Category: Books

Places To Go And People To See

jono55

When the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh died this past January, he left behind a treasury of writings that touched on just about every aspect of living I can think of. I’ve read at least a dozen of his books, perhaps more, and his gentle and rational voice came through clearly each time. He had the gift of being able to explain the application of Buddhist teachings to our lives in words that were straightforward and uncomplicated without ever being patronizing or proselytizing.

Robin recently gifted me with his latest book, entitled Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet. It is different from the others I have read in two respects. The first is that each of his short chapters is followed by excellent commentary by a Buddhist nun, Sister True Dedication. The second is that he writes as someone who knows how little time remains to him, and wants to leave yet something more for those of us who are still floundering about on the surface of Earth. As a dying father who has his children gathered around him and wishes more than anything that he could do more, could have done more, to ease the suffering of those he loved.

Thay, for that is what his friends called him, was a man who never lost hope for us, for our species. He knew that the answers to the wholesale suffering and chaos that we call daily life were already here, in front of us and inside of us. That life need not be as difficult as we make it. That respect, compassion, and love were the tools needed and that we all possessed them. And that is crucial, I think. He never said Come buy another of my books, absorb what I have to tell you, and all will be well.

What he repeated over and over is You know that person of value, of peacefulness, that the planet needs to survive? It’s you and you don’t have to go anywhere and listen to anyone in particular to become that person. You already are. What is needed is that you learn how you can step out of the stream of confusion you are now walking in and gather your wits. What I offer you free of charge is a method that has worked for millions of people and it won’t cost you a dime.

That is the message he repeats in this last book. That each of us already has the tools we need. They are part of our true natures. What Thay offers us is essentially an owner’s manual for our minds, our hearts, our bodies, and lastly for our conduct here in our home on planet Earth.

Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If in our heart we still cling to anything – anger, anxiety, or possessions, we cannot be free.

Thich Nhat Hanh
Life of Illusion, by Joe Walsh

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I was listening to NPR the other day, and a senior New Yorker cartoonist was being interviewed after a long and successful career. He recounted how when he started out he had submitted dozens of examples of his work to the magazine over and over without a single acceptance. What had to happen was that the magazine’s cartoon editor had to die, which he eventually did, and almost overnight his replacement began publishing this man’s work.

One of those many stories that come to me as revelations, when they really shouldn’t have. Give someone a bit of power and they will by god use it wherever they can, whether ’tis for ill or good.

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From The New Yorker

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Monday promises to be a drizzly day. It’s three a.m. and the decks are awash already. We’re planning a few days getaway in early April, and just found out that our cat sitter for the past eight years was not available, of all things. As if she had a right to a life of her own. So Sunday morning I met with our new sitter, who I will call Howard, since that is his name. He will fill in if our regular person ever again selfishly insists on her freedom.

Howard is a retired real estate broker, and seems to be a very nice guy, indeed. He is quite a talker, being one of those people where everything reminds him of a story, which he will then relate in detail. (I recognize the type immediately because I am one of them) When all an individual really wants to do is say Good Morning and then pass by, dealing with such a person is like being snagged by a gentle but insistent octopus who will only release you when they are finished with you.

So Howard and I chatted for an hour when all that was required was five minutes mutual consultation. I enjoyed it, however, because his tales were interesting and his sincere interest in animal welfare came through. He is a member of a local organization that raises money for the neutering of domestic animals, principally dogs and cats. He suggested that we watch for a special fund-raiser coming up when one of our better local restaurants offers a spay-ghetti dinner for one night, with a silent auction, etc. His advice was to buy our tickets early.

I might go if there isn’t a lot of spay-talk. Not the thing at dinner, you know. Just isn’t done.

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From The New Yorker

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I missed it completely. Sunday was the first day of Spring and I blew right past it. It’s the kind of thing where you can’t go home again, can’t step in the same river twice … you know the drill. It was Monday morning when I realized that it was too late for this year and I’d have to wait till 2023 and try to do better. Mother Nature puts out this stuff and doesn’t care if I keep up or not. I like her attitude, really, except when I am the laggardly one.

When you walk around Paradise, you can see the trees trying to contain themselves and not bud out prematurely. Do that if you’re a tree and then one really cold day comes along and freezes your blossoms off. There you are, damaged and with reduced hopes for the year. It’s a case where the sexual part of the tree blunders off into escapades when the wiser, older part knows better but can’t hold the process back.

Just like people. All of that life experience and knowledge gathered by parts above the waist can be undone in a fevered twinkling by parts below the waist on a Saturday night in a borrowed Buick. A couple of hours later when control has been returned to the brain, there is little it can do but wait and hope for the best.

It’s a rough system, isn’t it? When the biologic plan for making more humans takes over and sensible thinking is put on hold. I can see why Momma Nature would do that, because if we had time to think things through to their conclusions and weigh consequences pro and con there might be fewer takers. And Nature doesn’t want fewer, not at all. It’s always more with that girl.

Here’s how it might go if common sense and real planning were the order of the day.

It’s Saturday night and she is right here in the car with me and she smells wonderful and her eyes are sparkling and … uh, oh I can feel stirrings. Better get my head straight while I still can. I’ve got college to finish and mountains to climb and traveling to be done and I would very much like to trade the old VW in for a new Miata. So let’s take her home early and maybe we can meet again one day for coffee. In the daytime. In public.

Or it could go like it often does in real life.

It’s Saturday night and she is right here in the car with me and she smells wonderful and her eyes are sparkling and what was that baloney Father O’Reilly was spouting about purity and chastity anyway and I wonder if she is feeling the same about me and … wait, here she is snuggling in closer and oh lord where are my hands going and ………………………………………………….. ………………….. whew, what was that? This is one of those times when I wish that I smoked.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light, by Meatloaf

When I was a teenager and clueless about all this I had a friend who was notorious among us for having (gulp) had sex with several girls while the rest of us were still thinking about it as we would about a trip to Mars. He was a good Catholic boy and told his story like this:

“There I was with all sorts of thoughts about how good those girls looked and wondering what they looked like naked and what it might be like to sleep with them. Every Saturday evening I would go to confession and relate these mental wanderings to the priest and one day I asked him:”

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Father, I am sorry to keep confessing the same old stuff week after week. But thinking about having sex is always a sin, right?

Yes, my son, it is.

But it’s much worse to actually do it, isn’t it?

No, my son, thinking bad thoughts is the same as acting on them.

Say again?

It is just as much a sin to think about having sex with a girl as it is to actually lie with her.

……………… Father, could we hurry this up a bit and you give me my penance and all? It’s still early on a Saturday night and since I already know that I can’t stop thinking about it … well, I’ve got places to go and people to see.

