• Category Archives Literature

  • Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar steep drop 29.95  0mph S dew-point 54  sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30  Lughnasa

    First Quarter of the Corn Moon   moonrise 1326 moonset 2226

    Each day of the Olympics I will post a poem from a famous Chinese poet.  Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei are the three most admired T’ang dynasty poets.  It is so easy to forget that this last century is only a tiny portion in the sweep of Chinese civilization.  In all the sturm und drang about the rise of China the fact that China has risen and fallen many times over the last 5,000 plus years often remains buried.  That’s right, 5,000 years of a continuous culture, sometimes dominant, sometimes ruled by foreigners, many of whom embraced Chinese civilization.

    It is arrogant of us to judge China by our standards, standards that have stood nowhere near the test of time.  In China the collective always comes before the individual, at least that has  been true historically.  This is not to say that there have not been individualists in Chinese history.  Taoism tends to produce them, as does the famous literati system of rule by intellectuals.  Many painters and poets also walked their own distinctive paths.

    Well, anyhow, China doesn’t need my defense.  I just want to add a bit from the depth of Chinese culture as we go through Olympics which often seem more about air pollution and human rights than sport.

    Yes, I know.  This seems like a conservative position, but in reality it is a position informed more by anthropology and history, a position not too different from walk a mile in the other person’s moccasin.

    I spent an hour or so this morning admiring the work of the Irishmen who dug ditches.  Put the shovel in the earth, push it down, lift it up, heave.  Repeat.  Not back breaking, but a workout.  I had a good nap.  The fire pit has begun to appear.  It will be deep enough for a fire when the Woollies come, though whether the area around it will be is another matter.


    Garden Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • More Radical Than Thou

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    80  bar falls 29.66  0mph E  dew-point 76!  sunrise 5:55  sunset 8:43  Summer

    Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    Jerry Stearns sent word that he worked with rebels in Central America and served a stint as a bodyguard for Rigoberta Minchu, the Mayan activist.  This reminded me, though I don’t think it was his intent, of the old game, More Radical Than Thou.

    This was a game of gotcha and it drove the Everything Matters part of the personal is political.  If I, say, was a draft resister and an anti-war marcher, you might say that you planned to go to Canada.  If I planned to go Canada, you might say you were going underground.  If I said I was going underground, you might say, me too, but I’m going to bomb federal buildings, too.  This macho ratcheting up of the stakes in a round of how far can you travel away from middle-class morality and conventional politics lasted for a long, long time.

    It was an aspect of movement politics in which I always felt one step behind, never quite outré enough.  I was back then, as now, stuck with this dipolarity, radical and conservative, both alive and well, never reconciled, perhaps irreconcilable. Come to think of it this same dipolarity might have been the tense spring that kept me going back to the bar for one more round.

    Nowadays I cherish this peculiarity.  I can engage radical environmental politics, continue in my radical analysis of American society while loving the MIA and my docent role there.  I can continue opposition to conservative politics while loving the classics, poetry and faith traditions.  These two poles now serve as a creative edge for me, a sort of tectonic junction where volcanoes are born and subduction feeds the volcano.  Back then I felt the need to exist on only one end of the pole, rather than embracing the tension that came from them.

    More Radical Than Thou pushed me to one end of the pole.  I ended up denying, repressing the conservative part of me that wandered art museums, read Ovid and Homer and yearned for a connection with God.  Seminary and a stint as a Presbyterian minister only reversed the pressure.  While I could affirm my love of biblical study and prayer, I felt constant pressure to be more radical, to engage in more and more radical political activity.   This change from one end of the see-saw to the other was no resolution either.

    Only now, in these days when the introvert has settled into a quiet writing existence have I begun to live from both ends of the dialectic.  I can work as a docent amongst the fascinating details of art history while I the Sierra Club work blossoms.  I can write novels while I search nature and the American literary tradition for a pagan faith relevant to today.  Though the Jungian analysis moved far along this ancient trail, only unconditional love can heal these splits and I have found such love in Kate. We are soulmates.


    Art and Culture Friends Literature Memories Politics 📎and tagged

  • Steamed Dumplings Stuffed With Yak

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    78  bar steady  30.03  0mph ENE dew-point 56  Summer, warm and sunny

    Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

    A trifecta.  In to Minnehaha.  Back to Andover.  In to Kenwood.  Back to Andover.  In to Sierra Club and the MIA.  Back to Andover.  Geez.  As I said, I gotta check with my scheduler.

