Monthly Archives: March 2012

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings

Shadow Line Approaching

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Imbolc                                                 Woodpecker Moon

Not sure how serious, but I can feel the clouds rolling in, a definite darkening of the inner horizon.  Missed a call tonight for the Sierra Club legislative committee through some technological foul up.  Maybe on my part.

Sorting through my fear about exposing my writing to the light of day.  I know this needs to change and change can trigger a melancholic episode, too.

Doesn’t have to be reasons when the light begins to dim.  I feel heavy, slow, molasses on the floor, thick curtains to push through.  Could be the unseasonable weather.  I know it seems weird, but I really like the cold and the gradual procession of seasons.  This tempering and sudden switching feels somehow wrong to me.

As I said the other day, I know I can’t change the weather, so adapting to it makes sense.  Enjoy the beautiful day!  Sunshine and warm weather.  What’s not to like?  But a part of me, a strong part, wants March back in late winter.

Or, maybe, I feel this way because I’m becoming melancholic.

The melancholy is a family thing, a genetic inheritance.  The bipolar gene runs in my family, I’ve said it before here.  I’m not bipolar, but I have these melancholic episodes from time to time, sometimes with little or no trigger.

 

Writing

Writing Cowardice

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Imbolc                                            Woodpecker Moon

Not often do I trash or put into draft something I’ve written.  I don’t say this because everything I write is wonderful, hardly, but because this blog is as much about living out loud as anything else.  Letting warts and all show through.  Most of us have a wart or two and sometimes it helps to know others do, too.

Still, when I wrote the post below a couple of days ago it felt too raw, as I note near its end. This morning, though, on the way to the Art Institute with Kate, I made a comment about something I’d learned in touring the Art Show.  “It take a lot of courage, bravery, to show up, put yourself out there, let people see what you have, in public.  I admire that about athletics.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s like that in any area where you want your talents to be seen and appreciated, where you want to be the best.  Like in sending your manuscripts out.”

As you’ll read below, the same thought had occurred to me only a couple of days earlier.

The Original Post – from Monday, March 12th

A good writing day, another verse of Ovid translated, only took an hour, picked up 30 minutes of treadmill time.  A productive day.

Missed the aurora promised by solar storm watchers.  Apparently solar flares and snow storms have something in common, at least this year in Minnesota.

I realized, again, today that I’ve been a coward when it comes to my writing.  I write it, look at it, box it up and put on the shelf.  Right across from where I’m working now, I can see 5 manuscript boxes, each with a different book.  Maybe 6 to 8 years worth of work.  And what have I done with it?  Next to nothing.

Rejections are part of the writing experience.  Well, I solved that one.  If you don’t submit, they can’t reject.  I can’t really say I have a good reason for being so lazy or frightened or reluctant or ashamed (maybe, surprisingly, mostly this one.  It seems my work should, somehow, be more than it ends up being.)  Oops.  There’s that should word.

Not entirely sure, but this one I’m working on now feels different.  It feels to me that once I  squeeze it and press it, making it more compact and at the same more descriptive and dramatic that I’ll have something I can be proud of.

This is a little to raw for me.  It’s going into draft.

Art and Culture, Sport

Sports Show Tours: Day 2

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Imbolc                                                  Woodpecker Moon

Two sports show tours today.  The first, a public 11:30, had nobody show.  Not surprising at 11:30 on a beautiful spring day.  72 degrees today.  Sunny.

1:00 pm tour had 5 people, but they were all into the show.  Had great discussions. Folks said, well, after seeing this we’ll have conversations about constitutes art.  I’m not as interactive so far as I might be, will have to think about that.

Once again entered the Pfieffer from the video first.  Makes much more sense.  This crowd loved the piece, the immersion in the sound and its evocation of childhood sports events.

I made a simple changed in spectacle gallery that made reception of the upstate NY olympics much more favorable.  I showed folks the Gursk large format photograph of the boxing match and Diane Arbus’ shot of a downs syndrome girl first.  Then, we went to the upstate NY olympics and its ironic twist on the nature of sports spectacle was apparent.