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Comparisons

jono55

It’s not that today’s creative people are not turning out worthy projects, too many to count, really. But I am finding taking a personal journey back through films and writings that once made major impressions on me to be so interesting that I am having trouble finding time for the new stuff.

It’s taking navel gazing to new depths, or heights, whichever way you want to look at it. For instance, back when one needed to have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to be considered a person worth talking to in the small area of society that I occupied, I liked it enough that there are still passages that I can remember almost fifty years later. But when I tried to get into it recently it did not move me, and I never finished it. I’ll have to give it another shot, I think.

According to Edward Abbey, the book is a fictionalized autobiography of a 17-day journey that Pirsig made on a motorcycle from Minnesota  to Northern California along with his son Chris. The story of this journey is recounted in a first-person narrative, although the author is not identified. Father and son are also accompanied, for the first nine days of the trip, by close friends John and Sylvia Sutherland, with whom they part ways in Montana. The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions, referred to as Chautauquas by the author, on topics including epistemology, the history of philosophy, and the of philosophy of science.

Wikipedia: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

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The Studs Lonigan trilogy by James T. Farrell lit up my life back when I was a twenty-something. If you haven’t read it, it’s a story of a young tough growing up in Chicago in the Twenties.

Farrell chose to use his own personal knowledge of Irish-American life on the South Side of Chicago to create a portrait of an average American slowly destroyed by the “spiritual poverty” of his environment. Both Chicago and the Catholic Church of that era are described at length and faulted. Farrell describes Studs sympathetically as Studs slowly deteriorates, changing from a tough but fundamentally good-hearted, adventurous teenage boy to an embittered, physically shattered alcoholic.

Wikipedia: Studs Lonigan

When I first read it, I was the same age as the character Studs Lonigan was in the first novel and a young not-too-tough growing up in Minnesota. Now I am older than the character was at the other end of his life. I liked the books both times, but the effect on me reading it as a young man was all enveloping at a time when I had no idea who I was going to be. I could so relate to Studs and his struggles in that first novel.

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Last evening I re-watched the movie Key Largo. A fine film and each time I watch it I notice different things. This time it was that some of the lines they gave to Lauren Bacall and to Lionel Barrymore seemed stilted, forced, not how I think people would really speak at all. The movie was a stage play first before it was made into a film, and those lines would have seemed apropos in that setting, might have been expected, actually. It wasn’t really a distraction, but it’s where the difference between the stage and screen productions shows up.

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The book Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry, was published in 1985. I came across it a couple of years later, and have re-read it several times since then. It was one of those books about an era that hit me as how the West might really have been. It seemed real. Of course, how would I know?

McMurtry himself eventually expressed dissatisfaction with the popularity of the novel, particularly after the miniseries adaptation. In the preface to the 2000 edition he wrote: “It’s hard to go wrong if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but, to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization; instead of a poor man’s Inferno, filled with violence, faithlessness and betrayal, I had actually delivered a kind of Gone With the Wind of the West, a turnabout I’ll be mulling over for a long, long time.”

Wikipedia: Lonesome Dove, the novel

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Another one that seemed real, even though my wartime service was 8500 miles from any battlefront, was Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes. His story of the experiences of a Marine officer in Viet Nam was unforgettable. Without having any direct knowledge of my own that was in any way similar to his, I got the sense that this was how it was most powerfully. Again, how would I know?

The book is set in Vietnam in 1969 and draws from the experiences of Marlantes, who commanded a Marine rifle platoon. The novel looks at the hardships endured by the Marines who waged the war on behalf of America. It concerns the exploits of second lieutenant Waino Mellas, a recent college graduate, and his compatriots in Bravo Company, most of whom are teenagers. “Matterhorn” is the code name for a fire-support base in Quang Try Province, on the border between Laos and the Vietnamese DMZ. At the beginning of the novel, the Marines build the base, but later they are ordered to abandon it. The latter portions of the novel detail the struggles of Bravo Company to retake the base, which fell into enemy hands after it was abandoned.

Wikipedia: Matterhorn (novel)

Anyway, it’s been an enjoyable exercise so far. BTW, I have read War and Peace three times over the past forty years, and it was a fine journey each time. At each of those readings, when I turned the last page I didn’t want the story to be over. (I wonder if there are any podcasts by Tolstoy out there, I have questions for him … did he make any, do you know?)

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A Dick Guindon cartoon

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Some years back, I was watching a television news program that contained an obituary of a famous person who had just passed away the day before the program. It was so well done, containing bits of video, quotes from contemporaries etc., that it was obvious to me that it had to have been prepared well in advance of the person’s death. It seemed just too polished to have been done in less than 24 hours.

Looking into the matter, I found that somewhere in the bowels of large media organizations there are workers whose job it is to prepare these things. And to keep them updated in cases where the subject is inconsiderate enough to continue to live on and make more history for themselves. There have been times when the author of an obituary has died before the subject did.

It’s not an important topic, just one of those little weirdnesses of life. If I were such an exalted personage as to have my obit on file somewhere, I think that I might ask the media outlet to let me edit the darned thing, just to get it the way I liked it. Polish it up, add a little rosy glow to the prose. I could pass along a couple of selfies as well.

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I’m not at all certain that the larger world is ready for this photograph, but I can’t always protect you, you know. Sometimes you must take life on life’s terms.

This is me in my intern’s outfit. White for purity, pocket jammed with pens and pencils, and with my oldest daughter Kari being forced to act as ornamentation. You can see how happy she was to be included, poor thing.

This would have been taken in 1966, at which time there were few self-respecting university students who didn’t have a bookcase made of pine boards and bricks in their apartments or homes. They were inexpensive to put together and lent a certain rustic charm to the dwelling. Their only drawback was that they were heavy and unmoored so that the structure could fairly easily tip forward and crush anyone unlucky enough to be standing close by.

Baby Face by Little Richard

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A Dick Guindon cartoon

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When Robin was away this past weekend, I went to the web and watched Apocalypse Now: Redux. It’s the version that put back 49 minutes of film that had been edited out the first time around. This made an already long movie way longer (153 versus 202 minutes) and was not to its benefit. What had been a strange and depressing film was now even stranger, more depressing, and right there on the outskirts of depraved.

I won’t be re-watching any versions in the future. I think that I’m finally done with it.

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Finally, this morning’s NYTimes included a stunner. The wreckage of the ship Endurance, which sank 106 years ago in the Antarctic, has been found by some intrepid folks. It’s the latest chapter in one of the best shipwreck stories ever. Following this link will get you to the article and a short video that stirred what scrap of adventurer I still have left in my soul. Might do the same for you.

