The Goalie's Anxiety

Mitt Romney's (and my) BYU

2012-02-19T09:13:00.000-08:00

1968, Provo

A cold night. January or February. Istand with friends outside Brigham Young University’s “Smith Family LivingCenter.” Students are dancing inside the plate-glass windows. A young black manapproaches, looks into the building, moves on.

I know him, someone claims. He’s LDS.Must be lonely. Can’t hold the priesthood. Can’t marry in the temple. Seed ofCain. Curse of Ham.

We enter the Family Living Center,join the dancers.

His testimony of the true gospel, Ithink, commits him to a difficult life now; but in the eternities. . . . Mymind skids to the warm, firm thighs of the tall girl from Idaho who is holdingme as close as I her.

This is a scene I come back to often, especially when I'm wondering just how I became who I have become and what possibilities lie in my future.

Eighteen years old. A Mormon missionary in waiting, just months from two years spreading the Gospel in Germany (spreading is too strong a word, there was only one odd convert). Fresh out of high school. Gathering experience at the Mormon university—social experience as well as intellectual and theological.

And, unwitting fellow student with Ann Davies Romney.

This I learned this morning as I read Jason Horowitz's Washington Post piece on Mitt Romney's two years at BYU (the two years I was in Germany). It's a good account, I think, of life at our university in those days. You can read it HERE.

As the son of school teachers, raised in Farmington, New Mexico, naive about the Civil Rights movement (only the vaguest thoughts, including a hint that it was probably Communist inspired), unable to think of a term-paper topic except for a diatribe against socialized medicine (lamented in an earlier post), I knew little about the social world Horowitz sketches in his piece. Cougar Club? I did, once, disastrously (or, better, hilariously), attend a costume ball at the invitation of a Cougarette.

Although he mentions it, Horowitz doesn't elaborate on the racism that infected us on the BYU campus in those days. (See my earlier post on my own racism.) I, in Germany, Mitt Romney, in France, and thousands of other missionaries preached and defended the belief that a black skin (as well as the brown skin of Native Americans) was a curse carried by descendants of the murderous Cain.

Mitt's father (see the earlier post on pressure from a Mormon apostle to do otherwise) supported the Civil Rights movement; but as a practicing Mormon there was no way around the ongoing denial of the Priesthood to black men (women are, to this day, still denied the power that the Priesthood bestows). No way around for me. No way around for Mitt.

Nudity Explains the Darkness

2012-02-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

Paul Swenson reading at Ken Sanders Rare Books

He loved women, Bel Cluff told me as we left the memorial service for Paul Swenson.

You have a wonderful family, I told Fae Ellsworth, a radiant woman—one of Paul's numerous sisters, I presumed— who had read her funny and intimate poem "How to Be Paul Swenson"early in the service.

I'm not Paul's sister, she said. I've been his lover for the past decade.

Barbara Bernstein, also not Paul's sister, read a eulogy that began with a statement about how since Paul's death she had had a single focused repeated set of thoughts: about the plan of salvation.

No, not that plan of salvation, she said.

The Mormon Bishop would, somewhat awkwardly but with blessed concision, after remarking he had never witnessed an event like this one, lay out that plan at the end of the service.

A line from one of Paul's poems remarks on the Bishop's remark, something like this: "I baptized her and washed away all her sins—plot line thins at this point."

I mean Paul's plan of salvation, Bernstein continued. Every time he saw you he would do or say something to make your life better.

Eulogies abounded, as did poems by Paul and this one by his sister May (of Beat Generation fame), read by their sister Beth Swenson Hall:

“Feel me to do right,” our father said on his deathbed.
We did not quite know—in fact, not at all—what he meant.
His last whisper was spent as through a slot in a wall.
He left us a key, but how did it fit?
. . .
“Lie down with me, and hold me, tight. Touch me. Be
with me. Feel with me. Feel me to do right.”

At once familial and sexy, May's poem could have been written by Paul. They both loved women.

Paul, weeks before his death, wrote "Nudity Explains the Darkness" (thank you Bel for the signed copy) in which, in the context of dipping chocolates and dipping bodies in the dark in a hot tub, Paul remembers the AP reporter denied entrance to a Priesthood meeting in the Mormon Tabernacle because she was a woman wearing pants. She returned, Paul writes: "in low-cut dress, / and there, associated press of male / attention pondered golden crucifix / that burned between her breasts."

Paul even loved his phlebotomist (December 2011):

"My phlebotomist / finds my tiny vein / first prick. Even though / I'm a 'hard stick,' / as she calls it (as if I didn't know). . . . Not her looks that haunt me, / but that she wants / my fluid, and reads my EKG."

Doesn't surprise me at all that they want his fluid and to read his heart.

Nor does it surprise me that Paul's absence is powerful as the day wears on.

It does surprise me how little grief was in the air at the service. Raw grief, I mean. There were plenty of deep feelings, well expressed.

But where were the sobs, the tears, the distraught faces? Did we celebrate too well?

Fortunetelling in Wickenburg

2012-02-17T08:43:00.000-08:00

14 August 1972, Wickenburg, Arizona

While we drill an exploratory well afew miles north of town, I’ve taken a room in a ramshackle motel crammed intothe elbow of a highway-railroad intersection. My next-door neighbor is awizened ex-contortionist who looked deeply into my eyes the first time I saidhello and said she would read my palm if I would come into her room. I claimedto have a vague palm. Her name is Maria, and in the relative cool of theevenings she maneuvers a hose to sprinkle a tiny plot of grass and flowers. Shewears a sleeveless blouse, a pair of loose shorts, and sneakers with no socks.She ties white rags around her deeply tanned left calf and her equally brownleft bicep, white semaphores that accentuate the contrast between the almosttheoretical lines of her emaciated limbs and their pronounced joints. When Istared at her bulbous elbows (galls, burls), she responded with a practicedexplanation of how her mother tied her in knots when she was a baby so shecould be an acrobat. She had never regretted it, for it had led to her eventualfame and the chance to mingle with the truly great people of this century. Sheis resigned to living out her days in Wickenburg, where the desert heat easesher arthritic joints.

SUN and SNOW in a Dry Winter

2012-02-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

Add caption

ZORAN DJINDJIC

2012-02-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

REPORTING FROM MADRID -- A fugitive implicated in the 2003 assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic has been arrested along with two other men in Spain, police said Friday.

The three men were members of a Serbian paramilitary group known as Arkan's Tigers, Spanish police said in a statement. They were apprehended a day earlier at a restaurant in the eastern city of Valencia.

One of the men, Vladimir Milisavljevic, had been sentenced in absentia by a Serbian court to 75 years in prison for involvement in Djindjic's killing, as well as for other crimes.

Djindjic was shot March 12, 2003, by a sniper while on his way into a government building in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.

Today's headline from the LA Times takes me back to the afternoon I listened to Djindjic speak to a crowd in the rain on a Belgrade square:

There is supposed to be ademonstration tonight, Žarkoreports. Here in the square. Against school reform and for freedom of themedia. Djindjić isgoing to speak.

Who is Djindjić? I ask.

He was elected mayor ofBelgrade, Žarkoexplains. You remember the elections Milošević tried to steal? Djindjić had been a student of the philosopher JürgenHabermas in Frankfurt. He’s an intelligent man. But he never figured out how todeal with reality. So Milošević, whoisn’t all that bright academically but who has his fingers on the pulse ofthings, could step in after the fact, divide the opposition, and take overagain.

Rain falls across the afternoonand onto the nighttime crowd that has gathered in the square, a thousand peopleperhaps, standing under umbrellas and yellow street lamps.

Students hand out color postersthat feature a microphone lit brightly against a threatening black cloud,gripped by a hand with its middle finger extended. At the top are printed aquestion and a command:

KOLIKORADIO STANICA ČUJETE?

MISLITEO TOME.

I understand the photo perfectly, but to translate thewords I bend over my rečnik/dictionary:How much/how long the radio stopping place audible? Does it mean: How long willthe radio station be audible? And then: Think about it.

Notlikely.

At the bottom are the words:Radio Index. And then a brave and/or foolhardy “claimer”: Fotografija, ArtConcept and Design: KAMENKO PAJIĆ.

Twenty people, most of themmen, stand on a stage built up against an equestrian statue between the museumand the theater, lit by inconsistent spotlights. Students wave the oppositionparty’s green and yellow flags and one red, blue, and white Serbian flag.

The steady rain soaks a hugesound system.

Speakers, one after the other,take the microphone and work the crowd. The words are incomprehensible to me,but I understand the rhetorical devices: the repetitions, the pauses, thecrescendos, the climaxes.

The crowd is dripping wet.Hundreds of umbrellas block the view.

Žarkotranslates as much as he can. Every speaker, it seems, is denouncing as devilsMilošević andŠešelj, who himself once called Milošević adevil.

Shrill whistles from the crowd.

Milošević is a fox, one speaker shouts, a fox scheming withRichard Holbrooke to sell out Kosovo.

Isn’t this the liberalopposition? I ask Žarko.

He nods.

Couples are embracingthroughout the crowd.

Have you noticed that there isan erotic buzz in any demonstration? Žarkoasks.

A speaker compares Milošević with Hitler.

On the periphery, young mentell loud jokes. People buy cigarettes and magazines at a kiosk. Ambulancesstand by. A Red Cross worker in reflective clothing walks through the crowdwith a radio.

Finally Djindjić takes the microphone. He led the streetdemonstrations just a year ago, hundreds of thousands of citizens marching andblowing whistles and demanding that the results of the democratic elections behonored. They achieved their goal. Djindjić andfriends took office. But here they are again, out of power, outside in therain, speaking to a scant thousand demonstrators, participants in a revolutionthat is running out of steam.

Still, Djindjić is a consumate orator. We’ll go to the people, hesays. We don’t need the media. We’ll simply walk with the people. . . . We willnot stop until the Milošević government is toppled. . . . We will not allow himto cripple the education system. . . . And we will never allow him to give awaythe birthplace of Serbia. Kosovo is sacred ground!

This is nuts, Žarko says.

What is nuts? I ask.

One way to explain Milošević’s drastic educational reform, he says, is as anattempt to maintain Serbian control of Kosovo by keeping the Albanians thereout of the universities. So when Djindjićdemands that Milošević keepKosovo Serbian, he works against his own demand for academic freedom.

Complicated.

We’ll continue thedemonstration tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock, Djindjić says. See you there.

And that’s it. Thedemonstration is adjourned.

After a minute the sound systemblares some sort of heroic, overwrought film music. I think of Woody Allen’sline: “Listening to Wagner makes me want to invade Poland.” How do you move themasses without playing to the mass instincts that are part of the problem?

Before the lights dim, Djindjić gives an interview to a man in a red rain jacketholding a tape recorder and then another to a TV journalist (so who doesn’tneed the media?), and it’s over.