I apologize to those of you who don’t know the show but the pieces I’m talking about are installations:  a sound piece in the Pfieffer instance and a video piece in upstate NY olympics case.  Hard to describe in words which is, of course, part of their reason for existence.

Aging, Humanities, Literature, Memories

The Wide World and Beyond

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Imbolc                                                  Woodpecker Moon

A friend, who, like me, recently turned 65, said to me, “I just realized there’s so much to learn.  For example, I don’t know anything about China.”  This is an intelligent, well-read guy.  Hard to imagine someone waking up to the amount of things they don’t know at age 65, but I guess this is a true instance of better late than never.

For some reason this makes me recall those little orange biographies that used to sit in the library, though whether the public or school, I don’t recall.  Not too long, they offered a quick glimpse into famous american’s lives.  The content has either been absorbed or long forgotten, but the world they opened up, a world of people and places I had never experienced, remains.

I mention them because there were so many side streets on the boulevard of learning, some of which I knew well, most poorly, but they were in my consciousness from a very young age.

Another guy, also a friend, said recently that he’d decided if he hasn’t learned it now, he doesn’t need it.  Following that thought he went on to say that he was “giving up introspection.”  In the ensuing explanation it turned out he was really throwing away self-help books, other peoples ways.

In fact, what he was doing was allowing himself to start introspection.  Only when we go into ourselves without a guide, no training wheels, just you and the you you carry along, can we begin to make progress.  The Delphic Oracle said it best, “Know thyself.”

I’ve read people recently who say this is a bad idea, though I forget the arguments right now, but I’ve found it a very good idea.  A project still underway here at chez Ellis.

 

 

Literature, Writing

Novels and Fiction

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Imbolc                                                              Woodpecker Moon

Starting Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.  Kate read it a couple of weeks ago and liked it.  I picked it up along with a couple of others after reading David Wallace’s last, Pale King.  Trying to catch up on at least some of today’s fiction.  I tend to read fantasy, horror and classics, skipping over literary novels of the current day.  Don’t know why, just always have.

When I began writing, I never had any ambition to write so-called literary fiction.  Not that I don’t admire it.  I do.   I haven’t particularly enjoyed Russo, but I like Richard Ford, David Lodge and Dom Delillo among several others.  I liked the Rabbit novels, too.  Still, that sort of writing doesn’t appeal to me.

When my imagination goes to work, it veers off toward magic, the Celtic faery faith, fantasy in the mold of Tolkien and horror like H.P. Lovecraft.  Again, don’t know why, just does.  My work does have a structural base in myth and legend, ancient religions, so I’m never in the modern American fetish with realism.

The closest I could imagine coming to realism would be magic realism and I’ve not yet written anything like that either, though Jorge Borge is one of my literary idols.

Fiction needs solid, clear prose, an exciting premise, narrative flow.  The fictive dream, as John Gardener calls it, must be coherent and internally consistent, but it does not need to anchor itself in the here and now.  Hardly.

Weather +Climate

Enough With the Weather. OK. This Is It. For Now.

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Imbolc                                    Woodpecker Moon

The rain fell gently here last night; the air smelled of earth and composted leaves; the woodpecker moon backlit the clouds.  What could be a better spring evening?  In, say, Kentucky, at this time of year.  Imagine this.  That big tourney storm?  Yeah, lightning, tornadoes and torrential rains.  15 inches of snow is way better.  Way.

Conflicted.  Yes, I’m conflicted.  On the one hand, the weather is what the weather is.  My wishes and expectations have no affect on it, only on my mood.  Mature me says, get out there and enjoy the crocus and the snowdrops as they emerge a month early.

Immature me says, but I don’t want to.  I want the cold and the snow and the driving winds and slate gray clouds.  If I wanted a longer growing season, I’d live further south.  I don’t want the south coming to visit me, I want to go visit the south.  If I want to.

Over time the mature me will win out and I’ll adjust my planting schedules, my bee management for a different set of weather conditions; but, right now the guy who moved north to live among pine trees and snow drifts is feeling a bit shafted.

 

 

 

Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

The Week Ahead

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Imbolc                                       Woodpecker Moon

Hello.   Another week of spring is upon us.  If puddles are here, can mosquitoes be far behind?  We may have to suck it up and adapt, folks.