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Sanity Isn’t Everything

jono55

The television series “Bosch” is over and done after seven seasons. No more years promised or hinted at. But it is still out there to be enjoyed, because this is streaming-land, where you can have a second chance if you missed it the first time around. And if you did miss it, here’s why you might want to take a moment to put it on your list.

Everybody looking nice and noir here in this poster.

It seems that there has been one police procedural series at a time that is clearly superior ever since “Hill Street Blues” came on the scene, and Bosch was one of those for Robin and I. Taken from a series of books by Michael Connelly, we got to watch characters rise, fall, stumble, surmount obstacles … to develop in ways that we might not have predicted.

Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch. A good actor gets a fine role. What’s not to like?

The lead character, detective Harry Bosch, had a childhood that was so unjust, so nightmarish, that it made him a crusader for fairness and justice in his police work. Crusaders can be prickly people, and his character is all of that. But most of his behavior is … admirable.

Watch an episode or two if you are between series. You may get as hooked as we were and be glad for it.

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I’m reading The Great Influenza, a book about the pandemic of 1918. Now (I can almost hear you asking yourself) why would a sane person read about one pandemic when they are in the midst of another one, the end of which is nowhere in sight? I think the answer is in the words “sane person.” Sanity, if you will search the pages of this blog going back as far as you want to, is not a quality I have ever claimed for myself. It’s not even a goal that I aspire to, to be honest.

My own variation of not quite on the beam does not involve the use of meat cleavers, AR-15s, or other violent tools and actions. It’s the kind of looniness that at its worst others probably find at worst irritating or annoying, at best amusing.

But about the book. If we think that we have it bad today, it is instructive to see what happened in 1918. Think bulldozers in Philadelphia digging mass graves to help alleviate the piling up of corpses in hospitals, morgues, mortuaries, and homes. Think what seemed like an ordinary influenza season turning into a nightmare as the virus mutated into something much worse, a killer of amazing swiftness and ferocity. Think a disease that hit hardest at the young and fit and was tolerated better by the infants and senior citizens of the time, turning the usual run of a disease on its head.

The author tells a good story, and he has a fantastic story to tell. For me, the introductory chapters on the development of American medical science were eye-opening. Where we went from backwoods medicine to the best laboratory benches in the world in less than a generation, and from the far periphery of science smack dab into the center, a position we still hold. Where doctors went from incompetent butchers to the gods of society that they became. This latter was especially interesting to a former doctor-god like myself, who had to turn in his celestial robe and scepter some time ago and who has been living contentedly as a mortal ever since. (I really don’t miss all that, although I will tell you that if you ever get the chance to party with the seraphim, you’ll never be the same).

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Back when I was in the process of becoming a divorced person, I sort of lost my mind for a while. I kept bad hours, slept too little and often ate things that were not fitten to eat. I would be up nights writing poetry, most of which I recognized the next morning as drivel, some of it as just okay, but then I would read one that was really good. One which contained ideas and writing that I recognized as not mine.

Out of these experiences came my theory of how my cranial contents, and perhaps yours as well, truly operate. First of all, this spongy bit of tissue tells me what to do to keep all of the nutritional substances that it needs coming in on a regular basis. It ponders odd things without cessation, and it does this without my bidding or leave, and often without my complete understanding. It prompts me to carry it around to different places, I suppose because its fairly confined life would be too boring if it didn’t have new things to look at.

But it has become obvious that what I used to regard as my brain I now realize is a brain. It doesn’t really belong to me, and is actually pretty independent of me. But I can “rent it” like a tool when I need it to tot up a column of figures or type a blog entry like this one. When my rental hour is up it doesn’t stop but keeps on going like that mad little bunny with the drum.

Anyone who has ever begun to meditate will recognize themselves here. You sit on your cushion, arrange your arms and legs just so, and then begin focussing on your breathing. Almost immediately your brain takes off on a tangent. You bring your attention back to the breath and in a few seconds that monkey mind is off again, following its own muse. You wonder why this is so, and why you don’t seem to be in control of your thoughts. Well … now you know what I think. Perhaps you have a better explanation?

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The Year Of Ernest Hemingway

jono55

Last night Robin and I began the three-part Ken Burns series on PBS about Ernest Hemingway. As we watched the first nearly two-hour segment, it triggered an avalanche of memories involving those books and stories.

The year that I turned nine was the year that my parents bought an encyclopedia. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I suspect that a traveling salesman came to the house and caught them at a weak moment. That was a periodic occurrence in our household, where vacuum cleaners, Watkins products, and other ingredients of life were brought to their doorstep by men with good smiles and better sales pitches.

At any rate, one day boxes and boxes of books showed up at La Casa Flom, and it was like Christmas. We gathered round as a family and first unloaded the National Encyclopedia, which I’m pretty sure you never heard of. It was a less expensive alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and published by Colliers. Next to be unpacked was the Book of Knowledge, a series of books much like the “National,” but printed on better paper, and organized to be more interesting to younger readers.

As an inducement to buy these two excellent collections, my parents also received a ten volume set of novels by an author named Kathleen ?????? (can’t recall her last name), a large set of westerns by Zane Grey, and a similar extensive collection of the writings of Ernest Hemingway. It was a literary bonanza, and since I was at an age where I devoured anything in print that I could get my hands on, I started in that very evening.

I quickly tired of Kathleen ??????, and never finished the first novel, which seemed to me to have been written for girls. At nine I was a horrible sexist, and so I set these aside. But Zane Grey was amazing. The characters were brave men and women, the settings all in the Wild West, and the tales involved things like wagon trains, indomitable settlers, and landscapes described in ways to make a boy want to go there immediately – to walk those canyons, climb those mountains, and yes, take the land from those who were already there.

So not only was I a sexist at nine years old, but I had no problems with the Europeans invading and settling lands belonging to the Native Americans. That made me a racist colonialist as well. Quite the little beast, I was.

But it was when I reached the Hemingway books that I became a man. As reader, that is. Now I was in a literary world containing some of the most adult themes I had ever been exposed to, and I swallowed those books entire. Of course I didn’t really understand everything I read, but there was still a story in each that could hold my interest. The real kicker was the short stories, though.

There was a guy named Nick Adams, who lived in a country up north where there was nothing but forests and lakes. Where doctors paddled across lakes to attend deliveries of babies and where trout fishing could begin to heal a lad with PTSD. And there was one story called Up In Michigan. A story which I later learned that no less a personage than Gertrude Stein had pronounced unpublishable.

