Monthly Archives: October 2013

Literature

Reading

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Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Two novels in the last couple of weeks:  The Circle by Dave Eggers and Lookaway, Lookaway by Winton Barnhardt.  Both are of recent publication and different in content though not style.  I would call them novels of manners, a description of a world and how it works, how it influences lives and fates.  The Circle is a left-coast, uncanny Silicon Valley story which intends, I think, to show the hubris of technology companies as they reach for world changing ideas.  Lookaway, Lookaway is a Tom Wolfe type story line of Down East North Carolingians in the new south financial mecca of Charlotte.  It’s about three-quarters entertaining and one-quarter should have been edited out.

(Image from Guardian review)

Novels, as a great line from Tom Clancy noted, (thanks to Bill Schmidt) are different from real life.  They have to make sense.  In the Eggers book, which I enjoyed, young idealists, bright and ambitious, confuse their ideals of a transparent world, knowledge of the most intimate nature shared with all, with a positive reality instead of the Orwellian, faux-fascist society it would create.  A body check to technological hubris it helps us step back from the hype, the Steve Jobs spin, the Google glass view of the world and see that technology is only a tool, a tool like any other, and one that needs to be evaluated on the basis of its results and effect as well as its gee whiz cool factor.  A good read.

(NYT review image)

Lookaway, Lookaway probes the family of Duke Johnston and Jerene (Jarvis) Johnston, using a Game of Thrones one person, one chapter point of view.  This allows for a close in look at the characters chosen for a chapter’s focus, but, as other reviews have pointed out, some of the characters just aren’t worth that much treatment.  The first half of the book finds us at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill through the eyes of freshman Jerilyn Johnston, then back in Charlotte through the eyes of her mother, a steel magnolia sort, Jerene Johnston, and later the view point of Gaston Jarvis, famed author of a series of Civil War romances.

Barhhardt wrote a novel, the Bible, that I read about 30 years ago. It’s wonderful.  This one is less so, but still worth a read.

Art and Culture, Asia, Cooking, Family, Garden

Outdoors

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Fall                                                                              Samhain Moon

The mid-point of October and we’re almost done with gardening.  We broadcast under the cherry and plum trees today, removing the mulch, taking up the landscape cloth, laying down the fertilizer and spraying the biotill, then replacing the landscape cloth.  After the nap I helped Kate get the landscape cloth back down, then while she rejoined it with staples to the ground, I sprayed biotill on the vegetable garden beds and mulched all of them but the herb spiral.

(Persephone and Hades)

The raspberries, which I picked this morning, are still producing and the leeks await a cooking day when I will make chicken leek pot pies, next week probably.   The leek bed will get fertilized, sprayed and mulched when they are inside while cutting down the raspberry canes, then spraying and fertilizing has to wait until they quit bearing.

This was significant manual labor and we’re both in the weary phase.  A quiet evening leaf tea bowlahead.  Some Latin right now for me.

My new teaware came, a clay bamboo holder for my tea utensils, a new pitcher made of yixing clay with a white ceramic glaze inside and a rosewood tea scoop.  All of this from a shop in Vancouver that has excellent products, The Chinese Teashop.

Aging, Humanities, Latin, MOOCS, Third Phase, US History, World History

Anco Impari.

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Fall                                                               Samhain Moon
T. S. Eliot       Little Gidding V

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

The hurry of last week has receded and today is an outdoor day, raspberries and fertilizer. It’s chilly out there, but physical labor adds its own heat.

The end is in sight for both MOOCs, Modern/Post Modern with only two more weeks and ModPo with four.  Like the course I took last year on Greek Myth both of these have been excellent.  The interactive discussion forums and the video lectures in small, accessible chunks work well for the at home classroom.  The reading in all three has been challenging, definitely college and post-grad level material.  Did I mention that they’re free?

The Great Course’s cd and dvd classes, taught by professors of proven teaching ability, are excellent, too.  The lectures in these courses are longer and in more depth, but I have not found the spur to do the reading as I have in the MOOC’s.  That’s me, of course.  And, there is no interaction at all.  An advantage is that you can do them over any time frame and in multiple venues.  The MOOCs require a computer screen.  These are not free.

