Musings
Sorry I didn’t note the name of the photog who made this wonderful shot of crewing at the Olympics—reminds me of a water strider!
Today’s NY Times reports great news for fans of the nearly absent American chestnut tree—a stand near Albany (say Al-benny, like two guys names), in South Georgia, that appears to be resistant to the blight that’s killed off most of their relatives. Our Southern oak forests used to have a huge component of chestnuts, most of which were killed off in the early 20th c. Some chestnuts do sprout, but are usually dead before they are 20 yrs old, still from the blight. Up in the mountains, loggers as late as the 1960s were removing fallen chestnut logs, because the demand for the wood was so high.
Apologies for repeating myself about the chestnut blight, but I had to pass along this good news….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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For no logical reason, I present this early digital photo of mine, as a result of which I decided I no longer needed to use the camera’s B&W setting.
Anne was complementary of my vocabulary the other day, but no one would ever do the same of my knowledge of history. Here’re two bits from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, subtitled On Foot to Constantinople from The Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates, on his walking trek across Europe that began in 1934. In the first selection, he writes about visiting Vár, the citadel of Buda, above the Danube in present-day Hungary.
Tim [a huge black Alsatian] bounded about among the sarcophagi and broken walls and the ruined amphitheatre and dug for bones in the Temple of the Unconquered Sun; and in the museum we gazed at one of those disturbing bas-reliefs of Mithras in a Phrygian cap, plunging a dagger into the bull’s throat. (The god always wears an expression of unbearable anguish as thought the throat were his own; a hound leaps up to drink the blood and, down below, a furtive scorpion wages scrotal war.) (p.38)
…and…
On the fringe of allegory, dimly perceived through mist and the dust of chronicles, these strangers have an outsize quality about them: something of giants and something of ogres, Goyaesque being towering like Panic amid the swarms that follow one after the other across this wilderness and vanish. No historical details can breathe much life into the Gepids, kinsmen of the Goths who had left the Baltic and settled the region in Roman times; and the Lombards only began to seem real when they move into Italy. (p.52)
I only know one person who I suspect would get all the references in these two excerpts (that would be Pooh, though I may be doing a disservice to Rebecca); I certainly am out of my league!
Fermor writes these bits seemingly without effort, and I realize, reading them, how much knowledge of this and that relating to the modern world has filled to overflowing the places in my brain that, in another day, like early twentieth-century, might have been allocated instead to Classical history.
From elsewhere in Fermor, where is the Istrian peninsula?; what do “cascading pengös�? sound like (Anne?)?; what do crockets on a medieval church’s pinnacles look like?; what kind of garments are “Tintin plus-fours�??; and what’s a “bombinated�? nation-state like?
I must add one last quote, Fermor’s amplification of his assertion that Magyar (Hungarian) is most closely related to the Finnish language.
It was no help, at first, to learn that Magyar, whose resonance is fast, incisive and distinct, is an agglutinative language—the word merely conjures up the sound of mumbling through a mouth full of toffee. It means that the words are never inflected as they are in Europe, and that changes of sense are conveyed by a concatenation of syllables stuck on behind the first; all the vowel sounds imitate their leader, and the invariable ictus on the leading syllable sets up a kind of dactylic or anapaestic canter which, to a new ear, gives Magyar a wild and most unfamiliar ring. (p. 33)
Ictus? Dactylic? Anapaestic? Geeze!
I bet this is right up Leslie’s alley!
Posted at 11:17 PM |
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B.’s Big Day: Eighth Grade Graduation!
And, here is the moment. We loved her poise and gravity, we even sniffled a bit at one point. And, now, she’s off to High School!
I can’t sit here and not point out the creepy stuff, though. And those Catholics provide plenty. Note that the padre is handing out the document, the proof; it is from his hands she receives her legitimacy. Note that the principal stands off to the side, someone who is a teacher, who did have contact with this woman-child through her stay in this institution as part of her curriculum. Note also that the mic is staffed by two more women, who use their electrically-boosted voices to keep us all apprised of events at the front of the room, as those of us in the distant pews can’t see much. Note that even the statue on the wall is a woman, Mary, of course. And the stained glass, more Mary.
So, don’t let me get started on the male dominance symbolism, and well, okay, I quit here.
Still, they’ve prepped our gem well for her next stop on the academic trail….
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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In the public library late this afternoon, I picked up White Crosses, by Larry Watson*. Immediately, an image of the crosses on the hummock on the edge of Seney, called Seney’s Boot Hill, popped into my mind. This was one of my favorite stops on our tours of the north woods during my childhood. I was spellbound by the oblong depressions, the dampening of my footfalls by the thick layer of brown and crisp needles, and the susurration of the breeze in the pines above.
Bodies were regularly planted in this cemetery back in the heyday of logging, when, like the miners of the “Old West,” the loggers would get their pay and head to the bars and bawdy houses of Seney for some R&R. Inevitably, fights boke out, and sometimes a logger would die with his boots on, and the town would do its civic duty and plant the fellow out here on the edge of the Tahquamenon swamp.