I read it one day, and at first I didn’t get it, but I knew that there was something about it that was illicit and therefore awfully attractive there. Then I read it again, and this time I got it. It was about s.e.x. What we would today call date-rape, actually. I remember being chilled and frightened by what I had learned about human beings through reading that story. Of course I couldn’t talk about it with anyone, especially my parents. They would have been appalled at where my reading had taken me. My peer group had little interest in discussing Hemingway, so I could expect no help there, either.

No, it was my first exposure to knowledge that I wasn’t ready to process, and had stumbled upon way too soon. The only thing that I could see to do was to get older, and that was what I did.

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From The New Yorker

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This is something called a radio-photograph, and is of a black hole which is out there 55 million light years away. I was interested in black holes until one day when I was listening to PBS that I learned some facts which turned me off completely.

It was when I became aware that if I were ever to approach one of these things, that my body would begin to accelerate to enormous speeds. The problem was that the acceleration would be uneven.

For example, if I were entering the black hole feet first, at some point my feet would be going so much faster than my head that my molecules would come totally apart.

The astronomer who was discussing these awful things right there in broad daylight said not to worry, our vaporization would all be over so quickly we wouldn’t even feel what was going on. I didn’t buy it. I’m pretty sure that if my feet started going faster than the rest of me that I’d notice. And I’d be extremely unhappy about the whole process, to boot.

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Something of Value

jono55

In 1955 I was sixteen and OMG was I impressionable. There were many things that made dents in my psyche that year, dents which still show if the light is right and if I turn my head just so … . One of them was the book Something of Value, by Robert Ruark.

It was a novel about the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, which was very much in the headlines in the middle 50s. Lots of killing. More atrocities than you could shake a lion’s tail at. Colonials versus natives and all that. A very juicy set of horrors better viewed safely from several thousand miles away, which is exactly where I was.

Mr. Ruark was a White Hunter. Which means he was a member of a highly privileged group who traveled regularly to Africa to kill large animals for the fun of it. They would then take the heads, bring them back to the U.S. and build rooms in their homes to display them in, as evidence of their prowess. Ruark would write about his exploits, and publish these stories in magazines like Sports Afield and such. He was quite a good writer, actually.

When he decided to write about the Mau Mau, his informants were most often white people like himself. In spite of this handicap, he wrote a compelling novel that was very popular and which was my first little peek into the joys of colonialism. I learned that those brave and stiff upper-lipped British settlers could be quite awful at times in the way they treated indigenous populations. I learned that cruelty begets more cruelty, and that there seems to be no end to the creativity that can be brought to beat when doing harm to others.

It was a grim book, but had to be so if it were to accurately report the time and the events. The title comes from an African proverb which translates into something like: When we take away from a man his traditional way of life, his customs, his religion, we had better make certain to replace it with
something of value.”

It was that thought that stuck with me from then on. I remembered it when I began to be more aware, as a young man, of the true history in my own country of European settlers and Native Americans. (I say true as opposed to the heavily laundered version found in movies, which were my first source of information on the subject.) More cruelty, more horrors, more taking away without replacing.

They made a so-so movie out of the book which starred Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier as the friends turned antagonists. If you think it might be hard to imagine the dignified and righteous Poitier doing very bad things, you are right. It was.

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Which brings me to Easter Sunday. I can almost hear you saying “Huh? What fool sort of segue was that?”

My personal spiritual journeys have taken me on a zig-zag sort of route, and some of those directions have disappointed people I loved. So far I have caromed from Lutheran to Catholic to Lutheran to agnostic to Lutheran to Buddhist. If I live long enough, I might add yet another category to the list. Two things stand out for me. One is that you never know where your studies and thinking might be going until you find yourself there, and then what do you do?

The second is that I have never felt so rock-steady at any of these stages that I was tempted to proselytize. When I would leave one tradition behind for another, I have always been cognizant of the fact that … well … I could be wrong. That what I was leaving behind could be closer to the truth than where I was going. To debate with friends about religions has been something that I have avoided for these reasons. And to a large degree, it went back to that phrase from the book long ago:

When we take away from a man his traditional way of life, his customs, his religion, we had better make certain to replace it with something of value.

Something of Value, by Robert Ruark

So … if I were to argue religion with another person, and if I were successful in converting that person to my belief system, and if it turned out that my beliefs were wrong, what would that make me? What sort of friend would I have been?

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From The New Yorker

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All of the predictions are in place, the stars are aligned, and this Easter Sunday promises to be one of purely gorgeous Spring weather. It will be in the 70s here in Paradise, and there will be sunshine all over the place. Nor any drop of rain to fall. What will we do with this fine day?

We will have friends for brunch later this morning, for one thing. It will be our first indoor socializing since the onset of The Plague. Hopefully this is a true turning point in this disease’s dreary history, and a good first step back toward whatever normalcy will be.

I see myself lying back in the grass by a riverbank somewhere later on today, listening to the water and letting the unquiet air pass me by as I do the water in the river. I can almost feel the warmth of the sun on the aching places that I seem to have accumulated over time. And all of this in the company of my good and tolerant friend, Robin.

What a lucky man am I.

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Driver’s Ed

jono55

Larry McMurtry died this past week. Even if the only thing he had written was Lonesome Dove, he would be in my personal pantheon of authors who hit it just right. You know how it is … there are books that when you finish them, you have the sense of that’s how it was, that you have learned something true about a time or a way of life? Of course you can’t know if that is so, but it feels that way. That’s how I felt when I had finished Lonesome Dove. And again when I watched that remarkable mini-series based on the book, on television.

The characters were as real to me as if they’d been staying overnight in the spare bedroom, and we’d be sharing coffee and trading insults in the morning. This was also true of the people in Last Picture Show, Leaving Cheyenne, The Desert Rose, Moving On, Texasville, Terms of Endearment … the list of excellent books he’s written does go on and on.

I will give you only one quotation from Lonesome Dove here today. There is a long, long list of toothsome sayings from the book on Goodreads if you’re interested.Anyway, here’s the one that won out this morning:

“I figured out something, Lorie,” he said. “I figured out why you and me get along so well. You know more than you say and I say more than I know. That means we’re a perfect match, as long as we don’t hang around one another more than an hour at a stretch.” 

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

I have read a lot of McMurtry’s stuff, and there is still a lot of it for me to cover in the years to come. His writing never disappoints. So thanks, Mr. M, for giving me folks like Augustus McRae to turn to for counsel whenever I need them. That’s something, it really is.

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One day last week the programming robots at YouTube served this tasty bit up to me. I don’t ordinarily fill spaces in the blog with pirated Tubery, but when I found myself still chuckling at it several days later, and when last night I couldn’t resist forcing Robin to watch it again with me, I decided to bring it to your attention.