Though I am at heart an auto-didact and can develop my own reading plans, I appreciate these compressed experiences where an expert in a field alerts you to current issues and literature.  They’re a quicker way in to a broad foundation in a discipline and for an overview of what might have additional interest.

Over the years I’ve pursued in particular the history of ideas, ancient history:  Rome, Egypt, China, mythology, philosophy and literature.  In literature I’ve tended to focus on the classics and on the classical tradition.  These broad areas have fascinated me for a long time.  I plan to challenge myself over the fallow time with calculus.  Kate’s promised time as my tutor.

I suppose I could gamble or drink or run naked through the streets, but, hey.  Each to his own?  Right?

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Latin

The New Way

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Fall                                                                              Samhain Moon

Latin today, a good lesson.  I forgot basics, stumbled around, thought I had it when I didn’t.  So why keep banging my forehead against the solid wall of the Roman language?  There’s no reason, no necessity.  Just like the MOOC’s I’m taking are not necessary.

When Kate pressed me on taking two MOOC’s at once, I replied, “I never took less than 18-20 credits a quarter in college.  Graduated with way more credits than I needed.”  She looked at me. “You’re not in college anymore.”  There’s that.

In my defense I did set one aside, so I only took two instead of three.  That’s progress, right?

No, there’s something deeper going on here, I know that.  Learning keeps my mind vital, alert, attentive.  It helps me jump out of ruts into new territory.  I’ve always been curious what’s beyond the limits, the city limits, the college rules limit, the religious limits, the limits of the universe.  Liminal spaces are my favorite, places where two worlds intersect, a little blurry, mostly undefined.  In the past, the now distant past, I used to get there chemically, now books and movies and essays and thoughts and the shovel and the quiet mind and the open heart, they get me there instead.

I want to stand on the shore looking out, stand on the peak looking over the valleys, stand at the mouth of the cave looking in, then follow my gaze.  See what’s beyond safe ground. I hope I never lose that desire.  In fact, I hope I have it when I’m facing death, wondering what’s just beyond the safe ground of life itself.  But not, as my ENT doc said, for a long time.

Feelings

Old Friend

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Fall                                                                              Samhain Moon

You seem to be sinking into melancholy again.  No, I’m not.  Yes.  You are.

Oh.  Well.  October is often gray as my consciousness begins to mirror the sky.  It is in my way to miss the dimming of the lights arrival and not notice when it leaves.  Kate reminds me.  Then I feel heavy as if weights descended within from head to foot, slowly, taking attention and vitality with them as they slip down.

“Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to visit you again” has always seemed so apt. There is that strange feeling of comfort, of familiarity, as the mind’s interior collects, becomes heavier.  It is, almost always, a prelude to a period of heightened creativity, but there is the tunnel, sometimes long, sometimes short, that must be negotiated first.

That manhole cover is off and I’ve begun climbing down the ladder into the labyrinth.  I’ll need an Ariadne sometime soon.

 

Garden

Leaning Toward the Fallow Time

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Fall                                                                        Samhain Moon

Kate got several bales of hay (6) and pumpkins today at Green Barn, up near Isanti.  She saw Louis, who introduced us to his brother, Javier.  Javier has done a lot of work for us and will do more.  The hay will, next spring, go down as mulch over the landscape cloth around the fruit trees.  The seeds in the bales need to sprout and then die back before we can use it, otherwise we spread unwanted plants.

We’ll lift the landscape cloth when we broadcast fertilizer around the trees and spray them with biotill.  It will go back down to continue its function as a weed barrier.  Once we’ve finished this and I’ve sprayed and mulched the vegetable beds yet bare (with leaves from our trees), the produce gardens will be at rest.  With one exception.  The bed in which I plant next year’s garlic crop.

After that attention will turn to bulb planting in the perennial beds.  When that’s done, we’ll celebrate around a Samhain bonfire, welcoming the fallow time to our land and turn our work inside.  Like cleaning up and decluttering the garage.

That will be a big task because it entails dismantling our five stall dog feeding station, used when we had our maximum number of dogs, 7, 5 Irish Wolfhounds and 2 Whippets.

