Wind-blasted brick buildings spilling out
Out from the steel and glass monoliths of down-town.
Not by the formidable stone of the great museums nor
Standing before the scope of the grand modern sculptures,
But on a weary train, almost empty, heading north
Out of the Warzone,
Here it is quiet enough to hear the city’s music.
Frost-beaten brick tenements the color of dry blood
Sighing steam and warm grey smoke from chimney pipes,
Sad-eyed buildings watch the CTA crawl to and fro
in the flurries.
The city is slow; sleepy neighborhoods like someone
dropped Spain in the snowy north, clad her in bricks,
and announced the two o’clock hour.
Yes, I do like Starbucks. And I hang out in Barnes & Noble and Borders bookstore cafes for hours on end. But there is nothing like a real, independently run coffeehouse. Here are some shots of one of my favorites that I stop in on my way to and from Joshua Tree—The Water Canyon Coffeehouse. Always interesting music on tap too.
Only two years since my last visit. And, this time in winter. It snowed a beautiful 6 inches two days into our 5 day visit giving Marcia, Tim, and Lin a glimpse and feel of a Chicago winter.
Good bye Martha. My first cousin Martha Hollis passed away December 16. She’d been Christmas shopping with her daughter, Jeanette, at the Brea Mall last Saturday, the 15th. That evening she suddenly felt ill, was hospitalized, then unexpectedly passed away Sunday.
Whatever you may think or believe about the reality of angels, we all know what qualities they symbolize. Martha had all of them.
Martha was my 1st cousin, yet she was just a few years younger than my mother her beloved Ruthie who passed away Christmas 2005. Now they are both gone; they were like sisters. Without Martha’s help eight years ago I would have never found, or would have had a much harder time finding a really nice residential nursing home for mom when Alzheimer’s took over.
Of all my extended family, Martha was my favorite. She lived in constant pain from a complication related to general anesthesia administered in a mastectomy surgery some 20 years ago. But, she, literally, never complained. Her hair never grew back from the chemo, yet she always looked the fashion plate with her makeup, wig, choice of clothes. Being in her home at Christmas made you feel the wonder-filled with her handmade decorations and beautifully lit and decorated tree. At her memorial today, her Baptist minister read a beautiful poem, Christmas in Heaven - as if we needed more encouragement to weep - but I’m glad he read it. It suited Martha. We sang Martha’s favorite hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
There were scores of her friends at the service. She was intensely involved in local community work, especially working with the elderly and sick. They will have a very hard time finding someone to replace her. She was their voice in local politics and would drive many of them to doctor’s appointments and take them shopping.
Life is sweet, but so so so brief. Enough.
I’m including the Christmas in Heaven poem below.
Good bye Martha. You and your Ruthie will never be apart again.
While a graduate student in English at Northwestern (late 70s early 80s), I had the good fortune to study with Gerald Graff and get acquainted with the criticism wars that were beginning to rage. If Graff had lived oh, say, 2,447 years ago, he and Socrates would have given each other much to think about. Like Socrates, Graff practices a method of query-based discussion or dialectic in which no one is allowed to finally rest in or on any single theory, image, or conclusion.The conversation can always continue. Graff has taught the conflicts or controversies from the earliest days of his career, long before the practice was coined as a slogan by various individuals and groups.
I agree to a point with those who consider it unfortunate that religious fundamentalists have co-opted Graff’s phrase, “teaching the controversies,” in their efforts to get creationist mythology (intelligent design) taught in public school science courses. But consider what violence religious fundamentalists of all faiths have resorted to when discussion stops. So, by all means, let the controversies continue to be taught and discussed, by everyone. The only way to determine whether someone or some idea is right or wrong is to test it in the laboratory of discussion. So let the discussions continue: teach those controversies! bring on the conflicts!
If I had continued with literary theory as a professional interest, Graff’s query-based, Socratic approach is most certainly the one I would have taken: not identifying with any one school of criticism, but, instead, continually questioning each school’s assumptions, methods, and conclusions. Taking such an approach you risk angering and alienating, but, what was it they called Socrates . . . oh yeah, a gadfly.
Let the controversies and the conversations continue.
I am sure I am not alone in saying thank you, Professor Graff.
Now and then I find myself thinking back to the days, hours, years I spent browsing Great Expectations Bookstore located near the L tracks on Foster Street in Evanston, Illinois. I went there often in the late 1960’s, through the 1970’s, until June 1983 when I moved to California. It was nearly impossible to visit the store without somehow coming into contact with Truman Metzel, bookseller/owner, curmudgeon, friend, store guide, and host to hundreds of Northwestern faculty and students. He offered free coffee, an open table and chairs ready for whomever wanted to just hang out, sit and discuss. For ambience, he always had a radio playing near the coffee and table, usually tuned to WFMT, Chicago’s classical music station.
I’ll will certainly never forget my first visit to the store one fall afternoon in 1968. I was a freshman at Northwestern. After a half hour or so of browsing, I walked over to Truman and asked where I might find Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. Sitting at a desk messy with invoices, packing slips, book orders, he looked up at me over his half-rims and responded, simply, with his deep voice, unblinking eye-contact, and slow delivery, “Which edition, what publisher?”
His questions left me speechless—it would be years before I knew or cared about such things as editions and publishers.
[Note: Sadly Truman Metzel passed away June 6, 2008.
The remainder of this post and the post noting his passing are dedicated to his memory and the memories so many have of his Great Expectations bookstore.]
Here are three other pieces I found on the web relating to Great Expectations Bookstore and its inimitable, unique owner and bookseller, Truman Metzel, including a 2001 Daily Northwestern article documenting the final closing of its doors. The article contains an interesting interview with Jeff Rice, the store’s last owner/manager.