I just found this to be so funny. Conan O’Brien’s assistant is allegedly getting advice from a trio on her driving, and her responses are … well … supercute. Be warned of the presence of some off-color language. But the in-the-car banter is great.

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Robin and I were picking something up in the bathroom fixtures department at Home Depot when I spied this sign on a displayed toilet. I couldn’t believe it at first, and then began to truly appreciate what this small decal provided. It was a gift, pure and simple. Let’s take it one line at a time.

First … what exactly is “stealth technology” when it comes to water-closets? Have we reached some sort of nirvana where our visits to the bathroom can at long last be completely silent? Where no one on the other side of the door can hear what is happening, even though everyone of those people knows exactly what is happening?

I’m not dealing with that “extra large trapway to prevent clogs” at all. There’s just some imagery that I’m not willing to entertain. But I guess if the gastrointestinal fates dealt a person a really awkward blow they might be glad for that supranormal capacity.

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And now the piéce de resistance. “Flushes 7 billiard balls in a single flush.” The mind boggles. What possible relevance could this ever have to any human activity? (If you do know of one, please keep it to yourself.) Why are there only six balls in the photograph, instead of seven? And I simply don’t believe that you could make 7 balls disappear stealthily, so there goes claim #1 right down the drain. And how does one finish a game of billiards now that seven of the balls are on their merry way to wherever stuff goes when you turn the handle on the WC?

But with the stealthiness, the dreadful trapway, the billiard balls, and that sinister-sounding vacuum assist … I’m not sure I would have the courage to ever sit down on the device. And I would make absolutely certain that I was well away from the bowl when I turned that handle.

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Sunday Morning

jono55

I know that it’s Sunday morning and you have a God-given right to be left alone … but here I am anyway. Let’s face it, you clicked on something to get here, so face up to your part in all this. Ever hear of folie a deux?

Folie a deux (‘madness for two’), also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder, is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transmitted from one individual to another.

Wikipedia

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First of all, here’s more on Dr. Seuss and taking books away, by Ross Douthat, a generally morose but occasionally thoughtful columnist. He thinks that liberals should care more about what is going on.

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Another page in the movement toward alternate foods made of stuff we didn’t even know existed. For instance, do you know about the supremely hardy extreme fungus from Yellowstone National Park that is taking off right now? You don’t? Your ignorance could stop right this minute, should you so choose. Up to you. But know this – there might be, right this minute, a fungus burger out there with your name on it.

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From The New Yorker

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One of Billie Holiday’s signature songs was Strange Fruit. Biography has a short piece about the song and how singing it probably shortened Holiday’s life, while it certainly impacted her career. A sad story of the bad things that bad men in government can do and of the power of music to frighten them.

If you’re up for it, here is the song, sung by Ms Holiday herself.

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Saturday Scramble

jono55

Margaret Atwood is something else, isn’t she? When I went looking for a particular quote of hers that I vaguely remembered, I found no less than six pagesful of them in BrainyQuote. There are some really sharp ones in there. The one that I had originally sought was this:

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

Margaret Atwood

The thing that brought this saying to foggy mindedness was a book review in the Times of New York of The Bass Rock, by Evie Wyld. The book’s theme is violence against women by men, which is as tried and true a theme as ever was. (I used to cringe whenever this subject came up yet one more time, being a lifelong member of the perpetrator gender, but as in so many other areas I found that ignoring it didn’t make it go away.)

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

margaret atwood

I personally believe that this violence will not stop, or be significantly reduced until the topic has been laid out in front of us, bloody and raw, in a public square where we must walk by it daily and cannot turn our heads away. (How’s that for a metaphor?) Until we men are all absolutely sick to death of hearing about it and decide en masse to do something.

In this it is like the painful awareness of the systemic violence against people of color of that is today confronting Caucasians everywhere and around every corner so that we can only ignore it by complete denial of the nananananana variety. When we males (whites) as a group finally acknowledge the whole ugly mess as one we made and need to clean up all on our lonesome, it will happen.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

margaret atwood

I think that I might have to read this book. The sharper among you may have noticed that I am not perfect yet, but I believe that there is still that outlier of a chance that I may still get there one day. No one will ever notice when I do, of course, because I will have become the quiet, flawless, and empathetic listener that I was meant to be.

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Warning! Watch at your own risk! The following short video is known to cause liberals to smile broadly, and even right wingers’ faces to crack in painful ways. It’s all about the shoes. Oh, yes, it’s also about a real person with a sense of humor, something of which the red-right is seriously short.

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I’ve never been a big Martha Stewart fan. Back a few years, when you couldn’t turn your head without seeing her face on television, billboards, or magazines, I chuckled slightly when she went to jail for a few months for cheating. Although I admit that I did respect her for not prolonging things, the way a very wealthy person is able to do seemingly endlessly, when she decided to drop the legal maneuvers and do her short time in the calabozo.

So when I read yesterday that she is bringing out a line of CBD products for both humans and pets, I smiled. Yes, we’ll soon be able to chew our way to health or whatever it is that CBD can do for us and we will know that they are being sold to us by a very reliable ex-con. Because there has never been a question about Martha’s super-reliability.

I smiled again when I read who her partner (and old friend) was in this new venture, because he’s someone we already know as well. It’s Calvin Broadus. Calvin Broadus, you ask? Why, that’s his birth name. You may know him better by his professional name, which is Snoop Dogg. (I couldn’t make this stuff up, folks.)

We will be in very good hands, here. Madame Stewart’s ironclad WASP-y solidity, and Mr. Dogg’s long personal experience with the hemp family. Love it.

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Eggs and tomatoes go together so well, and there are scads of recipes out there of various combinations. Recently I experimented with something so simple and delicious that in the last seven days I had it three times for breakfast. Three times. It’s really only a variation on Chinese stir-fried eggs and tomatoes, but I humbly offer it here.

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I ran across this on YouTube and I found it to be helpful and inspirational. I have a well-developed tendency to think in stereotypes because it’s so much easier. After all, that way I can deal with people in large groups, rather than as individuals. So when a bunch of Southerners come out saying that Black Lives Matter, it gives me a chill. Now I actually have to think, which can be quite painful for me, and makes me crabby.

BTW, I should mention that I am not a neutral party, being the proud son of a union man who grew up during a time when that meant sometimes dodging the billyclubs and fists of the goon-armies of the rich.

