I’m with Rev. Wright

May 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

44 bar rises 29.89 0mph SW dewpoint 23 Beltane

Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

A first tonight. A salad made from lettuce I cut from the plants in our kitchen. Enough for two with plenty left on the plants. So, one test of the hydroponics down, a few more to go. I want to produce tomatoes and herbs on a year round basis, while also using the setup to start plants for the outside garden. Flowers, too, would perk up the kitchen and the inside, especially in winter. Slow, steady. Learning as we go.

Kate has tomorrow off, unexpectedly, so we’re going to go over to NOW fitness and buy a new treadmill. Tres exciting.

Looks like a couple of good days for outside work Sunday and Monday. I have plenty to do.

I haven’t said anything here about Rev. Wright and Barrack Obama. I’m with Rev. Wright. I know, I know. He comes off like a fruitcake, an angry voice untethered from day to day reality. His sermons are strident, cut deep. His critique of American society as a racist, vicious culture seems to describe a place none of us know. And we don’t.

Preaching has a long and complicated history. Its strongest and its most dangerous form comes when a minister decides she must speak truth to power. This always, always comes from a particular situation which the minister holds up to the Christian tradition, most often scripture in the Protestant community of which Rev. Wright is a part. The preaching task is never done in the abstract; it is always a spoken word to a people, a spoken word shaped by the scriptural and historical roots of today’s Christian church. When the community to which you speak and from you yourself come have experienced marginilization, unearned disadvantage, then the spoken word will express the truth of God’s justice to the powerful forces aligned against your community.

This type of preaching is never easy. It costs blood. It often produces pain. Clergy who insist on prophetic preaching, because they feel they can do nothing else, often lose their jobs, get branded as crazy, misguided, idealistic, out of touch. This is just power talking back, trying to press the truth to the margins again, where it can be contained. We, that this those of us in the white upper-middle classes do not know what it means to live as marginal persons, bereft of influence, beholden to power. We are the main-stream, the influential, the holders of power.

Naming truth hurts. But, as Jesus said, the truth shall set you free. But, he might have added, only after a really long painful time. Even so, it doesn’t make the truth any less true.

I never served a congregation as a minister for just this reason. I knew my politics were too radical for a congregation of Presbyterians. The tension and pain would not have had a constructive outcome. Rev. Wright made a different calculation and I support him in it.

Garden, Great Work

End of the Treadmill Season

May 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

54 bar rises 29.85 4mph WNW dewpoint 20 Beltane

Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Over to NOW fitness to check out new Landice treadmills. Not what I wanted to purchase, but the old one seems more and more problematic and it gets in the way of my workouts. As Ecclesiastes said, everything has its season. Turns out this is the end of treadmill season. Looks like I can get a deal. Sorta makes sense. Folks break into the great outdoors for aerobics.

I used to do all my aerobic work outside, all four seasons. In the winter I snowshoed, in the other three seasons I hiked in the regional parks and rode a bike. My bike rusted up and I started doing resistance work, which requires an indoor environment. Over the last few years I’ve switched to 100% indoor. The treadmill is a necessary part of my fitness regime.

Groceries. They had fresh, wild walleye. I bought some and made baked walleye, corn on the cob and asparagus for supper after Kate came home. She got a big bonus this quarter and she’s floating right now.

Spent some time outside. I fertilized the flowering bulbs, trimmed all the perennial grasses and dug up some ornamental annual grasses that finished their run. Have not yet hit my stride with the outdoor work, but I will. I prefer to do garden work early in the morning, then use the rest of the day for writing, reading, exercise and MIA related work. All that falls into place as the days become warmer.

General

The Sun. The Sun.

May 3, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

42 bar steep rise 29.72 12mph NW dewpoint 42 Beltane

Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

The sun. The sun. What a relief. Sunlight is a balm all on its own. No wonder we worshipped it in so many of our cultures across the globe. And why not?

