• Category Archives Writing

  • Wisdom of the Past Brought Forward

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar steady 29.77 3mph N dew-point 52  Summer, warm and clear

    Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    “To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.” – Barbara Tuchman

    Given this definition I must be, ipso facto, an historian.  In fact I consider myself a humanist in the traditional sense, one who searches the literary and artistic and faith traditions of the world for guidance.  In a broad understanding this is a historical work since it relies on the wisdom of the past brought forward, a version of the history of ideas.  It takes me into many libraries and archives and I am most happy there.  The sense of possibility in a place stacked with books or objects of art or the accoutrements of faiths journey is, for me, boundless.

    Having had my little car in the shop for so long I found I had a desire to get out during the day, to drive around, go shopping.  I did.  It didn’t amount to much.  So I came home and planted beets and carrots for fall harvest.

    After a long nap I have picked up again my research on U-U history in the Twin Cities area.   This project puts me squarely in the historians camp and will find me rummaging in boxes of letters, meeting minutes, newspaper articles and old sermons.

    There is a very interesting video on YouTube that highlights a heresy  controversy in late 19th century Minneapolis within the Universalist community.  Here’s the link.


    Faith and Spirituality Writing 📎and tagged

  • Back In Its Own Stall

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    79  bar falls 29.84 1mph ENE dew-point 61   Summer, hot, moving toward muggy

    Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    The cracks in the red car’s head were tiny.  I saw them.  They ran, in one instance, down the threads that hold the spark plug in place.  While threading in a spark plug or under pressure, these cracks could have broken loose and allowed oil and exhaust gases to invade the spark plug and generally foul things up.  Carlson was thoughtful in showing them to me.

    We’ve sunk almost $5,000 in this car this year.   That’s almost a year’s car payments.  Even so, we could put in the same amount next year and still be ahead of the game.  It runs quite well now, though there is that piece that fell off on the way home.  No kidding.  A big chunk of something fell off.  I’m going to take it back and ask them about it, but not today.  It looks like a shield or rock barrier, not metal, rather some kind of composite, tarpaper like material.

    It’s 31-32 miles per gallon on the highway alone justifies keeping it in our two vehicle collection.  The pick-up we’ll park for the most part in the not too distant future.  $90 a tank to fill it up.  Ouch.  And it sucks the gas down, too, with its v-8.  What were we thinking?  It is, though, a useful vehicle for errands and landscape chores.  Another advantage is its four-wheel drive.  (Oh, come to think of it, that’s what we were thinking.  In 1999, when we bought it, Kate still had call and  hospital duty.  She had to be able to get to where she was needed.) That makes it potentially important in a severe winter situation.  Besides, pick-ups and SUV’s have lost significant value.  We could get nowhere the value it is to us.  So, it will stay, too.

    Our neighbor went to bed apparently healthy, then woke up the next day with MS.  A striking and sudden life change.  It has occasioned a major alteration in their lives.  They went from the salary of a 58 year old career civil servant at the peak of  his career to a fixed income household.  This was six months ago.

    How it will affect their family dynamics over the long haul is an open question.  The prednisone  makes  him cranky.  He’s gone from an active guy who built his own observatory and sailed Lake Superior to a wobbly man who can no longer read.  His mental acumen seems fine, but for now he wanders, lost in the bewilderment of this rapid change, as well he might be.

    Today is an inside day.  I’m going to write on Superior Wolf, get ready for my research on Unitarian Universalism in the Twin Cities and, maybe, crack the case and clean off my cooling fan.


    Family Friends GeekWorld Writing 📎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

  • Will I Build A Computer?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    76  bar rises 29.76 6mph NW dew-point 51  Summer, pleasant and warm

    New Moon (Thunder Moon)

    A new head has been found for the red car.  Hopefully it will get placed on its automotive neck tomorrow and we will go back to two vehicles.  This is important with the rise of gas prices since our Tundra has a V-8 (may be an antique walking) whereas the Celica averaged 30-31 mph on the Alabama trip.  Co-ordination is not such a big deal for us, though that can matter.

    The computer has shut down on its own, without warning, twice already today. I bought the tools to crack the case, get inside and clean out the cooling fan, but I’ve hesitated due to a hyperactive June.  Now available time and increased urgency have moved closer to taking the step.  In the back of my mind, the fantasy part, I see myself building a computer from parts.  The tools I bought would serve that purpose as well.

    Ate lunch with Stefan at the Modern Cafe.  I had a lamburger and Stefan had a smorbord, pickled herring and beets.  Both were tasty.  We discussed his poetry and he feels I’m helping, so I’ll keep at it.

