Monthly Archives: January 2014

Latin, Memories, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Focused

Leave a comment

Winter                                                           Seed Catalog Moon

Made a concerted push and finished Climate Change, Week 2, today.   Always surprised at how concentrated mental effort exhausts me.

A bit of Latin today.  It was interesting, so I’ll post it here. Ovid describes the state of the countryside in Lycaon’s kingdom after the flood:

This occupies the high ground, a hooked ship sits

294  And draws its oars here, where not long ago a farmer plowed,

295  Above the fields or sails over the top of buried villas,

296  This ship on the surface catches fish in elm-trees.

 

This apres deluge piece from the Metamorphoses reminded me of a story I followed with fascination as a high school student.  The Army Corps of Engineers put a dam on the Salamonie River and submerged Monument City (pic) and two other towns.  The Corps bought the towns in 1965 and moved everyone out, including, which intrigued me at the time, all the cemeteries.

In this case you can literally catch fish in the elm-trees.  There was a dark glamour to the whole project. These towns flooded regularly and the dam sought to end the problem of rising waters in the area by covering them with water so that hooked ships might draw their oars there.

Kate’s sister Anne has been here the last couple of days sewing.  She’s got a couple of days off from the jail in Shakopee.

Cinema and Television, Weather +Climate

Flying High

Leave a comment

Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Cool again, heading toward zero and minus land.

Just watched Aviator.  Maybe a bit late since it was 2004, but, hey.  It was still good.  Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburne.  Amazing.  Worth watching the whole movie just to see her.  She’s one of my favorite actresses and she was at top form in this role.

Leonardo DiCaprio, whom Kate and I saw in Wolf of Wall Street on Christmas Day, portrayed the enigmatic and chaotic brilliance of Howard Hughes, his obsessive-compulsive disorder eating into his effectiveness.  In fact, he ended up so secretive that when he died aboard a plane in 1976, the Federal Government had to use fingerprints to discern that it was actually Hughes who had died.

 

Family, Friends, Woolly Mammoths
Aside Leave a comment

Winter                                                       Seed Catalog Moon

African proverb:   “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Groups like families and the Woollies offer us the opportunity for both.  To live long and well, we travel with each other on the ancientrail of life.  To hone a particular skill or project we can go alone, but with others supporting us.

 

Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Grrr

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                      Seed Catalog Moon

My Latin skills have begun to increase.  I can almost see myself learning.  Most of the time for the last four years it’s been slog, slog, slog, slog, insight.  Repeat.  Now something has begun to happen, like that learning has begun to snowball, building on itself.  Which, I guess, is what’s happening.  It’s weird, but fun.

(pic:  Ta Dah)

Microsoft, I’d forgotten how much you used to frustrate me.  Now that I no longer work as much in Word my animus toward Microsoft had softened, but getting Missing back from Robert Klein reminded me.  I can’t open the damned file.  I’ve had this problem ever since I “upgraded” to Word 2013.  It has some protective mechanism that is very suspicious of outside documents.  I’ve unlocked most of them, but so far this one, one I really care about, won’t open.  Grrrr.

Still, I’ve looked at some of Robert’s work and he’s very thorough and helpful.  I can’t utilize his work to its full capacity until I can get the document into Word however.  That’s where I can manipulate the editing and see exactly what he meant.  Grrrr.  Again.

One step closer to finishing up the final draft.  Might get it done before Denver.  If I can open it in the first place.

Myth and Story, Writing

Missing Returned

Leave a comment

Winter                                                         Seed Catalog Moon

Got my manuscript back today from the copy editor, Robert Klein, at quickproofs.  I haven’t looked at it, but I will, probably not seriously until I get back from Denver.  Some nervousness about it, because after I accept or reject his various edits then I have to get serious about submitting it to agents.  This is the point at which I’ve clenched over the years, a combination of perfectionism and self-doubt.  I’m determined to push through that this time.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Holidays

The Time of Unfolding

Leave a comment

Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

The holiseason has come and gone.  We’re now into what I call ordinary time, after the Catholic liturgical calendar.  We are though still in season and the season is winter.  No reason to doubt that in Minnesota this year.

We’re in the time of unfolding.  All the dreamy times, the hopeful moments, the gifts and resolutions of the holiseason must now become potent, active forces in our regular, our ordinary lives.

Whatever it was that caused your heart to leap, even just a little, in the holiday times, can now integrate itself into your ongoing.  Maybe you wanted to read more.  Unplug some times.  See the kids or the parents more.  Take time to play with your pets.  Go dancing.  Listen to more live music.  Meditate.  Now is the time for those things to take root, prepare for the quickening of Imbolc and the resurrection of Easter.

Be kind to yourself as you include new forces, new opportunities.  Sometimes the old ones won’t want to let go.  That’s ok.  Acknowledge them, say you won’t forget them, but their time is over for now.  Take the offered hand of the you you imagined not long ago, take that hand and let it lead you into this fresh year, all green with promise.

