Yearly Archives: 2014

Colorado, Poetry, Writing

Poetic and Chaotic

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Lughnasa                                                                New (College) Moon

Things to do in Colorado: write poetry. Read about the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Charles Wright. He sits in the same place, sees the same view and has done for over 30 years. While there, he notices his moods, captures them in his way.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written poetry regularly, a very long time. Over 45 years. Then, all I’d written got stolen along with my 1950 Chevy panel truck, a favorite vehicle that truck. It had three on the column, a sticky clutch and burned oil. Somehow, though, it stole my heart, just like that blue Volvo station wagon and that red Toyota Celica.

Somebody stole it, or else I parked it while drunk and never remembered I owned it. Coulda happened like that, too, I suppose. Life was like that back then in Muncie, Indiana. Poetic and chaotic and political. Another college memory, coming under the college moon.

(could be it. now if that file of poetry is still under the seat.)

So anyhow I think I’ll find a study in the mountains with a window where I can put a table and a pad of paper, a mechanical pencil. And I’ll sit there, noting what passes beyond the window and within my mind, jotting it down, see what the mountain air conjures.

The other kind of writing, this blog, fiction, I can do at a typewriter (oops, there’s an anachronism. I meant, keyboard.) but poetry has been manual for me, maybe because I started writing poetry before I knew how to type. I learned typing in high school, my senior year.

You know, I’d like to have that Chevy panel truck back. Wonder if whoever took it is done with it now?

Anoka County, Art and Culture, Family

The Saturday Slows

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Lughnasa                                                                         New (College) Moon

Kate and Annie were off to a quilt retreat yesterday afternoon and evening and all day today.  Held in downtown Anoka in a large room over a bank on Main Street, this quilt retreat gathers a large number of quilters with their machines and projects; they share technique and support each others work.

(The Quilting Frolic 1813 John Lewis Krimmel)

That left the dogs and me at home. This morning, with the temperature at 66 and the dewpoint at 65, I picked red raspberries in a fog. A few tomatoes were ready to come in and another large batch of onions and garlic.

Watched an interesting William Dafoe mystery, Anamorph. An independent film, it had no upbeat parts and a grim ending. Intelligent and well-made it became repetitive near the end, then picked up as the climax neared. 3 stars out of 5.

 

Memories

Go, Cave Men

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Lughnasa                                                                   College Moon

Looked at the world college and wondered, where does that come from? Here’s the answer from Lewis and Short, the OED of Latin dictionaries:

collegium:  persons united by the same office or calling, or living by some common rules, a college, guild, corporation, society, union, company, fraternity

(The Sodales Augustales or Sacerdotes Augustales, or simply Augustales, were an order (sodalitas) of Roman priests instituted by Tiberius to attend to the maintenance of the cult of Augustus and the Iulii in 14 AD. see Wiki. picture below)

September. Lots of schools start in September. It’s no accident that Mabon the second of the harvest festivals falls in September. In a largely rural America children were needed at home during the growing season, so school ended in May, late, and began again in September, when the harvest was…I started to repeat this nostrum, but then realized it didn’t make a lot sense. The fall harvest extends into September and the growing season in many parts of the country starts in early May, so I looked it up and found this:

“Why does the American school year start in September and end in June? It’s something of a mystery. Did children once “bring in the harvest” on the family farm all summer in the distant rural past?

Historians at Old Sturbridge Village, a living history museum that recreates an 1830s New England farming village, say not. According to the web site and schoolmistress there, farm children went to school from December to March and from mid-May to August. Adults and children alike helped with planting and harvesting in the spring and fall.”

Read more: School Year and Summer Vacation—History | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/spot/schoolyear1.html#ixzz3BE5Xf8Bx

This makes sense with what I know of agriculture and horticulture. Will need more research. Don’t have the time right now because I’m going out to harvest, especially raspberries. No school for me.

September always found me excited, a pleasant feeling of anticipation. That was never more the case than my freshmen year of college. I was off to Wabash College, a private all-men’s school in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Wabash was my fantasy college, brick buildings, leafy walkways, odd traditions. At that point in time it was also exclusive, very difficult to get into though that has changed.

(Freshmen had to wear the beanie, or “pot” as it was known on campus, everywhere. This made it easy for upper class men to identify you and make you do small chores for them, like carry their books.)

