Monthly Archives: September 2012

Cooking

Groceries.

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Lugnasa                                                                   New (Autumn) Moon

On the asphalt headed toward the grocery store, Festival, this morning.  You can tell it’s fall because the outside of the store sports very large boxes of pumpkins and still tightly gathered mums in pots.  Soon there will be shocks of corn and bales of hay.  Inside caramel coated apples, plain and nut covered, and the first red grapes of the fall.

Monday morning is a slow day at the market.  Two of the grocery guys were out stocking shelve, each apparently a healthy consumer of the store’s products (that’s healthy in the eats a hell of a lot sense), a produce clerk arranged pineapples above the bananas.

A few shoppers, mostly purposeful, no wandering.  Cereal aisle.  Check.  Turkey and sausage.  Check.   Eggs.  Pizza.  Bread.

Going hungry to the grocery store is a sure way to make fat profits for the nice folks at Festival and I was hungry.  I went $40+ over our weekly food budget, but on the bright side, I got a lot of good things to eat.

Then home.  Now, nap.

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Finishing.

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Lugnasa                                                                     New (Autumn) Moon

Finished Philemon and Baucis this morning.  Now I have to decide where I want to go in the Metamorphoses next.  Not sure I want to start at the beginning just yet. When I do, I want to produce idiomatic English and English as beautiful as I can render it.  I’m not there yet.  Maybe I’ll do the Medea cycle, she’s pretty interesting.  I plan over this next week or two to start some Tacitus, too.  Just to keep myself guessing.

(Medea.  Sandys.)

It feels good to have gotten this far, but there is plenty more of the trail yet ahead.

 

Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

Autumn

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Lugnasa                                                          New (Autumn) Moon

Paul Douglas (local weather doyen) reminds us that meteorological autumn begins September 1st.  I suppose.  Autumn begins for me when we have days like this one.  Low 40’s when I get up.  A chill rain.  Nights growing cooler.  Leaves changing, falling.

(West Wind.  early 1900’s.  Thomson influenced the Canadian Group of Seven though he died before they formed.)

Now that ancientrail begins.  The one where straightening up the house, restocking the larder and then, that final touch, turning the vent system over from summer to winter mark steps of readiness.

Like a denning creature, bear or beaver say, making the place warm and comfortable for the cold months ahead we burrow into our houses.  Ready for when the north wind doth blow.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Are You Trying To Start a Movement?

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Lugnasa                                                        Garlic Planting Moon
Presented Homecoming:  Faith of a Pagan at Groveland UU this morning.  They’ve honored me by having me come regularly for over 20 years.  Fewer and fewer times as I’ve moved away from the ministry, but still, each year, at least once, often twice.

There’s something about an immediate audience that makes writing fresher, harder, cleaner.  During the discussion after the presentation I found myself explaining my reimagining faith project and the more I said, the more enthused I became.  Strange, I know, but that’s what happened.  Partly I could see connections, heads nodding.  This was taking root as an idea.

“Are you trying to start a movement?” one long time Grovelander asked.

Made me stop and think.  No, I’m not.  But I’m trying to get clear enough to write down my thoughts, make them into a book, because I feel  this reimagined faith needs to be part of everyone’s inner tool kit.  I don’t mean it needs to replace your Buddhism or Christianity or Judaism or Sikhism.  It can be an adjunct, a both/and.  Or, like me, it can be whole deal.

An essential awareness of and responsiveness to the world in which we live, the planet on which we depend has too often been lost, especially in developed countries.   Now, too, developing countries like the BRIK nations.  Unfortunately, those are the very spots where this kind of earth mindfulness is most needed.  These countries are the ones that make decisions large and small that effect the future of human life on this planet.

Another Grovelander, a young Macalester student, challenged my pushing off against Christianity as an example of a metaphysic that distances us from the world.  She was right.  This message needs to penetrate especially religious and economic ideologies, be attractive rather than repulsive.  Yet still strong enough to bite.  Not an easy task.

But, hey?  If it was easy, someone would have already done it.