More and more daffodils have opened, they give a cheery feel to the garden. Tulips will open in the next few days if we warm up as predicted. The garlic has shot up and all the iris look healthy. The hemerocallis has emerged, too, giving the whole garden a greenscape. I’ve got way more hemerocallis than I need or want, so a lot of it will get moved or given away.

Tonight we will have the first salad with lettuce from the hydrponics.

Another errand Saturday. I’m going to go check out Landice treadmills in Arden Hills, pick up some groceries and wait until it warms up a bit this afternoon, then plant beets and morning glories.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

In Tutelage to My Self

May 2, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

41 bar steady 29.41 4mph dewpoint 39 Beltane

Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Wet. Cold. Dreary. An inside day. I was gonna plant beets and carrots outside, but not today. Maybe Sunday.

Lunch with Tom Crane. We discussed the meeting at his house where I serve as his assistant. The topic is mastery. The word poses some problems for me because it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate it from its linkage to subordination. The idea that lurks behind it, though, is strong. Somewhere in the terms Zen master or Taoist sage or master gardener, even master craftsperson lies a life time of practice, the honing of a skill or a life way on the hard stone of experience.

We had an interesting conversation about who we had come across in our lives we would consider masters. I’ll get back to you, but no one leapt to mind. We also discussed the possibility of naming for others where we see mastery in them. This gets around the culture bound reticence we upper-middle class Midwesterners have to tooting our own horn.

I admitted that I had not allowed anyone to mentor me, nor had I been willing to be anyone’s disciple. This is a weakness, I believe, borne of a need to figure things out for myself, to do things on my own. Tom had the same experience, but for a different reason. He was thrust into responsibility and expected to survive. And he has.

This is, in part at least, a vulnerability question. Can I make myself vulnerable enough to another person to become their student, their disciple. The result of not doing that is, as Tom and I admitted, a sense that we have never quite arrived, not quite done enough. A niggle of uncertainty that has no reference within us which we can use to dislodge it.

We also spoke a bit about being in tutelage to the Self. I said I have been willing to trace my own journey by the vague outlines I feel in that part of me that participates in the greater universe, and which calls me forward to my own destiny. As a Taoist, I would call that my attunement to the Movement of Heaven, the Tao. A good lunch on a wet day.

Friends, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

A Fed? LOL

May 2, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

43 bar steady 29.47 11mph NNE dewpoint 42 Beltane

Waning Crescent Moon of Growing

Well, ok then. The reader who wondered about my hydroponics is not a Fed. LOL they said.

It is a weirdness about the Web that we can connect directly with people, yet know nothing about them. The weirdness compounds when we realize the people with whom we come in contact in this way, we don’t know at all beyond a few words on a computer screen. In the case of comments on a website or a blog like this one the stakes are, for the most part, low, but when you consider the apparent number of people who meet up in person after such interactions.

All this reminds me of Alvin Toffler and his book, Future Shock. I still remember many ideas from that book because he was a good phrase maker. High tech, high touch is the one that comes to mind here, but in a slightly different vein than Toffler’s. His version was that the more we connect through technology, the more we will want to see each other in person. I believe that’s true, but I’m on another tack here. High tech, high touch heightens the need, the desire for personal interaction, yes. It produces that desire–the original sense of eros in the Greek, the desire for human contact–in a situation we have not evolved to understand.

We are animals wired over hundreds of thousands of years to read the language in another person’s eyes, the way they hold their hands, the set of their neck, the wrinkles and twitches of the mouth. Though we are often wrong even with those cues, at least in face-to-face encounters we have a chance to assess, to ponder. Words on a page are not the same. Not even close. It may be that we have a sophisticated reader’s intution about how language reveals the author, but that’s a game often got wrong by critics, so how good can we be?

The point is this, words without flesh, disembodied words put us at a disadvantage. We can’t judge the intent of a phrase, the reason behind a conjecture. This has led to the all too familiar problem of flaming where some unhappy soul takes this anonymity and uses it to vent, often just to vent.

