Monthly Archives: March 2013

Dogs, Holidays

Erin Go Bar

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Imbolc                                                              Bloodroot Moon

St. Patrick’s day at Pappy’s Bar.  We went, stopping by for a brunch at Pappy’s, to get dogfood.  In Pappy’s the bartender had shamrock suspenders, a leprechaun hat with shamrocks and sunglasses, on top of the hat, clear with green lights blinking within the frame.  A waitress, a superannuated sort, had a tiny yellow hat with a green flower and a green t-shirt tuxedo, pressed out far enough in front to provide a handy cushion if she should tip over.

At the end of the bar sat two young women, mid-twenties, sunglasses, eating eggs and sausage while tossing back Bloody Marys.  Next to us sat a younger couple, maybe early fifties, thin and fit looking.  She had on a Honolulu Harley-Davidson tee-shirt and a sad look, not sad today, necessarily, but a look that said life didn’t hold much sparkle for her.  He smiled, took a napkin and cleaned up the water after the bartender had wiped down the bar.  “It was wet,” he said.

Kate ordered the senior special and I got cornbeef hash and eggs in honor of the traditional St. Patrick’s day meal.

We took the last seats in the bar and there was quite a line waiting to eat in the restaurant portion.  This was at noon on Sunday.  A few folks had green tinted liquor drinks in highball glasses, but I saw no green beer.

The sign read March 17, 1992.  We check I.D.  I was 45 in 1992.

Art and Culture, Dreams, Family, Travel

Oh, man.

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Imbolc                                                                      Bloodroot Moon

Oh, man.  Staying up late no longer has the romance it used to have, or else the way I feel after, like this morning, has simply become intolerable.  Whatever I don’t like the feeling, jangly, edgy, a bit morose.

Had a dream last night where someone tried to steal my laptop.  While I had it in my hands.  I cried out, “Stop that!” and flung my arms up, waking myself up.  Pre-travel jitters I imagine.

Now when I travel, or at least prior to travel, I have a period, sometimes intense, of not wanting to go.  Not wanting to leave the predictable comforts of home for the uncertainty of the road, the hassles, the physical demands.  Once I leave the house this all wanes and then again I delight in travel.  The strangeness of it.  The oddities.  Even the hassles, so long as they don’t involve running for airplanes.

My family was born to travel.  Mom went to Europe as a WAC during WWII.  Dad traveled happily and often within the US with the occasional trip to Canada.  Once, even, to Singapore.  Mark has traveled the world since college or close thereafter.  Mary moved to Malaysia many years ago and both still wander.  Mary just returned to Singapore from Valencia and England.  Mark toured Saudi Arabia over his break.

Wanderlust, I suppose.  A sense that the present moment, the home, needs the occasional view from afar.  A desire to see what’s over the next hill.  In the next valley.  Around the next bend.  There is, too, at least for me, gaining a clear sense of my Self as stranger in this world, one alone while living with others.  This existential isolation hides often at home, the quotidian a salve for it.

So, Washington, D.C.  I was last there during a layover for a train home from Savannah, Georgia.  I went to the National Gallery that day; I’ll go again this week.

Cinema and Television, Cooking

Salmon, Chess, Homeland

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Imbolc                                                                  Bloodroot Moon

Kate cooked salmon with a wonderful glaze, cut green beans and a salad with orange, feta cheese, cubed cucumber, lettuce.  All excellent.

We discussed the first, basic aspects of chess tonight.  How to position the board, white on the right, and line up the pieces.  Then a brief lesson in how each piece moves.  The chess set is now on the end of the dining room table.  Kate’s never played.

I like chess because after determining who gets white nothing else involves chance.  It’s complexity appeals to me, too, but because it is complexity contained in space and time, complexity of a finite duration.  It defines well time devoted to the game and time outside the game.  Plus, no tee times.  No golf carts and no slices or hooks.

And, like good video streamers of the second decade of the third millennium we binge watched Homeland, finishing the thirteenth episode tonight with Clair Danes strapped down, medicated and receiving shock treatment–just as she remembers a key clue in the case of Sgt. Brody.  The downside of binge watching current programs is that after you finish you have to wait a year or more for the continuation.