    Katarina is an intern from east Germany, Jena.  We folded letters and surveys to candidates for Minnesota House races.  She’s a bright young lady whose lucky boyfriend lives here.  They both study political science and enjoy comparing US and German culture/society.  She gave the example of her parents:  “They have never worried.  They have no debt.  They live modestly.”  She said her mother was not allowed to finish high school in the old East German regime because her husband was a mathematics professor.  If you had an intellengentsia in the home, you also had to have a proletarian.  Odd logic, even for Marxists.

    After doing the mailing, I called about half a list of candidates who received the survey by e-mail last Friday.  This was just a reminder call.  Margaret Levin cajoled me into making phone calls and I’m glad she did.  It wasn’t so bad.  Of course, these were all friendly folk, too.

    Across the street from the Sierra Club is the Himalaya, a Nepalese restaurant.  It was noon, so I stopped in for steamed dumplings stuffed with yak and a tasty sauce.  The next course was a soup with potatoes, black-eyed peas and bamboo shoots.  Nan accompanied this dish.  Hmmm.  I enjoy finding these small ethnic places and sampling cuisine from countries I have not visited.  Food is one of the fastest ways into a culture, even faster, because more immediate, than language.

    I discussed purchasing a Nepalese thangka with the owner.  When I said I would like a Yamatanka, he said, “Oh, you like Yama?” He stuck his tongue out and down, Yama’s typical presentation. “Yes,” I said.  “Scary.”  I’ll speak with him about it again when I go in to the Sierra Club political committee meeting next Wednesday.

    Before I went to the Sierra Club, I stopped at the Northern Clay Center and picked up a small plate.  It is my intention, over the next few years, to replace our Portmerion with unmatched pieces from many potters.  This is the fifth or sixth acquistion so far.

    Each quarter I define a retreat.  It can be brief, three days or so, and it can be long, like the stay in Hawai’i.  I find I need to punctuate my normal routine with these caesuras or I get stale.  This habit began when I was in the ministry and I’ve found it a good carry over, so I’ve continued it.  Here’s my retreat for the fall quarter:

    7/22/08   No traveling for this retreat.  I will take two weeks and stop writing, stop using the internet (except for the blog and e-mail) and study books on novel craft.  In this retreat I will create a reading program and a writing program that will guide my work for the next ten years.


    Art and Culture Faith and Spirituality Great Work Literature Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • What Does It Mean to Be Human?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    85  bar falls 29.79  3mph NE dew-point 55  Summer, hot and unpleasant

    Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

    The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly has an interesting article titled, The Burden of the Humanities.   I want to add a cadenza, a riff of my own to this Big Band music of the intellectual sort.

    The first part of this article that caught my attention was the question of definition.  What are the humanities?  An obvious follow-on question, and the thrust of the article, is: Why the humanities?

    I come to this topic from some hours now of researching the growth of Unitarianism and Universalism in Minnesota.  The connection is not obvious, but it is real.  In Minnesota Unitarianism, at First Unitarian Society, the general topic of religious or secular humanism got its launching pad into public debate and debate within the Unitarian-Universalist Association. This came from the powerful preaching of the Reverend John Dietrich who regularly filled the Garrick Theatre with over a thousand attendees.  A former Reformed Church clergy he experienced a gradual evolution of his views away from Reformed Calvinist doctrine.  In a heresy trial in that denomination in 1911 he was found guilty and defrocked.

    Dietrich lifted the term humanism from an essay by Frederick Gould, published in the pamphlets of the British Ethical Society.  In that essay Gould proposed a new definition of humanism, one not rooted in the Renaissance understanding.  He proposed humanism as the “belief and trust in the efforts humans make.”

    This new definition of humanism tried to put itself on the same intellectual path as science.  Here is a snippet from one of Dietrich’s sermons, one defining his own religion:

    “So I take for my authority in religion the actual facts that have been discovered by science.  Beyond these facts which have actually been observed and verified, we really know nothing; and I make no assumptions which are not warranted by these facts.”      My Religion, John Dietrich, FUS 1929, p. 5  Published in the Humanist Pulpit, Vol. 3

    The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, influenced by Dietrich in content, reinforces this apparent marriage of humanist thought and the then triumphal march of science and reason.

