Daily Archives: October 10, 2013

Asia, Friends

In St. Paul

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Fall                                                                      Samhain Moon

Sheepshead.  I had some good cards tonight, but mostly not.  Made some hands, missed leaf tea bowlothers.  A streak here, but not one I’d prefer to continue.

(This Sung dynasty tea bowl is one of my favorite objects in the MIA’s collection.)

Came into St. Paul early and went over to the Tea Store on Cleveland.  It is near the theatre with Vina on one side and on the other the site of the place we rented videos when we lived on Edgcumbe Road.

I was in search of a tea spoon.  No, really.  I wanted a measure for the chinese tea so I can become more regular in the amounts of tea I use.  They had that.  I also bought some puer tea, tea formed into a cake and chipped off with a puer knife, then steeped.  Seemed interesting and it’s a type of tea I’ve not tried.  I also picked up some more white tea, which I’ve come to enjoy.

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It was fun being back in the Highland neighborhood, a place I enjoyed living.  A lot of interesting shops, a great grocery store.

Bill and I had supper at Pad Thai and shook our heads at the Tea Party.  We both find ideological blinders a poor way to run a political party and no way at all to run a government.

Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Expert or Master

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Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Moving fast this week.  Still working outside, in particular the orchard and broadcast fertilizer.  Two MOOCs presented a lot of reading.  Adorno and Horkheimer, Foucault x2, poems by poets who challenged modernism:  communists, harlem renaissance, Frost and the Formalists.  Finished up Loki in Scandinavian Mythology.  Assessing four essays for ModPo.  11 verses so far in Ovid.  Enough things to do, but not too many.

Been thinking about that learning curve graph I posted a couple of days ago.  It is, I suppose, a graph of mastery, a graph of, according to Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours of work.  Not sure about the time frame in hours.  Seems a bit facile to me.  By that measure I suppose I could say I’m a master reader, a master politician and maybe a master gardener. Probably a master student.  Still seems inadequate, both as a term and as a process.

(Edouard_Manet_-_The_Reader)

I like the graph better.  Steps.  Progress.  That makes sense to me.  Not hours. By that measure I would say I am an expert reader, perhaps an expert student.  So, I’ve become expert, not in a field or a craft, but in the tools of learning.  Worse things to focus on.