Toffler also described Over Choice, a situation where we face more decisions about more matters than we can handle with anything approaching wisdom. This applies to people we meet through the electronic ether, too. The reader interested in hydroponics might be a valuable interlocutor, one whose journey with indoor gardening might supplement and enhance my own. And vice versa. Or, they could be, as I speculated, a law enforcement officer hiding behind the web’s anonymity. Because it is my nature to trust first and question later, I accept the response to my speculation at face value; but, I have no face. Therein lies the dilemma.

We must evolve some method, some means of reading people we meet on the web. I suppose that’s what Facebook, Youtube, Myspace propose to accomplish, but there it is often meeting people to be meeting people. And those social networking sites get gamed, too. An endless loop.

Enough on this. I have to get to work writing my piece for the Muse. It’s taken an odd turn. Wonder how it will finish?

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Work

Hey, Buddy, Got Any Pictures?

May 1, 2008 Charles 2 Comments

55 bar falls 29.59 8mph NE dewpoint 36 Beltane

Waning Gibbous Moon of Growing

This is Grandma and her descendants, Gabriel and Ruth. Gabe still has to learn to suck and swallow. He also needs to wean himself from the canula that deliver an oxygen stream. Both of these are maturational tasks that would have completed on their own in the womb, so he just needs to grow and get older. Right now everyone wishes he’d do both quicker, unmasking one of the many contradictions in human development. As we age, no one wants to get older and grow bigger.

Kate came home last night. She was sad. Ruthie now knows her and runs up with a smile and arms out, “Grandma!” That’s tough to leave. Gabe, too, is in a vulnerable place even though she’s confident he’ll be fine. She also helped out Jon and Jen with domestic matters like cooking, grocery shopping and Ruth care when Ruth was not in daycare.

Having a child in the hospital creates stress just because, but there is stress, too, because work goes on while the daily routine gets disrupted. No one gets enough sleep. A tough time for the Olson family, Denver branch. It will receded into the past, someday, and become the stuff of family legend. When you were a baby, Gabe, you were in the hospital so long and we were so worried.

A reader from the Webiverse asked to see some photographs of my hydroponic setup. It occurred to me that it might be the feds trying to catch a not too intelligent dope grower. Go, ahead, buddy, show me your pictures. Heh, heh, heh. I hope so, but because boy are they going to be disappointed.

From this and the next angle all you can see are lettuce and tomato plants, but there are also morning glories, cucumbers and three varieties of beets. These last are not as far along in the growth process and will go outside as soon as the weather warms up.

As I’ve begun to work with the hydroponics, this setup seems small. The megafarm is the larger of the two; the smaller is sold as Emily’s farm.

Here’s the whole deal, including the seed sprouting area. The halide bulb and shield are just out of sight near the top.

It’s amazing the charge I got out of working with seeds and young plants when snow and cold weather blew around the house. I plan to branch out (ha,ha) a bit over the year to include flowers and, maybe, carnivorous plants. No, I don’t know why.

Art and Culture

One Psychiatrist Says to Another

April 30, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

61 bar steep fall 29.73 6mph WSW dewpoint 33 Spring

Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Some leaf curling and cupping on my lettuce and tomato. Not sure if it’s a problem or not. I can’t find any organisms. No sign of mildew, virus, aphid, biting insects. Still, it doesn’t look quite right to me. Time will tell.

Fed the dogs at 11:00AM and took off for the Walker to talk to Stefan. He asked me to edit and comment on his poems.

I got there early and wandered through the Suburbs exhibit and the Richard Prince exhibit. I’m not sure about Prince, as I know many others are not, but he has some funny jokes.

Two psychiatrists are at a bar together. One psychiatrist says to the other, “I had dinner with my mother last night and I had a Freudian slip.” The other psychiatrist raised an eyebrow. “I said, ‘You ruined my life you fucking bitch!”

