Yearly Archives: 2012

Literature, Writing

Pale King

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Winter                                          New (Garden Planning) Moon

Began reading Pale King last night.  David Wallace’s last, unfinished work, his editor organized it with permission of Wallace’s widow.  It’s the first work I’ve read of Wallace’s though not the first one I’ve bought.  I also own Infinite Jest, his breakout book, but never started it.  His prose is, well, wonderful.

Observations, close observations, fly so fast and thick it seems he could not have spent time writing for he must have spent his entire day with his eyes wide, notebook in hand, seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling.

This book has an improbable setting, the IRS in Peoria, Illinois, and will, I’m told, illuminate  boredom.  Though I’ve not read him before I’ll now read back into him.  He was called the greatest mind of this generation of writers.  I believe it.

Aging, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature

The Past Is Never Dead

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Winter                                              First Moon of the New Year

Saw “Midnight in Paris.”  Not much of a movie goer, I’m more of a movie bringer, so I tend to see things late.  I don’t mind.  Kate and I picked this one for our movie night on Friday.

The professor teaching a class in contemporary art theory at the Walker, I took this class back in, what, March, gushed about this movie.  A post-modern film.   A love letter to the past and present of Paris.  A love story.

She was right.  This is a wonderful film, a film that challenges our notions of chronos, that says, up front, that the past is never dead; it’s not even past, it’s right here with us.  A Faulkner quote from Requiem for a Nun.

Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams play an engaged couple with very different priorities.  Hers is to live the rich life with a successful Hollywood screenwriter (Faulkner was one.)  and his is to find a garret in Paris and write his novel about a man who owns a nostalgia shop.

A gateway opens to his golden era, the Twenties, when a fancy car from that era stops near him, just after midnight, its passengers hailing him.  He get in and discovers he’s riding with   F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda.  Along the way he meets Hemingway and Picasso and Gertrude Stein.

Later, another gateway opens for Owen and Adriana, mistress to Picasso, Hemingway and Braque.  This takes them to Adriana’s golden era, the Belle Epoch. There she meets Gauguin, Lautrec and Degas.  She decides to stay behind.

Like Murakami’s 1Q84 I’m not sure if this is a great movie, but it might be.  It will need more time, more exposure.

It’s lightness almost allows the more profound aspects of its structure to slip away in a froth of Hollywood champagne bubbles.  The easy transit between Paris now and Paris then, given physical content, a sense of this is now actuality, occults the truth behind a glittering persona.

Any of us who read seriously, who attend to cinema for more than diversion, who haunt the   hallways of museums the world over, who wander ancient ruins or immerse ourselves in ancient languages or religions, who visit places like civil war battlefields or the Hudson Valley looking for the painters inspired by it or any well preserved neighborhood in any major city, those of us to take politics seriously know the truth of Faulkner’s observation.

When wandering the ruins of Angkor in Cambodia, the Khmer kings live again, their great monuments speaking their story in the language of stone and symbol.  Walk the streets of Ephesus in Turkey.  You stroll with the Romans who lived there.  Head over to the amphitheatre where Paul spoke to the Ephesians.  He’s still there.

Have you read War and Peace?  Then you’ve danced in 19th century Russia.  Steppenwolf?  You’ve been to the magic theatre.  Magic Mountain.  The life of a tuberculosis sanatorium.   Great Gatsby?  American Tragedy?   Romance of the Three Kingdoms?  You fought in the wars at the end of the Han Dynasty.  Monkeys Journey to the West?  A trek to India from the heart of Buddhist China.

When I translate Ovid, I encounter him.  Words he wrote, arranged, gave meaning and sense and poetics.  He is there on the page and I converse with him.

Walk the halls of any art museum and have an encounter.  Let’s say Rembrandt’s Lucretia at the MIA.  She cries in front of you, her heart broken and her spirit damaged beyond repair.  She bleeds, clutches the rope with her left hand.  All while remaining regal, somewhat aloof.  At this painting you stand in the room with her, at the end of the Roman monarchy occasioned by her grief and her violation while you also stand in Rembrandt’s studio, applying the last bit of paint, perhaps some varnish.  Remarkable, wouldn’t you say?

 

 

 

Politics

Speaking of Oscillations

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Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

Gingrich wins.  Romney won.  Santorum won.  The longer and more divisive the Republican primary season, the better.  Let them shred each other.  It could give Obama a chance he may not deserve, but one I hope he gets.

On the other hand.  A sharply divided and ideologically splintered opposition can make governing a real headache, especially if the Republicans retain control of the House and take the Senate.  This latter is possible, with seven Democratic seats up and only two Republican.