We walk back toward my hotel.Around the corner stand eight vans full of policemen. One of them shoutsinsults at us as we pass. I don’t need a translator.

Radio Index posters adorn everywall, every column, every door. Someone has been busy. And brave.

In the hotel, a couple of menshake the rain out of their hair and off their coats and explain to the deskclerks: We went out to overthrow the government, and it rained. They laughuproariously.

Žarkosays good night and walks on to his mother’s place.

I sit in my room and rememberDjindjić’sbroad, handsome smile in the spotlight. His practiced wave. His rhythmicsentences. His forceful repetitions.

I think of the sentences Itranslated in Peter Handke’s A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia,of a very different rhetoric – Handke’s dialectical stammering, his pragmaticdetours, his incessant questions.

How does a country move from“crowds and power” to a self-conscious and skeptical democracy? Education?Books that teach another kind of thinking? But then, in a crisis, as peoplelook for answers, for comfort, right-wing rhetoric and left-wing clichésblossom. The leader promises purity, points to unambiguous solutions, incitesto absolutes, and starts wars.

I’ve read the theory. Tonight Isaw theory in action.

Don’t get me wrong. I admireDjindjić.Leaders aren’t perfect. But I can wish for a different kind of people. And I’mnot thinking of Yugoslavs.

REGULATIONS

2012-02-11T07:54:00.000-08:00

Painting the Japanese-American "relocation camps," artists inevitably featured the barbed wire enclosure.

Chiura Obata's juxtaposition of the wire and the written regulations highlights the fact that the barbed wire is stretched only to punctuate the written racist laws that removed these Americans from the West Coast to interior deserts.

Chiura Obata, from Topaz Moon

Estelle Ishigo, from Lone Heart Mountain

Estelle Ishigo's loosely strung barbed wire with wide gaps between the strands also suggests that the incarceration was only symbolically enforced by barbed wire.

Brian Evenson's story "Contagion" similarly relates barbed wire to regulation. Asa tool in the real world, barbed wire controls, separates, and imposes order.In response to an incomprehensible and frightening contagion, a town’s panickedpopulace transforms the wire’s function until the fact of the wire becomes thetruth of the new religion—“You shall know the fence and the fence shall makeyou free.”

Personal Music, Part 2

2012-01-31T12:41:00.000-08:00

a photo of the 55 Bar from another night

Yesterday afternoon, Tom and I and Kelsey's mother Easy loaded Bix into her car seat and headed for the city. Less than an hour later we were parked in front of the Lederhosen Bar, where Easy bought a container of goulash soup to take with us to Kelsey's gig at the 55 Bar (their website HERE).

Greenwich Village.

Just before we stepped down to the door of the place, I glanced to the right. The next-door neighbor is the Stonewall Inn.

Christopher Street.

Of course.

The 55 Bar, Tom explained, is located at the heart of much of the city's jazz scene. Just across the street is the Garage, which claims it has the most live jazz in the city (Tom's big band has played there). Half a block up another street is Arthur's Tavern, another jazz place. Not far is Fat Cat, where Tom has also played.

We settled in to some food and drink while Kelsey did her sound check. Several people came over to say hello to Tom, surprised he was up and out so soon. Remains a mystery to me: just 4 weeks out from valve replacement surgery.

And then the early show was on: Kelsey Jillette's American Project with guitar, bass, percussion, and Kelsey. [Along with other video's, including one from Tom's BigBangBigBand, there's a video of one song from last night HERE -- (to hear just the video, turn down the music playing to the left)] They started with an arrangement of Paul Simon's "Slipsliding Away" that almost eased me right off my seat. Kelsey's voice, especially in it's lower registers, is deadly.

The set continued; but Bix got a little too happy and I slipped her into her snowsuit and we slipslid out for a walk.

Around a few corners and a few more and there we were, approaching the bar again. Eight or nine guys standing in front of the Stonewall Inn looked us over and broke into big smiles when then they saw Bix's big eyes taking them in. "Ahhhhhhh" one of them said. "It's true," I said.

During the second set, Easy took Bix out while I enjoyed the music. And then it was 9 and the gig was done.

On our way past Arthur's Tavern Tom looked through the window and saw a saxophonist he recognized. We stepped in, he gave a big wave, and off we went, up the West Side to the Henry Hudson and then over the Harlem River to the Merritt Parkway and we were home in the other Greenwich Village.

Personal Music

2012-01-28T06:29:00.000-08:00

My son Tom recently had a valve replaced in his heart, three decades after the first surgery. He and his wife Kelsey are both professional jazz musicians based in Brooklyn; but for the recovery, they and their baby -- six-month-old Bix -- are in Greenwich, Connecticut, enjoying the hospitality of Kelsey's mother Easy, at Easy's pony farm: Kelsey Farm.

I'm here to take up some of the slack after Tom's mother covered the first weeks.

Day by day Tom finds himself back into his profession: first his alto sax, then his clarinet, and yesterday his bassoon. Last night, preparing to play a 1920's Conn alto sax, he laid out these three beauties. The light took my breath way. As does Tom's recovery.

FRATERNAL MEDITATIONS

2012-01-21T07:06:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about the appropriate form for a life, thoughts that are reflected in these first pages of the latest version of my text:

IMMORTAL FOR QUITE SOME TIME

FRATERNAL MEDITATIONS

by

Scott Abbott

ForJohn (Jay)

it can fool me but once
my grandmother used to say
death can fool me only once
then it’ll be my turn to laugh
Alex Caldiero

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.
John Berger

“.. . nothing returns from what has been destroyed, nothing is reborn, neitherdead men, nor burned libraries, nor submerged lighthouses, nor extinct species,despite the museums commemorations statues books speeches good will, of thingsthat have gone only a vague memory remains. . . .”
Mathias Énard

To confess wrongwithout losing rightness
Ezra Pound

Thisis not a memoir.
Thestory is uncertain.
Thecharacters are in flux.
Thevoices are plural.
Thephotographs are as troubled as the prose.

This is not a memoir.

Contents
I - Autopsy
II - 5 Degrees Before Top Dead Center
Green-and-Tan Notebook #1
III - The Albanian Smiled
Yellow Notebook
IV - Variations on Desire
Green-and-Tan Notebook #2
V - Horror Vacui

Blue Notebook

VI - A Dry Quill on Rough Paper

Blue-and-Tan Notebook

VII - Epilogue

CONSUMER CRIME: pd mallamo's novella" Sol Niger"

2012-01-15T07:28:00.000-08:00

Paul,

Spent a sunny afternoon reading your "Sol Niger."

It's a wild ride, funny and deeply depressing and so completely foreign that I was right at home (Freud's uncanny/unheimlich).

Holy shit! How do you do this?

Who the hell are you that you can think your way into lives like this?

I mean the TV lives. The stairstepper lives.

And, of course, the war-strewn African immigrants' lives and speech patterns and histories and wide-eyed incredulous witness of self-inflicted American idiocies and humiliations.

Not to mention the pigs' lives.

I'm so proud, after reading this, to be an all-consuming AMERICAN.

So proud to be from the PEOPLE of DONNY and MITT and MADOFF.

"Hero's journey thru the discount store that is America

tattoo, lingerie, quick-loan, cigarette, liquor, peepshow, divorce

TV-gay Japanese vampire chipmunk ninjas from outer space with stigmata in

similitude of chipmunk Jesus. . . ."

Holy evangelical methsnorting homophobic shit.

"His hope lay in the possibility, which occurred to him one evening while remembering the hippo, that an answer lay between the two extremes -- between 'there is' and 'there is not.' In fact, the answer may be in the inquiry itself, irrespective of outcome. Or the answer may be somewhere in the hit program Dancing With The Stars which Beeko L.A. never misses. The sight of inflexibly married Mormon Donny Osmond grinding hips with a half-naked showgirl in front of twenty-million rapturously fanatical American Evangelical Christian television viewer who vote him 'Winner!' certainly puts frisson into the larger quest of a public god."

I'm turning off the TV.

Sticking with beer.

Staying away from Dostoevsky and Judge Judy.

Driving a souped-down Subaru.

Eating only chicken.

Avoiding hippos.

And writing short declarative sentences for fear of all-consuming consumer contagion.

With admiration for your meth-producing Achilles Muckelroy who "is an indispensable component in that extraordinary symbiosis identified by its fullest flower only in America, where distributors, users, police, courts, legions of lawyers, full divisions of psychologists, prisons and prison guards, boutique detox spas, rehabilitation centers, DEA, weapon manufacturers, gun shops, car dealers, jewelry shops, banks and investment houses (some but by no means all offshore) depend on producers like him for a great deal more than just a nodding percentage of their very livelihoods."

Scott

. . . pd mallamo's story in GRANTA:

Sign of the Gun

1.
He buys a thrice-wrecked Maule in Alaska after his second season in the business, a brown-and-white STOL tail-dragger that doesn’t look like much but gets off the ground in 200 feet. He sells his truck and most of his things, stuffs the rest into the airplane and leaves Georgia forever.

2.
With a new set of topos he scouts north-west New Mexico for a week before he sees his spot, an abandoned airstrip with a wobbly hangar on the lip of a deep canyon just off the Navajo reservation. He wonders at its purpose all those years ago, the runway so short and close to the canyon’s edge it may have been for helicopters instead of fixed-wing. Now sage grows through the pavement and tumbleweed piles against the west side of the shed. The desert is full of old strips. For his purpose this is the best.

The maps indicate springs nearby. A self-published guidebook written by a hippy explorer forty years earlier says they are good springs. In a thousand square miles he’s seen nobody and figures he is alone.

3.
His back story, if he needs one, involves aerial mapping for the United Nations Cultural Agency. Uncharted Anasazi settlements detectable only from the air are scattered widely across the long red waste.

In truth he is a grower of high-grade marijuana for certain young lawyers in New York City who prefer organic, sun-grown bud, preferably from a desert with a whiff of Castaneda. He’ll call his crop Verse of Eden and should anyone care to read the fine print on the packaging he’ll describe it as That Which the Lord in His Infinite Wisdom Hath Brought Forth for the Joy and Benefit of Mankind. Like the prophets of old the desert makes his plant purer and stronger, altogether unlike that grown in the feeble artifice of civilization.

4.
You are going to be lonely for a while, he says to himself at six p.m. on a Thursday and orbits the field three times before dropping in like he’s crashing, just beyond the edge of the canyon he’ll fall back into when he takes off again. He stops abruptly before a dilapidated hangar, cuts the engine, opens the door. Footsteps absurdly loud in the deep silence, he walks through the ruined old building, returns to the plane for a pair of leather gloves and commences rearranging.

