Monthly Archives: March 2014

Writing

Welcome.

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Imbolc                                                                   Hare Moon

I want to say welcome to any of you new to Ancientrails.  One of the reasons these posts jean_burkes_3__mekeep coming is knowing you’re out there, whoever you are.  It’s not the only reason, however, since I write this mostly as a continuation of my previous hand-written journals, so I’d do it anyhow, but being read adds to the fun.  Just for your information you are one among a readership that now includes all continents, many countries and lots of the large cities in the world.  Not sure what that’s all about, but hey, the more… well,  you know. (or maybe you don’t.  …the merrier.)

 

Travel

And Parts South

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Imbolc                                                             Hare Moon

Road trip.  I love traveling with Kate and we’ve had many good trips already and will have many more.  I also love traveling alone.  Or, you might say, I just love to travel.  Less so now maybe than in years past, but not by much and now that’s only so because of the strong pull home has for me.  It takes some time to get past the inertia created by a place that fits my life so well.

Once I get on the road though, I’m there.  I love the randomness of travel, the mistakes and the happy accidents.  This is, I’m pretty sure, a direct reflection of my father’s love of just getting in the car and going somewhere.  He had a traveling gene, maybe one from that blacksheep Grandpa Elmo who finally lit out for the territories. It’s no surprise that Mary’s in Singapore and Mark’s in Muhayil, Saudi Arabia.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the destination.  I plan to descend into Carlsbad Caverns, have a wonderful workshop in Tucson, get in some hiking in the Catalina Mountains and see as much of Chaco Canyon as I can.  After being reminded of its existence by Mark Odegard, I may also take a side trip to Manitou Springs, Colorado, a vestigial remnant of sixties culture stuck in the Rockies west of Colorado Springs.

But along the way I’ll have a lot of time by myself on the road. I’ll see new towns and new topography.  Some things will appear that haven’t occurred to me, but that seem good at the moment.  And, of course, there’s road food.  Especially the tex-mex and other Mexican flavored cuisines of the southwest.  Not long now.

Health

Finally

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Imbolc                                                                         Hare Moon

Finally.  A combination of resistance and aerobics that feels good, burns calories and tests my balance.  It’s taken a long time to find a good fit, but here it is.  I do 4 high intensity intervals at 1.5-2 minutes each.  The first two are on the treadmill right away and take about 15 minutes with the cool down to 110 bpm and then backup and then back down again.

After the second interval cool down I do half of a half of a p90X workout.  They’re designed to go just over an hour and to work all the muscle groups of the day several times.  By doing half of a day’s workout I get in roughly 30 minutes of varied resistance work.  I cut it in half to do the third interval.  Then, when I’ve finished the resistance work I do the final interval.  Takes a little more than an hour altogether, but it’s so varied it doesn’t seem like much.  Burning 550 to 650 calories a time, 5 days a week.

The non p90x days I do an aerobic only day at around 130 bpm for 45 minutes.

I like this because it’s intense, varied, helps me gain and maintain muscle mass and maintain my aerobic fitness.  It’s taken a lot of experimentation, but this is a keeper.

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld

Quirky. Colorful. Funny.

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Imbolc                                                                           Hare Moon

The Grand Budapest Hotel.  A story told by a writer, an iconic writer for a faux eastern European country, as told to him by the former lobby boy of the Grand Budapest Hotel.  At the end Anderson credits Stefan Zwieg, an Austrian author of the early 20th century whom Wikipedia claims was “one of the most famous writers in the world.” (Zweig)

The Ralph Fiennes character, M. Gustave, bears a striking resemblance to Zweig.  M. Gustave, a hotel concierge extraordinaire, earns the affections of wealthy hotel patrons and runs the Hotel at its height, in the 1930’s.

The plot is full of Andersonian twists and madcap turns.  During a prison break a ladder is lowered and it keeps going and going and going.  One of the funniest scenes in the movie is a downhill chase on snow, Ralph Fiennes and the lobby boy on a sled schussing after the leather clad thug played by Willem Dafoe on skis.

Stars pop up everywhere.  Tilda Swinton,  F. Murray Abraham, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Ed Norton, Jude Law as well as Anderson regulars like Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson.  Each has a particular and zany role, but all carried off with the trademark Anderson seriousness with a smirk just behind.

Also like Anderson’s other films, this one is gorgeous in a unique way: vivid colors, grand architecture, picturesque mountains, rube goldberg like bridges and towers and walkways.

It is a movie made of meringue, but you notice that only after it’s over.  It wraps you up and coddles you along from the first scene to the last.  A delight.  Maybe, as Colin Covert said, a masterpiece.

Afterward we ate at the Hammer and Sickle, a Russian vodka bar.  With surprisingly good food.  I had a beet salad and a lamb skewer, Kate a vodka flight, borscht and pelminis (small balls of dough filled with a lamb, beef and pork mixture, much like a pot sticker).

Our waitress was a west Siberian transplant who went to school in Novosibirsk, married an American and is now studying computer science at home.  “But I’m not so well disciplined, so I’ll have to go to school.”  She’s headed back home for three weeks very soon.

General
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Imbolc                                                                         Hare Moon

Kate and I are fans of Wes Anderson so we’ve snagged a couple of tickets at the Lagoon for the Grand Budapest Hotel.  Afterward, we plan to dine at the Hammer and Sickle. They seemed to go together to me.

