Monthly Archives: May 2013

Garden, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Good Day, Even If It Is 95

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

Got outside around mid-day and planted chard, kale and carrots.  Need to get a second round of beets in the ground, too.  We’re well under way now, with beets emerging, leeks going well, garlic beginning to curl skyward though a bit behind, onions still a bit pale at the top, but progressing.  No bees today due to the cloudy morning, the best time to check on them, but not when its cloudy and rainy.  So tomorrow.

Using the time, the mornings for Missing, writing and revising in turn, trying to remember all the pieces.  A little difficult.  Like juggling chainsaws, bowling pins, feathers and knives.

Not unlike the afternoon’s translating.   Holding those words and ideas in the air, not committing, or at least not over-committing, to a particular meaning until all the pieces have been considered.  Mentally tired.

Minnesota, Politics, US History

Proud. Again.

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Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

Proud to be a Minnesotan.  Again.  Finally.  It has been a long, long time in the conservative weeds with no new taxes chanted ahead of every policy debate, ruining the things that have made Minnesota the strong, progressive state I loved when I first moved here over 40 years ago.  Now, in one legislative session we have more money going into education instead of raiding our school systems piggy banks while raising property taxes.  And, incredibly and beautifully and thankfully, we have marriage as an institution available to all Minnesotans.

It is not, after all, gay marriage, anymore than it is hetero marriage or African marriage or white marriage.  No, it is a legally sanctioned bonding of two people for the purpose of creating a strong family unit, whether that unit is two people or two plus kids.  Hopefully, in not too many years, we will look back on this debate and shake our heads, “Why was that such a big deal?”

An open civic society, a thriving K-12 system with post-secondary education appropriate for all, a world class health system, diverse cultural life and a commitment to a healthy environment, that’s the Minnesota I love and I can begin to see it emerging again from the compassion drought we’ve suffered under the tax-obsessed Republicans.

As Leonard Cohen sings, Hallelujah!

Garden, Great Work

Soil

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Beltane                                                                            Early Growth Moon

The soil temps have exceeded 50 so I’ve got to get out there with the carrots and chard, hoping the tomatoes and peppers come soon.  They need to get in the ground.  I’m going to look at soil improvement over the next few years.  I’ve always done some amendments, composted manure goes on all my beds at the end of the growing season and I often lay it down as mulch once the temps get hot, then cover it with leaves, but I’ve not done any other fertilizing or soil supplementing, largely because I grow organic and I just don’t understand the organic soil supplement process.

Bill Schmidt hooked me up with some e-mails from an outfit in Farmington, International Ag Labs, and their stuff looks doable, though still somewhat complex for me.  I’ll need to look into it further, but it seems to have a focus that makes sense to me.  The basic thrust? Biosustainability created through soil improvement toward optimum soil health.  When you see the thin layer that is our atmosphere, the post below with the astronaut video, and then when you consider that it is the top six inches or so of soil that make plant life possible, you begin to understand how tiny is our margin of safety.

We can take active steps that ensure a healthy atmosphere and a healthy topsoil, why wouldn’t we do that?

 

Art and Culture, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Like Attending My Own Funeral

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Beltane                                                                                 Early Growth Moon

Sort of like attending my own funeral.   All day today notes have come in from docent classmates responding to my resignation from the program which I sent out in a private newsletter we have just for our class.  Mini-eulogies.  It’s interesting because it is often this kind of stuff that we don’t feel liberated to say until a relationship has been severed, either by death or by saying a permanent good-bye.  Would probably be good if we could learn to say these things more often.  Thanks to all of you who’ve written.

The revision process has legs now, new material being written, older material rewritten.  I’m back in the fictive dream of Missing, inhabiting the two worlds and living with their characters, their flora and fauna.  It’s a homecoming of sorts.  Though I’ve been into for a month or so in terms of writing, I’ve been at it for longer with reading material from beta readers, re-reading the text myself and plotting a strategy for this third revision.

Put another 5 verses of Book I into English today, making better and more notes about items for the commentary.  I really want this commentary to synch with Perseus, but I also want it to live on smartphones and tablet computers.  I want it to be the commentary for this media age.

Greg and I talked last Friday about how this kind of reading necessarily becomes close reading, a sort of reading often promoted, but less often executed.   You might call it slow reading.

Speed reading has its place, I guess, and I certainly tried to put it to use, having taken the Evelyn Woods program when I started college in 1965.  This program preaches adapting your speed to the kind of reading you’re doing.  So, say Time magazine or Sports Illustrated (of equal depth most of the time) might take your quickest scan, finger moving down the center of the page with some speed.  Philosophy on the other hand would go much more slowly, say 150 words a minute.  The idea preached by speed readers is that the quicker you go the more your mind concentrates on reading alone, not wandering away.  Maybe.