The plane barely fits, with all the falling-down junk inside. He jockeys it in with a hand winch and goddamnit. He figures the shed has weathered many big winds so he’s not too concerned with structural integrity, but just in case shores up two pillars with four-bys and wire he finds on the ground. He plugs the engine where it needs plugging and covers from prop to wings with a waterproof tarp cinched tight at the bottom but cut for the doors. He lowers a light dirt bike, fuel and oil, provisions and grower supplies from the packed-tight fuselage and passenger side, jacks up the rear of the craft to make it level, removes the passenger seat, lays his bed out, then, further back, checks the germination of his seed in the damp folds of the bluetowels.

[for the rest of the story click HERE]

Photograms by Flowerville

2012-01-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

The Flowerville blogger writes about books, books in Dutch, German, French, English, Greek, Italian, etc. She writes about books as if they matter personally. She wrestles with them intellectually and emotionally. She also photographs them (books).

The writing and photography can be found on her blog: http://fortlaufen.blogspot.com/
and on this flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flowerville/

And, if you were to come visit, I'd show you a few photograms that arrived in the mail yesterday. Flowerville makes the images with photographic paper, flowers, light, and then developing chemicals. It's an old process Henry Talbot practiced.

My scans aren't as good as the originals or the digital reproductions you can see at the flickr site; but they'll give you a sense for what I think is an amazing art form. Click on the photos for a larger image.

Walking the Fence Line, Feeling Alive and Mortal

2012-01-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

Blue and I walk along this fence once and sometimes twice a day. This morning we made tracks in the light snow; a week or two ago there was no snow. Same steep hill. Same barbed-wire fence. Shifting contexts.

There are a couple of deer paths that intersect the fence, and the deer sometimes leave hair behind (see the snow crystals gathered around the hair in the third photo here)—like their tracks, signs of their passing (Blue can, of course, scent other potent signs of their having been here).

At one point on our faint trail I have to duck low under an overhanging maple branch. This morning as I was about to duck down, I noticed a long grey hair caught on the bare branch.

It was mine, a sign of my having passed here. A sign of time past, of time having passed, of always impending mortality. Made me feel alive.

Sailors' Delight/Sailors' Warning

2012-01-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

a.m.

p.m.

ORIGINS OF MY RACISM

2012-01-01T10:35:00.000-08:00

The new year begins with old thoughts provoked by one of Paul's letters in the New Testament. I quote from notes I made in the late 1990's while thinking about my brother John, his homosexuality, and my own homophobia:

For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: Whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake. . . . Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith; Not giving heed to Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth.

Following Paul's lead, conditioned by his biases and the prejudices of a Christian nation, our parents helped pass along, or allowed to be passed along, part and parcel with their conservative stability, a subtle racism. I had to confront this again a few weeks ago, waiting at a streetlight. Around the corner came a car with a black male driver and a white female passenger sitting intimately close to him. My stomach turned.

A bowl of nuts for the holiday season: hazelnuts, peanuts, walnuts, pistachios, pecans, and nigger toes. That’s what I grew up calling them.

Standing next to the east goal post of the football field at Hermosa Jr. High, a fellow seventh-grader gleefully and perhaps maliciously informed me there were creatures in the world called “homaphrodites.” Incredulous, yet believing, I instinctively acted to brace up my crumbling world, erecting the first, but not last, phobic pillars to protect me from those hitherto unknown, still faceless, but now named “homos.”

Dad taught science and math at the junior-high school before he became principal. As a science teacher he had access to mercury and to our delight he brought home plastic vials of it. We split it into quivering masses with our fingers and raced heavy blobs down inclines. Dimes, when rubbed with mercury, glistened like new silver.

BOCA RATON, Fla. (AP) --

Drips and drabs of silvery mercury led officials to about 3 pounds of mercury sitting in a dorm room at Florida Atlantic University, forcing the evacuation of 187 students. The toxic metallic element, which attacks the lungs and central nervous system, was in a bottle labeled “mercury” with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones.

Families can be toxic with the best of intentions. A threatening letter written during an election in which another Romney was running for President of the United States gives ample context for my own family's religiously based racism (see inserts).

[from the Boston Globe]

Not long after Stapley warned George Romney not to mess with the racial order set up by God, these notes from an experience at BYU, 1968:

A cold night. January or February. I stand with friends outside Brigham Young University’s “Smith Family Living Center.” Students are dancing inside the plate-glass windows. A young black man approaches, looks into the building, moves on.

I know him, someone claims. He’s LDS. Must be lonely. Can’t hold the priesthood. Can’t marry in the temple. Seed of Cain. Curse of Ham.

We enter the Family Living Center, join the dancers. His testimony of the true gospel, I think, commits him to a difficult life now; but in the eternities. . . . My mind skids to the warm, firm thighs of the tall girl from Idaho who is holding me as close as I her.

And another set of notes:

Rodney Barker’s book, The Broken Circle, about the murders and civil unrest in my home town, Farmington, New Mexico, takes me back to additional origins of my racism. Most surprising is a 1975 Civil Rights Commission assessment of the events following the torture and murder of several Navajo men by boys in my high school.

There were large demonstrations against anglo insensitivity to the case, a case that resulted in the killers being sent to reform school till they turned eighteen.

The Mayor of Farmington in 1974, just a few months in office when the marchesbegan, was also the LDS Stake President. He was a family friend. He did what he could to manage the situation. He held meetingswith the protestors. He tried to explain that the three boys didn’t representthe rest of Farmington’s Anglo population. Their abbreviated sentences to juvenal reform school were notevidence of racism, but products of technicalities of the law.

The Mayor could not understand whythe Navajos were so riled up. To understand, he would have had to oppose thesociety he represented, the culture that had made him. That made me.

When “The Farmington Report” finallyappeared, concluding that investigators had found ample evidence of racism,discrimination, and brutality against Navajos, Mayor Webb’s frustration wasmanifest:

This is a typical example of how theever-growing cancer of bureaucracy is dominating and directing our country andthe lives of its citizens. . . . This commission would appear to want to drageach of us down to the level of the lowest common denominator and obviously isadvancing the cause of socialism in this country. They advocate that governmentfill all of the needs of the individual rather than achievement throughindividual effort. This would be impossible to finance and completely contraryto the American way of life, and the greatness achieved through the freeenterprise system and self-achievement of the individual.

Sterling Black, chairman of the Advisory Committee, respondedwith frustrations of his own:

There appears to be little awarenesson the part of the general population or elected public officials of thecomplex social and economic problems. . . . Navajos are aware of theindignities and injustices, and want something done to better the situation. .. . [Unfortunately, they hear only that] there are no problems existing, peoplein this town get along very well with each other, there are no indignities,there are no injustices, and there is nothing to be done to remedy thesecomplaints.

Some Final Thoughts:
My years in high school and at BYUduring the sixties and early seventies were sheltered years flavored by anunrelenting political conservatism. In that world, the civil rights movementwas a Communist front. William Dibble, a decent Mormon painter, began to dabblein abstraction sometime about mid-century. The Dean of Fine Arts at BYU thoughtit prudent to warn him: Bill, you are flirting with apostasy and are on thebrink of Communism.

Joseph Roth on The End of the World

2011-12-29T07:05:00.000-08:00

The New York Review of Books (December 22, 2011) has an essay by Michael Hofmann about Joseph Roth that will serve as the introduction to Hofmann's translation of Roth's letters. Here a passage that puts the end of the world in its place:

I am not in a tizzy about the letter from. . . . In view of the approaching end of the world, it's no big deal. But even then, in the trenches, staring death in the face 10 minutes before going over the top, I was capable of beating up a sonofabitch for claiming he was out of cigarettes when he wasn't, for instance. The end of the world is one thing, the sonofabitch is another. You can't put the sonofabitch down to the general condition of things. He's separate.

Western Civilization

2011-12-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

The headline, with an Abbot involved, seemed to implicate me. And then a second article about religious intolerance made me wonder just what s0-called religious men fear about women (and female animals). And how is that fear related to a need to control? And then I remembered the mission statement of the grounds crew of Mormon BYU: "The grounds will be kept clipped and controlled." And then I thought about what Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western Civilization: "I think it would be a good ideal."

Greek Abbot JailedOver Land Swap Scandal

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 28,2011 at 12:13 PM ET

ATHENS,Greece (AP) — Greek authorities on Wednesdayjailed the abbot of a 1,000-year-old Greek Orthodox monastery pending trial forhis alleged key role in a land swap with the state that blew up into a majorpolitical scandal.

Investigators havesaid the deal was weighted in favor of Vatopedi Monastery in northern Greeceand cost taxpayers about euro100 million ($131 million). Two ministers losttheir jobs over the swap, which the conservative government canceled,acknowledging that it had hurt the public interest.

The scandalnonetheless contributed significantly to the conservatives' 2009 generalelection defeat.

Abbot Efraim, 55, wasled to Athens' Korydallos prison after spending the night in the capital'spolice headquarters, following a 600-kilometer (370-mile) journey from theOrthodox monastic sanctuary of Mount Athos — from which women and femaleanimals have been banned since 1046.

Israeldetains ultra-Orthodox man in bus row with soldier

By AllynFisher-Ilan

JERUSALEM | Wed Dec 28, 201112:57pm EST

(Reuters)- Israel detained an ultra-Orthodox man on Wednesday on suspicion of calling awoman soldier a "whore" on a public bus for refusing his appeals thatshe move to the back of the vehicle, a police spokesman said.

Theincident came days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to crack downon acts of harassment by religious zealots, with the publicity surroundingthese cases risking upsetting his political alliances with ultra-Orthodoxparties.

Muchof the controversy has surrounded complaints by women against ultra-Orthodoxmen trying to force them to sit separately in the backs of public buses indeference to their religious beliefs against any mixing of the sexes in public.

SoldierDoron Matalon said on Israel Radio that a devoutly religious man had approachedher and insisted she move to the back of a bus in Jerusalem earlier onWednesday, after she had embarked at a station near her military base.

"Itwas very frightening," Matalon said, saying the incident was not the firstin which she had been asked to move to the back of a bus but that this time shefelt more defiant.

Matalonsaid she replied to the man: "You can move to the back if you want. Justlike you don't want to see my face, I don't want to see yours." She addedthat she was "serving our country, which unfortunately means I am alsodefending you."

Theman responded by shouting at her "whore, go sit in the back," Matalonsaid, adding that the driver later stopped the vehicle and police arrived.

Policespokesman Mickey Rosenfeld confirmed an ultra-Orthodox man was taken intocustody and "questioned about his motives" for insulting the soldier,but no decision had yet been made as to whether he would be charged.

Somebus lines that serve predominantly religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem andother cities have been segregated despite complaints from women's groups thattheir civil rights were being violated.

UnderIsraeli law women are entitled to object to sitting in the back, but they riskverbal and physical abuse for refusing to do so.

Several thousand activists demonstrated in the cityof Beit Shemesh near Jerusalem on Tuesday against incidents in whichultra-Orthodox zealots have spat at and insulted women and female children,complaining they were immodestly dressed.