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Fighting the Good Fight Department

When A Heart Is Empty by David Brooks
Trump Wasn’t Oblivious, He Didn’t Care by Paul Krugman

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I am presently re-reading Awakening the Buddha Within, a book that I first came across when I decided to see what the deal was with this thing called Buddhism. The book still interests me in its presentation of the main points of this “religion,” and also irritates in prodding me to accept karma, rebirth, and miraculous ideas that some schools of Buddhism adhere to. I am not a particularly good customer for miracles, it turns out. It’s one of my enduring quirks. Please notice that I said enduring, not endearing. This facet of my personality can be quite maddening to some.

It may well be that I am missing a great deal of the magic and beauty of life by insisting on a less colorful rationality, who knows? Even if this is true, I already find so much to admire out there … the world as I see it is so much more beautiful than it needs to be.

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A translation of the lovely song “Djorolen” goes like this:

“Cries out in the forest
The worried songbird
Her thoughts go far away
The worried songbird
Cries out in the forest
The worried songbird
Her thoughts go far away
For those of us who have no father
Her thoughts go out to them”

It’s August – Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

jono55

Just finished re-reading (for the fifth time?) Canoeing With the Cree, a classic of wilderness canoe travel. It’s a very popular book in stores in Ely MN, a gateway to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This, even though the route described by the book passes nowhere near the “BW,” but quite a bit west of there.

No matter, it’s a great story, first published in 1935. Young Eric Sevareid and his friend Walter Port wanted an adventure in the summer following high school graduation. In spite of their youth and inexperience, they persuaded their parents to let them paddle a canoe from Minneapolis to Hudson’s Bay, a journey of 2250 miles, at least 500 miles of it poorly mapped.

That’s the craziest part of all. I ask you, readers … would you let one of your kids do this? On their own in the wilderness for four months, barely enough time to finish the trip before winter would set in, which would probably have been fatal?

Honestly, if any of my own children had threatened to do this I would have locked them in a tower cell and worn the key around my neck, hoping that a few months of solitude would clear their mind.

(This strategy would probably have been moot, because if anyone tried to do this today, I think Child Protective Services would take the children away before they ever pushed off from that first landing.)

They did make it, of course, and Eric wrote the book. Both men went on to long lives. Eric became a journalist and a famous television news commentator of the fifties and sixties. But it is the story of these two eighteen year old kids that is still amazing, 90 years on. It’s a quick read, see if your library has it.

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I was alerted to this video by friend Caroline, and I am indebted to her. It provides some much needed humor, of the gallows variety.

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Yesterday Poco did several remarkable things, for which I have no reasonable explanation. In one corner of the back yard, our other cat, Willow, had caught a mouse. Poco did what he often does, out of curiosity. He padded over to watch the drama.

Suddenly the mouse made a run for freedom under the wooden fence. In an instant Willow was up and over the 5-foot fence and down the other side. Right behind her went Poco, our 14 year-old arthritic friend – up and over. Two minutes later both cats paraded back into the yard, but this time the mouse belonged to … Poco, who proceeded to devour it. Even though he has very few teeth left.

I had believed him physically incapable of all of these behaviors because of his age and infirmities. (Poco and I are about the same age, according to the data I have available.)

That dratted cat is making me look bad, and I deeply resent it.

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From The New Yorker

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Angst Galore

jono55

I was in my twenties when I read the Studs Lonigan trilogy, written by James T. Farrell. For me it was a turbulent read, one that left me not-the-same when I had finished.

Along the way I found that I had identified with the main character way more than I realized. He was an ordinary guy with good intentions, and that was how I saw myself. So when his life came to a too-young and unhappy end, I clearly saw that it was one of the directions that my own life might take. In fact, might be taking right then and there.

Studs could be me. I could be Studs.

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A result was that I was truly shaken by the death of a fictional character for the first time in my life. The author had made him more real to me than most of the actual people that I knew. To this day I greatly admire the writing skills that could do that, without really knowing exactly how it was done. A sorcery.

So it is with some misgivings that I’ve decided to go back through the trilogy. At the time of the first read, life was a universe of unknowns in front of me, a time both scary and exciting. Reading the books now will not be the same … but wait … life is still scary and exciting. There is still a broad universe of unknowns ahead. I’m really little more than an older version of that boy still trying to figure things out.

So I guess I’ll just read ’em and let ‘er rip.

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With all of the new books being published every day … why read some of the old stuff again? I can’t remember exactly when I realized that no matter what I did, I could never read all the books or listen to all the music that I wanted to. It wasn’t just the fact that I was starting to run short on time, it was that it always had been an impossible task.

After that epiphany I found that whatever I read or listened to no longer had that desperateness attached to it. I could fully enjoy each book, listen carefully to each tune, without the oppressive thought “I better get cracking, there is so much more to see and do.”

Now when I see something at a bookseller with a title like “500 Books to Read Before You Die” I am not moved to open it. I don’t need somebody else’s list, I’m pleased to be working on my very own, thank you very much. And the list consists of the book in front of me and open to the page.

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From The New Yorker

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In our daily lives today we are witnessing a kind of resistance to truth, to facts, to science, that are puzzling to some of us. How can they think that? is a phrase often heard and one that rattles around this cranium of mine like seeds in a castanet.

We see pictures of men with guns standing guard outside a bar in Texas so that the owner can open his business without regard for the public health. They’re standing up for the constitution, they say. How can they think that?

I read letters to the editor in our local paper which are nothing but rehashes of lies and gibberish extracted from Fox News, without evidence of any original thought on the part of the writer. How can they think that?

I look with shame and horror at our present government’s actions and policies, but my neighbor three doors down looks at the same steaming pile of horseapples and calls it beautiful. How can he think that?

So when I ran across these words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer they rang instantly true to me, and provide an explanation for what we see. Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and an anti-Nazi dissident at a time in Germany when both were very dangerous things to be. He was talking about Nazis in 1940s Germany, but they apply awfully well to our President and his followers today.

Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in April of 1943 and hanged in April of 1945. He was a prolific writer, and his Letters And Papers From Prison may be his best known work. The following is from that book.

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against stupidity we are defenseless; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed, and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

It seems obvious that stupidity is less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he speaks on behalf of an empowered group. In conversation with him, one feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans and catchwords that have taken possession of him.

The stupid man is under a spell…[And] having become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Letters And Papers From Prison.

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From The New Yorker

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Solitaire

jono55

Got our taxes done and off in the e-mail. Our preparer is a down-to-earth woman who lives on a very small farm near Delta CO. She’s probably somewhere in her 60s, plain-spoken, always professional. Year before last she had gotten involved in raising sheep, but quit after a single year when “the coyotes got all the lambs.” The way she tells it, that episode broke her heart.