 

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Memories, Poetry, Weather +Climate

Yet.

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Imbolc                                                                   Bloodroot Moon

Snow came in the night.  Maybe 2 inches.  Freshened up the landscape, pushed back the melting time.  Last year today it was 73, ruining my vision of the north, turning it into a slushy Indiana/Ohio/Illinois.  Climate change stealing my home.  It disoriented me, made me feel like a stranger in a strange, yet strangely familiar, land.  Now.  30 degrees.  8 inches of snow.  Home again.

A book on my shelf, important to me:  Becoming Native to This Place.  The idea so powerful.  One so necessary for this nature starved moment, as the pace of the city as refuge lopes toward its own four minute mile.  Cities are energy, buzz, imagination criss-crossing, humans indulging, amplifying, renewing humanness but.  But.

All good.  Yes.  Yet.

That stream you used to walk along.  The meadow where the deer stood.  You remember.  The night the snow came down and you put on your snowshoes and you walked out the backdoor into the woods and walked quietly among the trees, listening to the great horned owl and the wind.  The great dog bounding behind you in the snow, standing on your snowshoes, making you fall over and laugh.  Remember that?

There was, too, that New Year’s Day.  Early morning with the temperature in the 20s below zero and another dog, the feral one, black and sleek, slung low to the ground, went with you on the frozen lake, investigating the ice-fishing shacks, all alone, everyone still in bed from the party the night before but you two walked, just you two and the cold.

Before I go, I also have to mention those potatoes.  The first year.  Reaching underneath the earth, scrabbling around with gloved fingers.  Finding a lump.  There.  Another.  And another.  And another.  The taste.  Straight from the soil.  With leeks and garlic.  Tomatoes, too, and beets.  Red fingers.  The collard greens.  Biscuits spread with honey from the hive.

Commentary on Religion, Latin, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Solid Day

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Imbolc                                                                                 Bloodroot Moon

Missing in the a.m.  About 1/6th done.  As I read, it’s hard not to jump in, start line editing, but getting the story and the transitions and the big picture clear is necessary.  I have to reenter the story when I begin this 3rd rewrite, reenter the story in order to change it.  Only by having it again in mind will I be able to do that.  I can already see the value of this approach.

I have a list of characters, things and places that I’m writing down as I read.  The first time a character appears or a place gets mentioned or a thing like a particular sword gets used.  A long list and I’m only a little ways in.

Translating today went well, two sentences, about 6 verses.

The mechanical inspector came to examine our new furnace.  A cursory look.  “Fine.”  And he was on his way out.  To show though the things you do not know.  He stopped at Kate’s long arm quilter.  “My wife just died.  She was a quilter, left me with a lot of quilting things.”  Then, he buttoned up and left.

Still reading the competition.  Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

And, hey!  How about that Pope.  Argentina, eh?  But, from a good Italian family.  And a Jesuit?  Interesting though.  Look at a graphic  that shows Catholic strength by world region and you will see that it has bulged for some time in the Southern Hemisphere.  As the West has gotten more secular, Africa and Latin America have grown more Christian.  And more conservative.  It will be a while before we can see what this means.

Great Wheel
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Imbolc                                                                            Bloodroot Moon

Several years ago I asked the naturalist at Cedar Creek Ecological Station, a UofM site here in Anoka county, what he considered the first sign of spring in Minnesota.  Without hesitation he said bloodroot.  When the bloodroot blooms.  That’s why this moon is the bloodroot moon.

Cinema and Television

Defining Moments of Our Time

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Imbolc                                                                        Bloodroot Moon

Watching Margin Call while I workout.  This 2011 movie with Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci and Jeremy Irons and a wonderful supporting cast gives me chills.  It sets

itself in 2008 in a company that sounds a lot like AIG or Lehman Brothers.  A rising young analyst, really a rocket scientist gone over to finance for the money, discovers the company  has already passed its margins of safety.  A coldly calculated retreat then follows.