    I’ve gone on a bit here about this because it is important to separate this now common understanding of humanism from the question, What are the humanities?  The answer to this question, I believe, turns the definition and the defining of humanism away from science and toward those realms of knowledge found in the classics of East and West, the artistic output of both East and West, and the philosophical and religious systems of both East and West.  That is, the question of what it means to be human can be answered only in a very narrow way within the science of say, physical anthropology or gross anatomy or human evolution.  Here the human is a physical entity shaped by the process of natural selection.  This is not wrong, it is right and necessary; but, it is not sufficient.

    What it means to be human is found in the lived experience of humans.  That is, we are what we have been and what we have been shapes without defining what we can become.   How do we know what we have been?  We read the Grand Historian on the Qin and Han dynasties.  We listen to karnatic music.  The plays of William Shakespeare come to life before our  eyes.  Tolstoy helps us understand humans in War and Peace.  The cave paintings in Lascaux and the Cycladic figurines of the Cyclades both reveal aspects of a human response to lived reality.  The Winter Count of the Lakota and the great urban areas of London, Istanbul, or Rio De Janiero do the same.

    The knowledge base of the humanities is broad and deep; it requires years to become fluent in even a small part of its study, yet it is precisely among the paintings and plays, the music and the poetry that we can rethink the human project and find old resources for new questions.

    Thus, if I were to redefine humanism, I would say:  “an appreciation for what it has meant and what it now means to be human, an appreciation gained best from the cultural products of humankind over the millennia of our existence.”


    Art and Culture Cinema and Television Faith and Spirituality Literature World History 📎and tagged

  • Wading in Your Media Stream

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    61  bar steep rise 29.96 2mph NNW dew-point 45   Summer night, nice

                                  New Moon (Thunder Moon)

    I’d forgotten the all consuming nature of writing a novel.  It goes to bed with you, advances into your dreams and wakes up with in the morning.  Plot ideas, twists, character developments, inconsistencies, new characters.  All aswirl.  The novel bumps up against daily life, takes something from it, gives something back, a loop, a mobius strip.  Feedback.  A neuro-net firing and firing and firing.  It’s fun, a wild ride while its cookin’. 

    There are plateaus.  Superior Wolf landed on a plateau about 6 years ago, struggled to get off it a couple of times, then settled back down to rest.  Jennie’s Dead has been on a bit more of an up and down ride. She’s in storage now, but I can sense her wanting to break out now that her brother has begun to get legs, take strides.

    Somehow, as happens in my life, momentum has increased.  Both the velocity and the mass have kicked up at the same time, calling back into action skills set aside long ago.  The Sierra Club work will require a good deal of time.  The novel needs constant nourishment.  So does the garden.  These three alone would be a good deal, but I also have a sermon to write for September that will take at least a week of research, if not more.  I’ve also agreed to take on managing the Docent Book Club and my term for that starts this month.  Then there’s that pesky Africa check out tour.

    Right now this all feels good.  Blood flowing, mind working.  And I’m sure it will feel that way for a good while, probably on into December, then I’ll feel a need for a let down again.  Right now, though, I’m jazzed.

    My Woolly meeting is in August this  year.   I sent out the following e-mail so guys could prep for it.

    Hi! Your Media Stream:  This is the water from which you take much of your intellectual nourishment.  What is it?  The radio stations to which you listen, TV programs you watch, movies you see, books you read, magazines and newspapers you take or consult.  I-Pod fare, music at home.  Any media, in short, that you use for either entertainment or education. How will we organize the meeting?  Like this—please bring a book you are reading right now.  Please bring a book you consider important and formative for you, perhaps one read long ago.  Bring a copy of your favorite magazine.  Be prepared to let us know your favorite radio program, TV program (if any), movie (again:  current and from the past) and newspapers.  We’ll set music aside for this evening, but it might be fun to pick up again at some point as both Scott and Frank have led us to do at retreats. The physical objects themselves are important, so please bring whatever you can.  2 books and 1 magazine at least.  If you can jot down your favorite radio program, TV program and movies (past and present) and newspapers, I will collect your lists and send them to Bill to publish on our website. What’s the point?  To dip into each other’s media stream for a bit, to hear why we like the books, movies, programs, newspapers and magazines that we choose.  I imagine five-ten minutes each of sharing, then a round of conversation about what we’ve heard.  This is for fun and to expand our grasp of who we are.


    Art and Culture Literature Woolly Mammoths Writing 📎and tagged

  • An Instant Classic

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    63  bar steep rise 29.64 6mph N dew-point 58  Summer night

    Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

    As always, the movies come later up here above 694, inside the pick-up section of the Minneapolis metro.  Tonight it was “No Country For Old Men.”  This movie is an instant classic according to many reviews.