Altered Consciousness and "The Idiot"

2011-12-27T10:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I sat in front of the stove, feeding it wood now and then while reading Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot in Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation.

Chapter V of Part Two has Prince Myshkin back from Moskow, looking for Rogozhin and then Nastasya Filippovna. His mind starts to slip, a sure prelude to an epileptic seizure, and he fights for clarity of thought, wrestles with his perceptions.

"He fell to thinking, among other things, about his epileptic condition, that there was a stage in it just before the fit itself (if the fit occurred while he was awake), when suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul, the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, and all his life's forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a jolt of sublime tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause" (225-226).

"'So what if it is an illness?' he finally decided. 'Who cares that it's an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?' . . . If in that second, that is, in the very last conscious moment before the fit, he had happened to succeed in saying clearly and consciously to himself: 'Yes, for this moment one could give one's whole life!'—then surely this moment in itself was worth a whole life" (226).

Reflection on Kitchen Counter

"'At that moment,' as he had once said to Rogozhin in Moscow, when they got together there, 'at that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more. Probably,' he had added, smiling, 'it's the same second in which the jug of water overturned by the epileptic Muhammad did not have time to spill, while he had time during the same second to survey all the dwellings of Allah'" (226-227).

"Then suddenly it was as if something opened up before him: an extraordinary inner light illumined his soul. This moment lasted perhaps half a second. . . . Then his consciousness instantly went out, and there was total darkness. He had had a fit of epilepsy, which had left him very long ago. It is know that these fits, falling fits properly speaking, come instantaneously" (234).

As I'm reading about this extraordinary (and the word is used repeatedly) hightened consciousness, perhaps 8 hours since I last ate something, and while drinking a strong gin-and-tonic, I can feel my own consciousness shift. I put down the book and gaze into the fire. I lay my head on the chair's arm and gaze out the window. The vertical lines of the house, of the window frames and the post of the front porch and the stucco corner stand out vividly. I shift my gaze slightly to the maple skeletons, find a dark spot, it must be a remaining leaf, that breaks the lines of the branches, and savor the experience of unexpected and powerful perception. The dark spot. I focus on the dark spot, on the contrast between the spot and the ink lines of the trees. I'm flooded with joy at the beauty—the simple beauty that is obviously in the eye and soul of the beholder and perhaps only thus beautiful. I wander into the kitchen and find an extraordinary reflection shining from the counter.

Thrilled, I get my camera and take pictures of what I am seeing, wondering how the images will resonate in the morning.

So here they are. While I think they are striking, there is no way, other than in these descriptions in language, to get at the phenomenological experience, at the feelings and perceptions that were the experience.

Later in the evening, wondering, as had Myshkin ("Was he dreaming some sort of abnormal and nonexistent visions at that moment, as from hashish, opium, or wine, which humiliate the reason and distort the soul? He could reason about itsensibly once his morbid state was over. Those moments were precisely only an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness" (226)), how real or how authentic or how meaningful the experience was, I thought again of the careful, rational, abstemious years I spent as a practicing, teetotalling Mormon. There are benefits to such a temperate life; but as I was trying to make sense of my own life in the new context that emerged with the death of my brother John, of AIDS, as I measured my prim abstinence with his sometimes profligate drinking, I remembered calls from Van Winkles, the restaurant he worked at in San Tee, California, a Chargers' game blaring in the background, John's voice both excited and a bit slurred.

I visited the restaurant, and I've thought, often, about contrasts between two brothers, some in his favor, some in mine:

Van Winkles, 1994

The tiny khaki-colored can ofEmergency Drinking Water among John’s things was for that horrible moment,perhaps, when there was nothing stronger in the house. During telephoneconversations with Mom, John routinely promised he would quit drinking and getmore education. His calls to me were often fortified by alcohol.

I don’t get drunk. Nor did I callhim.

Thomas Mann, East German Edition: Bibliotragedy

2011-12-25T13:51:00.000-08:00

When I traveled east for graduate studies in German at Princeton, I carried with me a 12-volume edition of Thomas Mann's works given to me by Chuck Hamaker, a friend and librarian. We had one child, Joe, and very little money, living on the $2500 yearly stipend the German program had awarded me.

Books were precious.

After about a year in Princeton, our daughter Maren was born. She sometimes slept with us in those first months. One night I fell asleep while reading Mann, letting the book slide down to the floor.

During the night, one of us changed Maren's diaper and dropped the soaked cloth beside the bed. Directly onto the open book.

By morning the book was swollen to three times its normal thickness. Days of drying ensued. I tried all kinds of things, including showering the pages with baby powder. Today, 33 years later, while taking photos of the books, I slammed the pages of the book together and was greeted by a fragrant puff of baby powder.

And which of the volumes was it? The Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man), of course, a book that drips delicious irony all on its own. This page (646) doubles down on the irony with its account of Lust und Liebe, which, as Mark Twain pointed out, is like familiarity, which breeds children in real life, if not in novels.

SOL-STICE

2011-12-21T08:46:00.000-08:00

sunset, december 21, 2011, from our porch in woodland hills

Today the sun-stands still (sol-stice) after having wandered south for six months. Tomorrow it will start moving north again. That's good news for all of us who get SAD this time of year.

http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/ua/SunAndSeasons.html

This figure from a Weber State site shows what's up:

Lots more information at the site (click on the caption).

Seasonal sadness doesn't seem to be a new thing. Alignments of standing stones set up thousands of years ago mark the point the sun will reach before finally starting to come back.

The photo below shows the southernmost reach of the sun, right at the top of Santaquin Mountain. Moving to the left, as the sun now will do, it will slide down the mountain, climb the peak with the microwave tower, and descent down into the next dip before June 21.

sunrise, day after the solstice

I spent a couple of weeks one summer traveling from Land's End to the Orkney Islands, visiting standing stones and thinking about why we stand up stones. There are burial sites and fertility sites as well as the astronomical sites, so the answers are multiple.

In honor of this year's solstice, some photos from that trip (much better ones all over the internet; but these are mine and thus memoryladen):

Avebury

Stonehenge: No Access to Stone Circle!

Standing Stones of Stenness (Orkney Islands)

Ring of Brogar (Orkney Islands)

And the most phallic of them all! The Devil's Arrows

Addendum

The Flowerville blogger's response to the photos took me back to the notebook I had with me on the trip. A couple of images scanned from the book I left in a London cinema near the end of the trip, after seeing Wim Wenders' Bis ans Ende der Welt, and then retrieved, gratefully!, hours later):

Standing Stones of Stenness

Ring of Brogar

What Remains of my Orkney Lunch

Finally, a poem of George Mackay Brown's, recommended by flowerville:

A Work for Poets

To have carved on the days of our vanity
A sun
A ship
A star
A cornstalk

Also a few marks
From an ancient forgotten time
A child may read

That not far from the stone
A well might open for wayfarers

Here is a work for poets --
Carve the runes
Then be content with silence

And a poem by my friend Leslie Norris, may he rest in peace, about poetry and life and the cromlech in the photo above (note the 12 stanzas -- *sta-nzas):

“The Twelve Stones ofPentre Ifan”

Thewind

Overmy shoulder

Blowsfrom the cold of time.

Ithas

Shapedthe hill,

Ithas honed the rock outcrops

Withthe

Granulesof its

Rasping. When the old ones

Wereborn

Theydropped in dark-

ness,like sheep, and hot animals

Howledfor

Theafterbirths.

Iwatch the great stones of

Faiththey

Movedin the flickering

Mountainsof their nameless

Lives,and

Seeonce more the

Pointsof adjusted rock, taller

Thanany

Manwho will ever

Standwhere I stand, lifting their hope

Instill,

Hugestone, pointed

Tothe flying wind. The sea ebbs again

Andround

Theendless brevity

Ofthe seasons the old men’s cromlech

Prepares

Itshard shadows.

Thefour great stones, elate and springing,

Andthe

Smallerstones, big

Asa man, leaning in, supporting.

Leslie Norris (Walking the White Fields: Poems 1967-1980)

Jim Harrison's "The Great Leader"

2011-12-20T17:35:00.000-08:00

I've been reading Jim Harrison's new novel, The Great Leader. It's about an upper peninsula detective with history as a hobby. His wife left him 3 years earlier. He mourns that loss as well as the death of his beloved dog.

I'm drawn to Harrison much as I'm drawn to Charles Bowden's work: neither writer has been castrated by too much civilization; both men see clearly and feel deeply; neither is afraid of revealing the weaknesses and proclivities that we (men especially) are prone to.

He retires at 65, early in the novel, but keeps on with a case he had —investigating a religious leader with pseudo native-american new-age sensibilities who gathered a group together in a longhouse in the woods and fucked them one and all. So the detective keeps following him, first to Arizona and then to Nebraska, even as he retires, trying to figure out the connections between sex, religion, and money.

Early on the Great Leader shared some blackberry wine with him: "he was amused when Sunderson [the detective] had spit his blackberry wine on the ground thinking it tasted strongly of Robitussin cough syrup. 'What kind of fucking geek would drink this?' Sunderson had asked. 'My people,' G.L. had answered, adding that all herbalists knew that blackberries increased sexual energy."

In another early part, he's half dreaming about naked cult members and his girlfriend Roxy: "he didn't care for one of her favoritye sexual positions which was to sit nude on his clothes dryer turned to 'cotton sturdy high' to feel the warm vibrations. He was 5'9" and had to stand on a low stool for proper contact and feared pitching over backward at climax. . . . In contrast, on a trip to Italy with his wife he had been absurdly and elegantly stimulated by the draped forms of Renaissance women in paintings. Sexuality had so many layers and those at the bottom were pathetic indeed."

The old man in this ragbagofabook drinks too much and is getting old and although he peeks through his window at the neighbor girl who gets naked for him he would never sleep with the 16-year-old although he does with plenty of women.

And what to do now that he has retired, now that he is divorced, now that he is 65? He walks a lot, thinks about brook trout, tries to get close to the cult leader, drinks and dreams:

"Before answering Mona's call he had had a confused dream that had his favorite brook trout creek becoming round, a perfect circle in the meadow, woods, and marsh that was its path. Toward the end it had become coiled and serpentine, which reminded him of some of Marion's favorite ideas. The aging process was linear with the inevitability of gravity but our thinking and behavior tended to occur in clusters, knots that wound and unwound themselves."

"Turning from the beach and the loose sand and snow blasting into his face with the thunder of the waves in his ears he resented the frailty of his age. He felt that the cold was his heritage and now it was betraying him, a bit dramatic for the simple fact that he had forgotten to put on his wool long underwear."

In the end the book doesn't really end but that's perfect for this guy who isn't dead yet so why should the book end.

Darkest day of the year tomorrow.

