Monthly Archives: November 2013

Writing

Missing, the final chapters

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Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

On, hopefully, the final lap with Missing. Lonnie and Stefan will pass on their comments this morning.  I’ll incorporate any changes necessary after this conversation and then give the manuscript to Quickproofers.  After Bob Klein finishes with it, I’ll incorporated changes from his work.  At that point it gets sent to agents.  If there are no bites through agents, then publishers.

Writing novels and selling them takes a long time. You have to see into the distance, keep your pace steady.  I’ve not been good at the business side of writing and now I’m going to be.  It’s past time.

Family, Politics

Collaborative, Getting Along

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Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Kate’s in Clear Lake, up Highway 10 toward St. Cloud, for a sewing day.  She goes once a month or so and sews with two, sometimes three other women.  This is a tradition as old as needle and thread I would guess.  These sessions offer a time for getting work done, for learning from others and being with each other, visible.

Women have made more opportunities in their lives like this than men have.  Child rearing, cooking, sewing and the keeping/making of a home have provided chances to share the load of what could be lonely work.  Men usually left the home for work, for hunting and left the woman home with the children.  Now that’s changed a lot, a whole lot, and in my lifetime, but the traditions of mutual support and aid still work.

Of these women, for example, Kate was a doctor, Carol a dentist.  Contemporary young women have joined in groups Stitch and Bitch and child care co-ops.  Women’s culture has tended more toward collaboration and this is a valuable trait women now bring to the work place.

Men have tended more towards competitive approaches, seeing other men as challenges rather than potential collaborators.  Who will bag the deer?  Catch the fish.  Bring home the money. Advance to the next position.  Win the game.

Yes, of course, there are men who collaborate and women who are competitive, and sometimes these are even the same person, perhaps competitive in one sphere of life and collaborative in another.

I don’t know what a macro look at these trends would reveal now.  As many women have entered the work place and left the full-time stay-at-home role, they are in cultures that emphasize competition and getting ahead rather than collaboration and getting along.

And, yes, there are work place gurus who try to coach folks into more collaboration and less mutual throat cutting, but this aspect of our overall culture will, I suspect, die hard.

Still, I’m hopeful that the collaborators and the getter alongers will eventually make in roads, creating more humane work places and homes.  That is, if global warming doesn’t make all so irritable than we can’t sustain attention long enough to change.

 

Latin, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses

Off the Plateau

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Samhain                                                         Thanksgiving Moon

It’s been a week since Greg recommended I get to the place where I can read the Latin and translate as I read.  This means doing what I’ve already done, looking up words, writing out a translation, but there is now another step.  I look only at the Latin and translate it without reference to Perseus (on the web) or even to my notes.  If I stumble, I go back to Perseus and the notes.  Then back to the Latin alone.  Only when I can look at the bare Latin and translate the sentence with no outside aides, can I feel finished.

I thought this would slow me down and at first it did.  As I grew used to doing it though, staying “in” the Latin, as Greg called this method, began to make things easier.  I began to to see the shape of sentences quicker, the subjects and objects popped out faster.  Verb tenses and noun/adjective/pronoun declensions are becoming more automatic.

Staying “in” the Latin is winching me up, slowly, from the long plateau I’ve inhabited.

Here’s an example: “Hac iter est superis ad magni tecta Tonantis
regalemque domum.”  This is a line from the story of Lycaon in the second large section of Metamorphoses, Book I.  Just looking at this line, with no aids, I will read it to Greg this way:  Hac, on this, est, is, superis iter, the exalted way, ad magni tecta, to the great temple, Tonantis, of Thundering Jupiter, regalemque domum, and his royal home.  So the translation reads:  On this is the exalted way to the great temple of Thundering Jupiter and his royal home.

(Lycaon wants to test the omniscience of Iupiter and serves him human meat.  Hermann Postumus, 1542)

It has taken literally years to get to this place and I’m not all the way there yet.  But I’m moving faster and better now.

 

Latin, MOOCS, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses

The Weight of the Inert

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Samhain                                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

I finished the fourth and last writing assignment for ModPo.  I’m attaching it because it was fun, a riff on the Chance poetics of John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Bernadette Mayer (pic).

Next week we finish up and my 3 months excursion into the modern and the post modern through Coursera will be at an end.  The gardening season has come to an end.  And Holiseason is just beginning.

Over the next weeks and months I plan to consolidate my learning both in poetry and the post modern.  As I’ve said before, I want to include these concepts in reimagining my faith.

BTW:  Some of you have expressed interest in the MOOCs.  Here are the two I’ve worked with and can recommend:  Coursera and EdX.