What struck me, more than the historical period piece about the biggest financial disaster of our time, were some simple shots.  Demi Moore and the CEO of the local branch walking down a darkened corridor to a meeting with the chairman of the board.  They’re serious.  Their world is about to come apart, a world they’ve worked their lives to achieve.

And I thought.  Gee, step outside that darkened corridor.  Go down and walk on the sidewalks of New York or the trails of Yosemite.  Wander the blue highways of Minnesota or board a boat on Lake Superior.  The world in that corridor does not matter.  It’s not existentially important.  It’s a constructed, artificial world no different from an amusement park or a video game.  Everybody agrees to treat it with gravitas, putting it in a movie with serious music in the background and tension building.  That’s all it is, another way this animal lives its life, and not a particularly significant part of that life.

Kate and I got the first disc of Homeland a couple of days ago and we’ve watched the first four episodes of this Showtime series about the CIA and the war against terror.  Claire Danes, a favorite of mine among young actors, and Mandy Patikin, a wonderful and sensitive actor, give the series bite.  It’s an interesting peak into the world of spies and terror and contemporary events.  In that regard it’s similar to Margin Call.

The two works together summarize defining moments of this very young millennium, moments that have had a huge impact on all of our lives and will continue to effect us for years to come.  They will be historical documents a hundred years from now, a Rorschach on our hopes and fears, mostly our fears.  They’re both high caliber, sophisticated presentations worth your time.

 

 

Writing

Revising: A Process

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Imbolc                                                                  New (Bloodroot) Moon

All morning reading Missing.  I’ve taken the Finding Your Writer’s Voice advice and decided to read through the whole thing, not revising, just taking in the story, marking spots where the pace/action sags, taking notes on characters and places, but mostly getting the story firmly in mind before I begin revising.

As I read, I have the thoughts of my beta readers present to me and the ideas those thoughts have generated.  When I get to the end of the reading, it should be clear what I need to do for this third, and I hope final, revision.  Final before a line-editing one, I mean.

Reading my own work is peculiar.  Sort of like a mechanic working on a car she built.  At each point I think, gee, I could have designed that differently, better.  The desire to tinker can get in the way of reviewing the overall design.  Feels good to make progress.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

On Translating Latin On This Particular Plateau

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Imbolc                                                  New (Bloodroot) Moon

Latin.  I’ve found a method that works for me right now and I want to write it down before I lose it.  First, translate one sentence a day.  Keep going until several verses have been finished, perhaps two or three days before a session with Greg.  Then, go back and review, one sentence at a time, the work that has been done.

In that review nail down the whys of the translation and identify specific questions, i.e. type of subjunctive clause, that extra word left over.

In general I’ve discovered that the faster I want the process to go, the more anxious I get and the less attention I pay to the details.  Yet, in Latin, the devil is truly in the details.  A great spiritual and intellectual exercise for me, the paying close attention demanded by my buddy Ovid.

 

Health, Writing

Low Grade Disharmony, Dis-Ease

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Imbolc                                                                         Valentine Moon

Looking back some low grade disharmony began to sneak up on me last Wednesday.  Feeling punk.  Over the weekend I laid low.  I find it a DIY MFA for writing a couple of days ago.   It had some interesting suggestions for reading as a writer and with a specific purpose, so I followed them while sleeping and resting.

That is, in this instance I read the competition.  Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  A middle-school Harry Potter-like story of a twelve year old who discovers he’s the son of Poseidon.  It’s fun, a bit, well, juvenile, yet captivating and the plot has a propulsive force.

The gods and demi-gods, monsters and other creatures of the sacred world abound.  I love this stuff, even in its middle-school form.  Once I’ve finished the third of the Percy Jackson books, I’m going to start on Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.  Also on the list is re-reading Tolkein.  Of course, I read him and a long, long time ago.

There are three other lists on the reading with purpose idea: one is classics, another informative and the third is contemporary.

The same process asked for my 5 all-time favorite books.  This kind of list changes, but here is the one I wrote down on that day:  Steppenwolf, 100 Years of Solitude, Mists of Avalon, Metamorphoses, the Bible.

Now I’m feeling better, though not all the way there, and its time to get cracking on that revision.  Time’s, well, we all know what time is.  And we don’t get more.