Leaving for Wabash meant that my adult life was about to start and I couldn’t wait. So, this month’s moon is the college moon.

 

Great Wheel, Memories, Minnesota

Cheese Curds

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Lughnasa                                                           Lughnasa Moon

State Fair. A Lughnasa festival writ large. Texas and Minnesota, 1 & 2 in terms of state fair attendance. So Minnesota’s is big. And filled with the improbable from seed art to deep-fried pickles on a stick. Princess Kay of the Milky Way gets immortalized in butter, meaning there is an occupational niche for, yes, butter sculptor.

(Antrim, Ireland. Old Lammas Fair.)

The cows and the pigs and the horses and the chickens and the llamas and the rabbits and the pigeons and the sheep are all here in the city now, rooted out of their familiar stalls or sheds or fields, loaded in wagons and driven into the concrete jungle that is St. Paul, or Falcon Heights if you’re going to be picky.

The DNR has the great pond with Minnesota fish, right across from the giant slide where the gunny sacks serve as seats.  Along the street that runs to the main entrance and you hit cheese curds fried and politicians hoping to avoid being fried.

Then there’s machinery hill where, like the livestock, farm machinery comes into the city for a few days. The tractors seem at home there, a place they belong as much as in the field following the gps to the other end of the furrow.

And the people, walking arm in arm, carrying a WCCO bag, a bunch of colorful brochures and printed information from the DNR, colleges, that wonderful gizmo the hawker made seem magical. They might be eating honey ice cream, purchased at the bee exhibit run by members of the Minnesota Hobby Beekeepers Association.

Carried above the noise and crush of the crowds are ringing bells, flashing lights with their lustre lost in the daylight. The Fair’s id, the Midway. Riding, swooping, throwing, carrying big soft bears no one would buy. Where pointlessness is exactly the point.

It’s all underway right now, through Labor Day. This one will be our last as Minnesota residents and we’re going, probably on Monday. I’ll be headed for the cheese curds.

 

Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Summit In Sight

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

Not as smooth as last session. Now the tutorials seem to go, smooth and relatively mistake free, then clunky, filled with uncertain work. The plateaus were, in the past, obvious and as they were overcome, the terrain of the past was visible. With this plateau, and it sure seems like one in its stubbornness, the past seems to vary from session. That means knowing what needs more attention is difficult.

(Caspar David Friedrich)

This feels like the climb toward the peak where hypoxia can set in, without warning, and force a climber back down if they’re climbing without oxygen. Eventually acclimation triumphs over the thin air or the distress makes it necessary to leave the climb. In this case the peak matters enough to stay up here until acclimatization takes over.

To overextend this metaphor, the view from the peak will be enough to satisfy. That is, book after book of Latin now accessible. Yes, this peak has already been climbed many times, but as any dedicated climber can tell you, until you’ve reached the peak yourself, the mountain isn’t yours.

Colorado, The Move

Fun.

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Here’s an unexpected thing. I’m having fun. Complex projects taken from ground zero to functional used to be my main strength. Lots of project elements, interlocking timelines, decisions getting made, things getting done. Once the decision to move was final and the process began to gain headway, old work habits began to emerge.

We’ve got contractors, realtors, family and most of all ourselves committed to a next February put the house on the market date. That means we also have to find a new place in roughly that time, too. Pacing and execution spread over a year, a bit less, has made the work move smoothly and, except for psychic disjunction, the occasional cognitive dissonance of trying to be two places at once, without pain.

There is, of course, the climax of the whole matter governed by the sale price of this house. It’s a big unknown right now and will be for several months. But we will get the whole move finished and become Coloradans by some time in the first half of next year.

Cinema and Television

Marvel(ous)

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Lughnasa                                                               Lughnasa Moon

At family gatherings I was the one with the stack of comic books reading in the corner, or on the stairs, somewhere out of  sight or at least out of the flow of people. As a teen-ager I was one of those who helped Marvel Comics overcome Dell, the Fantastic Four outstrip Superman, Batman pushed aside by the X-Men. As an adult it makes me grin that Marvel has become a force in movie making, too. Irony, subtly, taking the narrative and the illustration right to the edge then happily blasting beyond it, that’s the hall mark of Marvel comics and their best movies.