(illustration above:  The Green Knight Gesso tells the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the Green Knight’s perspective. The old ways are parting for the new, yet in the ancient there is wisdom to learn and to be retained. The Green Knight is symbolic of ancient wisdom.)

Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Our Ordinary Wonder

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Lugnasa                                                          Garlic Planting Moon

What to say?  The wound so deep, the insult so grievous.  Nothing.  Nothing.  Nothing.

I remember that elevator ride with my mother, she on the gurney her face tortured by her brain in agony.  She had already begun to move away, fast, from the one who walked with me to the ice cream shop not far from our house and bought me a sundae for my good grades.  Who held my hand when I was scared.  Who taught me to watch the spider out our kitchen window as a wonder of the universe.

The phone call.  Unexpected in February.  My sister, normally in Singapore, here for a visit.  A call from Alexandria, long abandoned home.  Dad died.  Just died there sitting in a chair.  Winked out.  Gone.

None escape. None. It is this truth, underscored with bright black lines by the death of the one’s we love, that creates the wonder.  Our lives.  Brief.  Random.  Often, as the Odyssey says, filled with pain and suffering, yet still.  Still. Glorious.  Radiant.  Precious.

Sometimes I think these things.  Feel them.  But do not say them.  Now, now I do.

 

 

Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

A Tip of the Glass to Hermes

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Lugnasa                                                          Garlic Planting Moon

I’m within 5 verses of completing Philemon and Baucis.  I will complete it before the Rembrandt exhibition leaves town with its painting of this story from Ovid.  That was my goal though I’ve come up several weeks short because I wanted to circulate my transmission among the docents, but all public tours stopped last week.

When I finish it tonight or tomorrow, I’ll have translated three complete stories from the Metamorphoses:  Diana and Actaeon (Titian exhibit), Philemon and Baucis (Rembrandt exhibit) and Pentheus, one I chose because the story is retold in the Bacchae.  None of my translations are worth sharing much of, if any.  I’m still clumsy and not always accurate, but I moved through 10 verses today, so my speed has improved.

Speed is a goal because the Metamorphoses is long and if I ever hope to translate it, I’ll have to go faster than I have.  It’s divided into 15 books and at some point I’ll shift from a focus only on learning to a focus on translating and learning.  The difference probably being that I’ll work on a long chunk, say a book, then hire Greg or somebody to go through my translation with me.

A commentary useful for advanced students is still a goal, too, and as I translate I plan to do so in a way that will facilitate a commentary.  Pharr’s commentary on Virgil is a good model and one I will have in view the whole time.  BTW I also did another 10 verses in the Aeneid, too.  More practice.  The more I read, the better I get.

 

Literature

For People Who Love Quotes, But Not People

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Lugnasa                                                                                Garlic Planting Moon

When faced with someone else’s incomprehensible slang:

“Well, well, well, well. If it isn’t fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.” – A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

To liven up a dull conversation:

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.” – Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut

For telling someone to get lost, but nicely:

“I desire that we be better strangers.” – As You Like It, William Shakespeare

For when someone is quite below your notice, and you want to let them know:

“He is simply a hole in the air.” – The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell

For dispelling any illusions:

“Don’t fool yourself, my dear. You’re much worse than a bitch. You’re a saint. Which shows why saints are dangerous and undesirable.” – The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

For disagreements over Magic cards/games of Dungeons and Dragons/cosplay:

“The man is as useless as nipples on a breastplate.” – A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin

For morons (read: everybody):

“I told him he didn’t even care if a girl kept all her kings in the back row or not, and the reason he didn’t care was because he was a goddam stupid moron. He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron.” – The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

When only the juiciest alliteration will do (or when cursing out children): 

“You blithering idiot! … You festering gumboil! You fleabitten fungus! … You bursting blister! You moth-eaten maggot!” – Matilda, Roald Dahl

For someone who thinks they’re better than you:

“This liberal doxy must be impaled upon the member of a particularly large stallion!” – A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole Continue reading For People Who Love Quotes, But Not People →

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Politics

All The Perfumes of Arabia Will Not Sweeten This…Hand

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Lugnasa                                                                  Garlic Planting Moon

The events in Libya call to mind Shakespeare’s Macbeth:  …a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.  A video, which itself may or may not exist, played by actors who say they were duped, causing “spontaneous” eruptions of religious anger in two different countries at the same time with the same target, US consular buildings.  The fury, as in Macbeth, will require hand washing, but not hand washing that will work, also like Macbeth, for “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this…hand.” Macbeth Quote (Act V, Sc. I).