    Talk about an oxymoron.  An instant classic.  That’s where the frisson is, yes, but I have a suspicion that just beyond the irony of such a juxtaposition lies a realm in which critics believe in their capacity to know a classic when they see one, even if it has only six months of theatre runs under its belt.  I don’t believe in such a capacity; but, I do believe it is of the nature of criticism to imagine its existence.

    This is a fine movie.  It has a story line that takes you by misdirection.  As the movie unwinds into its fullness, the obvious assumption is that it is a mystery, a how will they catch him yarn.  Anton Chigurh and his compressed air weapon, used in stock-yards for killing live stock, cuts a wide lane of violence down the center of the screen.  The opening scene shows the remains of a drug deal that has killed at least eight people.

    The plot seems to follow the results of this shoot out when it really follows Sheriff Bell, Sheriff of Terrel County in west Texas.  His story is a meditation on aging and on the violent criminal action that follows in the wake of the international drug trade.   He is an intelligent, compassionate man bewildered by crime he no longer understands.  In the final scene, which took me by surprise, he recount two dreams about his father.

    A classic?  Hell, I don’t know.  I’m not even sure the movies that film historians claim are classics are classics.  I feel more confident in defining literary classics.  There I feel I know one when I see one.  With movies?  Difficult.  Casablanca?  Yes.  Singing in the Rain?  No.  Wizard of Oz?  Maybe.  Birds?  No.  Why?  Too sleepy to explain.  This movie a classic?  Probably not.  But it is a damned fine movie anyhow.


    Aging Cinema and Television Dreams Faith and Spirituality Literature 📎and tagged

  • The Book Fort

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar falls 29.80 0mph NNE  dew-point 63   Summer, cloudy and mild

                             Last Quarter of the Flower Moon

    F- runs in the Star-Tribune daily comics section.  When it connects with me, its humor reminds me of the gold standard, Gary Larson.  It doesn’t hit that point much for me, but once in a while.

    One that didn’t hit me that way, but, in Kate’s reinforcement, has begun to reveberate featured a librarian looking between a pair of stacks.  In the back, near the corner, a man sat on the floor with books arranged around him in a rectangle and he had another book in hand to add to the walls.

    The librarian has a walkie-talkie and he says, “Book fort.  We have a book fort going up.”

    Kate looked at it, laughed, and said, “That’s what I’m going to call your study, a book fort.”   

     I laughed, too.  If you go into my study, you would first notice a small bookshelf filled with books and other books stacked up on top of it perhaps ten books high.  These are the books I may want to read soon.  To the right is a green cupboard with four shelves and glass doors.  That one is full, too, and contains books on liberal religion and liberal political thought. 

    On the wall that extends to the east from that cupboard stands another series of books cases.  These have philosophy, folk tales, folk myths and stories, aesthetics and art, and some religious books.  These are more reference volumes.  Directly across from them are a low series of bookshelves that hold my Asian collection.  It’s pretty deep in Chinese and Japanese literature, but there are volumes here on Hindu topics and Angkor Wat, too.  On top of these shelves sit my poety collection, perhaps 15 feet long.  Along the wall nearest my desk and half way along the room’s north side are travel related volumes, reference works and material on the Renaissance.  There are also books on the military, on water rights and gardening.

    Directly behind my desk is a tall bookcase filled with art history books.  I use these volumes a good deal when I prepare tours.

    So, book fort is an apt description.  But.  Forts are battlements, a place to hold out if the enemy strikes.  I do hide behind these books, retreating into my book fort to meditate, to study, to push away the enemies of distraction and human contact, except through printed words.  There is a hermetic quality to my life here in Andover, a quality I like, even prefer. 

    Fortresses though can keep one in as well as others out.  After giving it some thought, I would not trade my book fort for a trading post or a tourist venue.  In it I have the luxury of safety and a safety which protects my contemplative life.  This is not so much retreat from as it is retreat to.  If you ever come over, you are welcome inside the moat.  I’ll lower the draw bridge for you.


    Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • Does Google Make Us Stupid?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    70  bar steady  29.81  0mph NNW  dew-point 52  Beltane, cloudy and warm

                      First Quarter of the Flower Moon

    “When life gives you lemmings, jump over the cliff.”  A quote from an unusually cynical book I’m reading right now.