Also, “You know what it means when you come home to a warm, loving embrace? It means you’re in the wrong house.”

These are on monochrome backgrounds, sort of pop artish. Most of the other re-purposed photographs show an interesting angle on American culture. I can imagine a curatorial meeting where having Richard Prince and the Suburban show together would add irony, creative tension. I’m not so sure. I found the suburban show more provocative than the Prince. It has an original take on a widely experienced phenomenon. Prince recycles material from our magazines, our popular culture, but his work seems more cool, distant. The suburban exhibition is lively, engaged with the subject either ironically or in a non-judgmental way.

Stefan and I met in Gallery 8, the first place aside from United Theological Seminary I saw when I first came to the Twin Cities over 38 years ago. Oddly, I had lunch with Lonnie, his wife, there many times when she and I used to keep up.

We talked about his poetry. I took a slash and burn approach to editing this batch. “I’m trying to find the line here, Stefan. Like skiing. I cut out everything that didn’t get me down the hill fast.” I told him that was an idiosyncratic method and that he could do whatever he wanted with the feedback. He gave me a few more so I guess it wasn’t too bad for him.

Family, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

Hazards in the Learning Process

April 29, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

41 bar steady 29.96 0mph ESE dewpoint 24 Spring

Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Spent a good part of the afternoon on mechanical and electronic stuff. It was time for the first changing out of the nutrient reservoirs in the hydroponics.

I first tried the way the setup suggested, that is, drain the reservoirs onto the plastic shelf on which they both sit. This is not as crazy as it may sound since the shelf has grooves pressed in to carry used nutrient mix and water toward a drain plug at the end of the shelf. So, I hooked up some plastic tubing by cutting a small hole in the end of the cap and opened the taps. This is slow. The drain hose is not too big. It’s also messy since the hole in end of the plug allowed a bit of the liquid to drain around the tubing and drip on the lights (electric!) and the floor.

Hmmm. Had to be a better way. Then I thought of all those car thieves hard at work stealing gas. Siphon! By chance I had one hundred feet of plastic tubing and it fit inside the drain tubing quite neatly. I pushed this tube through the hole in the drain cap, sucked on it a bit and voila! Both of them drained all by themselves. Still took a while, but it is a handsoff operation.

As I read somewhere, I took the used nutrient mix out and poured on the garlic, garlic is a heavy feeder and impervious to the cold weather we’ve had. That’s important because you can’t encourage growth in most plants when the temperature can still go below freezing. That possibility exists here until May 15th. I also poured it on some daffodils about to bloom.

Then I made 9 gallons of fresh nutrient mix and poured it back into the reservoirs through the pots holding the lettuce, tomato plants, three kinds of beet and morning glories. A tip I read in the hydroponic bible (according to the folks at Interior Gardens) suggested swapping out the nutrient every three rather than four. So, I did. This is fun.

The treadmill still has some hiccups. I had to rewire it again this afternoon. Landice apparently thinks they may have sent me a bad rheostat. If so, that means I swapped a bad one for a bad one rather than a good one for a good one. More work ahead there.

I also put away all the material from the Weber tours and the bronze tour I have a month or so ago. The library is neat. (in a manner of speaking. That is, my manner.) I have a file to read for the three hour bronze session I have for Family Day on the 11th. I also have a number of articles and objects to use as reference while I write something about Urania visiting the MIA.

Kate called today, too. Ruthie ran out of the kitchen yesterday, into the dining room and tripped, falling on the corner of the coffee table. Big cut. Lots of angst. But super grandma was there to be calm. She and Jon took Ruthie to urgent care for stitches. This is a busman’s holiday for urgent care doc, Kate Olson, but it gave her a feel for the other side of the examining table. As she often does, she felt guilty. Not her fault. Ruth is a puppy, running and playing and trying out the world. There are hazards in that learning process and none of us escape.