    He wants to start a support group for children of successful parents.   My hunch is it would be big hit.

    On the way home from the Modern (it’s in NE Minneapolis) I drove north of Anoka (really, west) to Anoka Feed and Seed where I picked up four bales of bedding straw.  I’ll use it to mulch the garden over the next few days.

    Now, a nap.


    Garden GeekWorld Woolly Mammoths Writing 📎and tagged

  • Garlic Harvest

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    77 bar steady 29.93 5mph N dew-point 49  Summer, hot and sunny

                          Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

    Wrote this AM.  Appended chapter 3 of Superior Wolf to its page on this website.  Next week I’ll take down chapter 1 and put chapter 4 and so it will go until I have written myself to the end.  We’ll see where it goes.

    Moved mulch, created by renting the super chipper from Home Depot and grinding up branches, tree trunks and chunks of shrubs.  The mulch goes on the perennial bed first, keeping the weeds down as we move into high summer and also cooling the soil just a bit.  This involves a wheel-barrow, a pitchfork and a lot of moving from one place to another.

    After a nap I unburdened the kitchen table of a couple of months of magazines, catalogues and desparate fund-raising pleas.  This involved a paper-sack, a lot of sorting and moving from one place to another.

    Now I’m gonna cook supper, red beans and rice with some prime rib left overs thrown to make it interesting.  The now standard fare of lettuce, onions and cilantro from our gardens inside and out will join store purchased tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers for a colorful salad.  Later in the season we will have all of these ingredients. 

    I also learned from a piece of paper recovered from the literary overburden of the table that I can  harvest the garlic now.  Somehow garlic has become my favorite crop.  Don’t know why.


    Family Garden Writing 📎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

  • The Generator Failed

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    60  bar falls 30.16 0mph NW dew-point 36  Beltane, twilight

                  Last Quarter of the Hare Moon 

     This story grabbed me.  See below it to see why.

    “MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – A woman who spent nearly 60 years of her life in an iron lung after being diagnosed with polio as a child died Wednesday after a power failure shut down the machine that kept her breathing, her family said. Dianne Odell, 61, had been confined to the 7-foot-long machine since she was stricken by polio at 3 years old.

    Family members were unable to get an emergency generator working for the iron lung after a power failure knocked out electricity to the Odell family’s residence near Jackson, about 80 miles northeast of Memphis, brother-in-law Will Beyer said.

    “We did everything we could do but we couldn’t keep her breathing,” said Beyer, who was called to the home shortly after the power failed. “Dianne had gotten a lot weaker over the past several months and she just didn’t have the strength to keep going.”

    Capt. Jerry Elston of the Madison County Sheriff’s Department said emergency crews were called to the scene, but could do little to help.

    Odell was afflicted with “bulbo-spinal” polio three years before a polio vaccine was discovered and largely stopped the spread of the crippling childhood disease.”

     I learned a couple of years ago that I spent some time in an iron lung during my episode with bulbar polio.  It was a shock to me.   Paralysis struck my left side and lasted for about a year.  I recall one event in an emergency room or an operating room, lights above my body, people in white working on me.  I saw all this from a spot up near the ceiling.  I know this sounds weird, but the memory has permanent residence in me.  The remarkable part is that no one from the family was in this  room.  Just me.  And the medical team.

    Seeing this story reminds me of all the others, like me, who were victims of the post-war polio epidemic.  Most of us made it through with little physical aftermath, but some died.  Some still wear braces.  Some required breathing support of one kind or another for their entire life.  It all seems so long ago, but this woman was exactly my age. 

    I wrote some today on Superior Wolf, about 1,500 words.  Moving forward.


    Memories Writing 📎and tagged

  • Vanished

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    67  bar falls 30.34 1mph WSW dew-point 29  Beltane, sunny

                        Last Quarter Hare Moon

    The piles are no more.  One more phase’s detritus has gone into the trash bin or file folder or magazine holders.  It feels good to have them gone, a relief.  Financial information up to date.  Philosophy News, SF Bulletin, Parabola, Scientific American and Wired are in places where I will read them now.  Hmmm.  Guess the upstairs on the kitchen table pile remains.  Gotta work on that.  But not now.  It’s of more recent vintage.

    Sleepy.  Nap time.  Then some outdoor work and some more writing on Superior Wolf.  Had a good idea yesterday that I will implement today.  It’s an old idea, in a way the first idea for this novel.  It has energy.  Which is good.


    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