Fog and Ice and a Dog Named Blue

2011-12-19T10:13:00.000-08:00

Blue and I took a walk this morning. Here's some of what we saw (wish I could have photographed what he smelled):

An Odd Concatenation of Memories

2011-12-18T19:08:00.000-08:00

Sam,

Just had, while reading Jim Harrison's new novel "The Great Leader," a passage about the old man's childhood paper route, an odd set of thoughts.

They begin when I was in junior high school, living in Farmington, New Mexico. I had a paper route, The Albuquerque Journal, and the subscribers were in our subdivision and a neighboring one. I delivered the papers dutifully every day. But collecting for the paper wasn't as easy. I would go around to the houses with a little notebook the Journal provided, and when they paid would give the customer a little receipt. But sometimes they weren't home and one month would lead to another and soon they owed for three months or four or even six and I felt guilty myself and unable to ask for so much money. I knew kids near my age in a couple of the houses and that made things difficult as well, for whatever reason.

I ended up eating the bills of some of these; and in any case was constantly in a state of knowing the books didn't exactly add up, always to my disadvantage, since I had to pay the Journal representative exactly what was owed.

Then there was the summer I worked for W. C. Bacon and Son, a water-well-drilling company in Salt Lake. I worked all summer, and aside from the drillbit I lost in one well and the time the company's pickup seized up when I was driving it past the Cottonwood Mall, I did my job and earned the company money. But the Bacon son, who was running the company, was having a tough time and the last month's money wasn't immediately forthcoming. We left for New Jersey with the debt unpaid. I lived with that for about 6 months, when the check, at least most of it, came in the mail.

Ever since then I have the occasional dream, almost nightmare but not quite, that there are some type of loose ends out there, often from hard work of some sort or another, money still not paid.

And this is where you come in with your corn selling job. Any time you heard me asking about that, I was really asking about my own past.

So there it is.

Hope your finals went as you hoped.

Much love,

Dad

BREAKFAST BEFORE SUNUP

2011-12-17T11:33:00.001-08:00

sage breakfast (douglas fir for dessert)

frosty backs on these young ones

still bedded down

Amorphous Mitt

2011-12-17T07:28:00.000-08:00

The photo in the previous post of the aggressively unaware moneymakers took me back to a piece the editor of The Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas Section asked me to write while Romney was running for governor of Massachusetts. Unfortunately, my argument didn't sway the voters. I did, however, get hundreds of mostly angry comments in the paper's electronic version. Mormons do love their own.

Mitt (Money) Romney

2011-12-14T19:12:00.000-08:00

In the previous post I featured a photo of five of my sons.

In this post I'll put up a photo of another group of young men. George Will linked to the photo in his Washington Post column today:

Will likes this kind of capitalist display (Romney front and center) and calls what's going on here "animal spirits." I'm less enamored of these arrogant young white men who are celebrating money they have made by acquiring companies, firing employees, and selling the companies for profit. Even if the company goes bankrupt, they still get paid a fee for their efforts. A fuller account here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/romneys-bain-capital-record-shows-mixed-record-on-bankruptcies/2011/12/13/gIQANksluO_story.html?hpid=z2

A Couch-full on Friday Night

2011-12-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

Nate, Ben, Tom, Tim, Sam

MY LIMITS AS A PHOTOGRAPHER

2011-12-10T07:51:00.001-08:00

1. through a glass darkly

Woke up before dawn this morning to find a lunar eclipse underway. Shortly before the moon was entirely engulfed by shadow, I tried to photograph the amazing sight through the window. Knowing that hadn't worked (see photo 1), I took the camera and myself in my undies out onto the deck and into the 10-degree Fahrenheit cold and knelt with bare knees on the frozen recycled plastic and steadied the camera on the steel railing that wanted my skin and took a couple of very long exposures, much too long, as it turned out (see photo 2).

2. too much exposure

You'll have to take my word for it; it was a sight for lunatics!

Addendum: early the following morning

Fine Compliment

2011-12-08T07:00:00.001-08:00

"He was nearly fifty years old, but he was very fresh; he only colored his mustache and limped a little on one leg."
—from Goncharov's Oblomov

I'll be discussing the standing metaphor in the novel at a new blog on the metaphor of standing, Homo erectus in the culture of Homo sapiens:

http://onstanding.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/oblomov-standing-vs-lying-down/

Ben Abbott: Budding Scientist with Bad News

2011-12-03T08:56:00.001-08:00

Some news the other day that has a father's heart beating proud, even while it scares the pants off me.

My son Ben is co-author of an article that just appeared in Nature. He let me know through his blog, which you can find here:

http://moosedent.blogspot.com/2011/11/first-scientific-pub.html

Here's the actual article:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2226716/Schuur%20and%20Abbott%202011.pdf

There have been reports on the article in Time, The Washington Post, and lots of other places, including this one in Ben's local Fairbanks newspaper (with three nice photos of Ben at work):

Ben Abbott, a University of Alaska Fairbanks doctoral student at the Institute of Arctic Biology, poses in the ecology lab Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011, where he tests soil and water samples for carbon content. Abbott, along with seven other UAF researchers co-authored with an international group of fellow scientists an article appearing in the scientific journal Nature. They believe greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost will be released at a much faster rate than previously estimated, which could have significant implications for climate change projections. Sam Harrel/News-Miner

Read more: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - New estimate boosts permafrost contribution to climate change

So, we'll celebrate Ben's very first published scientific article while soberly contemplating the future of our fragile life on earth.

I had a student ask me if Ben believed in global warming. I don't know if he believes in it, I said, but he's studying it.

Identity

2011-11-30T06:44:00.001-08:00

The organizers of the Vanderbilt Kleist Conference (April 2011) sent photos from the event as they try to pry the last manuscripts from delinquent scholars for the proceedings of the conference.

Images of myself often make me wonder about identity; and these were no exception.

Who am I in the context of painted koi, listening to a paper on Kleist? Who am I while reading a paper I have written? Who am I in an unaccustomed suit and tie?

Am I, in other words, who I appear to be? Am I the sum of what I'm thinking at the moment? Am I what I look like? Am I what I produce?

And if the latter is the case, then I'm as much the woodpile I stacked yesterday morning as I am the paper on "Erection as Assertion" that will be published next year.

Three Pages from Bento's Sketchbook

2011-11-26T10:02:00.001-08:00

Just finished reading John Berger's latest book, "Bento's Sketchbook: How does the impulse to draw something begin?"

As so often with Berger, this is a series of short meditations, loosely drawn together by Berger's reading of Spinoza (Bento short for Benedict) and his sketches in a book dedicated to Spinoza.

Tyranny is the subject of two of the pages I scanned, a topic I've been thinking about while working on Handke's "Voyage by Dugout" and while reading an advance copy of Brian Evenson's novel "Immobility." "You know what word I never want to hear again," a character says in Handke's play: "neighbor. Fuck the neighbor. Death to the neighbor." Evenson's book is about forced community, a post-catastrophe world in which the authorities artificially lame an especially talented person to get him to do their bidding.

Berger writes about today's global tyranny in which differences between rich and poor are institutionalized. Handke writes about Marscorporations that use international events to forge soi disant community by vilifying some group, in this case the Serbs. All three texts echo messages of the Occupy Movement.

VOYAGE BY DUGOUT

2011-11-24T11:25:00.001-08:00

It has been a long trip, but the end is in sight. As you can see by the condition of the book in the photo, it and I have done a lot of work together.

Here's a snippet from the beginning of the trip:

1:30 a.m., 1 June 1998

I’msitting in my room in the Hotel Višegrad, looking out onto the Drina and theTurkish bridge, still lit by floodlamps. The bridge’s eleven arches arereflected in the silky black river. A nightingale calls from across the river.I’ve never heard a nightingale; but it can be nothing else. Unmistakable. Itcalls again, and then again. It’s indescribably romantic. I’m alone in my room.

Fromthe terrace below there is an occasional burst of laughter from Peter, Zlatko,Thomas, and Žarko, who are still talking with the two women from the Organizationfor Security and Cooperation in Europe, the younger one from Spain, the olderfrom France. We argued for hours about the role of organizations like theirs inYugoslavia.

Howlong have you been in Yugoslavia? Peter asked the French woman.

For a year-and-a-half, she answered.

Do you speak Serbo-Croatian? Peterasked.

No, she answered. I’ve been too busyto learn. The first town I was in was under attack for nine months. I workedthrough an interpreter.

You are here to tell the people howto run their country and you don’t understand their language! Peter exclaimed.You can’t bother to learn their language?

Who are you? the woman asked. Whatare you doing here? What gives you the moral right to judge what I’m doing?

Go home, Peter said.

Fuck you, the woman said.

Go home.

Fuck you.

The night air had chilled, and theFrench woman was shivering. Peter took his coat from the back of his chair anddraped it around her shoulders. There, he said, that will help.

Fuck you, she said, and pulled the coat around herself.

A year later the trip continued:

6 June1999, Vienna

Inthe city center, I stumble onto a Sunday-evening demonstration against NATO andfor Yugoslavia. “NATO – fascistik, NATO – fascistik!” the crowd of maybe 2000chants.

Back in my room, unable to sleep, Iturn back to my translation of Peter’s new play. I wish Žarko were here tocompare notes. How did he translate “Fertigsatzpisse”? Pissing your finished,your modular sentences? Sentential piss?

At 10:30 I watch a report on Peterdone for Austrian TV (ÖRF2). Peter’s crime, the reporter and his commentatorsagree, is that he is a “Serbenfreund,” a friend of the Serbs. Not good to be afriend of the enemy. Peter should have known better, it’s an old story: Japlover, Kraut lover, Jew lover, Nigger lover, Serb lover.

I turn off the sentential piss andreturn to Peter’s play. Before midnight I’m out of paper. I write across the face of my travel itinerary. I fill margins. By one a.m., having exhausted all possibilities, I look through the cupboards and drawers in my room. The drawer of the night table opens to a Gideon Bible, in the back of which are ten blank pages. I decide the hand of God has provided and rip them out and continue translating till first light.

9 June1999, before midnight, Žarko's birthday, Vienna

I ought to go to bed, but I'm stillreeling from the events of the day.

Several hours ago NATO and theYugoslav Parliament came to some kind of agreement ending the bombing after 78days.

And, I'm just back from the worldpremiere of Peter's “The Play of the Film of the War,” directed by ClausPeymann. I’ve seldom been this moved, this challenged, by a work of art.

The really bad guys of the play,three “Internationals” who know all the answers, who dictate all the terms, whocan think only in absolutes, appear on the stage as follows: “Threemountainbike riders, preceded by the sound of squealing brakes, burst throughthe swinging door, covered with mud clear up to their helmets. They racethrough the hall, between tables and chairs, perilously close to the peoplesitting there.” American and European moralists, functionaries with no hint ofself-irony or humor, absolutists who run the world because of their economicpower – these sorry excuses for human beings were depicted this evening asmountainbike riders.