She’s the sort of person I have no problem visualizing on the seat of a Conestoga wagon heading West in the 1800s, reins in her hand and moving steadily toward an uncertain future and away from a grudging past. Her name is Darla Haptonstall and she’s a gem.

This year she doesn’t get to chat with her clients, which is one of her main reasons for getting up and going to work. Because of the emergency we all bring in our contaminated papers and leave them at the door, and she turns them into refunds, which are signed electronically. The work gets done, but is devoid of en face human contact.

I spoke with her briefly on the phone yesterday, and I’m not quite sure what I said but it had to do with toilet paper and it broke her up entirely. The poor lady must be starved for amusement.

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I don’t mind paying my taxes, because I know that our elected officials will use them prudently. If Pres. Cluck can take my few dollars and funnel them into some needy plutocrat’s pocket, why, isn’t that what he’s there for?

If I were to keep those pesos for my own use, I might squander them on fripperies like food and shelter and music and have nothing to show for them at the end of the day but a smile on my face.

No, it’s better by far that I send my shekels off to Washington D.C., where there are skilled people who know exactly what to do with large quantities of other people’s money.

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Here’s a touching John Prine story. If you’ve ever in your sweet short life known a 10 year-old girl, I guarantee you’ll like it.

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I am rereading Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. This will be the third time I’ve gone through the book, and this time promises to be the best of all.

I was a twenty-something living in Minnesota when I first read it, and had to try to imagine through Abbey’s descriptions what it was like living in Arches National Monument for those seasons. I read it the second time as a middle-aged South Dakotan when I visited Moab UT for a couple of days on a swing through the southern part of the state. I understood his book on a different level then, having actually seen some of the places he had written about.

But this time I know so much better all of those locales, especially Arches (which is now a national park) and the Moab area. I’ve spent an accumulation of weeks wandering about the red slickrock of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado and have a deeper appreciation for that desert landscape and what it does for my spirit to be there.

To be there and to take the time to do nothing at all. To walk without any agenda that the land itself does not provide.

[Wikipedia has a particularly good review of the book that I can recommend to you.]

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Under Pressure

jono55

Monday morning was a drizzly sort of thing, with some intermittent patches of slushy snow falling. Thirty-two degrees of half-way-welcome damp. Early in the afternoon Robin and I went out for a walk and just when we were far enough from home to ensure that we would be good and wet, we found ourselves in a thunderstorm.

On Sunday I had assembled one of those small Rubbermaid storage sheds as the final piece in our “Let’s see if we need that big rental shed after all” project. The winning strategy involved ridding ourselves of yet another pile of truck. We’re not quite down to the place that daughter Maja is in, one where all she owns is a suitcase-ful of clothes, a pair of Birkenstocks, and a parasol, but we finally appreciate the utility of that way of living.

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A few months ago, on a routine office visit, my personal physician, Dr. Geronimo Malfeasance, found my blood pressure to be elevated. Rechecks x 4 were okay, so he let it pass as due to my being a nervous sort of person (I denied it) and that was that.

But because the alarm had been raised, I had purchased an inexpensive BP cuff to take my pressure readings at home, which proved so frustrating to use that I stopped doing them very early on. As far as I could determine, any chance of getting an accurate reading required that you have three arms and the manual dexterity of a sword juggler.

But recently it started to bug me that I hadn’t been a better patient, so I dug out that POS cuff and found a reading that was so high it belonged on a Stanley Steamer pressure gauge rather than any device used by human beings.

So I threw out that poor excuse for a blood pressure cuff and did some quick research. I am now the proud owner of an Omron upper arm BP measurement tool. It’s a beaut. Put it on your arm and press a button – that’s all. It blows itself up and lets itself down. No cords, no tubes, and the readings are beamed via Bluetooth to my phone into an app from Omron, where they are recorded and averaged.

I’ve taken a good two dozen readings and while most of them are mildly elevated, there is no serious cause for alarm. Some weight loss, taking the salt shaker off of the table, you know the drill. With any luck my numbers should come down delightfully. But Omron will tell me if they don’t.

Life is good.

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Referencing the cartoon above, some of you may not have encountered smelt or the people that fish for them, and I offer this information.

Smelt are a small silvery fish, a little over six inches long, that inhabit large bodies of water during most of the year, but in spring migrate up streams to spawn. As they do, they are set upon by humans dressed in all the warm clothing they own and wearing high rubber boots.

These men and women, who are vehemently opposed to fish having sex in the open where children might come upon them, wade into the cold water with long-handled nets and scoop the fish into buckets. There is no angling, no hook and line, and no finesse required, but only the shoveling skills of someone cleaning out a barn.

You then take the bucketsful home and fry up the fish, usually whole (no scaling or cleaning) with a little breading. At this point everyone sits up to the table and congratulates the fisherman on all his hard work. The fisherman is often not present to hear this praise, being indisposed as a result of the hypothermia acquired doing all that scooping the day before, and the pneumonia that it became later on.

Just in case the prospect of wading in freezing water to scoop up little fish doesn’t meet your criteria for entertainment, in those parts of the country where smelt can be found, churches and social groups will put on what are cleverly called smelt feeds. You need only show up with enough money for the ticket and you can eat all you want.

They are actually quite delicious. And the children are protected.

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Morning Has Broken

jono55

Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world

Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dew fall on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight
Mine is the morning
Born of the one light Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day

Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world

Sunrise in the Northwoods

This lovely hymn has crossed over into popular music and has been covered by many, many artists.

Sunrise on the prairie

For me there have been countless mornings when I’ve risen early and stepped out barefoot onto wet grass and had that exact feeling … like the first morning.

Sunrise in the mountains

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Well, here I am stamping my feet like an impatient child on December 23, waiting for Christmas FINALLY to arrive. And it’s all the fault of Karl Marlantes and Hilary Mantel.

Mr. Marlantes wrote what was to me one of the best books about the VietNam War, Matterhorn. It told the story of a young Marine Lieutenant during a relatively brief interval in that conflict. To me it smacked the most of reality, but of course how would I know, a man who never left our comfortable shores during my time in the armed forces?

But still, we read books every day that touch us, even though they are written about times and places that we did not experience in person, don’t we? And picking out the ones that seem the most real is part of our obligation. Our unsigned contract with ourselves.

So now he has a new novel that I am anticipating reading, Deep River.

Marlantes’s novel Deep River (2019) was published in July 2019. It follows a Finnish family which flees Finland and settles in the Pacific Northwest in a logging community. The story looks into the logging industry and labor movements of the early 1900s, and rebuilding a family in America while balancing family tradition.

