Monthly Archives: October 2013

Aging, Asia, Friends, Latin, MOOCS

TGIF

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                     New (Samhain) Moon

Rain washing away the drought, ushering in cooler, more fall like weather.  Gray skies and a general chill in the air.  Familiar to anyone from a temperate latitude.  I like it.

Busy day today.  Up early and out in the garden in the cool before dawn, working with my hands spreading fertilizer, raking it in to the top couple of inches of soil.  Back inside to write my 2nd essay for ModPo, this on a William Carlos Williams poem, identifying its imagist qualities.  After that, a nap.

Greg and I took my creaky Latin back onto the track.  I pumped the handle hard, but the little car moved pretty slow.  We set some goals per two week period, 60 verses per through next May.  If I can go faster, I will.

Immediately after Latin over to Kyoto Sushi, an all you can eat Japanese restaurant in Maple Grove just off Weaver Lake Road.  Bill and I had lunch and he passed some bio-till to me along with some reading material.  As old guys sometimes do, we also discussed hearing aids.

Back home for a second nap.  Back up and two lectures on Emerson, Self-Reliance and Experience.  Emerson as a proto-Nietzsche and Baudelaire influence as well as a post-Kantian precursor to the modernist critiques of the early twentieth century.  Whew.  That confused me, too.  Basically, he emphasizes active personal experience, moving forward into the future, letting the past be the past and your self be its Self.

Workout.  OK. Time for TV.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

The Universe At Work

1 Comment

Fall                                                                      New (Samhain) Moon

Lunch with Bill Schmidt.  Bill says “the universe works” and means in part by that that problems have solutions even if they’re not evident through the usual channels.  His working example is his own experience with a milking herd for which he was responsible.

The herd came down with pseudomonas.  As he said, bad news.  The Wisconsin state vet advised him to kill the herd and start over.  No, he thought to himself, someone out there knows the answer.  So he kept himself open to an answer as he worked the land in Door County.  It came through a soil tester who knew a guy who might know something.

Sure enough, this person had a solution that involved colostrum.  Mammals produce colostrum in late pregnancy.  It is a milk that contains antibodies to protect the infant animal against disease.  It saved his herd.

The larger lesson, Bill believes, is that we need to keep ourselves in a constant state of openness for answers, for new information, for ways of thinking that might seem strange, yet have real value.  He practices this in his daily life.

 

Garden

Broadcast News

Leave a comment

Fall                                                             New (Samhain) Moon

Out this morning early, before the rains come, laying down broadcast in the remaining vegetable beds.  Now all but the leeks, raspberries, strawberries and herb spiral have fertilizer already at work, nourishing the soil critters and spreading into the upper soil layers.  Those remaining are still active beds and will remain so until a heavy frost.  Then, I’ll cut the raspberry canes to the ground, pull the leeks for potpies and Kate will finish the herb spiral.  The strawberry plants will die back and I’ll be able to get the fertilizer into the top soil.

Planting garlic will finish the gardening season.  We still have fertilizer to lay down in the orchard, more ambitious undertaking as I said earlier this week, but I’m sure we’ll get it done in the next few days.  After that the bulbs go in the ground and with the exception of closing up the bee hive, we’ll be set for winter.  Bring it on.

Art and Culture, Asia, Friends

The Clark Collection

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                     Harvest Moon

Tom Byfield and I had lunch at D’Amico’s.  He brought two pounds of bees wax from also former docent, Glenn Keitel.  Glenn took up bronze casting just to see what it was like. Did a piece and decided he knew.  So, I got the wax intended to be lost.  Thanks, Glenn and Tom.

After the lunch, a lecture by Andreas Mark, the new curator for Korea and Japan.  (Shibata Zeshin, 1807–1891  Detail from a screen, the four pastimes)  This will be a show with a lot to see.  Andreas, a funny guy, has arranged the show chronologically, starting with an 8th century piece that had fire in it, but just how it was used, “Don’t ask me.” he said. The Clark collection was put together by Bill Clark, a leader in the field of artificial insemination of cattle and who, according to Mark, was accused of collecting mostly images of bulls.

Well, not so.  There are over 1000 objects in the collection, formerly housed in Hanford, California, and the ones I’ve seen are very high quality.

Japan’s artistic tradition has a substantial Chinese influence, but the Japanese found a way to make Chinese style their own.  That will be a major theme of this show and one with quality objects to tell the story.  We are lucky to have the Clark collection objects here in Minneapolis and I look forward to seeing more of them as time goes by.

 

 

Art and Culture, Friends, Weather +Climate

Days of Rain

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                           Harvest Moon

Looking forward to the lecture on Audacious Eye, the upcoming Japanese exhibition at the MIA.  Tom Byfield and I have lunch plans before the lecture.

Asian art continues to be a passion for me, so this exhibit, which showcases pieces from a large collection donated to the MIA, is a great opportunity to learn more about Japan.

Rain over the next few days allows me a chance to focus on the MOOCs and Loki’s Children.  Sunday looks like the next good gardening day.

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with the startup of Ovid tomorrow.  Gotta think about how much it means to me.