“Žarko,” I said, “Don’t you ever tellPeter I ride a mountainbike.”

“No,my friend,” he whispered, “I’d never do that.”

Theplay drew on several incidents from our trip, including when Peter put his coataround the shoulders of the OSCE woman in Visegrad. After the play, flushed withenthusiasm and insight, I told Peter how well he had integrated a real eventinto an imaginative play. “Brilliant to put her and her friends onmountainbikes!”

“Doktor Scott,” he chided, “Doktor Scott. Always onduty.”

And now, thirteen years later, after trying 20 or 25 potential publishers, one of which backed out at the last minute out of fear of what Susan Sontag might think, I've just sent off the translation to PAJ, the Performing Arts Journal published by MIT Press. It will appear in May. Makes me happy, even as I and the book have seen better days.

Mrs. Robinson, Jesus Loves You

2011-11-17T17:34:00.001-08:00

1966, Farmington, New Mexico

Late-afternoonlight diffuse in the old Mormon chapel. The sacrament meeting is already anhour gone. The man standing at the pulpit intones the word of God.Sixteen-year-old boys and girls sit thigh to thigh in the back row, pass notes,play games on paper, brush hands.

July 1967, Farmington

DR. GENESMITH, ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON. I have swept his parking lot, watered his shrubs,cleaned his office, transcribed his tapes, and once almost fainted while I helda basin of warm water into which he squirted fatty yellow fluid drawn from deepinside a man’s knee through an enormous needle.

Today, I’mworking in the red glow of the darkroom, developing a set of x-rays. I pull thefilm from the chemical bath and hang the sheets to drip dry. I turn on thefluorescent screen behind them.

Gistening reproductions of ClaudiaColter’s spine.

The bones curve ever so slightly fromthe delicate vertebrae of her neck down to the right and then back to the leftbefore disappearing between the bright wings of her hips.

The bright wings of her hips.

Again I tracethe scoliostic curve, ghostly against the black film, deviating so beautifullyfrom the strictly vertical. I study the dim arcs of ribs that frame her spine,the cunningly articulated vertebrae snaking down between the ribs. I pictureClaudia in the next room, naked under the examination gown.

The thoughts arouse me, confuse me.I’m feeling what I’ve learned, in church, to distinguish as the fire of theHoly Ghost. I worship these pale images.

The door opens. It’s Dr. Smith: Sowhat have we got?

January 1968, Provo, Utah

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson,

Jesus loves you more than you will know . . .

The Graduate and his girlfriend fleeher seductive and wrathful mother to an upbeat soundtrack, and I leave thetheater happy for them, free with them, disgusted by "plastics" andconvention. But the "Jesus loves you" unsettles me. I wish Jesus andthe seduction that had my full attention (Mrs. Robinson’s parting knees!)weren't so snugly intertwined.

Through a Glass Darkly

2011-11-11T14:59:00.001-08:00

In class today we talked about Brian Evenson's "Contagion," about the long page detailing dozens of kinds of barbed wire. It felt, despite its tight focus, like a window onto a whole world. I thought of Bolano's 2666 and of the hundreds of pages that catalogue the deaths of women in Juarez. Again, the accumulation adds up finally, patiently, to a whole world. And then my thoughts turned, as they so often do, to the list of my brother's possessions at his death. For the second time (the repetition doubles the accumulation) I post the list:

31 July 1991, Orem

Inthe afternoon sunshine, John’s death certificate glows bright green on my desk.

Nevermarried.

Sex:Male.

Nota veteran.

Autopsy,yes.

The sun transforms the books on thenorth wall into an ordered riot of colors.

The coroner told us John had nevertested positive for AIDS. Otherwise his name would have been in a nationaldatabase.

On the radio this afternoon there wasan interview with a Utah AIDS patient. We all, he said, feel immortal for quitesome time.

1 August 1991, Orem

I still have John’s things, but whatsense does it make to keep them? I make a list under a rubric that feels like apre-cut dress for a paper doll:

Personal Effects

A large black plastic clock with redhands. The face displays a stylized eagle and the words Miller Genuine DraftLight, Cold Filtered. The second hand lurches in quartz-driven, one-secondsegments around a brass post.

Greasy running shoes, the solescracked through.

A pair of stiff, resoled, black-leatherlace-up shoes.

One small khaki-colored can: “EmergencyDrinking Water.”

A black-painted cardboard Africanmask.

A life-sized bas-relief plaster bustof a Roman soldier. He wears a gold-plumed helmet and a black breastplatedecorated with a lion’s head.

Ash trays: 1) stamped metal, round;2) white-and-black porcelain shaped like the collar of a formal dress shirtwith black tie; 3) heavy glass square with a line drawing of a grotesquelyearnest smoker and the text: Smoking is Very Glamorous, Idaho InteragencyCommittee on Smoking and Health.

Two unwashed pots.

A frying pan.

Two forks.

Three spoons.

Three wooden-handled cooking knives.

A stainless-steel butter knife with ared-brown substance burnt onto both sides of the blade.

A metal box stuffed with yellowedrecipe cards.

Kitchen Consultations, Favorite Recipes of the Universityof California Doctors’ Wives Association.

One set of car keys.

A heavy ten-speed bicycle, both tiresflat.

An aluminum bicycle pump.

A dirty green backpack holdingseveral bicycle parts.

A black-and-white TV, encased inwhite plastic, and a separate rabbit-ears antenna.

A small GE radio, missing its batterycover.

A Dylan Thomas poem, typed out andtaped to a cupboard: Do not go gentle into that good night.

A framed quotation from Ayn Rand: IfI had one desire in this world, it would be to desire something.

One condom, still sealed in plastic; PRIME,Lubricated with SK-70.

Handwritten IOU’s for the Cactus Bar.$5, $10, and $20 denominations.

1990 Pocket Pal – handwrittenaddresses and telephone numbers.

Newspaper and magazine clippings inan imitation leather briefcase.

A manila envelope containing legalpapers.

PUPPIES, a 1990 Calendar marked withseveral hand-written notes.

3 ballpoint pens and a blue plasticpencil sharpener.

A black nylon wallet. Inside, a photoof a woman in her sixties, a water-damaged photo of a red-faced infant, aSocial Security card (585-46-4127), a Boise Public Library Card, and $203 inbills.

$7.12 in coins.

A blue sport bag.

Masking tape. Written on the fat rollwith a black marker: J. Abbott 1132 S. 4th #3.

Liquid Ivory soap.

A small bottle of Wella BalsamConditioning Shampoo for Dry Hair.

Suave Shampoo Plus Conditioner forNormal to Dry Hair.

A small bottle of ListerineAntiseptic.

2 bars of Lux, The Pure Beauty Soap.

A large-toothed red plastic comb withhandle and a matching red-handled brush with black nylon bristles.

A bottle of aspirin.

MAX FOR MEN hair drier.

A yellow toothbrush.

Curity, wet-pruf adhesive tape.

Four TELFA sterile pads and oneband-aid.

Plastic sunglasses.

A one-edged razor blade.

A 100-tablet bottle of AdvancedFormula Centrum, High Potency Multivitamin-Multimineral Formula. From A toZinc. Expiration Date Oct. 93. There are 115 tablets.

26 grey, green, red, or whitematchbooks advertising The Interlude Bar & Grill in Boise. A stylized youngwoman kneels to consider her putt. Her left hand holds her putter, her righthand a martini.

A green matchbook advertises FreeCash Grants: Call 1-900-USA-RICH. Valuable Money Making Information and theABC’s of Receiving FREE Money from the Government. Now the one dollar perminute two dollar first minute charge is the first step to RICHES.

Nine Kent III Ultra Light Cigarettes.

A burlap-covered corkboard. Glued tothe top of the burlap is a black paper cross. A hand points upward toward thecross. A pair of lightning bolts. At the bottom bold letters spell ONE WAY.Four magazine photos have been thumbtacked over the Christian display. Two ofthem feature similarly posed electric-haired women, one white, one black, bothcoyly shirtless. The other two photos show the shaved, blindfolded heads of twoblack women against a chain-link fence.

Two posters from the Monterey JazzFestival, 1982 and 1983: trumpets standing on chairs.

A poster of a fantasy landscape: castleand dragon and hero and princess.

A 10” x 14” pencil drawing of ahooked trout.

A framed magazine photo of camelsdark against fire-lit clouds.

A magazine photo of an eagle perchedin front of a brilliant sunset.

A framed painting of a demure littlegirl with long red hair.

A spool of navy-blue thread.

A needle with a loop of purplethread.

An old pair of Levis; five patches sewnwith meticulous stitches.

A worn satin comforter, rust-coloredon one side, tan on the other.

A blue quilt tied with red yarn.Splotches of white paint, cigarette burns, and grease spots.

Three pair of black-and-white-checkedrestaurant uniform pants.

Two heavily starched white chef’shats.

Two collarless chef’s jackets. Starched,with tightly woven cloth buttons.

Eleven pastel-colored knit shirtsadvertising the 25th Interlude Open. A young woman kneels with putter andmartini.

A pair of grey sweat pants and a greysweat shirt.

T-shirt: FALLIN’ ANGELLS SPORTINGCLUB, Angell’s Bar & Grill, Boise, Idaho.

T & A CAFÉ T-shirt –Where the “ELITE” meet to “EAT.”

A wheeled brown vinyl bag with straphandles.

Three sweaters, colors faded, oneunraveling at the left cuff.

A worn leather-and-canvas coat.

Two limp bed sheets.

Cassette Tapes: The Best of JudasPriest; Guns and Roses – Appetite for Destruction; Anthrax – Stateof Euphoria; Foghat Live.

A plastic ruler with geometricformulas and the admonition: Stay in School, Upon Graduation . . . Join theAerospace Team, U.S. Air Force.

Twenty-six paperback novels, most ofthem missing the front cover. Eric v. Lustbader dominates the pile, but thereare others as well:

Neon Mirage, by Max Allan Collins: Mob Justice .. . Another shotgun blast ate into the side of Ragen’s once-proud Lincoln.

Vision of the Hunter, by John Tempest: In his hands, hispeople’s future. In her eyes, the promise of a love stronger than time.

Burt Hirshfeld's Moment of Power:The savage new shocker. . . .

Superconscious Meditation, by Panda Arya, Ph.D.

Self Hypnosis: The Creative Use ofYour Mind for Successful Living, by Charles Tebbetts.

Louis L’Amour’s Education of aWandering Man.

The Magnificent Century, by Thomas B. Costain.

Home as Found, by J. Fenimore Cooper.

Radclyffe Hall’s The Well ofLoneliness: Banned in the U.S. . . . Forward by Havelock Ellis.

Hoyle's Rules of Games, Second Revised Edition.

Edith Hamilton’s Mythology.

Readers Digest: Secrets of BetterCooking.

Basic Documents Supplement toInternational Law: Cases and Materials.