What I do know is that if you want to learn, slowing down to the pace translation forces, often word by word, looking up the word, its grammatical forms, figuring out how they fit together before the sense of the sentence begins to emerge, then you read slowly.  Letting the mind wander when it will, tracking words down through paths already in the mind, making connections, asking questions, probing the text.  This is how you make a work your own.

So, I’m for slow food, slow travel, slow reading, slow thinking.

 

Memories, Politics, US History

Folk

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Beltane                                                                 Early Growth Moon

Listening to 1960’s folk on Pandora.  Forgot how much folk music figured in the 1960’s.  I remember my first anti-American rhetoric coming in the Black Swan Coffee House in Stratford, Ontario where I was for the Shakespeare Festival.  It was an anti-Vietnam folk song sung in what would have been 1963 or so.  We were had barely begun our operations in Vietnam at that time.

Many of the early protest songs were folk songs, following the long, already established tradition among labor organizers.  There’s something about the acoustic, often with no band, that speaks deeper to me.  Kate and I support Folk Alley, too, which plays contemporary folk along with the occasional older songs.

The Coffee House circuit was big in the 1960’s a type of caffeine bar very different from Starbucks and Caribou.  They are coffee house lite, almost not there as cultural institutions, with their isolated patrons floating on the web while sipping pretentiously named drinks.  The 1960’s coffee house was more in line with the 18th and 19th century versions in England where much of the early scientific and industrial revolutions got their start.  The main difference is that the 1960’s version featured political plotting, resolve boosting through music and plenty of buzz to work on the next protest late into the night.

 

Art and Culture, Family, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Laboravi

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Beltane                                                                     Early Growth Moon

Out to Famous Dave’s at 11:20 this morning, just ahead of the Mother’s Day rush.  We had a nice meal, discussing family, as the restaurant slowly filled up, the number of very large patrons noticeable unfortunately.

I’ve been back at work on Missing, now writing new material, most focused on John’s origins, where he came from and what if any implications that might have for his time on Tailte.  This will lead into the work of experimenting with point of view, which I’ve given a lot of thought but have not made any decisions about as yet.

Greg, Latin tutor, began to push me a bit this last time, saying how many verses he wanted me to tackle before our next time.  Up til now I’ve been learning at a pace comfortable for me, maybe a bit slow for him, but ok since I was the student.  Now, I’m closer to a colleague and we need to have adequate material before us each time we meet.  We’ve met in person once in the last three and a half years, at Kate’s retirement party at the MIA two Januaries ago.  Odd.

I sat down and pounded out five verses in a little more than an hour.  This includes making commentary notes in Microsoft Notes, words to highlight, helps, ways in which Perseus confuses the matter, words Perseus doesn’t have.

Here’s a strange, and a bit disturbing, thing.  I turned in my resignation from the MIA last Tuesday.  I’ve heard nothing from them.  12 years.  Nothing.  Weird.  And confirming of my decision.

 

Politics, US History

The Moral Arc

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Beltane                                                                    Early Growth Moon

Gay marriage.  Yes.  That the vote to pass this measure in Minnesota might come two days after mother’s day.  Priceless.

In the long, long exile of a left perspective from the American political scene, beginning somewhere around Nixon and only now gradually beginning to lift and even now sporadically and with drone inflected interludes of neo-con thinking, it was Martin Luther King’s prescient rhetorical flourish that sustained me:  “The moral arc of the universe may be long, but it bends toward justice.”

And, I mean that.  When Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union, when he cut welfare programs and raised defense spending, when Bush I was elected and couldn’t recall what a grocery store scanner was for, when Clinton continued the dismantling of our welfare system and most dismally of all, when Bush II was elected by the Supreme Court, then reelected even after his fatal rhetorical flourishes, Axis of Evil and Mission Accomplished, even then I knew that history opens toward freedom and the breaking of tradition-forged chains and when that freedom comes and the chain’s links lie broken in the street, time does not revert.

Now, marriage will become, here in Minnesota at least, an expression of love between two people willing to commit to each other in a long-term, legally binding relationship.  There is not now and there never has been any problem with that.  But often the obvious and political reality don’t match.  Ask the atmosphere.  Rending the disjunction between justice and social reality was the focus of King’s life, Ghandi’s too; it is our focus as well, those who would end economic discrimination, further women’s full integration into life at all levels and make the world’s borders as open as possible.

 

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Writing

The Veiled Narrative

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Shane Carruth, Upstream Color (see below), was also the cinematographer.  Forgot that last night.

In answering questions, in particular about the density of his works, he made two points, both interesting.  First, he said he makes a narrative as it needs to be to tell his story.  That means it may take  more than one pass to take in all  the narrative has to offer.  Just like reading a book or seeing a painting.  Made sense to me.

(Barrias, French, 1893)

Second, all narratives, he believes, are veiled, which he emphasized in answers to more than one question.  In this he means the viewer or reader never knows the whole story and often knows a very limited portion of it.  I took from his overall answers that this conviction comes from life, where the future veils the narrative in every instance and, too, I suppose, since we never know the interiority of the other, veiled in that sense as well.