She comes home tomorrow and I’m glad. The bris has been delayed because Gabriel still has not decided to eat enough and he’s still on some oxygen. Until he can eat and breathe on his own, he’ll remain in the level 2 nursery.

And. No snow!

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, GeekWorld, Great Work

Newton, Darwin, Einstein–an Enlightenment Trinity.

April 29, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

41 bar steady 30.16 1mph SSW dewpoint 26 Spring

Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Charles Darwin was and is a remarkable man. Newton, Darwin, Einstein–an enlightenment trinity. An old paradigm physicist, a new paradigm physicist and the first student of complexity, a biological pioneer. These three have direct influence on so much of our world: calculus, atomic energy, genetic sciences, conservation biology, space travel, orbital mechanics. So much. To know the work of just these three and still deny the reality and power of ideas. Impossible.

Darwin has influenced my own thinking. A constant question I bring to the biological world is, “How is that adaptative?” “What adaptative advantage does that confer?” These two questions alone encourage speculation about fever, pollen, phototropism, the color of plant leaves, the place where birds nest, bipedal locomotion and so on ad infinitum.

I have multiple reading projects that will happen when I have time. One of them is to read through Darwin’s work, at least the important books. Why? To separate what Darwin was about from the muddled and often inaccurate picture offered by his acolytes. Here’s an example. An instructor at the arboretum’s symposium I attended on Saturday used the term survival of the fittest. Not Darwin. Herbert Spencer. Spencer used Darwin’s ideas to speculate about the succession of civilizations. He invented the now long ago discredited notion of social darwinism. Oswald Spengler brought the idea into its zenith of disrepute during the Nazi era.

Darwin’s idea is natural selection. It is not only the fittest, that is the strongest and most competitive, that survive. Those also survive who have a protected niche (think islands and deep valleys), a winning reproductive strategy (seeds versus spore mats) and great defense (lion fish, poison ivy). The long sweep of evolutionary time favors those whose characteristics favor survival, whether the organism is the fittest in their niche or in their species or not. Thus, the many endemic birds of Hawai’i may well not survive in some other environment.

Here’s a brief paragraph from Wikipedia that says this better than I can:

“An interpretation of the phrase to mean “only the fittest organisms will prevail” (a view common in social Darwinism) is not consistent with the actual theory of evolution. Any organism which is capable of reproducing itself on an ongoing basis will survive as a species, not just the “fittest” ones. A more accurate characterization of evolution would be “survival of the fit enough”, although this is sometimes regarded as a tautology.^[3]^[4]”

I have added a link to the Digitial Darwin Library on the right side here. Allison Theil turned me on to the Darwin exhibition at the Brooklyn Botancial Garden. They had the link to this library. In 2009 we will celebrate the 150th year of the publication of Origin of the Species. Much sturm und drang can be expected. I stand with Darwin.

Cinema and Television

A Clever Take on the Horror Flick

April 28, 2008 Charles Leave a comment

29! bar steady 30.17 0mph NNW dewpoint 22 Spring?

Last Quarter Moon of Growing

Just finished watching Cloverfield. This was a clever take on the horror flick. It used Blair Witch hand-held camera and concealment with high production values off in the distance. The affect is a sense of immediacy and immersion in the experience. In this case we don’t know much about the monster, in fact nothing outside its destructiveness at first. If we didn’t know we were watching a horror movie, we might think that New York had experienced a multiplied terrorist attack on the scale of many 9/11’s.

The monster convinces because it’s alien in form, though it most closely resembles a bat with a long tail and ferocious teeth. It also convinces because we see it from a distance and are most aware of its presence as the army races believably into action against it. Unlike most monster movies where the army seems called into shoot guns because that’s what we know how to do, in this instance it appears desparate, almost hopeless. This makes it seem real.

Matt Reeves, the director, wanted to give America a monster as iconic as Godzilla is to the Japanese. I don’t think he succeeded on that score. Besides, we have King Kong. Who is more iconic than that giant gorilla?