Our Land and Home

The Weed Wrench, a Well Traveled Tool

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67  bar steep fall 29.59 2mph W dew-point 32

          Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

“O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!” – William Shakespeare

The origin of schadenfreude.  A malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortunes of others.  When happiness turns about for others, then we discover this difficult side of our Self, the corollary to Shakespeare’s observation.

Steve and Aimee came over today.  They wanted to thank us for the loan of the weed wrench.  They returned the favor by showing us their moves for the morning, wrenching out buckthorn after buckthorn in the area where we have a fire-pit and midden heap park under construction.  They also cleared out the area where we will put in Ruth and Gabe’s playhouse.

Bright, good work ethic, a pleasure.  

Now for a nap.

Art and Culture, Family

Sayonara, Weber Collection

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79!  bar steep fall  29.62 5mph WSW dewpoint 35  Beltane, sunny

                       Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

The final Weber tours.  A Japanese language class from Kennedy HS in Bloomington and a small group of stunned ladies of a certain age.  Neither tour was a flop, neither an engaging and vital time.  The Kennedy group had a few kids that were present the whole way, interest.  One young lady took out a notebook and started writing.  The second seemed timid, afraid to respond to inquiry, interested but reticent. 

At the end a woman told me she’d seen a Bhutan exhibit in Honolulu.  “The objects came with five Buddhist monks.  They came to bless the statues with water each morning.  Since in Buhtan, they received this sprinkling directly, but were in cases like this,”  she indicated the Nara Buddha at the beginning of the show, “they had, oh, I don’t know, a tupperware container,”  she spread her hands out and formed a large sloppy rectangle, “It had water.  Then they had a mirror.  They got the objects reflection in the mirror and sprinkled that.”

Sayonara, Weber collection and bon voyage.

I have a long stretch of days with little planned.  No docent classes, no tours, no preaching, no social engagements.  The right time to garden and to write.

Jon called while I was writing this.  They want to have the bris on June 2nd or 3rd.  Could I come?  I’m there.  I’m excited to see Gabe and Ruth, to see Jon’s garden and Jen with her new brood.

On to the treadmill.  I try not to remember this, but apparently in Victorian jails, prisoner powered treadmills were a form of human as donkey labor.  I’m not sure but that may be where the term comes from in the first place.

Friends, Literature, Writing

Current Literature

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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. 

Travel

Road Trip

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71  bar falls 29,90 0mph W dewpoint 35  Beltane, sunny

                   Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

A day with no garden work for me.  This 61 year old body needed some downtime.  Some movement exercises, 40 minutes on the treadmill and I’m good.

Kate planted annuals and has ideas for grass and petunias that sound good.  I have to amend the soil first.

Tonight is Sheepshead.  We’ll see how I do this time.

Kate and I have discussed the possibility of having Ruth come here for a week or so this summer. We’d like to get her started on regular visits to Grandma and Grandpas. 

The trip to Alabama has begun to take shape.  Looks like I’ll leave around June 14, stay in Selma for three nights–16-18, then I may head on out to Denver, crossing the deep south the whole way.  I haven’t seen Natchez or New Orleans since Katrina.  Road trip.  Road trip. 

Our Land and Home, Writing

I Think That I Shall Never See

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71  bar steady  30.00  1mph SSW dewoint 35  Beltane

            Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

A morning at the Rum River Tree Farm.  Kate and I went wandering among the trees up for adoption.  We looked at fruit trees for our orchard apple, plum, pear and cherry.  We also looked at some willows, Niobe for example, with a wonderful yellow gold bark.  Great accent trees.  The larch look great, too.  Both of these require a wet environment, so we might have to change our irrigation system around a bit.

River Birch clumps go for around $260.  I figure 3 or four would transform the lower part of our front yard into a shady grove.  One or two other trees, running up the slope, would follow the elevation.  Kate wants lanes of grass among the trees.  I want more trees, so I imagine we can come to a compromise.

We also will buy some tree lilacs, trees for our grandkids, planted in their honor.  All of this comes from the permaculture thinking.  I’ve added some to that page if you follow that part at all.

Now it’s 72 degrees outside.  This means it might be a good day for morels.  It also means some of those seeds we sowed will begun to germinate, some more of them, I should say.

Spent an hour last night editing Superior Wolf.  It’s a keeper, needs expansion, filling out and elimination of one whole story line, but it’s a good one.  So’s Jennie’s Dead. 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Literature

A Vivid Imagination

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59  bar steady  30.02  1mph WSW dewpoint 42  Beltane, sunny

                Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon 

“The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.” – Sir R. F. Burton

Burton is an interesting guy. He traveled the world and did a translation of the Arabian Nights.  He is, however, not much of a theologian.  His genes must have cascaded down to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.  They, too, seem to believe that if you betray your ignorance loudly, then others will agree.   All faith traditions are far more subtle, more nuanced that mere projection.  Do they each have their problematics? Absolutely.  Do the problems justify the kind of reductionist argument deployed by religions cultured despisers (to borrow the phrase from Frederick Schleiermacher)? Not at all.