While I agree intellectually with this latter point, as an intention in a work of art, I’m suspicious.  It can too easily serve as an excuse for careless ambiguity and might enforce an aterminus approach to story telling; which, though it is true as Carruth said last night, that all film narratives must end (and by implication in that way deviate from the truly veiled nature of the narrative future) that departure from reality should not encourage pointless realism.

There may be some of that in this film.  Until I’ve had longer to consider it, and until I’ve seen it at least a second time, I’ll reserve my opinion on that.

 

Cinema and Television, Feelings

Upstream Color

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Beltane                                                                Early Growth Moon

Saw Shane Carruth’s second movie, Upstream Color, tonight at the Walker.  He made Primer, a film about time traveling geeks who become paranoid in the course of their travels.  It was a huge hit, cost $7,000 to make and got Shane noticed by Hollywood and film buffs.  It won the grand prize at Sundance when it premiered there.

Upstream Color is another dense, need to see it again and perhaps again movie.  According to Shane, who was at the screening tonight and answered questions afterward, this movie began with the idea of a woman stripped of all those things that make her her–house, money, job, self-respect and then follows her as she tries to rebuild herself.  And this movie is about that.

But it gets there through magic worms, pigs in Circe like relationship to a group of human beings, a thief and orchid harvesters.  It also gets there in a circular narrative that has no apparent center, no apparent antagonist and finishes with an ambiguous ending.

Shane is a direct, humble, honest representative of his work.  And when I say his work, both films are his work to an extraordinary degree.  He writes and directs them.  He also composes the score and has a lead role.  He has also taken on the role of distributor, describing in answer to one question a film industry equivalent to the disaggregation of publishing I learned about it in my marketing seminar with Scott Edelstein.

This movie was at Sundance in January and now it’s here in Minneapolis in spite of a limited release distribution schedule.  It was fun to see it so soon after the Festival and to hear Shane talk about his work.

I realized I really enjoy being part of the Walker crowd, seeing and hearing things early in their arc, discovering artists as the world discovers them.  In the same train of thought I realized I’m really having fun translating Ovid, sort of the opposite aesthetic experience, one rooted in the deep classical past.  Then it occurred to me that I must really be enjoying life.

But.  Over the last two or three weeks I’ve been feeling, if not melancholy, at least morose. Triggered by the back pain and Kona’s vet visits, yes, but still, odd for one who’s enjoying so many aspects of his life.  Including writing the novel.  I guess all this means is that we are not one, but many and some of me has a happy life and part of me has a blue life right now.  At the same time.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Overview Effect

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Beltane                                                                                              Early Growth Moon

“There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commercial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet.”
G.K. Chesterton

The video below, 20 minutes long, came to me via friend and cybermage Bill Schmidt through his daughter, Moira.  I include the two quotes along with it to emphasize a subtle point.  Chesterton was looking anthropomorphically at the locus of fairies, gods and saints, ok as far it goes, but he neglects the much longer tradition of nymphs, dryads, fairies of the woodlands and fields, holy wells, sacred mountains, places of pilgrimage and, most tellingly underlined in this wonderful video, the dynamic, vital oasis in the midst of the vacuum of space:  Earth.

(John Byam Liston Shaw  angel offering the fruits of eden)

We live already, as Bill likes to point out, in paradise.  We are, unfortunately, working hard, very hard, through the godless, saintless and fairyless world of commerce–Chesterton surely had this right–to expel ourselves from paradise.  There is no east of Eden in space.  If we lose this paradise, there is not another for us to inhabit.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears  The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.”   NYT yesterday

I enclose the second, seemingly far out of context, quote which comes from our money manager because it highlights a fall in the prices of copper, platinum and paladium.  This fact, falling commodity prices, rather than science or political will, are the main things that will work in favor of stopping the Polymet mine near the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area and its follow-on mines that await only its successful completion of its environmental impact statements.

(expulsion, Masaccio)

“PolyMet expects to mine copper by late 2015   One day after announcing plans to raise $80 million in cash, officials of PolyMet Mining Corp. on Thursday said they are moving headlong toward permitting and, eventually, construction of Minnesota’s first copper-nickel mine.”  Duluth Tribune

We should not, must not, leave these decisions to the whims of the market.  We must develop the political and personal will to say no.  Hard?  Yes.  Necessary?  Listen to the astronauts and look at the thin layer of atmosphere that is all that protects us from the harsh reality of the space we inhabit.

“Commodities markets. It wasn’t all bad in April: natural gas futures rose 9.0%, cocoa futures gained 9.1%, and wheat futures rose 6.3%. Now for the bad news: gold fell 7.8% last month to an April 30 COMEX close of just $1,474.00. Silver cratered 14.6% in April; copper fell 6.4%, platinum 4.3% and palladium 9.2%”

 

 

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.