ETCETERA: The Unpublished Poems ofE.E. Cummings.

The dust jacket of a Modern Libraryedition: The Philosophy of Kant. The book itself is missing.

Fivespiral notebooks: two of them green-and-tan; one blue-and-tan; one yellow; oneblue. Notes and drawings in John’s hand throughout.

Memories from Childhood

2011-11-09T18:07:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, a beautiful, quiet, and sometimes unsettling evocation of childhood memories from a three-week sea journey from Sri Lanka to London, the events of which still weigh heavy in the narrator's mind.

Made me think of my own childhood.

March 1950, Farmington, New Mexico

In what eventually will become ourhometown, for three days running, good citizens report seeing flying saucers.Between eleven and noon each day, hundreds of the alien craft thrill buildersand teachers, cooks and civil servants, farmers and trading-post operators.

I was born seven months before thealiens were reported in Farmington. John was born fourteen months after theircoming.

I have never seen a flying saucer.Nor, to my knowledge, did John.

September 1954, Paonia, Colorado

The littleengine keeps leaving the tracks to frolic in meadows. Flowers snagged in hiswheels betray him. Pedagogical engineers hide in a meadow and jump up with redflags when he turns their way. He gives up frolicking, stays on the tracks, andgrows into a good puller-of-trains.

I put downmy Golden Book to watch flatcars stacked with fruit boxes rattle past our loghouse. My mother leads me across the street to a warehouse. She knocks at aside door. It slides open. She passes her warm bread and a pot of steamingpinto beans through the opening to a dark-eyed woman holding a brown-skinnedbaby at her breast.

1956, Montpelier, Idaho

My friendBernie shows me the litter of birth-wet puppies under his front porch. Theirfather, he says . . . my dad said their father was a dead daddy horse.

1957, Montpelier, Lincoln Elementary School

Pots, rings,or chase. We lay out our games of marbles on the playground. I drop my winningsinto a blue-and-white-striped bag Mom made from a leg of a pair of overalls. Itgrows fat and heavy. I knot the drawstring carefully.

When I’m notplaying marbles, I watch a girl with patent-leather shoes swing so high thechains go slack. Her shoes flash in the sun. Her black hair flies in the wind.She knows I watch her.

1958, Montpelier

Mrs. Sharphas enrolled us in a reading contest. We write titles and authors’ names onlined paper. I speed through dozens of little paperbacks. My list grows andgrows. Mrs. Sharp awards me a round steel medal engraved with my name and thenumber of books I have read: 129.

1960, Farmington, New Mexico

If itweren’t for our fierce soccer games on Ladera del Norte’s dirt field, I wouldgladly skip lunch to sit in class where our teacher reads another chapter of Little Britches. He’s tough. Determined.Good with horses. Ingenious. Saves his wages.

Seeds of Enlightenment

2011-10-29T12:23:00.000-07:00

April 1969, Cologne, Germany

What arethose books on your shelves? I ask, pointing at a rainbow-colored row ofpaperbacks.

It’s aseries published by Suhrkamp: Brecht, Marcuse, Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch. Do youknow them?

Not yet.

Before theweek is out I am carrying a slim purple edition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, bendingover the dialect-strewn text on the streetcar, reading my way into a radicalnew world, savoring the vinegary words on my tongue: “Eia popeia / Was rascheltim Stroh? / Nachbars Bälg greinen / Und meine sind froh.”

Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag -- my shelf 40 years later

May 1969, Cologne

My missionary companion agrees to spend the morning in the Wallraf Richartz Museum. It will be my first art museum, just as the Cologne performances of Aida and Lohengrin have been my first operas.

In the entrance, an oversized, bulbous, winged and brightly colored woman balances on one leg. She makes me smile. Niki de Saint Phalle is the artist.

We look around. The sheer number of works begins to overwhelm me. How does one experience all this?

A flash of blue and yellow draws me across the room. The bright blue is from sky and water, the light yellow from grasses and reflections on the river or canal. A delicate drawbridge spans the water, its counterweights reaching back like wings. A woman carrying an umbrella crosses the bridge.

I stand in front of the painting, struggle with unexpected emotions.

The paint has been daubed onto the canvas in yellow slashes to form the grass and the reflections on the water. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen this way. I feel like Moses standing before the burning bush.

The label says “Zugbrücke,” Vincent van Gogh. May 1888.

Wallraf-Richardtz Museum, Cologne

Worse than Hives

2011-10-28T16:38:00.000-07:00

I had just finished an article about Heinrich von Kleist's story the "Marquise von O. . ." and needed the critical editions of Schopenhauer, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Herder for the citations. Deadline for publication this coming Monday.

My choices? Drive to the University of Utah on a Friday afternoon and fight rush-hour traffic on the way home or drive across town to BYU.

Despite the fact that I get (psychological) hives when I step onto the campus where I taught for 11 years, largely a result of memories of academic freedom violations that drew a strong censure by the AAUP investigators Sam Rushforth and I and others invited to campus, I chose what seemed the easier option and headed down University Parkway toward BYU.

Big mistake!

Traffic slowed down near the BYU stadium and I slowed down too. Behind me I could see a car accelerating instead of slowing. I did the only thing I could: honked. It didn't help a bit. The other car crashed into me, knocking me into the car in front of me so hard that it hit the car in front of it.

It was a Mercury behind me. Its entire engine compartment was destroyed -- liquids leaking everywhere. My Subaru, built higher than the Mercury, took its damage underneath and throughout the frame.

Doors that won't open. Muffler mashed up against the frame. And when I finally drove away, trouble with the drive train.

Moral of this story: stay away from BYU.

CAN YOU SAY THIS ON NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO?

2011-10-26T17:08:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, on "The World," in a story about the possible future of North and South Korea, a student at a girls' school said "I think it would be bad if they unificate."

Last Bike Ride of the Year? Fall Plants (and dog) in the Yard

2011-10-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

J. M. Coetzee's "Summertime": Afrikaners and Mormons

2011-10-23T09:47:00.000-07:00

The book is a fictionalized and fragmentary biography. The biographer presents the Nobel Prize winner's notebooks 1972-75, interviews with five people who knew the author, and undated fragments from his notebooks. The accounts are largely unflattering.

This morning as I finished the novel (the genre designation on the title page is "Fiction"), I was left wondering about my own deficiencies, awkwardness, guarded personality, loyalties, and relationships with my parents.

And about my rejections of and identifications with the religion I was raised in and whose tenets I practiced for 40 years.

Here's a passage from Summertime that seems to get at complexities I recognize:

So we have the case of a man who spoke the language only imperfectly, who stood outside the state religion, whose outlook was cosmopolitan, whose politics was -- what shall we say? -- dissident, yet who was ready to embrace an Afrikaner identity. Why do you think that was so?

My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically.

Was there nothing that drew him more positively to embrace an Afrikaner identity -- nothing at a personal level, for example?

Perhaps there was, I can't say. . . . He had been rebuffed by the Afrikaners too often, rebuffed and humiliated -- you have only to read his book of childhood memories to see that. He was not going to take the risk of being rejected again.

So he preferred to remain an outsider.

I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner.

WANDERLUST

2011-10-23T03:22:00.000-07:00

Johann Gottfried Herder’s Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 / Journal of my Trip in 1769

Many of the events of our lives are, in truth, dependent onthe play of chance. Thus I came to Riga in my clerical office and thus Iabandoned that office; thus I began to travel. I was not happy with myselfsocially, neither in the circles I frequented nor outside the ones I chose notto frequent. I was not happy with myself as a teacher, the sphere was toonarrow for me, too unsuitable, and I for that sphere too broad, too foreign,too busy. I was not happy as a citizen, since my domestic life was typified byrestrictions, little substantial productivity, and a lazy, often odiousplacidity. And least of all, finally, as an author, in which capacity I hadachieved a reputation that was as disadvantageous to my position as it was tome personally. Everything was loathsome to me. I didn’t have enough courage andstrength to destroy these unfortunate circumstances and to swing myself into analternate career. Thus I was forced to travel; and because I doubted thelikelihood of that, as suddenly, overwhelmingly, and even adventurously aspossible. . . .

I reproach myself, I have lost years of my Human life; and wasn’t it my sole responsibilityto enjoy those years? Didn’t fate offer me the full capacity to do so? What ifI had chosen to make the French language, history, natural science,mathematics, drawing, comportment . . . my highest commitments? . . . Iwouldn’t have become an inkpot of learned scribbling, a dictionary of arts andsciences that I haven’t seen and don’t understand. I wouldn’t be a repositoryfull of papers and books that belong only in the study. I would have avoidedsituations that hemmed in my spirit and mind and thus limited me to a false,intensive understanding of people. . .

Herder boards a ship and while sailing to Sweden, Denmark,and France, develops a new curriculum for educating the kind of person hewishes he were. While denouncing abstractions and the language of abstraction he constructions new abstractions. It reminds me of Thoreau's turning to nature at Walden Pond and then experiencing nature through the lenses of classical education.

Still, Herder's decision to travel in order to flee the restrictions of his life, in order to open new spheres of experience, speaks to me.

Time to break loose.

Wanderlust.

Tristan / Tantris

2011-10-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm not a big fan of contemporary romance novels. That's doubly true for contemporary teen romances. So when this book arrived in the mail I thought it must have been misaddressed.

The author, however, is a former German major, a student of mine who went on to complete a Ph.D. in German Studies at Princeton. I knew Mette had been shaping a career as a writer and that she had a growing list of published books. But I had never read any of her work.

Tris & Izzie is Mette's title. Tristan und Isolde was Wagner's title. Tristan was the simple title of the 1211 epic poem by Gottfried von Strassburg. Okay, I thought, I'll read it, see what's she's up to. Flipping past the title page, I discovered why she sent it.

I'll be damned, I said. I'll be damned.

Right when I was wrestling with the idea that perhaps I'm not the teacher I always thought I was. Right when I've just gone to class and found that only 2 of the 6 students had read the assignment and the other 10 hadn't even come to class. Right when I most needed it in that eternal cycle of pride and doubt, here comes a book out of the blue that claims I taught at least one good class.

So I read it. Teen romance and all. Magic teen romance with giants and evil serpents and swordplay and love philtres and a two-headed dog.

If that had been it, even with the dedication, I would have replied with a luke-warm thank you very much. It was very thoughtful of you.

But that was not it. All the magic teen romance takes place in high school. And that makes all the difference.

Izzie is 16 and loves Mark, a basketball player and nice guy. She loves his butt in tight pants and loves to kiss him. When her affections switch to Tristan, she likes his butt even better. Izzie is the antithesis of the passive magic teen princess heroine. She's a real teenager. Okay, she's also got magic. Okay, the story based loosely on Gottfried's Tristan has a happy ending (although when the black sails appeared at the end I feared tragedy).

