Monthly Archives: September 2013

Art and Culture, MOOCS, Poetry

A Stein Is Not A Tankard

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Fall                                                                          Harvest Moon

Working with the poetry of Gertrude Stein.  Tough stuff.  She does break.  Through the usual patterns.  And forces a new way viewing seeing connecting word thing thing to word or not.  Word to word.  Forcing nouns to squiggle out of their links, forcing them to talk to each other like, well, like California girls talking to each other, like.

[Karel van Mander III man drinking beer from a tankard   1630-1670 (work pd.)]

Close to impenetrable, at least for the lone reader.  In collective reading with a guide like Al Fireis her work can jump, come alive though whether it makes sense.  Not supposed to make sense, I guess.  To make word. Yes. Words to words.  A world of words, a languaged world still or as always unreachable by sense so that world is nonsense.  Only words adhere to words within which we find ourselves worded and sentenced to life without sense.  Amen.

 

Politics, Weather +Climate

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” -Bob Dylan

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Fall                                                                                   Harvest Moon

“Earth in warmest period in 1,400 years, global climate panel says.”  NPR Updraft blog

“President Obama spoke in the White House briefing room on Monday evening, and castigated House Republicans for failing to perform one of the most basic functions by not providing money for the government.”   NYT

“Markets Slide Worldwide Amid U.S. Budget Battle”  NYT

 

Dogs

Yawn.

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Fall                                                                   Harvest Moon

We’ve had at least two break-ins here over the last week or so.  Both during the day.

So when the dogs began barking this morning at 5:00 a.m. (5:00 a.m.!), we both wondered.  Then we listened.  No.  Gertie had her excited bark, not her stay away or I will lacerate you bark/growl.

All three went out.  All three came back in.  And started up again at 5:30 a.m. (5:30 a.m.!)  The two big dogs, Vega and Rigel, stayed out and Gertie came into our room.  This happens rarely and it’s never clear what stimulates them.  Presumably some animal noise. One we can’t hear.

This meant both of us have been a bit draggy today, sleep deprived even after naps.

Art and Culture, Friends

Threads

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Fall                                                                          Harvest Moon

Breakfast at Keys.  In Spring Lake Park.  Mark (soon t0 be Mario again) Odegard and I discussed the Hack Factory, which sounds very cool.  The Twin Cities manifestation of the Geekworld maker movement.  We also talked about Bruce Dayton and his astonishing collection of art–in his home.  Plus the Matisse prints hung at the Marsh.  Ode saw both on Saturday.  He and Elizabeth are getting cranked up for four months in California, house sitting in the mountains and tending 10 chickens.

Casual time with friends is not so easy to accomplish when living in the ex-burbs and I look forward each opportunity.  I’ll see Tom Byfield this Thursday for lunch before the lecture for Audacious Eye, Japanese material part of an entire collection recently donated to the MIA.   Next week Allison Thiel at the Walker.

These threads of connection constitute a significant part of the living matter out of which the weave of our lives forms its fabric.

General

dictionary of obscure sorrows

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dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

liberosis

n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life before you reach the end zone, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

midsummer

n. a feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds you of the coming snow.

 

nighthawk

n. a recurring thought that only seems to strike you late at night—an overdue task, a nagging guilt, a looming and shapeless future—that circles high overhead during the day, that pecks at the back of your mind while you try to sleep, that you can successfully ignore for weeks, only to feel its presence hovering outside the window, waiting for you to finish your coffee, passing the time by quietly building a nest.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Our Land and Home, Writing

Yet Another Late Learning

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Fall                                                                        Harvest Moon

Another late lesson.  Or, perhaps better, a lesson only incompletely grasped, now more fully understood.

Learning, difficult learning, excites me and keeps me motivated.  But.  The brain only has so much patience for stuffing new things in before it tires, eyes glaze over and a slight headache develops.  At least for me.

(Peasants harvesting crops, by Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel)

Over this growing season I’ve discovered that taking a work outside break, a work with my hands or my back break, releases the tension and I can come back to my work refreshed.  I have also found that I enjoy the work outside much more when I understand its value in the total rhythm of my day.  So there’s a virtuous circle here.  Work hard at the desk, then get up and accomplish something manual garden work or changing light bulbs or organizing the garage.

 

Garden

The Garden Nears the End

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Fall                                                                               Harvest Moon

Another half gallon or so of red and golden raspberries, the last carrots, the last greens, most of the last beets.  A few tomatoes, mostly yellow and a pepper.  The raspberries keep going, producing new berries faster than I pick them.  The leeks have thickened up and are ready for making into chicken pot pies when I pull them in October.

The sky has that fresh, rain washed look, bright and filled with sun.  Golden and red flecks have begun to show up.  The birch, the euonymus have begun to turn.  The Norwegian maple across the street lit up a week ago.

Our old harvesting baskets, woven reed from Vietnam, have worn out and gotten lost so we bought some garden hods, a U-shape of thick green 1/2″ mesh with a wooden handle and two wooden ends.  This shape and configuration makes it easy to hose off the vegetable.  That’s handy for root crops like beets, carrots and leeks.   It worked as advertised and will see many more harvest seasons.