Wikipedia

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But it is Mantel who now disturbs my days the most. Because she has already written two wholly excellent novels about the era of Oliver Cromwell and Henry VIII, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. And now her promised trilogy is complete, with the publication of The Mirror and the Light.

The first two were the kind of book that made you hate it when you reached the last page and there were no more pages to look forward to. The sort of unhappiness that would make one fling the dog-eared paperback against the wall in frustration.

So I have certainly set myself up to either have a grand time reading this book, or a major disappointment. Either way will probably involve some flinging.

Stay tuned.

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Needle & the Damage Done …

jono55

Willow went for her routine health exam on Thursday and except for needing to lose a bit of weight, she passed easily.

The result was that she was given three immunizations, and was feeling pretty ill by Thursday evening. She was sleeping constantly, plus eating and drinking poorly. Not a good day.

For me, it is all so reminiscent of taking my own small children in for their shots decades ago. You take kids to the doctor who are uneasy in their minds because any kid over two years of age knows that the doctor’s office is the House of Needles.

After the patting and the probing and the putting of metallic tools on their bodies, and just when they start to have hope that they are done, that they’ve dodged a bullet, in comes the previously non-threatening nurse with a trayful of trouble.

Sometimes my kids felt ill afterward, just like Willow is going through right now. In each case I had taken a person or pet in for “their own good,” and rolled those dice for them. Because I knew the odds. I knew in depth about the diseases they were being protected against. I also knew the possible side effects of the shots themselves, which ranged from the trivial to the very serious. The good always far outweighed the bad, as long as you were not that unlucky one in a million who experienced the rare serious side effect.

So I empathize with my small friend, and hope that tomorrow is a better day.

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BTW, on that same Thursday I went to the City Market pharmacy for my own influenza vaccination. A little late in the season, perhaps, but I carry a hiking stick to point at anyone approaching me who has a bleary eye and a bad cough. In this way I will hope to keep the disease at bay until the immunization has time to work its magic.

The pharmacy tech came up to me and demanded to know how old I was, because their supplies were at low ebb, and he wasn’t sure I was the right age for the products they had on hand.

In other words, here I was at eighty, and being carded.

He matched me to their materials, I got my shot, and Friday morning am nursing nothing worse than a sore arm and a touch of fever.

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Fighting the Good Fight Department
Stop Freaking Out About the Climate by Emma Marris

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Robin’s first small-group discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s stories on Thursday evening was delightful. Last night’s story was “Good Country People,” which I found both hilarious and macabre. The great thing about the discussion is that we never came to a consensus about anything in the tale except that we couldn’t come to a consensus.

Except for one Buddhist, the members of the group were all from Robin’s church, including the pastor and his wife. One of the ladies had been an English teacher when she was younger, and kept repeating how repellent the story was to her. Disgusting, repugnant, yechhhh! Are they all like this? the lady said. But by her own admission she will be at the next one, so there must be something she is drawn to.

Here’s a photo of O’Connor. She described herself once as having a receding chin and don’t mess with me sort of eyes.

The eyes for certain … a steely gaze indeed. There is a quote of hers that fits this pic:

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

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The song “Love, Lay Me Blind,” over there in the Jukebox, is so affecting. I can’t recall when I first ran across this piece of music and purchased it from iTunes, but whenever I play it a sense of sadness comes over me. Somehow it recalls a loss, but there is no memory attached, just a feeling. Perhaps it’s one of those archetypal memory things tucked away in my DNA somewhere.

This lovely video for the music tells its own story, which is also of a haunting.

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Pithiness

jono55

For Christmas, Robin gave me a copy of Barnes & Noble’s “Book of the Year.” It’s title is The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. It’s a slender volume, each page an illustration with a few words on it, or sometimes no words at all. It takes no time at all to read the entire book if you go at it as you would a novel. But I doubt that’s how the author intended it be used.

Taking in the pages slowly as you would a book of aphorisms would be a better way of approaching it, I think. To me it was all very reminiscent of the Winnie the Pooh books, where a cast of small characters say small things that can have large meanings.

I loved the illustrations, which were done by the author, as much as I did the text … perhaps more. They have a soul of their own, a tender and wistful one.

I’ve scanned in a couple of pages for you, just to illustrate what I mean. All in all it’s a lovely little book that I like very much, even though it strongly leans toward the Hallmark-y side of literature, which is not my usual territory.

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Here’s a cartoon by an old fave of mine, Dick Guindon. He was a student at the U of Minnesota when I was an undergrad, and drew for the student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily .

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I was thinking about the fascinating pictographs all over this fine country of ours that have been left by early Native Americans. There are some very well-known ones in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota, which are treasured by that state’s citizens, as they well should be.

Hegeman Lake, Boundary Waters, Minnesota

In numbers, though, they are dwarfed by the sheer abundance of the paintings and petroglyphs in this part of the country. One of our favorite local hikes, in Dominguez Canyon, contains hundreds of such drawings, inscribed on a handful of boulders. Perhaps it’s as simple as that there were so many flat rocks to write upon, and that shale and sandstone make better “paper” than granite.

Dominguez Canyon, Colorado

No matter. What has intrigued me is that we know so little about why they are there and what they say. Into this pool of thoughtful ignorance I will drop this small suggestion: perhaps some of them are the equivalent of blogs.

A man or woman feels the urge to record something. They find a large flat stone surface, have the tools at hand, and they write/paint their observations on life’s happenings. Or their imaginative take on them. Then they come back on other afternoons and add to the record, one piece at a time.

Grand Gallery, Horseshoe Canyon, Utah

Until someone comes up with the key to unlocking the true origins and meanings of these art forms, I am going with my own interpretation. (Just like I do with nearly everything else.) And if the truth does come out and conflicts with what I think, well, then I have some choices to make, don’t I?

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Robin is leading a book discussion group at her church dealing with the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. For myself, until just recently I really knew nothing about the woman or her writing but for the story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” a twisted little tale that ends with a psychopath shooting an old woman completely dead because she was annoying.

I have been invited to attend the first discussion Thursday evening and I am planning on going, although I have advised her to keep her expectations low when it comes to my participation. After all, I am an old Minnesota boy of Norwegian/American heritage and we do not have a reputation for literary commentary. We are much more noted for shyness and being too modest to plop our opinions down in public.

One item that attracted me to this group (besides the fact that I have a thing for the teacher) was learning that at the age of 5, O’Connor had her first 15 minutes of national fame due to owning/training a chicken who walked backwards. Here is Flannery and the bird.

Now there’s someone I can learn from.

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Once every couple of years or so, I need to remind myself how great the music coming out of the Sahara can be, especially the guitar music.

So here is the band Tinariwen.

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