But best of all, at least for me, was that it's just plain funny. Juxtapose a tragic epic German poem with high school and, if you write well, you've got a book that makes you laugh. What a fun day it was reading this.

A couple of examples:

Then I took a shower, put on clean, unsweaty clothes, and ate a candy bar (a sure cure for any ills). I also looked on the Internet for cures for a love philtre. Here is a list of them:

1. Death

That was pretty much it. Both of us had to die. If I just killed Tristan, I would pine over his loss, and then I would end up dying of a broken heart anyway. Jumping off bridges, taking poison, or simply refusing to eat and wasting away were some of the top choces for ending the magical power of a love philtre, according to all the old stories, and the new ones, too.

As tempting as it was to strangle Tristan with my bare hands on his bare, bare neck--

Let me put that a different way.

Here's another sense for Izzie's narrative voice:

Brann was right next to the giant's face now, and he was examining her carefully. Maybe he was nearsighted. Who would make glasses in that size?

The giant opened his mouth.

I thought how bad his breath must smell from up close. It was bad enough where I was, yards away. I didn't think he was a vegetarian. He looked at Branna like she was a tasty treat, a bite-size chocolate-covered ice-cream bar. He wasn't going to worry about the calories, either. Guys never do. They want to be bigger.

In short, it's a good story.

In short, I'm deeply moved by the dedication.

In short, thank you, Mette.

Indian Summer / Nachsommer in Utah Valley

2011-10-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

PINK

2011-10-15T11:15:00.000-07:00

Photo by David Light (slight fuzziness due to my photo of the photo)

Lyn's brother-in-law, David Light, took this photo in Scotland. It has been hanging on our wall since late last year and I've often had the impulse to write about it (in the service of seeing it better).

In several ways the photo is the polar opposite of Hyunmee Lee's painting (see the previous post); but in an odd way it raises some of the same questions hers does.

This time the mass that weighs heavy on me is stone, cut stones stacked and mortared together to make a massive set of structures. Had I been walking past these buildings I would have looked the other way, hoping for a human face or an interesting sequence of hats.

David saw and photographed the mass -- and much more.

There are the colors, remarkable in variety despite the fact that they are all closely related.

There are the mostly vertical shapes, a verticality enhanced by the horizontal roofs they hold up, straight lines broken only in a couple of places by curved arches.

There are the alternating planes, some facing the viewer, some slicing across the view, that keep the eye guessing about relationships.

So the mass is differentiated, interesting, even beautiful. Still, I wouldn't have asked David for the photo if it hadn't also made me smile.

PINK!

Pink is just the wrong word for this stolid set of buildings. It belongs here like shit belongs in a boardroom. It's unsettling. And sly -- sly at least in the photo, even if it's probably just the sign for a boutique of some sort. As letters that together mean something beyond themselves, it works in my mind like the "5" or the "b" or the squiggle works in Hyunmee's painting, as a sign of the human mind at work making sense of things.

And then there's "ROYAL EXCHANGE SQUARE." The building is a human construction and has a name. The name, however, the sign "for" something, raises tension in the context of the massive pile of stones that stands there. Although the architecture too is language, there's a distinct contrast between the two modes of signification.

Exacerbating that delicious tension is the hanging sign facing backwards, "MERCHANT CITY." It takes a conscious effort to make it out, a conscious effort that inserts itself agilely into what looks like a mass of stones.

And finally, there's the camera.

Not the camera in David's hands, but the security cameral bolted to the building and then reflected in the window. These windowed and reflective and lettered buildings are self conscious.

This is a significant set of buildings, thanks to David's good eye.

2011-10-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

Hyunmee Lee's "chunji-changjo" (heaven and earth)

The painting is signed LeeHyunmee, the artist's name in her native Korean. But Hyunmee is also an American and so the catalogue for the USU exhibition of the "Creation" paintings called her Hyunmee Lee. The difference in cultures and languages feels to me like a good metaphor for the differences between how Hyunmee describes her painting and how I receive it.

chunji-changjo is the Korean. "Heaven and earth" the English.

Living with the very large black-and-white painting for a couple of years now, I find my mind and my feelings tending away from heaven and earth and feeling their way toward consciousness and subconsciousness, toward what is simply/complexly the case and what human consciousness makes of that.

Frank McEntire, a fine sculptor himself, quotes Hyunmee in the exhibition catalogue to the effect that the Zen concept of "ch'i," the life force, is the life of her paintings.

I have as little personal sense for "ch'i" as I have for heaven. What I do have is an ongoing visceral response to the painting that has a powerful conceptual component.

It's a dark painting for me, especially when I'm gripped by melancholy (a richer word than depression). It weighs heavy on me, so much so that at times I can't stand to look at it. If I do look at it in that mood, I can sense my life slipping formlessly and helplessly down off the canvas.

At other times, however, in other moods, what I feel about the weight and direction of the blackness is tempered by the scratchings and markings and scrumblings (Frank's word) in the black and across the black and even aside from the black. They are the workings of the eye and the mind and the hand of a human being. They seem like attempts to find patterns, to understand forms, to create meaning out of chaos.

In these moods I look to the right of the painting and see what my mind's eye takes to be a "5." Or it could be a "b." Or it could be the accident of an artist's gesture with a brush and paint. In any case, I see it as a sign created to make sense of the inchoate, a letter or number with which to create meaning.

Okay, it's ambiguous, it's only partially clear, it may be an accident; but it's delicate, it has a light and thoughtful form, it is the antithesis of the heavy and sliding blackness.

And that's all I really need, a simple antithesis on whose structure I can stretch my emotional and rational self (I almost wrote "selves" -- "zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust").

Heaven and earth. Consciousness and subconscious. Chaos and order. Whatever it is, it (usually) works for and in me.

ADDENDUM:

Hi Scott,

How are you? It's a wonderful news. Just read your interesting writing and I enjoyed it.

Just a short note about the gestures and black color in my work:

The strong black gestures moving across the surface of large canvas was beginning of my "meditative gestures". The large dark gestures are influenced by Taoism and Buddhism; the black unifies and bridges the harmony of energy (chi). The black color is very special to me, for me black is much more than just feelings (and white is full as empty canvas.) The black color is a window, it opens to the another world (far from a physical world), so my black is lighter than any other color. Hope to enjoy the painting and you could move into a realm of progression of balance.

Thanks for the email! We are doing great!!! Say hi to Lyn!!,

Best,

Hyunmee

RESPONSE:

Hyunmee,

thanks for your thoughts about your painting.

I'm intrigued by your idea of seeing the black as a window, as lighter than any other color. It reverses the polarity for me and just now, watching the motion of the black on the white, I could feel it lifting and rising like a balloon.

Why not, indeed, see the white as "full as empty canvas" and all the various black markings as the signs created by a hopeful and thoughtful artist.

I'll never see it as you can, of course. I'm just not equipped to do so. But to live with the painting and to see it and feel it and to think about it like I'm doing now will make it a fine companion for the coming years.

Been thinking a lot lately about aging, especially in conversations with Alex and Sam. Health and sickness. The inevitable winding down -- entropy is in fact the law. But until it all goes black (or white), there's still the back and forth out of which we fashion our lives. That's the ongoing power your painting has for me, Hyunmee, the interplay, the dialectic, the bridging, the tension out of which life proceeds.

MORE THOUGHTS IN THE MORNING SUNLIGHT

The comment by the flowerville blogger has reinforced my sense for how important this work of art (any work of art) is as it raises questions and stimulates the desire to work them out.

This morning I looked more closely at the white paint Hyunmee starts with. In my mind it was just white, just a background for the black. But when you really look at it, the white is as thick and rich and marked as the black.

It makes me think of Zarko's friend Julije Knifer, about his paintings that began with multiple layers of white, layer after obsessive layer of white, putting off the moment he feared, when black would enter the picture. Here a couple of photos from Zarko's experimental book called "Knifer" that show the painter before unfinished canvases.

photos of julije knifer at work, by zarko radakovic

And then I think of snow and the marking that comes from our entering that uniform covering of the familiar.

Finally, another Knifer meander and a link to an earlier conversation about Knifer which, surprisingly (or not) also involved depression: http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2010/02/meanders-zarko-radakovic-julije-knifer.html

Utah Valley: 4 October - 6 October

2011-10-06T16:22:00.000-07:00

Scales and Spurs, Greens and Reds

2011-10-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

memento mori (and that evolution is a fantastic artist)

mysteries, foreign and domestic, physical and digital

2011-09-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

After reading Stieg Larsson's trilogy of crime novels, detective novels, mystery novels, after enjoying the conundrums and the dangers and the answers, I've spent the summer reading Norwegian (Jo Nesbo) and Swedish (Henning Mankell and Hakan Nesser) and American (Richard Stark) and Dutch (Janwillem van de Wetering) and Irish (Benjamin Black -- John Banville) mysteries.

I love the stories.

I love the problems posed and exposed.

I love the fact that in every case the world turns from the inexplicable to the explicable. There are answers. And the detectives and inspectors and constables figure things out rationally, skillfully, certainly.

They are, of course, as the genre demands, precariously fallible. Harry Hole, Jo Nesbo's inspector, is an alcoholic and lonely man. Quirke, the Irish inspector, is lonely and alcoholic. Nesser's chief inspector Van Veeteren really wants to be a bookseller. And, oddly enough in this genre, Stark's Parker is himself the criminal for whom the reader identifies.

The closure in every case is like the closure afforded by a slot machine when the triple 7's line up. It's satisfying. And it's a lure for suckers who want to believe that closure is the essence of both arche and telos in human history.

In this context, my favorites of the bunch (all of which I like, with the exception, perhaps, of the conservatively tinged Henning Mankell stories) are the Dutch constable and inspector Grijpstra and de Geir, and their boss the Commissaris. The latter has to keep dipping into hot baths to ease pains in his legs. The former two are easy going Dutchmen who, after capturing an escaped prisoner, commit to bringing him good cigars in prison because they're not really sure he is such a bad person. There's not much gunplay, not much testosterone, just a lot of paragraphs like this one from "The Corpse on the Dike": "The commissaris nodded. He had stopped going to parties ten years ago, when his rheumatism had begun to change from an occasional twitch of pain to a worsening and continuous feeling of hot needle pricks. He had never regretted his decision."

Good people. Good stories. And what's so bad about slot machines anyway, as long as it's clear from the beginning that they will win all your money in the end?

Finally, in an earlier post about Scott Carrier's e-book "Prisoner of Zion," the book that enticed me to buy a Kindle and then to buy Benjamin Black's mysteries as Kindle books and to read them on the little machine, I mentioned my ambivalence about e-texts.

Now, when I look at the beautiful tower of mysteries I've read this summer, when I hold the sets of books from Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Holland, and America, the combined titles in the e-reader don't seem very satisfying, even though I enjoyed the actual reading.

A pretty girl who naked is, is worth a hundred statues.
e.e. cummings