The partisan in me wants to watch the Republicans blow themselves up, weaken their party back to the special interest group it used to be, but I know that’s not a good way forward for our country.  We need two parties, a more conservative, fiscally conscious and moderately bellicose one and one dedicated to justice, economic and social.  These are two legitimate strains of  thought when it comes to understanding and creating policy for our country.  The best governance comes from these two impulses fighting it out in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

Given my druthers we would move toward the democratic socialism of  Europe, covering health care, creating affordable housing, solid support and aid for those who cannot find work, seeing that everyone gets as much education as they can tolerate, and providing solid retirement benefits.

Martin Luther King said it best:  “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

I believed that in 1964 and I believe it today.  We must keep working, not become faint-hearted or victims of despair.  Just when greed seems to have gained the high ground, just when hatred seems stronger than love, just when the 1% seem to obscure the 99, just then  will the high ground transform to common ground, love embrace hatred and the 99% become seen and heard and felt.

Aging, Retirement

What? No TV?

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Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

Business meeting this morning.  Some drastic pruning budget wise to squeeze our spending into line with our post-retirement income.  Example:  dropped cable tv.  I know.  It feels almost unamerican.  My mom and dad raised me to watch at least three to four hours of television a night and I feel like I’m letting them down.  Not to mention CBS, NBC and ABC.

The impetus for this came after the trip to South America.  We watched no TV over the cruise and when we got back I settled in with a good book in the evening.  We still have a blu-ray player, Netflix and I just signed us up for Hulu Plus, so we’re not leaving the big box behind in toto, just the absurdly expensive piped in Comcast version.

The internet connection?  Well, we kept that.  There’s TV and then, there’s the internet.  No comparison.  We’re not totally TV broadcastless as it turns out.  To keep our lower rate for the internet I agreed to a $12 a month “antenna” service from Comcast.  With the broadband the total was lower than internet alone. You get a discount on the broadband if you have any other services.  Weird, huh?

None of this feels draconian, just adjusting things to keep pace with changing reality.

We’ve also decided that with Kate retired we can go with one car.  We’ve done that for a couple of months anyhow since the Celica blew a tire.  Again.  I’ve decided to let it set until warmer weather.  I’m gonna give it away.  It’s been a great car and we didn’t make it to 300,000 miles together, but it still feels like time to let go.  I’ve driven it since September of 1994.

 

Writing

Why Do I Write Novels?

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Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

So, why do I write novels?

In a writing group some years ago, maybe 20, a writing exercise turned into 120 pages of Even the Gods Must Die, a novel inspired by the Norse Ragnarök.  The doom of the gods, Ragnarök foresees the end of the nine worlds, the death of the Aesir and the Vanir with plenty of teeth-rattling battles.  Fenrir fights with and kills Odin.  Thor fights the Midgard Serpent, kills it, but dies later from its poison.  What’s not to like?

The exercise came in the midst of a writing group I formed to help me as I wrote my dissertation for McCormick Seminary.  My dissertation on the decline of the Presbyterian Church satisfied the writing requirement for a Doctor of Ministry which I received in 1991.

By that point I had met Kate and discussed with her leaving the ministry. If I left the ministry, what would I do?  The skills I’d learned didn’t transfer readily.

Well, there was that 120 page story.  Hmm.  Maybe I’ll write.

Not a big stretch, really, since my Dad had earned his living as a journalist and columnist.

Early on I decided to focus on ancient religions as a fundamental component of my novels, fantasy novels all, so far.

So, in one important sense, I wrote novels to escape the ministry after it had become a swamp.  Do I write to overcome existential alienation or do I write so that others can overcome their existential estrangement?  No.  I write because the process and the stories fascinate me.

At some point I hope I can make some money, too.  And, if you read my work and find your angst or your anomie lessened, all the better.  But I’m not counting on it.

Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

Why Write Novels At All

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Winter                                    First Moon of the New Year

I’ll respond to this in another post, but for those of you interested in the novel, it’s worth a read.  You can reach the whole article through the central question link.

The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer “How should novels be?” but “Why write novels at all?”*

*The roots of this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the ’80s promulgated the notion of “cultural capital”: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is — the novel very much included — the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that “refined” tastes have…

The idea that “the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness” crops up all over the writing of the Conversazioni group: in Franzen’s nonfiction, and in Wallace’s, and in Smith’s beautiful encomium to Wallace in her book of essays, “Changing My Mind.” It also helps to explain these writers’ broad turn away from various postmodern formalisms and toward the problems of the human heart. Indeed, when we consider the web of influence that connects them to old roommates and friends and lovers and students — a list that includes David Means, Rick Moody, Mary Karr, Donald Antrim and Jonathan Safran Foer — and to newer work by writers like Karen Russell or the Irish novelist Paul Murray, “Here is a sign that you’re not alone” starts to look like the ascendant trope of and about literature today…

But will we be alone? Literature, to a degree unique among the arts, has the ability both to frame the question and to affect the answer. This isn’t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary “literary fiction” aims to treat us aren’t an awful lot. It’s just that, if the art is to endure, they won’t be quite enough.