Quotes

And yet still more

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“Man can only endure a certain degree of unhappiness; what is beyond that either annihilates him or passes by him and leaves him apathetic.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

_Elective Affinities_ [1809]
“If thou follow thy star, thou canst not fail of a glorious haven.”
— Dante Alighieri 1265-1321, The Divine Comedy, Inferno XV, l.55
“The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts.
We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple
because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto of every
natural philosopher should be, “Seek simplicity and distrust it.”
— Alfred North Whitehead, _The Concept of Nature_
“Do not let too strong a light come into your bedroom. There are in a beauty a great many things which are enhanced by being seen only in a half-light.”
— Ovid (43 BC – 18 AD)
“It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are.”
— Orhan Pamuk (1952- )

 

Weather +Climate

Frosts, Light and Hard

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Fall                                                                  Samhain Moon

The mornings are darker.  The evenings, too.  The night has begun to shift its way toward noon, pushing in from the boundaries where it was held back by the angled earth. Perverse as it is, I’m glad.  The furnace is on and the house takes on that snug burrow feel common to the fallow season.  We’re all hobbits for the duration.  Bring me my second breakfast.

The weather news has frosts, light and hard, within the week.  26 on Tuesday.  Well, fine.  I put the garden away for the most part long ago.  A few apples are left on the tree, a few raspberries on the canes, the leeks.  That’s it.  Of course, there’s the broadcast fertilizer for the orchard, planting bulbs, spraying the biotill on orchard and vegetable garden, but that’s all doable.

Then, with Halloween/Samhain we begin the long holiseason where we humans light up the landscape with our fear of the sun’s forever absence.  We eat, light candles, string outdoor lights, give gifts, go to special seasonal choral and theatrical events, gather with family.  Really we’re gathering around the fire huddled up hoping this will not be the year when the sun leaves and chooses not to come back.  It always has but you never know.

 

Politics

Go Now, You’re No Longer Needed

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Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Translated into English the Latin Mass has closing words that always get me, “Go now, the Mass is ended.” They may have changed a bit since the last time I went, but it sounds like the bums rush.  We’re done; you can leave.

It came to mind when I read on the NYT’s site that the shutdown is over and the default avoided.  To the Republicans I say, “Go now, your term has ended.”  They inflicted real pain on the economy, looked like spoiled pre-schoolers or practicing alcoholics who want what they want and want it now and only burned through political capital for no achievement.  They do not deserve to sit in a deliberative body charged with solving our common problems, not creating them.

I read a very interesting NYT op ed piece on what the risk is of the shutdown strategy, Democracy After the Shutdown.  It threatens the social compact on which our government depends.  That’s a big deal.  Read the article and see if you agree with it.  I did.

Art and Culture, Poetry, Writing

Out There, Man

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Fall                                                               Samhain Moon

The beats.  for beatific.  A generation I have begun to feel more now, reading them in ModPo.  I never read them, ignored them as quaint, anachronistic for the rebellion, my rebellion, our rebellion, the 60’s.  Now looking back at them, imagining them as outriders on the buttoned up, nuclear overcast, post-war suburban build out to conformity culture in which I was young, now I can see.  And hear.  They inhabited a margin unimaginable from the center of Levittown, a world of China and tea with no oriental associations, a rootless, roving busload of wearers of black, makers of poetry, listeners to jazz, respecting no sexual or social conventions.  Out there, man.

(Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso in 1956)

Now.  Now I hear the Howl and have listened to Kerouac’s strangely charismatic voice, speaking through digital technology only barely coming to be in his own time.  These are not my people.  I am not of them.  But they are our people, our American outsiders.  Buoys on the shipping lanes of middle class culture warning out beyond here there be monsters.  My people are political.  The beats were not.  We used acid and mescaline and peyote, they turned to heroin.  They found their place in poetry and wandering and improvisation; we found ours in the street, organizing, fighting.  Different.  But the same.

(Carl Solomon, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at the Gotham Book Mart, New York City, 1977)

American outsider voices.  All amplified in that strange alien language spoken only where the commuters never ride.  Where the matron never serves tea.  Where the only hope is purity and clarity and the archetypal.  Never sullied by bills and jobs and diapers and cars breaking down.  Out there surfing the big breaks of idealism that crest upon the shore of America the Capitalist and America the Conformist.

(Train Station, by Bernice Sims)

I hear them now, speaking in their cadences at night in coffee houses, pounding small drums and shouting into the microphone about pain and angels and doomed love.