 

The Weight of the Inert

Version I

“5 Before the sea and the sky that hangs over all the lands and

was one of the faces of the whole of nature in the world,

I have spoken of the chaos, the amount of raw indigestaque

and nothing but an inert and heaped up in the weight of the same

not well joined the seeds of discord of things.

10, supplying light to the world, no one has as yet the Titan,

not renew the waxing moon horns,

or hanging in surrounding air

balanced by its own weight, or long arms

edge of the lands stretching out her arms;

15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

 

Version 2

5 and and which covers

One look in the whole world,

the said, the amount of raw

and only if the weight of the inert

things do not go well.

10 Nothing in the world,

neither growing Phoebe

or in the surrounding region

their own weights, and not long

15 and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.

 

Since I’m currently engaged in translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I performed the following operation. First, I copied a Latin section of Book I: 5-15 from Perseus, a classics aides website. I took that section and put it into google translate. I then went through the Latin and eliminated all words with the letter a and ran it again through google translator. The result is version 2.

I retained the first version here so you could see that the translation was far from smooth and contained some chance operations on its own. In that sense version 2 is more than 1 step away from the Latin version of number 1 since it introduces the still clunky results of the google translation algorithm into the altered text.

Version 2 surprised me. It makes almost as much sense, if not a bit more, than Version 1, not in the Latin, of course, but in the English machine translation.

I hear a surprised boy saying, “And, and which covers one look in the whole world.” Another voice, perhaps a chorus replies, “The said, the amount of raw and only if the weight of the inert.” Another, deeper voice, an adult male weary with experience says, “Things do not go well.”

The boy again, chastened now, “Nothing in the world, neither growing Phoebe or in the surrounding region…”

And finally a resonant female voice, mature and wise, “Their own weights, and not long and that the air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

All this on a stage bare except for the actors, a broken Greek column and a small tripod holding a basin in which a bright fire burns.

A fluxus moment, perhaps performed on an off-Broadway sidewalk, the stage improvised with concrete blocks and plywood.   The air is cold, midnight of the Winter Solstice, and a flier announcing the performance reads, “Saturnalian Words. The voice of Sol Invictus.”

This has a Harry Haller, magic theater resonance for me. The whole thing could be a performance in one of the side stages, feeding the Steppenwolf in all of us.

OK, I know I’ve gone pretty far afield with this, taking it from chance to dialogue and from dialogue to theater and then positioning the theater in Hesse’s imagined dramatic space. But that very journey speaks of seed text and deterministic method, that somehow flensing an ancient text, then using a very contemporary technology to alter it, can create haunting, yes, I’ll say it, meaning. Meaning created in that most artistic of ways, with the caesura as important as the content.

What did that one look over the whole world see? And why does a rejoinder to it reference the raw and the inert? The next line seems very apt in a Kafkaesque, Hesseian way: “Things do not go well.” How could they?

Finally the last two spoken lines speak of loss and seem to refer back to that one look over the whole world which saw what? “The air, land, sea, and there, and sky.”

Politics

Looking Ahead to 2014

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Samhain                                                          Thanksgiving Moon

When we reach the elections of 2014, a morality play based on the pragmatic side of politics will probably have played out.  The phenomenal self-inflicted thumping the tea party gave themselves and their erstwhile partners in the GOP got more painful in the elections held yesterday.  Christie’s win is for a moderate Republicanism of the older (that is what I remember from last century, last millennia politics) sort, pushing the tinfoil trefoils back a bit further in the party’s now rickety bus.

The GOP can read the demographic and electoral and opinion poll tea leaves as well as any one can.  The demographics of American minority populations means the influence of the older white male voters who make up to the GOP’s current core will decline.  Already have declined.  See the demographics of Obama’s win.  But, the GOP optimists say, yes that may be true nationally, but at the state level, where congressional races are run, we still have the oomph to maintain the house and maybe gain seats in the senate.  Maybe.

But this is where the opinion polls come in.  If the American public sees the dizzy we bleed red white and blue crowd as Republican, even that state level advantage can be reduced.  And it doesn’t need to be reduced much to give the Democrats a shot at the House.  They need only 17 pick-ups in 2014.  Admittedly, given the current configuration of House districts, many of them gerrymandered in a right wing Republican way (and, yes, there are a few left wing districts, too.  Just see Minneapolis and St. Paul for examples), the Democrats face a tough road to control of both houses.  But it can be done.  And the tea party can help.  That’s a tea party I’d attend.

Aging, Health, Third Phase

Subjugation and Submission

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Samhain                                                                     Thanksgiving Moon

The nurse had a corner office.  “Yes, you can see Olive Garden over here and the Allina clinic over there.  Oh, and cars on the freeway.”  She’d had it all day.  When she handed me the gown and robe, she assured me that the glass had mirroring, “You’ll not be making a show.”  Didn’t bother me either way, though spread out immediately below the third floor windows were two large parking lots and people came and went from their cars.