The simplest argument against them is this.  Have you ever seen a love?  Have you ever smelled justice?  Yes, you have seen or smelled their physical manifestations, but have you seen the complex of emotions and judgment that produce them?  No.  Why not?  Because they are constructs of the mental world.  What constitutes the mental world?  Is it just the firing and stimulation of neurons?  Oh, how do you know?  Because the fMRI tells you so?  How does the fMRI tell you its information?  That’s right, through sight. 

I’m with Kant here.  The ding an siche, the thing in itself, is unknown and unknowable due to the mediation of the senses.   Therefore how Dawkins and Harris can claim to reach beyond their sensorium and know a negative is beyond me.  Does the trashing of their fundamental argument make them wrong?  Unfortunately, no.

By the by, if you’ve never read the Arabian Nights, The Thousand and One Nights, then you’ve missed something.  Find a complete edition because the Muslims who wrote it had a vivid imagination.  I mean, really vivid.

     

News of the Strange, Politics

The Things They Do

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65  bar steady 29.95 0mph ESE dewpoint 30 Beltane, sunny

           Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon 

“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.” – E. B. White

To underline the suspicion note in the EB White quote I gleaned articles from today’s news stories.  The ones who govern us on the basis of that 50% + 1 majority do some strange things.  And so do their spouses.

“Cindy McCain, whose husband has been a critic of the violence in Sudan, sold off more than $2 million in mutual funds whose holdings include companies that do business in the African nation.

The sale on Wednesday came after The Associated Press questioned the investments in light of calls by John McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, for international financial sanctions against the Sudanese leadership. ”

“…woman accused of booking clients for a high-priced call girl ring pleaded guilty Wednesday to money laundering and promoting prostitution in the federal probe that brought down former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Temeka Rachelle Lewis, who worked as a booking agent for the Emperor’s Club VIP, is the first defendant to admit guilt in the case that led to Spitzer’s resignation.”

“WASHINGTON (AP) – Hold on, NFL. Spygate isn’t over. Not if the “incensed” Pittsburgh Steelers fan in Congress has anything to do with it. Sen. Arlen Specter on Wednesday called for an independent investigation of the New England Patriots’ taping of opposing coaches’ signals, possibly similar to the high-profile Mitchell Report on performance enhancing drugs in baseball. “What is necessary is an objective investigation,” Specter said at a news conference in the Capitol. “And this one has not been objective.”

The Pennsylvania Republican was unforgiving of his criticism of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, saying that Goodell has made “ridiculous” assertions that wouldn’t fly “in kindergarten.” The Senator said Goodell was caught in an “apparent conflict of interest” because the NFL doesn’t want the public to lose confidence in the league’s integrity.”

“Can Bob Barr become the next Ron Paul?

Mr. Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who on Monday announced his candidacy for the Libertarian Party nomination, certainly hopes so. It is a prospect that could give Senator John McCain’s campaign fits, threatening to siphon critical Republican votes away from him in important battleground states.

The situation is purely speculative. But Mr. Barr is keeping close to the script that has had Mr. Paul, a Texas congressman, drawing votes long after Mr. McCain became the presumed Republican presidential nominee.

Mr. Barr is trying to tap into the fervent band of followers who were attracted to Mr. Paul online and donated generously to his campaign by hiring the same Internet firm that ran Mr. Paul’s Web site. And he is hoping to spread his message to those fans, by running online advertisements on their Web sites, proclaiming: “Advance liberty? Learn more about Bob Barr!””

“The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

The government’s forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the “pre-flight cocktail,” as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

“Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac,” says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was “dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose,” according to an airline crew member’s written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards “taking down” a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse’s account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, “Nighty-night.”

Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Rites of Spring

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52  bar rises 29.94  2mph NW  dewpoint 20 Beltane, sunny

                Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon

Nope, this isn’t about naked pagans dancing under a full moon.  Sorry.

Rather, it’s about those things we do.  In spring. 

The Mickman’s guy just left.  “Charlie,” he said, “We came through the winter pretty good.  Just one dead sprinkler.”  He handed me a sandy, wet plastic sprinkler head, smiled and went on his way.

Kate bought her annual supply of, well, annuals.  Alyssum, impatiens and coleus.  She’ll go back for a few more.

We prepared and planted new beds, cleaned old ones.

The furnace last ran in April, but, unlike most years we have not turned on the air conditioning yet.

