Monthly Archives: June 2013

Family, Woolly Mammoths

Mark of Arabia

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Beltane                                                                         Solstice Moon

The desert rambler has returned to visit.  Mark showed up at the backdoor this afternoon.
He went with me to the Woolly meeting at Bill Schmidt’s apartment.  Bill had a delicious meal and a very thoughtful video called Griefwalker. Stephen Jenkinson is a man who has chosen to live into death rather than away from it and has discovered great riches in the process.  Check out his website if that sort of living interests you.

(Mark two years ago)

Bill, Stefan, Mark, Warren, Frank, Scott, Mark Ellis and I were there.  Mark O. had a 60 mph car accident this last Friday, thankfully door to door rather than head to head, but scary with considerable to his car.  He reports some fears about driving now, understandable.  Warren’s making some moves on their various houses, of which they seem to have at least 2 too many and maybe 3.  Frank’s picking out burial plots.  Scott’s helping a friend deal with a schizophrenic relative who has ended up in a locked unit for her safety.  Stefan has begun to recognize that the racing, cramming pace of his life has begun to overtake him.  I talked about the shoulder pain and the p.t.

The Woolly meeting is here next time and, barring rain, we plan to make good use of the fire pit.

 

 

General

Quotes continued

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“Great doubts
deep wisdom…
Small doubts
little wisdom.”
— Chinese Proverb
“There are books so alive that you’re always afraid
that while you weren’t reading,
the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river;
while you went on living, it went on living too,
and like a river moved on and moved away.
No one has stepped twice into the same river.
But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?”
— Marina Tsvetaeva
“There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether are learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.”
— Robert Graves
“To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).”
— Robert Graves
“WHEN a dream is born in you
With a sudden clamorous pain,
When you know the dream is true
And lovely, with no flaw nor strain,
O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.”
— Robert Graves
“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
— Jean Paul Sartre
“Hell is other people.”
— Jean Paul Sartre
“Human life begins on the far side of despair.”
— Jean Paul Sartre
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”
— Samuel Beckett
“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?”
— Albert Einstein
“As punishment for my contempt for authority, Fate has made me an authority myself.”
— Albert Einstein
“As far as the laws of mathematics
Refer to reality,
They are not certain;
As far as they are certain,
They do not refer to reality.”
— Albert Einstein
“A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy.”
— Albert Einstein
“A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it.”
— Albert Einstein
“All explorers are seeking something they have lost. It is seldom that they find it, and more seldom still that the attainment brings them greater happiness than the quest.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
“All things are in the universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us: and in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.”
— Giordano Bruno
General

Readiness Drills

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Beltane                                                                               Solstice Moon

Getting ready for grandkids, for Mark.  Cleaning up detritus from other cleaning efforts left partly accomplished.  Doing garden work.  Lois, housecleaner, comes on Wednesday, the kids on Thursday.  I find this kind of work quickly saps my energy though I’m not sure why.  I spent about two hours at it today and feel worn out.

(Ruth)

I have opened up file drawer space in the study which will allow me to organize my writing folders more easily.  In order to do this I put Europe, America and Africa into file boxes, still accessible, but not immediately.  I left the Asian art files in the top file drawer, where they have been since I put the file cabinet in because I intend to continue my immersion in Asian art.

The mess that gathered as I tried to eliminate and reorganize material in January is now gone.  There are still items to move and refile, but they are in their own places for the moment.

Woollies tonight.  Workout this afternoon.  Probably more cleaning tomorrow before dentist and p.t.

(Jon, Gabe and me)

I’ve learned that devoting a couple of days to this kind of stuff every once in a while seems preferable to doing it all the time.  At least for me.

Art and Culture, Memories, Minnesota, Music

Destination Twin Cities

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Beltane                                                                               Solstice Moon

 

Butch Thompson is an elegant guy who can really get down.  “Two Minnesota artists — celebrated choreographer Sarah LaRose-Holland and jazz pianist Butch Thompson — have collaborated to present “Destination Twin Cities,” an impressionistic, time-traveling exploration of neighborhoods, landmarks, people and places that define urban life in Minnesota. Who were we, and who are we today?”

Butch played piano and one very soulful clarinet piece and Sarah LaRose-Holland’s dance troupe, Kinetic Evolutions, gave movement to a nostalgic look back at many Twin Cities’ notable places from the Lexington Restaurant to the Hennepin Avenue Strip.  The latter roughly located where Block E is now.  It was a place full of dives that provided steady work for many Minnesota jazz musicians.

Slides of Twin Cities past:  the Wabasha Caves, street cars, winter scenes in neighborhoods, the Stone Arch Bridge, the West Bank accompanied the music and dance projected on the brick wall of the former Guthrie Lab space, 700 N. 1st Street.

Butch’s music was sad, cheery, bouncy, wistful and cool.  The choreography had some fine moments, especially two two person sets, one ironic and intentionally so I imagine, paired a fine African-American dancer, Kasono Mawanza, with a superb Chinese dancer, Jenny Sung, moving through an evening at the haunt of the white power elite, the Lexington while the second featured a mother and daughter walking on Selby Avenue.  The daughter was 5 years old, maybe 6 and kept right up with the adult who could have been her real mother.  The Lexington piece was elegant and smooth, all careful sinuousity while the Selby Avenue work had improvisation and the kind of charm only a young performer can bring to the stage.

 

 

Latin, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Getting Good

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Beltane                                                                        Solstice Moon

I’ve let the creative writing business slide for a couple of weeks, just got out of the rhythm with garden and other matters.  That Loft class starts in three weeks and I want to get further along in my revision before then.

Been reading information about learning plateaus, as I wrote below and I’m certainly on a plateau in both the writing and the Latin right now.  Just plugging away.  Read a piece drawing on work in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that suggested embracing the struggle, the sameness, the lack of progress or even the regression.  Makes sense to me.  When I can remember it.