Having moved beyond the arid speculations and nihilistic gibberish of logical positivism and deconstruction (respectively) some academic philosophers are once again addressing big questions. Questions like: What is the meaning of life? Listening to a Philosophy Bites interview with John Cottingham on my way to Joshua Tree this morning I was graced with his insightful thoughts on how a philosophy that would lead to a sense of meaning in one’s life should accommodate the inevitable vagaries and uncertainties of life � illness, old age, death. That simple observation, suggestion led to a new, if subtle, insight.
I have had similar insights about living and meaning in the past, but from Buddhist and other eastern teachers, never from a philosopher speaking from a western philosophical point of view. There may be a way for east and west to meet after all.
It is easy to be discouraged when one encounters or has been subject to limiting contingencies, lost opportunities, unrealized dreams, paths not taken, failures of various sorts � we all have them. But if one has a “philosophy” that acknowledges and accommodates them, one can move on.
Some 10 years ago I began to browse and surf for information on how to get my own telescope � well by 1999 I was lugging out my 10″ Meade LX200 to my backyard and happily looking at the clusters and nebulae in Sagittarius and Scorpio, the Orion Nebulae, and other sky treasures that, before getting a scope, I could only see at Joshua Tree National Park star parties.
Now I own a home on a 1 and 1/4 acre tract just 1 mile from the northern border of the Joshua Tree park and can look through that same LX200 (though now easily wheeled in an out of the garage on JMI Wheeley Bars� ) under some of the darkest skies anywhere. Just hunting for objects to look at using star charts and monthly astronomy magazines is satisfying enough. But I also want to image. For now I’m going to limit myself to webcams for the planets, piggy-backing my Canon 10D and, when I get the drift-align, polar alignment technique down, I’ll try some prime focus. But, I think I will wait to build my permanent observatory before trying anything more ambitious. Why? Because to do good astroimaging you need very precise polar alignment and having to polar align everytime I wheel out my scope is just too much of a hassle.
We’ll see. I’m a few years away from building the observatory.
In a few days I’ll upload a gallery of images I took the other night learning to use my SBIG STV�. I plan to use the STV primarily for autoguiding when I use my Canon 10D at prime focus. But it can also do some low resolution imaging of its own (black and white). Using it in “Track & Accumulate” mode Monday evening (’til 3 in the a.m.) I got some interesting images of M13, M8, M27, and M51. As soon as I process them in ImagesPlus and Photoshop, I’ll share the results.
I just finished reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. With thinkers like Hofstadter making clear what it is to be alive and human, I believe we need less and less to resist the apparent truth that consciousness is constituted of forces, things, and processes wholly physical in nature. (I say physical instead of material because the physical includes energy fields and virtual particles of the quantum realm, entities not usual referred to as material.) I can do no better right now to convey some of Hofstadter’s thoughts on the subject than to share a couple of quotes from the final few pages of the book’s “Epilogue.”
Just as we might shrivel up and die if we could truly grasp how minuscule we are in comparison to the vast universe we live in, so we might also explode in fear and shock if we were privy to the unimaginably frantic goings-on inside our bodies. We live in state of blessed ignorance, but it is also a state of marvelous enlightenment, for it involves floating in a universe of mid-level categories of our own creation � categories that function incredibly well as survival enhancers.
Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems � vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. (Hofstadter, 363-364)
I’m following Strange Loop with David Papineau’s Thinking About Consciousness. From the intro it seems that, in addition to his original thoughts and insights on the case for consciousness being wholly physical, I will also be treated to an overview of the major positions, terminology, and arguments comprising philosophy of mind.
Wallace Stevens’ A High-Toned Old Christian Woman begins with a declaration of the “supremacy” of poetry as fiction. What, then, are lesser fictions? What makes poetry supreme in the realm of fiction? How is it fiction? Is “fiction” real? What is real? Of course, I know what is real, and so do you. But do they? Let’s conspire.
The soundness of the assertion that poetry is the supreme fiction is perhaps best determined by reading and re-reading and sharing one’s thoughts and reactions. The “fiction,” the shaped artifact, is the poem itself. An unread, or insufficiently and inadequately read poem, invites further reading. For until adequately read, a poem remains unrealized, unmade.
Perhaps that is what Stevens meant by a poem being the supreme fiction. It only becomes real through an adequate “supreme” effort and close reading. Prose fiction usually (not always) requires less interpretive effort and to that degree is a lesser fiction than poetry which requires “supreme” interpretive effort to become a real “fiction” living in the mind of a reader.
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
In our time . . . the illusion of immortality is created by technology. The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all, is our equivalent of the mare incognitum, the unknown sea that lured ancient travellers with the temptation of discovery. Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web’s outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal. — Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
11/18 Energy Blog Roundup and Open ThreadTuesday, 18 November 2008, 3:20 pm It's Nithin, back from my long slumber. This is a new weekly post I'll be doing that highlights the best on energy blogging through the netroots. Enjo. […]
Obama Speaks to Global Climate SummitTuesday, 18 November 2008, 12:47 pm Did you see President-Elect Obama's speech to the Governors' Global Climate Summit in California today? Very enjoyable. Here's the video, or you can g. […]
Architecture for TibetThursday, 20 November 2008, 12:23 pm John Ullman, president of the nonprofit Architecture for Tibet, recently got in touch with Tricycle about his organization’s efforts to construct an. […]
Dharma on No Dollars a Day; Peter MatthiessenThursday, 20 November 2008, 11:45 am These uneasy times and a plunging Dow Jones (and longer — or is it shorter — skirts?) made me think back to a special section Tricycle put out way. […]
Entries (RSS)