The dogs spend more and more time outside, just like we do.

The guy who cleans the gutters and does the outside windows will show up after the cottonwoods disperse their seeds.

We moved the snowblower to the back of the garage bay and the riding lawnmower to the front.  These are his and hers machines.  Snowblower–his.  Lawnmower–hers.

We have all of these mechanical/electronic servants.  Instead of a gardener, we have a sprinkler system and a riding mower.   Instead of servants working mechanical fans we have an air conditioner.  Instead of a summer kitchen we have Vent-a-Hoods.  Instead of the post office we have e-mail.  Instead of shopping in real world stores we have Internet retailers.

These are sophisticated technological devices and they replace human labor of the domestic variety with skilled human labor.  The skilled folks make more money because they work in several locations rather than just one.

I find though, that when I work in the garden, I prefer hand tools:  a spade, a spading fork, pruning saw, trowel, rake.  In general  I allow only one mechanical tool into my work on our grounds.  The chainsaw.  It replaces labor I’m not sure I could perform even if I had the time.  On occasion I’ll rent an industrial strength chipper, but only after many hours cutting down trees and brush, then delimbing.  I plan to rent a stump grinder sometime this spring, but that’s a very special purpose piece of equipment.  Otherwise it’s shovel and pick, adz and drawknife.  Small sledge hammer, wire cutters and bolt cutters, Japanese weeding knife, serrated sickle and unserrated sickle.  A tool in the hand is worth two in the bush.  Or something like that.

Dreams, Politics

Have You Ever Had Culloden?

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60  bar steady  29.68  1mph S dewpoint 45 Beltane  overcast

              First Quarter of the Hare Moon

After I read several articles about Obama’s running mate choice, I came away convinced that Bill Richardson won’t be his choice.  The most interesting article I read suggested Wes Clark or Bill Bradley.  The prevailing opinion seems to be that he needs gravitas on foreign affairs in a Vice President.  This disturbs me since the most recent example of a naif at foreign affairs coupled with a strong VP is George Bush and Dick Cheney.  Do we really want a shadow presidency when it comes to conduct of foreign policy? 

The argument for a strong woman makes sense to me, but the candidates didn’t.  I don’t know.  If I had to choose among the folks bandied about so far, I’d go with Bradley, then back to Richardson.

Another planting day here on the homestead.  And a good one, it appears.  Good planting, transplanting days are overcast, low wind and cool.  They put minimum stress on plants being transplanted and conserve moisture.

In a dream last night I traveled to Wales.  It was an island in this version, with an interior river that followed the coast line.  You could rent boats and just let them float along.  I went through several small towns and villages.  They were mixtures of theme park and historical village, like Williamsburg.  At one point I stopped in a village and spent the night in a hotel. It cost $80 and had all natural wood done in a folk culture style.  A young guy took me to my room and said he would be back later with culloden.  What’s that, you wonder?  So do I?  He said it was boiling water with holes in it.  He never brought it so I don’t know what it was.  There were snacks, but you had to pay for them.

In the morning I woke up and went down for breakfast.  A waiter pointed out the menu to me.  It was a traditional meal, but I didn’t recognize any of the dishes.

At several points I said, “Yes, my family’s from here.”  It felt good to be home. 

The only dark spot was that I had forgotten to pack my tooth brush and tooth paste.  Kate had them, back on the mainland at a conference.  I figured I could buy some, but I hadn’t seen a drugstore.  Didn’t solve that problem before I woke up.

Garden, Writing

Novels In Vitro

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48  bar rises 29.83  1mph NW dewpoint 38  Beltane

            First Quarter of the Hare Moon

Once again the papers and books pile up while I focus on the task du jour, getting the garden planted, cleaned up, preened, weeded and planned.

Significant news on the hydroponic front.  The heirloom tomato plant I’ve kept inside has flowers.  That means tomatoes sometime in the near future.  Most of the early work with the hydroponics has come to fruition, literally.  I eat a salad from it at least every other day and the tomato plant flourishes.  Three tomato plants, four cucumbers, six basil and four morning glories have gone outdoors. 

Phase II starts soon.  Phase II will see cherry tomatoes, peppers and eggplant first as seedlings, but then as plants to continue growing indoors.  If this works well, we might expand the hydroponics to include flowers and more plant starting for outdoors.  We’ll see.

I have two or three novels in various stages of development.   Two of them, one about werewolves and the other about witches and magicians, both set in Minnesota have promise, but I’d have to get back to work on them full time.  Again, I don’t seem to do it.  Thinking about this because there are so many bad werewolf movies and books out there.  I did, though, mention Sharp Teeth here, I believe.  This one’s a keeper.  Done in blank verse.