It’s easy for me to fall into the despair trap.  The one where lack of progress proves lack of talent, lack of smarts, lack.  I fell into it for several years with the writing.  I had this mindset, either you’re doing it or you’re not.  Obviously not true.  Learning anything takes time, often lots of time.  That 10,000 hours stuff, I don’t know about that, but it does take a long time to get good at anything.

(Dreamer of Dreams, Edmund Dulac)

 

Garden, Great Wheel, Our Land and Home

Heat

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Beltane                                                                              Solstice Moon

All beds but one mulched and that one I want to plant some carrots in tomorrow or Sunday.  Planted another row of carrots in the large raised bed today.  Put down jubilate and transplant water on the carrot seeds and on the leeks.  Having the heat is good, the tomatoes, peppers and egg plants need it.  Now this isn’t much heat, I know, if you’re reading this in, say, Riyadh or Singapore, but still it counts here.

The growing season has begun to rock on.  I thinned some early beets and onions today, the strawberries have fruit and all the orchard trees have fruit, too.  Kate’s already given away rhubarb and lilacs, plus tomato marmalade from crops awhile ago.

In just one week the sun will hit it’s peak height here in the northern hemisphere:  “The summer solstice occurs when the tilt of a planet’s semi-axis, in either the northern or the southern hemisphere, is most inclined toward the star (sun) that it orbits. Earth’s maximum axial tilt toward the sun is 23° 26′. This happens twice each year, at which times the sun reaches its highest position in the sky as seen from the north or the south pole.”(Tauʻolunga)

After that, as the maximal tilt gives way, slowly, the days grow shorter, the dark begins to dominate and I move into my favorite half of the year, the part headed toward the winter solstice.  Though I love the growing season, it doesn’t feed me in the same way the gradual darkening and cold does.

It’s great right now though, heat for the plants, which will, ironically, feed me when the dark season comes.

GeekWorld, Great Work

It’s the Bomb!

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Beltane                                                                           Solstice Moon

Friend and Woolly Tom Crane read my reference to the nuclear option (pulling pants down) in a previous post and reflected:  “Some folks in the fifties saw the results firsthand [of the nuclear option] and got up from the table saying “we just can’t do this, cause look what we are doing:  we could destroy the planet in just an hour or two!”

See this clip from a test of the first H-bomb.

He then went on to observe that we can’t go somewhere, say the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands, and watch the degradation of the atmosphere by carbon pollution or the over fishing of the oceans or consumption of fresh water at a rate the skies cannot replenish.  If we could, he wondered, might we come to the same conclusion, that this, too, is madness?

And could we, also, become aware of our co-creative powers in that very destruction as we switch on the air conditioner, drive to the store for a loaf of bread or eat cod?  An intriguing and thoughtful idea.

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Plateaus

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Beltane                                                                            Solstice Moon

Up early.  Thank you, noisy dogs.  Breakfast, read paper then out to the apple trees for more bagging.  On two of our trees, the honeycrisp and the northerly tree (whose variety name I can’t recall), we have well over 200 apples, closer to 250.

( a honeycrisp last year)

The third tree (whose name I can’t recall either right now) has ten.  Not sure what happened to it.  It only blossomed on the most westerly branches and then sparsely.  Like the other two it had leaf rollers active early, but the leaves otherwise look healthy and the leaf rollers don’t explain, at least I don’t think they do, the minimal blooms and even smaller fruit set.  Anyhow the apples have all got bags and within, roughly, the best time.  Best time, when they’re larger than a pea, got rained on and on and on, but at the first dry moment, we’re done.

Also laid down leaf mulch in the vegetable garden, at least until the sun got high in the sky and my skin began to give off a faint burnt odor.  Back at that one tomorrow morning.  At that point the time critical chores for the garden will be done.  That will mean I can adopt my writing in the am and translating in the pm schedule again.  I’m ready.

Latin last time was hard.  I missed several obvious elements in my translation and in general felt like a schlub.  My first reaction in those instances is to wonder if this is the time to throw in the towel.  Have I gone as far as it’s reasonable to have gone.  And besides it costs a lot to have a tutor, maybe if I do gone on, I should just do it on my own.  If I haven’t gotten this stuff by now,  what makes me think I’ll ever get it?  You know the drill.

(Justus.  transferred to I.S. 318 at age 10.  Already had a 2000+ rating.  Is now the youngest African-American national master ever.)

Then I watched Brooklyncastle.  This remarkable movie, available for instant streaming on Netflix, details a year and a half in I.S. 318, a public junior high in the NYC school system.  Here’s a quick plot summary from IMDB:

“Brooklyn Castle is a documentary about I.S. 318 – an inner-city school where more than 65 percent of students are from homes with incomes below the federal poverty level – that also happens to have the best, most winning junior high school chess team in the country. (If Albert Einstein, who was rated 1800, were to join the team, he’d only rank fifth best). Chess has transformed the school from one cited in 2003 as a “school in need of improvement” to one of New York City’s best. But a series of recession-driven pubic school budget cuts now threaten to undermine those hard-won successes.”

One of the chess coaches makes a remark about learning chess to the effect that many students just learn and learn and learn, don’t do well, then their knowledge jumps up a notch.  It’s that sudden leap in learning, up to another plateau, that I recognized from Latin education so far.  Which means that I’m slogging right now in the swamp between plateaus, the dense plant life and boggy water pulling me down, but what I need to know is keep at it, just keep at it.  Then, I’ll jump to the next plateau, which will be a whole new swamp, perhaps a Grand Marais as we might say in Minnesota.  But those kids taught me to pay attention to what I already know.

(Rochelle.  On her way to being the first African-American female Master)