Commentary on the news, News of the Strange

Flying Dutchman

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Imbolc                                                              Hare Moon

The Flying Dutchman.  A legend of the days of sail, the Flying Dutchman could never make port, could only ride the oceans.  The doomed crew, it is said, would try to make contact with other ships, sending messages back for loved ones long dead.

(Flying_Dutchman,_the   The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder c. 1887)

Perhaps Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 will become the aviation age equivalent, an airliner doomed to circle the globe, never able to land, only occasionally pinging satellites, its crew and passengers preserved in a deathless state.

So, if you’re on a flight to somewhere and all those turned off or airplane mode cellphones start ringing, answer the phone.  It might be a passenger of Flight 370 wanting to send a message home.

Health

Running through my brain

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Imbolc                                                              Hare Moon

After my workout, I turn on the steam bath, come into the study and check e-mail, look at newspapers, and clear off my desk.  Often, I’ll turn to writing here because the endorphins are flowing and I feel good.

That’s true right now.  Even though the combination of ending the climate change course and submitting Missing has left me a bit directionless, the workout pushes me to a more positive place.  Exercise induced biotherapy.

Anyhow.  Time for supper.

Art and Culture, Friends, Poetry

2nd Thursday

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Imbolc                                                                 Hare Moon

“An angel…his whisper went all through my body:

‘Don’t be ashamed to be human, be proud!'”   Romanesque Arches

Discussed Tomas Transtormer and his poetry today with two docents, Jane McKenzie and Jean-Marie.  Shows how meager my grasp of contemporary poetry is.  I’d not heard of him, a Swedish Nobel Prize Winner, and a damn fine poet.  His work has a crystalline edge, images cut with words as facets.

“The man on a walk suddenly meets the old

giant oak like an elk turned to stone with

its enormous antlers against the dark green castle wall

of the fall ocean.”   Storm

His poetry suggests a tour focused on image.  What is an image?  How do we know one? What is the same, what is different between the image of a poet and the image of a painter?  Of poet and sculptor?  Of poet and photographer?  What is there about an image that makes us yearn to create them, remember them, see them, hear them?

The Matisse exhibition shows an artist focused on and struggling with this very question. How can I use paint, color, line to say woman, flower, wall?  Is it different if I ask the same question of bronze and clay?  Who might guide me?  Van Gogh?  Cezanne?  Seurat?  Monet?  Early in his career he answers yes to all these guides and works to see the world through their eyes, yet imprint it, too, with his own vision.

Due to a collecting idiosyncrasy of the Cone sisters (patronnesses of both Matisse and the Baltimore museum) the show jumps from his experimental years and works in a mid-career but still formative stage to the bright lights of the last gallery, the wonderful prints from his book, Jazz, and other colorful pieces.  This is a joyful painter who thought long and hard about his work, wanting it to appear effortless.

Matisse took line and color to reveal the essence of image.  And he makes it look easy and the human beings in his work are proud, just as the angel whispered they should be.

 

Writing

Submission

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Imbolc                                                                 Hare Moon

Deucalion and Pyrrha have come to a mossy, ruined temple, a pale image of its former, undrowned self.  They bend down and offer prayers to Themis, a goddess of prophecy and justice.  They are the only two people left after the flood. “We two are a crowd,” Deucalion says to Pyrrha.

This was in the afternoon’s section of Ovid and it rang a bell with me as I submitted my manuscripts.  The dominant word being submit.  The process of submitting a manuscript definitely has an offering quality to it, a sacrifice to whatever powers lie outside the study, those demi-gods who rule on the fate of creative work.

This is not a feeling I like very much, because there is always the possibility, as there was for Deucalion and Pyrrha, that the offering will not be accepted.  In fact, I’ve already received one, “Not for me.”  That’s after sending seven submissions out before lunch.

E-mail makes submission easier.  And rejection, too. Yes, it stung. Just a bit, but it’s there. Not a bee sting, not that much, but a quick injection of rejection.  This is normal.  No sacrifice, no rejection.  No sacrifice, no acceptance.  The awful dialectic all creative people face. Perhaps this has been the root of religious sentiments from the very beginning.

In paleolithic times art must have had sacred power, the capacity to call up the animals for the hunt or incite the slaying of enemies, the rising of the sun.  What, then, if the artist was not good enough?  What if the art would not work the magic?  Or, what if the tribe or clan believed it wouldn’t?  What then artist, poet, singer?

The stakes feel the same now.  At least to me.

 

Our Land and Home, Weather +Climate

Ugly

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Imbolc                                                                      Hare Moon

Out to lunch celebrating the submission of Missing.

An often unremarked aspect of the thaw is how ugly things become.  The pristine whiteness that softened and reshaped the landscape becomes gritty, pocked with an icy crust.  Then, when it recedes, like a glacier retreating up a mountain valley, there is a debris field.  The difference of course is that in this case the debris is cigarette butts, condom wrappers, rubber bands, bottle tops and other objects discarded, perhaps back in November near the spot where they resurface.

This is why an early public services task here is street sweeping, since no one likes the looks of our road sides filled with the litter of three plus months.  Then in the lawns there are small tunnels and nests of dead grass where the voles have lived under the snowpack. Too, there is often a mold on the faded lawn, as if Miss Haversham had taken over in the neglect occasioned by winter.

All this though gets swept aside and forgotten as the lawns green, the trees bud and the first flowers begin to emerge.  The streets are clean, the lawns growing.  Soon it will time to get into the garden.