Great Wheel

Michaelmas

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Fall                                                                           Harvest Moon

Michaelmas is here, the springtime of the soul.  This is a new entry for the Great Wheel series and begins time with the four quarter days of the British old calendar (see information from Historic UK below*).

(delacroix eugene  st. michael defeats the devil)

 

These quarter day are close to the equinox and solstice days, following the actual occurrence by a few days and having the advantage of a fixed date on the calendar for festivals and other events rather than relying on variable astronomical conditions.

Our Supreme Court begins its new term on October 1st and the government fiscal calendar restarts then, too, a shadow of this tradition well in place at the time of the American Revolution.  If you read books that relate matters of witchcraft, they will sometimes refer to these quarter days and/or the Catholic holidays for the cross-quarter days.  That is, Lughnasa, August 1, for example, was Lamas, a mass for the first loaves of bread made from the new harvest.

I love the imagery recounted below about Lucifer expelled from heaven and landing on a blackberry bush.  Of course, the implication is that it was the Archangel Michael who booted him out.

By now, a full week after the fall equinox or Mabon, there are already 21 more minutes of darkness than light.

(raphael-st-michael-and-the-dragon)

*”There are traditionally four “quarter days” in a year (Lady Day (25th March), Midsummer (24th June), Michaelmas (29th September) and Christmas (25th December)). They are spaced three months apart, on religious festivals, usually close to the solstices or equinoxes. They were the four dates on which servants were hired, rents due or leases begun. It used to be said that harvest had to be completed by Michaelmas, almost like the marking of the end of the productive season and the beginning of the new cycle of farming. It was the time at which new servants were hired or land was exchanged and debts were paid. This is how it came to be for Michaelmas to be the time for electing magistrates and also the beginning of legal and university terms.”

“St Michael is one of the principal angelic warriors, protector against the dark of the night and the Archangel who fought against Satan and his evil angels. As Michaelmas is the time that the darker nights and colder days begin – the edge into winter – the celebration of Michaelmas is associated with encouraging protection during these dark months. It was believed that negative forces were stronger in darkness and so families would require stronger defences during the later months of the year.”

“In British folklore, Old Michaelmas Day, 10th October, is the last day that blackberries should be picked. It is said that on this day, when Lucifer was expelled from Heaven, he fell from the skies, straight onto a blackberry bush. He then cursed the fruit, scorched them with his fiery breath, spat and stamped on them and made them unfit for consumption! And so the Irish proverb goes:

“On Michaelmas Day the devil puts his foot on blackberries”.  Historic UK

Anoka County, Great Work, Science, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

A Riff on Rain That Got Away From Me

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Fall                                                                    Harvest Moon

Rain.  Creates a hole up in the burrow and sleep, slowdown sort of feeling.  We went out for a small lunch, took a nap.  Business meeting in the morning, partly dividing up money from the recent stock surge.

The soil here in the Great Anoka Sand Plain (a former river bank for the Mississippi as it detoured around the Grantsburg Lobe of the Wisconsin Glaciation) allows rain water a clear path to aquifers beneath it, including one from which we get our water.  Not great for gardening unless there happened to be a peat bog atop the sand like the Fields Truck Farm that surrounds our development.

So, there’s a trade off.  Good water resources for tillable soil.  The small crop vegetable grower and orchadist, however, can amend the soil with organic matter and top soil. We’ve done that.

The aquifer from which we get our water, the Franconian Ironton-Galesville, (see pic) underlies much of eastern Minnesota, much of Wisconsin, some of Michigan, Illinois and Indiana is hydrologically connected to Lake Superior as you can see by the map on the right.

In case you think the olden days have no impact now, you might consider aquifers.  The Franconian Ironton-Galesville aquifer came into existence during the middle Cambrian period of the Paleozoic Era, beginning some 540 million years ago and continuing to about 485 million years ago.  The water in this aquifer circulates around and among the area under all these states, providing the water from municipal wells throughout the region get the bulk of their water.

Here’s another matter to consider.  Water cycles up and down, into the earth then up to the sky and back to the earth, sometimes ending up in aquifers and sometimes in lakes and oceans and rivers and streams and ponds and lakes.  This material from the Coon Creek Watershed District interests me.

“The ultimate source feeding groundwater is precipitation. Actual
aquifer recharge rates are not well quantified within the watershed
which leads to uncertainty in assessing sustainable withdraws.
Over appropriation is the result of removing water at a rate and or
volume faster than the aquifer can supply. In cases where a water
source takes 100 of years to recharge, appropriations are an
irreversible withdrawal.”
An important thing to note here is that in cases of drought, as now, there is no recharge possible.  That means that any climate change induced reductions in rain fall directly impact our long term capacity to draw our water needs from these ancient sources of water supply.

 

Politics
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Fall                                                                       Harvest Moon

from Mother Jones

“The Republican Party is bending its entire will, staking its very soul, fighting to its last breath, in service of a crusade to make sure that the working poor don’t have access to affordable health care. I just thought I’d mention that in plain language, since it seems to get lost in the fog fairly often. But that’s it. That’s what’s happening. They have been driven mad by the thought that rich people will see their taxes go up slightly in order to help non-rich people get decent access to medical care.”