After gowning and robing, I got a look in a mirror.  There was another old guy in hospital wear, slightly bemused.  Me.  This time the old guy in the mirror was me.  Took me a bit to acclimate that.

We make these visits once in a while as strangers from the non-medical world, visiting a world truly known and understood only by those who work in it daily.  Kate was among them.  It’s a world where the casual infliction of pain is part of the job. Like the IV I had inserted.  It’s a world where strong boundaries in our world are constantly breached.

People not known to us, or known briefly, may touch our naked bodies and may insert objects in different orifices.  These are acts that, outside of this special world, are crimes, even felonies.  Here we consent, play the masochist to the system’s sadist.

That system says it wants us as partners in our own health care but our lived experience of the medical world is one of subjugation and submission.  We take and do what the doctor orders.  Subjugation and submission.  Rebeling here challenges your own self-interest in a very direct way, so the penalty is high.

The TSA, as I observed last month, trains us in submission, too.  Take off belts, shoes,  empty your pockets, carry only this much shampoo, this much toothpaste, stand here, raise your arms.  Wait.  Wait.  Wait.

These self-contained worlds, whirring and buzzing, act as they do for our benefit.  And I believe they do. He said, choking a bit on the TSA bone.

Still, for those of us with stubborn, strong personal boundaries and a high sense of self-agency, encounters with these systems jars the most basic and sensitive aspects of our psyche. They leave me tired and out of sorts unless I’ve been drugged.  As was the case yesterday.

My regard for the often maligned American health care is, paradoxically, quite high.  I’ve had generally good results, confounding my aversion to subjugation and submission.  Efforts I’ve made to make myself more of a collegial actor in my health care have helped.

Still, as I look at third phase life and its inevitable downward turn, the thought of entering the strange and often alien world of medicine more and more often is not a pleasant one.  It does motivate me, if I needed another motivation, to stay healthy.  Not sure what to do with this, but here it is.

Health, Third Phase

Going in Reverse

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Samhain                                                            Thanksgiving Moon

The drugs have worn off and I’m getting more alert as the night grows more advanced. Plus I had a meal.  A major event after the ritual of purification.  At least for awhile I’m running against the rhythm of the day.

A washed out feeling, a bit loose at the joints, yes, and the grin has left my face.  The drugs brought back the days, the ’60s, when a grin and dilated pupils meant there was a good party going on somewhere nearby.  Now, as a resolute third phaser, I get my drugs the legal way, when I have a medical procedure.  I enjoy them just the same.

 

 

General
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Samhain                                                          Thanksgiving Moon

An incredible experience.  Lucid for the whole procedure I watched with fascination.  The body is a miracle of evolution, finely crafted for its task.  I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable and healthy colon.

Aging, Health, Third Phase

Once More Onto the Gurney

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Samhain                                                                Thanksgiving Moon

Purified, my documents for the temple in order, I’m ready to go lay myself on the table of sacrifice.

Though I’m not nervous, it is sobering to realize that this is one of those moments when the outcome could be life altering.  To continue my now over extended metaphor, each time we draw near the holy of holies we risk the wrath of the gods.

Of course, this is supposed to have the opposite result, timely knowledge.  I’m in favor of that.

Weather +Climate

Moving into Winter

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Samhain                                                                 Thanksgiving Moon

The snow came.  Wet and heavy, it presses down on tree branches, putting those with leaves under stress.  These snows can crack limbs as it did to the cedar trees we cultivated for so long just off our deck.

These early snows are not the snows of romance and greeting cards.  They clump and weigh, turn immediately into slush underfoot, leaking through footwear.  They don’t last long since the same temperatures that create them, once daylight appears, will begin to melt them.

They can drop the temperature since snow cover is one of the factors that keeps a winter cold.  It’s the albedo effect.  White snow reflects the sunlight back into space, where it warms the air, but not the ground.  That’s also why Minnesota’s tendency under previous climate regimes to keep snow cover around for the whole winter made us colder.  If the earth is bare, it soaks up some of the sun’s heat and raises air temperature near the ground.

In the months after Samhain the sun recedes, losing power.  Not only are the days shorter, but the angle of the sun spreads what sunlight we receive over a larger area, weakening its intensity.  These are not months favorable to the vegetative world.  In reading an article about Samhain in the New York Times the writer reminded me of a key element of the Samhain season, the tallying up of the amount of fodder available to feed animals.

When the number of animals exceeded the available feed, farmers culled their herds until they were sustainable.  This meant that there was often meat at Samhain, but the slaughter added another death related aspect to the holiday.