This is the rankest madness, throwing over thuggery the veil of religion and that of religion scorned.  No world can contain those whose beliefs are so weak that even crude humor can sully them.  They will never rest, never find peace.  And if, as I suspect, this was not religion scorned but a moment seized to justify murder, then the world can contain those even less.

It’s time for all sane citizens, no matter their religious conviction, no matter their national or tribal affiliations, to say enough.  Let’s stop this.

Writing

Revision

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Lugnasa                                                            Garlic Planting Moon

I have a rhythm now.  Get up, eat breakfast, go down stairs and revise.  Revising, I’m learning, is as much work as writing.  Harder in a way since it requires re-thinking, re-imagining.  But, more fun, too, since the whole can begin to weave back and forth, the end influencing the beginning.  Consistency problems ironed out. Larger themes both seen and reinforced.

It’s a problem, this rhythm.  Mornings are my good time, the time my brain switches on, ready to plunge right in.  Afternoons, not so much so.  But still outside work needs to get done.  And I’d like to do Latin, too, in the afternoons.  Not all figured out.

I’m making progress, a light touch on the content.  Correcting.  Amplifying.  Excising.  The end, I know, has to be stronger.  And, I’m considering putting a chunk of the end in the beginning.  Characters need fleshing out sometimes.  A habit or mannerism, perhaps.

This is new for me.  It feels as if I’ve gone one more step on the ancientrail of creativity, of writing the long piece.  Feels good, too.  But, it’s surprisingly tiring.

 

Bees, Dogs, Garden, Our Land and Home

Animal Ironies

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Lugnasa                                                                   Garlic Planting Moon

Animal ironies.

5 years ago when we put in the orchard Vega and Rigel took it upon themselves to shred the netaphim irrigation system.  We built a fence around the orchard to keep them out.  This was around the time I installed an electric fence to keep Rigel inside the chain link fence that goes all round our woods and most of our property.

Of late, squirrels have taken to jumping off a small ash, onto the top run of the split rail fence and from there on to our honeycrisp tree.  This was the first year the tree produced much fruit and we anticipated them.  So did the squirrels.  I saw one squirrel, with an apple twice as big as his head, leap from the apple tree onto the rail, from the rail onto the ash, all the time carrying this huge apple.  After that he disappeared among the oaks.

Also, this year seems to be a gopher year.  They come in waves, some years almost none, others they seem to be everywhere.  This is an everywhere year.  In pursuit (I think) of the underground rodent, Vega and Rigel have decided to join local 147 of the Sandhogs after seeing this picture and admiring the work of their NYC brethren.

They’re hoping for new tunneling tips from their brothers.

Also, yesterday Kate took Gertie, our German shorthair into the vet.  Her left rear leg had not gotten better after a course of antibiotics to eliminate a possible Rocky Mountain Spotted fever infection.  Gertie began her doggy life running around in the Rocky Mountains outside of Denver.

New diagnosis, confirmed on X-ray?  Spinal stenosis effecting the 10th vertebrae.  Just like her mommy.  She’s now on a course of steroids to shrink the swelling, hopefully in a month or so.

One last animal irony.  After my decision a year ago to shift bee management practices, taking only the honey the bees could produce in a year, rather than trying to overwinter the colonies, I have been forced–by the bees–back to the U’s original management strategy.

That is, buy packaged bees one year.  Watch over them and help them thrive.  Make sure they have enough honey to survive the winter.  Divide them the next spring, take all the honey from the parent colony and repeat the process with the child colonies.

Once the bees educated me to the soundness of this strategy I can now declare this year a success since I believe both colonies will go into the winter with sufficient honey.  So much for my plans.  Bees laugh at the plans of man.