Anoka County, Cooking

Cork

Leave a comment

Winter                                                        Seed Catalog Moon

Kate and I went to a new fine dining restaurant in downtown Anoka, Cork.  It’s located in a former breakfast place, a long time gathering place for Anokans.  It’s a little rough, the ambience is still made-over breakfast place, the service is sketchy though friendly and the wine pours happen from a refrigerator unit mounted against the far back corner of the dining room.

But.  The food is good.  Kate had giant risotto meat balls and sea scallops.  We shared shrimp and lobster wontons and I had chicken marsala.  I prefer veal but the chicken was good.  It was pricey, probably too much for the whole package, but I’m glad its in town.  Our only other fine dining place folded during the great recession.  Thanks, Wall Street big bankers.

It’s nice not having to drive all the way into the city just to eat out at a nice place.  We have three pretty good places:  Osaka, Azteca, Tanners and a bunch of ok, but usual:  Famous Daves, Applebees, Kam Wong’s Chinese, Dino’s Gyro.

Great Wheel, Great Work, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

The Weekend

Leave a comment

Winter                                                           Seed Catalog Moon

Got caught up with the Climate Change MOOC, part of the process involved getting my head turned toward scientific reading, following graphs and numbers and equations. I’m past the first really brain busting part and the flow of the reading went much better this morning.  Another challenge to, as Hercule Poirot would say, “the leetle gray cells.”

Spent some time with an easier task, translating more of the Metamorphoses.  In these verses Neptune rides the waters, urging them on as they flood the earth, then strikes the ground with his trident and creates earthquakes.  Poseidon, earth-shaker, as Homer knew him.  This was an earlier human generated, outsider mediated, apocalypse.  Climate change is our very own.

The Great Wheel blog continues to take shape, a bit here, a bit there.  Changes, tweaks, but growing.

 

General

Quiet

Leave a comment

Winter                                                                                                                               Seed Catalog Moon

The quiet of a northern winter night has settled here.  The temperature, at 15, is 20 degrees higher than Tuesday night, yet still in the direction of cold.  And cold is the physical equivalent of silence.  There’s less and less molecular movement as the temperature goes down, in fact the temperature going down is decreased molecular and atomic movement.  So here we are, cold and at night when human movement, too, is at a minimum.

The noises come from the computer, small ratcheting noises of a hard disk receiving or transmitting data, my own inner ear–a slight buzzing, my gut–a gurgle, but they are noises that underscore the silence rather than disturb it.

Just to sit alone now is to meditate, the field around me not so different from my inner one, undisturbed and undisturbing.  A blankness, a sense of union, of being part of, not distinct from.  This is why this time draws me, beckons to me to stay.  To linger.

Art and Culture, Asia, Friends, Tea

Back in the MIA

Leave a comment

Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

Went into the MIA today to see the Audacious Eye exhibition.  It contains representative torii-in-snow.jpgtorii-in-snow.jpgobjects from an entire collection, the Clark Collection, acquired in the last year by the MIA.  It was an uneven show with several spectacular pieces and several not-so spectacular ones. Many of the nicest pieces were screens and paintings in the Chinese tradition, a substantial influence on all of Japanese culture.

(detail_of_daruma  Tsuji Kakō, 1870–1931)

Lesson from this.  Go in the first days of a new show so a later visit, more focused, can result in greater depth.  Several of the pieces I would like to see again will, I imagine, be up in the permanent collection over the next few months.

Ran into docent friend Bill Bomash.  We had lunch and talked about the museum and his life.  He went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.  His roommate came back one day and said he’d signed up for a year abroad.  Bill thought that sounded good, went to the library and looked at the bulletin board with year abroad brochures.  The Scandinavian Seminar had no prerequisite language requirement.  Aha, he said, that’s for me.

His year focused on Denmark where he discovered an affinity for the Danish language which he spoke with almost no accent.  The director of the Seminar, whom he met by chance while working in Copenhagen mistook him for a Dane, complimenting him on his English.  This proved significant later on when he applied for Ph.D. work at the University of Minnesota.  A letter of recommendation from this same man produced an offer of a teaching position in Danish.  He funded his Ph.D. work teaching Danish.  All because of that brochure on a bulletin board.

After the MIA, I went over to Verdant Tea where I met the general manager, Brandon, purchased two clay tea jars and a new teapot, one Brandon purchased in San Francisco some time ago.  Verdant Tea is a very Seward neighborhood kind of business with latter day hippies and contemporary hipsters sitting around sipping tea and discussing the issues of the day.

Found the exhibit, which was quite large, induced museum fatigue two galleries from the end, so I began to look with only cursory interest.  Still, it was good to be back with the art. Trying to figure out how to get in often enough to satisfy that itch.