played out over and over again on continent after continent in era after era. The Qin Dynasty. Rome. The Khmer. The Mughals. The Macedonians. The Persians. The Greeks. The Maya. The Aztecs. At some point in world history others will add, the United States of America, Europe and, yes, even China and Japan and India.

We need to step back, take a look from the long view. These are neither the worst of times, look at the fate of Carthage, for example, nor are these the best of times, see the Song Dynasty or the Classical Mayan period or Persian culture.

Yes, I find the politics of our time, of this millennium, disheartening in their mean-spiritedness, their lack of charity and compassion, their polarization, but, as Cicero said, “No reign lasts forever.” It could be that our knuckle-headed policy directions will put paid to the human race, it’s possible, for sure, but history tells me that we’ll muddle through somehow, in spite of ourselves.

Asia, GeekWorld, Travel, Writing

Ancientrails in Exile

August 8, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Ancientrails in exile (I crashed my own website. Geez. Wrote this while it was down. Thanks againn to Bill S. who undid whatever I did.)

August 7^th, 2011 5:05pm

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Got a passport photo for my Brazilian visa. Looks like a booking photo. You can’t smile during these sessions. Why? Facial recognition software struggles with recognizing faces anyhow and anything that distorts the face makes their task even harder. A great article in Wired talks about this problem and argues that the solution (if we want one) lies in the work of the caricaturist, who emphasizes the unique aspects of a person’s face. This is the way our brain recognizes faces, but is very difficult for algorithms to master.

Now. If you’re a terrorist, please don’t smile for your passport photo because we may not be able to recognize you. Gives you confidence, doesn’t it?

Last night I made an attempt to increase my computer literacy by upgrading my WordPress software on my own. Note to self. Don’t do that again. The result has been a database connection error. As near as I can tell, I’ve succeeded in taking down my own website.

Mark and I have been rereading the Go handbook. It’s a bit confusing, at least to me, but we’re going to get to playing anyhow. This is a sophisticated, yet simple seeming game.

On to Tai Chi tonight. I feel like I’ve made real progress over the last week. Slow. But progress.

August 7, 2011 10:30 pm

Lughnasa Waning Honey Extraction Moon

We learned a new move tonight. The instructor, Cheryl, said I had the basics of it after our first independent practice. “Gotta be a first time.” I told her.

It felt good to get something other than correction. It’s been a tough slog so far, but I’m gradually pulling myself into the physical world, uniting mind and body. At some point I want to learn the Taoist thought behind it all. But not quite yet.

Not having ancientrails to post in feels pretty weird to me. I miss the familiarity of it. Posting on the blog remains one of the more steady tasks I have in my life. Fortunately, I don’t need the program to keep writing.

August 8 2011 1:55 pm

Ancientrails is still down though the error message has changed. That must mean Bill Schmidt, good friend and cybermage, has made some progress.

China scolded the US for “gigantic military spending and bloated social programs.” That roused a patriotic wait just a minute reaction. On several levels. The military spending is high, but it has been high for some time as the US, the current and still reigning world hegemon, has many enemies and self-interest spread over the globe. No matter what those of us who prefer peace or other foreign governments like China might want, the military spending reflects our status as the only ever global hegemon.

Bloated social programs. Only if you’re not poor, old, disabled, a veteran or a person who wants at least some security in old age. Bloated is the wrong word, a Chinese mimicry of our own Tea Party. How ironic is that? The Chinese Communist Party lining up alongside the Michelle Bachmanns and Ron Pauls of American politics.

Do they need reform? Oh, yes. Will it happen anytime soon? I hope so, even though the result might negatively affect Kate and me.

What the Chinese could have scolded us for, what would have bit harder than hackneyed bumper sticker critiques, would have been questions about our love of democracy. Democracy as it exists in this country today no longer solves problems. It creates them. Why does the nation of Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton find itself broken down into the politics of faction? Military spending and misshapen social programs are the not cause, they are the symptom of a nation no longer able to make its own form of government work.

Now, there’s a critique.