Travel, US History

The West

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Winter                                        First Moon of the New Year

Residuals from Denver.  Gabe saying, “Oh, no.” as he pushes his toy trains over the edge of the table.  Ruthie dancing with her stuffed horse while the US Junior Olympian dressage quadrille performed.  Jon at work on the renovation, painting doors, grouting tile.  Jen and I headed out to A-basin to pick up Jon after his head banging.

The more we go out there and, specifically, the more I go to the Great Western Stock Show, the more intrigued I get with the West.  Cowboys.  Belt Buckles.  Rodeo.  Horses.  Ranches.  Brahma bulls and Longhorn cattle.  Rhinestone belts and Stetson hats.  There is an America here that I know little about.  A part of the country’s history born in pioneer expansion and Indian oppression.  A hardy, land and livestock oriented life necessitated by land unfit for traditional agriculture.

Both the new West and the old one intrigues me.  Even the very old one.  The Anasazi west and the gunfighter and outlaw west and the rancher and cowboy and pick-up truck west.

Not sure right now what to do with this intrigue, but something will come.

Code of the West

  • ·         Live each day with courage
  • ·         Take pride in your work
  • ·         Always finish what you start
  • ·         Do what has to be done
  • ·         Be tough, but fair
  • ·         When you make a promise, keep it
  • ·         Ride for the brand
  • ·         Talk less and say more
  • ·         Remember that some things aren’t for sale
  • ·         Know where to draw the line
Dogs, Family

Ouch

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Winter                                        First Moon of the New Year

We landed.  We drove.  We napped.  Ah.

Got up, went to Armstrong Kennels to get the dogs.  While getting the dogs, Kate had Rigel, a big girl, around 100 pounds, on a leash.  In her eagerness to get in the car and go home, Rigel tugged the leash, Kate tripped, hit her head and opened a three-inch gash over her right eye.

She’s at Urgent Care right now getting it sewed up.  No, she did not want me to drive her.  She’s tough.

Rigel got in the car.  Now she’s asleep on the rug upstairs.  Back home again in Minnesota.

BTW:  It cost more to board the dogs than it did to board Kate and me at the Best Western.  Hmmm.

Cinema and Television, Family, Literature, Travel

1Q84, Girl With Dragon Tattoo and Dancing Horses

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Winter                                     First Moon of the New Year

Buddy Mark Odegard told me he just finished 1Q84.  Me, too.  Last night, in fact.  This is a good, maybe a great novel.  Time will tell on the evaluation.  It has a good mix of magic realism, Kafka, contemporary product placements, love story and a peak inside Japanese society at this point in the new millennium.

It affected me in a deep way, wondering about the nature of this reality and alternatives to it.  Wondering about the origin of religious beliefs.  Wondering if the Japanese appear as similar to us as they do in reading Murakami.  1Q84 will have to set with me for a while, perhaps a long while.

Also saw David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Long and beautiful, it recreates the mood and jarring character of Lisbeth, the mystery of Harriet Vanger and the investigative tenacity of Mikhail Bloomfield.  We were part of a small crowd of gray haired folk, a quartet of women in front of us who had one woman explaining the ending to her friends.  Over and over.

We’ve also seen the Swedish version, a grittier piece with lower production values.  Naomi Rapace seemed to inhabit the angry side of Lisbeth better than Rooney Mara, though Mara exposed her gentle side.

We’re off to Dancing Horses tonight, for something completely different.  The last night here with the Denver Olsons.  Tomorrow we pack up and return home.

 

Commentary on the news

Thoughts on the News

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Winter                                 First Moon of the New Year

Costa Concordia.  A sinking, listing cruise ship sends shivers down the spine of any cruise passenger.  Those lifeboat drills, the one you grumbled about when you walked to your lifeboat station?  Turns out they’re important.  Standing on the promenade deck with others, looking around wondering how foolish you look wreathed in your bright orange life vest, seems a lot less foolish now.

Romney pays 15% tax rate?  What’s wrong with him?  Can we afford a president who isn’t clever enough to avoid taxes altogether?  Inquiring minds.

Obama ineffective?  Doubtful.  Health care reform.  Out of Iran.  Got Osama.  Finished bailing out the economy.  I may not like the bail out, giving money to oligarchs who fail so they can turn around and oligarch again seems backwards when thousands of people have lost their homes and unemployment remains stubbornly high.

Yet.  A deep depression, pulling down the rest of the world’s economies, is in no one’s self-interest.  The targets, not the fact or size of the bailout, is what bothers me.