Daily Archives: October 19, 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?