Garden

Co-Habitation

August 6, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

While harvesting Swiss Chard this morning, I looked down and saw a streak of blue head for the edge of the raised bed. I stopped all motion and, sure enough, the blue streak slowed, blue-tailed-skink stopped and looked. A skink with a bright blue tail had a curious, what’s going on in my world, peek, then scurried down a small hole underneath the horizontal board topping the side of the raised bed.

One of the pleasures of non-toxic gardening lies in the number of garden critters that develop happy homes in and around the beds. We have salamanders, skinks, various snakes, toads and frogs as well as the more common gopher, chipmunk, opposum, raccoon, groundhog, rabbit and squirrel.

The number of insects and arachnids also increase in variety, too. I see spiders, lady bugs, wasps, native pollinators and diverse number of mosquitoes, too. Of course the butterflies, moths and dragonflies also show up as do lightning bugs. Not so many of these last as my childhood nights in Indiana, but they are here. Many, maybe most, of the insects and arachnids I do not recognize.

Birds, too. Rose-breasted nuthatches, robins, blue jays, chickadees, red-tailed hawks, great gray owls, pileated woodpeckers and red-tailed woodpeckers, crows, sparrows and even the odd sea gull and pelican at certain times of year.

These sightings remind me of the truth I wrote about last year at some point: Kate and I share this property with so many other living beings, most of whom will be here long after we leave. Well, their direct descendants anyhow. The bank and Anoka county say we own this land, but we don’t. We’re merely occupying it for a period of time, co-habiting with an astounding number of others.

GeekWorld

19 Story Rocket Blasts Off, Payload Bound for Jupiter. Jupiter!

August 5, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Though I follow the Great Wheel and feel as bound to this earthome as to my humanity, space exploration, either human or technological, still thrills me. Here’s another huge project, with some pics, a movie and the mission goals from NASA. Can you believe this is happening while we’re alive?

The rocket, the Atlas V, lifts off with the Jupiter probe. This is one big rocket, 19-stories.

Key things to know about Juno (NASA website)

Spacecraft launched August 5, 2011
Five-year cruise to Jupiter, arriving July 2016
Spacecraft will orbit Jupiter for about one year (33 orbits)
Mission ends with de-orbit into Jupiter

Juno will improve our understanding of our solar system’s beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of Jupiter.

Specifically, Juno will…

Determine how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which helps determine which planet formation theory is correct (or if new theories are needed)
Look deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure composition, temperature, cloud motions and other properties
Map Jupiter’s magnetic and gravity fields, revealing the planet’s deep structure
Explore and study Jupiter’s magnetosphere near the planet’s poles, especially the auroras – Jupiter’s northern and southern lights – providing new insights about how the planet’s enormous magnetic force field affects its atmosphere.

Family, Health, Travel

Friday Journal

August 5, 2011 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Moon

Got excited during the Graphic Design class and ordered Adobe Creative Suite 5.0. It’s cheaper since it’s behind the latest iteration 5.5. I’ll be able to do my own eBooks, website, manipulate photos. It’s more software than I need, but I like to have the best tools when I’m ready to use them.

Mark has had a callback from Target Warehouse and a potential position in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Arabia position would be cosh, he says. After living in Bangkok, Mark has a lot of English slang from British expats. He’s excited. This working at looking for a job seems to be working for him.

Took the last bits of the truck back to its now lifeless body. We kept the old tail gate, hitch and bumper removed when we added the Tommy lift.

Kate and I spent lunch yesterday and the time after in a darkened Osaka, choosing shore excursions for our cruise. I haven’t run the totals yet, but I imagine when we add in dog boarding and the two additional days in Rio we’ll have a heft sum in addition to the cost of the cruise. All part of the deal. We still need to get our extra passport photos and start the Brazil visa process.

Finally got back to the aerobics yesterday. Slept better. The clay intensive and family reunion threw me off schedule. Getting back up one step at a time. First, aerobics. Then, resistance. Meanwhile practicing Tai Chi.

General