    Am also reading an article from the Atlantic which asks the question, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?”  The author says that he and other his literary friends now find it difficult to read a whole book, to sustain a long and complex thought process, to do anything more than speed read blogs.  They attach this tendency to the Web and their constant web presence, searching, reading, researching, writing. 

    It makes for an arresting article title.  I wanted to read it.  The argument doesn’t track for me, however.  Unless it’s my age (compared to theirs), their experience does not match mine.  I don’t find reading a book a challenge.  I do notice that I have a shorter attention span at times, something I correlate more to the span between commercials on TV programs;  but, when I need the focus for a subtle or complicated book, it is there.

    When I write a novel, it comes in daily chunks, not one long, intricate thread.  It must get there, of course, but it happens in discrete, manageable bites.  Reading complex material is the same process for me.  I read it at a pace that makes it accessible to me.  

    When I started college, I took the Evelyn Woods Reading Dynamics Program.  I remember two things.  One, if you want to read fast, take an index card and follow it as you move it down the page, taking in lines whole, from the center, rather than left to right.  Two, no matter how fast you read, the material determines the pace you can read.  Where 1,000 words a minute might be possible for fiction, when reading philosophy 150 words a minute is fast.  This squares with my own experience and factors into the topic, too.     


    Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • Sensuality Awakened in a Hindu Temple

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    47  bar steep rise 30.04 6mph N dew-point 38  Beltane

                Waning Gibbous Hare Moon

    There are frost warnings not 75 miles north of us.  Frost.  On Memorial Day.  OMG.

    Kate came home after a busy holiday clinic, today and yesterday were both very busy.  I cooked walleye, pasta with morels I found in our woods with a sauce Kate made earlier and asparagus.  We ate it while watching Passage to India.  This is an old movie, so you probably saw it long before I did, but it’s a stunner visually.  David Lean and Merchant Ivory, goes without saying.  The plot worked well in exposing the basic contradictions in the colonial exploitation of India by the British Raj.  The major plot point, however, an incident in the caves of Marabara still eludes me. 

    It seems that Adela, played by Judy Davis, awakened to her sensuality while visiting a Hindu temple in ruins.  It seems further that her on again/off again marriage to the City Magistrate created a level of cognitive dissonance with this awakened sensuality.   It all came to a head when she fled a wonderful day organized by a Muslim doctor.  She made an accusation of attempted rape, or, was manipulated into making one.  Then she recanted.  Puzzling.

    Kate’s off to bed.  I plan to finish Lush Life by Richard Price tonight.  A wonderful novel in many ways, though it is so thick in its content that I become weary of it and need a rest.  It is a tour de force of urban conflict, parsed out on the shockwaves of a brutal murder on the lower east side.  If you want to read a genuine American voice on a quintessential American topic, I recommend it.

    No writing by me yesterday or today on Superior Wolf.  In a bit of a general funk, the dream surfacing some of it.  Not sure where it’s going, doesn’t seem so oppressive tonight.


    Cinema and Television Family Literature Writing 📎and tagged

  • Current Literature

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    59  bar steady  29.90  0mpn WSW dewpoint 44  Beltane

                Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

    A mediocre night at sheepshead, but we had a lot of laughs anyhow.  Bill Schmidt cleaned up the nickels tonight.

    While driving back and forth I finished I Am Charlotte Simons, a 2004 Tom Wolfe novel.  It’s reviews are all over the map and I can see why.  On the one hand it is an arresting look at college life in the Ivy league.  On the other hand the characters never reached very deep into my soul.  It was long and brimming with detail, a novel of manners of a sort.  I’m glad I “read” it. (Listened to it.)  Don’t know if I would have finished it as a read.

    Another writer who has my complete attention right now is Richard Price, author of Clockers and Lush Life.  I finished Clockers a few weeks ago and bought Lush Life last week.  I’m part way into it.  This guy writes dialogue with an ear like no body I’ve read before.   In Clockers he channels inner city drug dealers and homicide detectives with equal credulity.  Lush Life continues this same kind of street savvy attention to speech and mores, this time on the Lower East Side in New York.  Clockers was set in New Jersey. 

    Both of these guys, in different ways, reach into a segment of American life only a few of us witness.  Of the two, Price’s work has the ring of authenticity while Wolfe’s is satirical and just a bit off key.  Still, I enjoy both authors and am glad to have them on the scene.

    I returned, last night and today, to a novel I’ve fooled around with since 2001, Superior Wolf.  It has possibilities. 


    Friends Literature Writing 📎and tagged