General
Aside Leave a comment

Fall                                                                       Harvest Moon

Thunderstorms tonight.  Rigel is back in the mud room snugged up against the door to the garage.  Gertie is in our bedroom.  Only Vega rides out the thunder with equanimity.  The fertilizer that got broadcast today got a good watering in.

September was 4.5 degrees above average.  The first couple of days of October have been more like summer.  That’s about to change with the possibility of snow up north tomorrow morning.  Even at that there is still no frost forecast.

 

Family, Garden, Humanities

Gotta Get Back to the Garden

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                          Harvest Moon

A full day with the garden, spreading fertilizer, working it into the soil, mulching the beds. Also pulled out the tomatoes, ground cherries and peppers while Kate removed the cucumbers, hot peppers and marigolds.  The compost pile looks colorful.

As I worked, I wondered about the significance of our garden for our lives, for the questions around reimagining faith.  At one level it feels like aesthetic statement.  A claim about the beauty of productive land and its products.  At another it embodies our relationship as a joint work, a family project that yields food and time together.  Going against the grain of the modern emphasis on surface and the phenomenal it places us in touch with the under ground, the chthonic and its rich resources.  Too, it puts the natural world into our lives, integrates our life with the seasonal rhythms.  This goes against the modern emphasis on the new and making things new.  Growing food goes back 10,000 years in human history and eating from plants back to the first proto-human.

I wondered today if the post-modern might be a more eclectic era, a time with a willingness to look back into the human past and ahead into the human future with no need for the ideology of reason, fragmentation, the new, yet not being afraid to acknowledge the fruits of scientific reasoning, manufacturing, globalization.  Just putzing as I raked.

Garden, Travel

Plato

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                    Harvest Moon

Kate and I drove out to Plato, Minnesota today.  Picked up broadcast fertilizer for both the vegetable garden and the orchard, plus the concentrated liquids for sprays and drenches. The broadcast fertilizer goes down now, worked into the soil.  Tomorrow.  The rest will be next year, including the nitrogen in the vegetable garden.  Different vegetables, different sorts of nitrogen.

Luke has a building up on the concrete slab Bill and I saw when we were out there in June.  He’s running a small business right now from a crumbling concrete block building. It’s stacked full of barrels and bins, weights and mixing apparatus.  A bare bones operation.  He mails all over the U.S. from Plato.

They missed a shot there in Plato.  Should have Aristotle Avenue, Diogenes Boulevard, Zeno and Anaxamander and Thales Streets.  But no.  Main Street.  2nd. 3rd. Coulda been good.

The fields of corn are dry, most not harvested though there was a cleared field or two.  Orange and green in the landscape.  There were, too, shallow lakes with wind rippled water, a bright deep blue, one with an egret pointing toward the west, white on blue, beautiful.

It takes an hour plus to get to Plato from Andover, a journey from the northern ex-burbs to the far south-western boundary of the metro area.  Each time I hop in the car, drive to someplace like Plato to pick up something, I remember how far away Indianapolis was from Alexandria.  Less than 60 miles.  Planning involved.  Rarely if never done.  Now, to pick up some fertilizer we get in the car and drive further than a trip to Indianapolis.  Because, you see, it’s all part of our area.  Our metropolis.  Our urbanized region.  Strange.

Politics, US History

It’s Just Not Exactly Clear

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                       Harvest Moon

What the?

Politics has been a dominant thread in the fabric of my life.  If the fabric of my life were, say a tartan plaid, the bright red threads would form some of the whole blocks.  Political awareness for me surfaces for the first time during the Stevenson/Eisenhower election in 1952, the long night of November 4th and the early morning of November 5th to be exact.  That night my father and I sat up watching the flickering black and white screen of our still very new television as the votes came in from across the nation.

We, I followed my father’s preference here, assured that it was the best one, were Stevenson supporters.  It was not the last night my heart would beat fast as votes overwhelmed hope, but it was the first.  What I remember most is the television screen and staying up very late as sober voiced men reported votes “as they came in.”  And staying up late with my dad.  I was 5.

Given the strength of this memory I’m sure somewhere prior to this I’d become aware of politics.  As a newspaper editor, Dad had an important community role, sort of judge and teacher, sorting out candidates for endorsement and informing the town of what they all stood for plus the bare mechanics of the electoral process.

All this is to say that I consider myself an informed participant/observer of the political scene, locally, nationally and internationally.  Politics in all forms still fascinate me, 61 years later, and I’ve only recently (within the year) stepped away from an active role.

And I don’t get it.  I don’t get the train wreck happening in Washington right now.  Sure, I understood ideological purity and intransigence, I’m a card carrying 1960’s radical.  What I don’t get is that these guys are on the inside, part of the system, elected to Congress.  In that role ideological purity and intransigence have limits.  That’s what a legislature is for, the mediation of public disagreement.  The mediation.  Not the my way or no way politics of the Republican far right.

And I don’t get it.  The climate change deniers.  The science piling up and up and up and up.  A long time ago.  The evidence all pointing in the same direction: anthropogenic.

In both instances the far right remind me of Thelma and Louise, only in this case it would be pomade hair underneath those scarves and the scarves would be made from U.S. flag material and the top down convertible they’re driving would be an October, 1929 Nash.  There it goes, over the cliff.