Guardians of the Galaxy is mainline Marvel. It’s characters have distinct flaws, an arc and even the villain(s) are complex. Funny, too. Vin Diesel is quite the surprise as Groot, the tree creature and Bradley Cooper voices Rocket Raccoon perfectly. Zoe Saldana (Avatar) is smashing (literally) as Gamora. Chris Pratt manages a level of seriousness combined with insouciance that brings to mind Han Solo, but his character, Peter Quill, Star Lord, has more heft.

Worth seeing if you have any schoolboy crush left for out there sci fi.

 

Anoka County, Garden, Great Wheel, Myth and Story

The Season of Harvest

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Lughnasa                                                             Lughnasa Moon

Lughnasa celebrates the beginning of the harvest. Already underway by August 1st, at least here, and continuing through early to mid-October the harvest is concerto after concerto, first the beet and carrot concerto, then the onion, then the garlic. Soon the green beans and the sugar snap peas chime in and the collard greens play their deep green notes and the chard lights up the hall with its rainbow of colors. The opposite of chamber music garden music counts on ancient melodies like the sound of the rain, the wind and thunder of storms, the subtle bass notes of fertile soil.

(alma-tademas-harvest-festival)

We have already passed the allegro first movement and now enter the adagio, the time when various crops come slowly to maturity in late summer and early fall. Around Mabon, the autumnal equinox, the grain crops and corn and beans will begin to peak, the sound of combines and corn pickers, the brilliant blue notes of the September sky, grain falling into golden piles on the wagons, yellow corn piling up. And finally, as October sees the first frosts and the last of the crops come in, the final movement, begun in a frenzy of gathering will trail off, cold and bleak, senescence browning the once vibrant greens.

At the end, summer’s end, is Samain. It marks the end of the growing season and thins the veil between the worlds. As the vegetable world dies again and the fallow season begins, Samain is a time between rich, fruitful life and the darkness and chill of death. It’s an appropriate time for the barrier between the living world and the world of those who have died in it to become permeable, for the dead to come to the living and the living to the dead.

We are now in the harvest season punctuated by Lughnasa, Mabon and Samain, beginning, middle and end. Dance to its music. The music of life renewed and come bountiful.

Feelings

Bad Moon Rising. And Setting.

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Lughnasa                                                                    Lughnasa Moon

Had some time over the last couple of weeks where my feelings began to spiral down, that heaviness began to creep into my bones and pointlessness was on the rise. That’s turned around. Could be a chemical bath, new or more neuro-transmitters sloshing in the cranial cavity. Could be diving back into the garden, the Latin, the packing. Could be a bad moon setting.

My energy level has begun to return, too. Might be because of the red meat I haven’t eaten-a mostly ban. Might be because I’ve cut back on dairy. A not as much commitment. Might be halo effect from making those decisions. Who knows? I am, right now any way, in a time when habit changes come more easily, with less undermining from the id or whatever drives me to the bagel late at night.

The older I get the more I believe these changes have a strong chemical component, a driver based not in our past or in our stars, but in our glands. Somehow the internal tides ebb and flow, bathing us in mood altering chemicals of our own creation. Can we influence them, counter them? Yes. Can we eliminate them and enter the happy pink cotton candy land that seems just over the hill of the self-help section? Absolutely not. Life is not easy. Has not not been easy. Will not be easy. But it can be fun, gratifying, exciting and fulfilling.

 

Colorado, Music, The Move

The Way West

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Lughnasa                                                                  Lughnasa Moon

More decluttering. Harder than it seems. Each decision means a bit of the past, or at least physical evidence of it, gets dismissed. It can feel harsh. I threw out today all the tours that I had designed while a docent at the MIA. Why? They are based specifically on objects at the MIA and will not be useful in another museum except in a very abstract way, too abstract to support moving them to Colorado. Still. Those tours, with 8-10 items, hours, sometimes days of research and the memories associated with the tours themselves were not just pieces of paper, but parts of my life.

(trails west)

It’s easier to throw out or box up to sell Minnesota focused gardening books and files. They’re related to a geographic particularity and we’ll not be here. The space those took up will have xeriscaping, Rocky Mountain flora, bee-keeping in the mountains books and files.

Now all of the files and books in the garden study, the six bookshelves in the exercise area and the three in the area outside the garden study have been sorted and almost all boxed, appropriately taped, or tossed.

Today’s music was Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. You gotta serve somebody, it might be the devil or it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody. The anti-libertarian ballad.