The Great Comet of 1996, Hyakutake as photographed from latitude 56 north near Ketchikan Alaska. As noted by the photographer “By including the north star in this short time exposure, Hyakutake and the night sky are given a real sense of motion”. Chip Porter

Tomorrow morning the novel gets first pick of time and attention, this time until I’ve finished this draft.  Then Stefan’s paper will go in the printer and I’ll crank out the first complete rough draft.  I know already things that need attention, amplification, cutting, but I’m going to leave those alone for now.

My new schedule with the Latin:  an hour or so on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays and a full day on Fridays seems to be good.  In the paper this morning there was a story about a kid, 16, who is a hyperpolyglot, who knew there were such people?  He learned the arabic alphabet in four days, then it took him, he said, a week to read fluently.  That’s just one of many languages he reads and speaks.

Well, he’s him and I’m me, still slogging through the grammar and the vocabulary almost two years on.

Reimagining has not got much attention this last week or so, but it will pick up again.  I plan to work on it episodically over the next couple of years.  I do have to crank out 3,000 words or so Groveland by April 1st.  That’s a good target.

 

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Politics, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

A Year of No Winter, Now With No Spring?

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Imbolc                                         Woodpecker Moon

OK.  So, there was this place that used to have winter but had it replaced by a season of cloudy skies and what passes for cold in the southern states.  Then, that season ended and summer began.  Minnesota 2011-2012

Not kidding.  It’s 60 degrees here today, March 11th.  And this doesn’t seem to be an aberration, the temps go like this for highs:  59, 65, 70, 67, 68.  And that gets us through Friday.  It may throw the bee season into a conundrum since my package bees don’t arrive until mid-April and the bloom cycle could be accelerated by as much as a month.

This is also a year when I didn’t start any vegetables.  Not a one.  We moved the hydroponics into the garage for storage so we could consolidate the dog crates in one place. I imagine the places I buy plants will have used the same calendar as usual and we could waste a month or so of available warmer weather.  In other words we could have a growing season up to 6 weeks longer than normal.  But we’re not ready for it and won’t be.

The Great Wheel continues to turn, but the holidays may usher in different weather than usual.  Climate change is well under way.  I hope the climate change deniers have a ringside seat in hell to the catastrophe they’ve created.  I know, that sounds extreme, but I mean it.

The deniers will not and never could change the basic science behind global warming, all they could ever do was slow down humanity’s response to it, a slowing down that amounts to a criminal act, a felony against generations yet to be born.  They need to be held responsible for their greedy, stupid, infantile actions.

But they probably won’t be.  They’ll die off before the worst of it hits.  That’s why I hope hell has a special viewing room for these shrunken souls.

Would you like me to tell you what I really believe?

Aging, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Family

Shun Yen and Falun Gong, once more

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Imbolc                                    Woodpecker Moon

One more thing about Shun Yen (see below).  Their pitch is that they produce performances that draw on and therefore promote 5,000 years of Chinese culture.  Maybe.  They have dances based on various Chinese myths and legends, like Monkey’s Journey to the West, and on ethnic Chinese communities, but there are also contemporary dance pieces and, scattered throughout something very, very odd.

The contemporary pieces feature a common theme.  Black clad police thugs with red hammer and sickle insignia on their shirts.  They beat senseless the gentle, meditating citizens who hold up a sign that says Falun Dafa is Good.  Yes, Chinese police have beaten Falun Dafa or Falun Gong members and persecuted them.  That’s not at issue here, but, again, I paid $90 a ticket to see several dance numbers that were propaganda against the Chinese government.

There was no balance here, no context, no alerting the audience to the fact that this was their intention.

These vignettes, I think there were four, were not the oddest part of the evening however. Four times during the performance the dancers would remain off stage and a Steinway, a big black concert Steinway, and either a tuxedoed male singer or a formal gown clad female singer, all Chinese, would sing short verses, maybe they were songs, that declared some piece of Falun Dafa dogma.   Continue reading Shun Yen and Falun Gong, once more →