Daily Archives: May 18, 2013

Faith and Spirituality

Paradise (Just another day in)

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Beltane                                                             Early Growth Moon

For Bill.  He’ll know why.

“Since [landing after Apollo 12], I have not complained about the weather one single time. I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic. I’m glad there’s people around.  One of the things that I did when I got home, I went down to shopping centers, and I’d just go around there, get an ice cream cone or somethin’, and just watch the people go by, and think: “Boy, we’re lucky to be here. Why do people complain about the earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden.”

 

— — Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan BeanVia Brainrow: “Perspective”
Humanities, Politics

Bell, Book and…Gun?

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Beltane                                                                            Early Growth Moon

So, I went into the St. Louis Park Public Library, looked around for the session on literary agents (see below) and noticed an armed and uniformed policeman talking with a librarian. When I left, the same policeman was still there.  I didn’t ask if this was part of the NRA initiative to make all schools safe by putting police with guns in them (and, BTW, arming teachers and administrators, too), but a part of me retreated at the sight, a sanctum of my childhood, and there was, in fact, a boy of maybe 8 or 9, pulling books off the shelves and examining them, invaded by guns and police.

Police powers and the rights of free speech and learning live an uneasy balance, one that needs to be uneasy, one that should not be thrown off balance by seeming to grant police powers the right of access to a place devoted to freedom of thought.  This is inappropriate to the young one hunting for just the right book, the immigrant hunting for clues to American politics and the radical hunting for information for their arguments.

Police presence has a chilling effect on freedom of thought and freedom of action, as, of course, it is meant to have, but in the street, at the bar or the broken in house or where shabby accounting practices prosper, but not, I would go so far as to say never, in a library.

General

Agency

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Beltane                                                                     Early Growth Moon

A sunny afternoon, a thundery morning.  Snow this evening?  No.  Just kidding.  I think.

Anyhow we’re in the midst of a high humidity moment, again.  65 dewpoint and 78.  Not the end of the world, but this is after all, just May 18.

Went to a Hennepin County Library presentation on how to pick a literary agent.  It was actively bad.  The woman, whose name I will not reveal to protect the innocent, gave as her qualification for making the presentation her failure as a literary agent.  There you are.

Unfortunately I arrived a half-hour late and had to sneak into a spot where I couldn’t leave gracefully.  This is Minnesota.  So, I endured.  I had no way of knowing in advance that she would be terrible; it was a Loft sponsored event and I thought it might give me another slant on the whole agent side of publishing.  Sigh.

This is the second time this week I’ve gotten times bollixed up.  The first time we went to the American Swedish Institute and got there around 10:45.  When I tried to buy a ticket for the Sami show, the lady said, “The museum doesn’t open until noon.”  “Oh,” I said, “That wasn’t clear on your website.”  Yes it was she said.  Then, I thought it was them.

Two times and I’m the connecting link; I have to look at how carefully I look.  Hmmm…

Cinema and Television, Poetry, Weather +Climate

The Howdydoody Season: Winterspringsummerfall

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Beltane                                                                          Early Growth Moon

In a long ago time I took a group of youngsters from Brooklyn Center United Methodist Church on an outing.  Wherever it was we ended up, there was a beanbag toss game that featured Howdydoody characters.  The kids, as kids always do, said, “What’s that?”  And I, as unsuspecting aging adults always do, said, “Why, that’s Howdydoody.”  The blank stares gave me my first frisson of growing old though I was only 27 at the time.

On this now very outdated program there was a character whose name describes for me the season we’ve been passing through since, oh, March or so:  Winterspringsummerfall.

 

This is not a new phenomenon, though, as James Russell Lowell’s poem shows:

Under the Willows [May is a pious fraud of the almanac]

by James Russell Lowell

May is a pious fraud of the almanac,
A ghastly parody of real Spring
Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind;
Or if, o'er-confident, she trust the date,
And, with her handful of anemones,
Herself as shivery, steal into the sun,
The season need but turn his hourglass round,
And Winter suddenly, like crazy Lear,
Reels back, and brings the dead May in his arms,
Her budding breasts and wan dislustred front
With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard
All overblown. Then, warmly walled with books,
While my wood-fire supplies the sun's defect,
Whispering old forest-sagas in its dreams,
I take my May down from the happy shelf
Where perch the world's rare song-birds in a row,
Waiting my choice to open with full breast,
And beg an alms of springtime, ne'er denied
Indoors by vernal Chaucer, whose fresh woods
Throb thick with merle and mavis all the year.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22956?utm_source=PAD%3A+Spring+Song+by+Sherwood+Anderson&utm_campaign=poemaday_051813&utm_medium=email#sthash.6TuB0x7D.dpuf