More recent do-gooders have added new crosses, and generally keep the place, well, spruced up.
* An anonymous reviewer found Watson’s tale “annoying,” but I didn’t know that when I brought it home. Perhaps my experience will be different.
Posted at 5:48 PM |
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The first time I remember smelling gardenias was sitting in a bar long after dark in Oaxaca, when the vendor ladies came around with baskets of modest little bunches of the white flowers and their deep green foliage. Their target audience was the gentlemen trying to impress their lady-friends. I thought the dense, heavy aroma was terrific at cutting the cigarette smoke. Indeed, I now realize I’m missing sitting in the Bar Jardín through the evening, eating toasted garlic peanuts and sipping Dos Equis Oscura, and awaiting the arrival of the gardenia ladies.
Our front yard is now bathed in gardenia fragrance, as the bushes there are just coming into full bloom, replacing the gorgeous but scent-silent azaleas that have been gone for a while.
Posted at 6:05 PM |
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Oddly named Fivefingers, these shoes seem like a great idea, unless your toes don’t repond well to this much circumscription or you want some arch support.* My conclusion is that the designers picked the repellent yellow/blue contrasting colors because they were thinking about diving and underwater visibility.
I’m safe from checking these Fivefingers out, however, as there are only a few scattered dealers carrying them on their shelves. And, besides, I’m SUCH a Keen** fan!
* Kudos to my SIL for suggesting I take a look at these fine foot-coverings.
** Sorry, obnoxious site; pages are slow to load and hyperactive with presumed impressive programming—NOT.
Posted at 5:44 PM |
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I often forget just how large New York is—the state!—and how varied its terrain is. We zoomed through the state and city just after Thanksgiving, as you can see from this trip down memory lane. Here’s the view from a peak whose name I’ve forgotten that K and I hiked up to.
Regarding Sunday’s entry, I’ve also added a (crude) map showing where Eagle’s Nest is. That long skinny lake to the northwest is Long Lake, but the one just east of it (and NNE of Eagle’s Nest) has the best name: Fur Farm Lake. Yes, because back in the Old Days a harvesting concern was quartered there. Google’s gotten some bad data, however, because the big lake to the north of these two (no!, not Superior!) is labeled “Camp Seven Alke”. And that last word is a typo for LAKE.
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Happy Mom’s Day! Here’s my mom last summer at Eagle’s Nest, near the headwaters of the Tahquamenon, one of our favorite stops when we’re out peregrinating in the northwoods.
I’m afraid I’m not as inventive as Froggy, who has “penned” a special Mother’s Day poem, for my lo-o-ng-time friend Anne. Go Froggy!
Froggy’s best line is only on the audio version: “Every day is Mother’s Day!”
Posted at 10:22 PM |
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Some days, like today I think, my mood is cactus-y, rather rotund yet pleated, rather prickly, and certainly slow-growing. Cheers!
Posted at 7:51 PM |
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Vince…likes getting to work at 4:30 in the morning and finishing before lunch. He feels as if he’s gotten one over on the world, leaving his place of employment for lunch and simply not coming back. He’s realizing this is a fixed part of his personality, this desire to get one over on the world. Maybe there’s a hooky gene.
I like that idea: a hooky gene. I think I have a part-time, situational one! You?
Later Vince thinks more about time and the sensation of it passing.
When does the day turn? Clocks and calendars say midnight, but the man who lives his life by a clock is no better than a robot. Daylight? Letting the sun determine is only slightly less arbitrary. So what? Consciousness? Does the day begin when you rise out of bed into it? Is there a fixed moment when you pass from one to the other? Even awake, Vince has felt the turn from one day to the next; no rule says when it happens, you just know when it does. If he had to peg it, he’d say closing—when the bars shut down.
Okay, if “day” is arbitrary, does it have to have a start/finish? Can’t it just be that understood thing that has a sunlight part and a night part, and leave it at that? And that we understand from context what is meant?
Yeah, to some degree, that’s okay, but then some anal retentive type decides we have to distinguish noon from 1 pm in such a way that we all know what we’re talking about and, whew, then we have to consider the issue Vince raises.
Okay, one more excerpt, since it’s also musing on time:
There is a moment when all the work that can be done is done. Plays have all been made, strategies and mistakes. The various people are in position and there’s nothing more than the wait—no more running or politicking, compromising or pleading. It’s going to be what it’s going to be, and all that’s left is for the thing to play itself out. And at that moment, time is measured in sighs, regrets and ironies; these are the seconds, minutes and hours of the night before.
I haven’t finished this book yet, and I’m into the dangerous last third, and the ending seems to be heralded by the paragraph above. So far the tale’s been above average, as Garrison K would say, and the characters worth spending time on, yet I keep worrying that it’s starting to self-destruct. Vince strives against himself, like the rest of us, but the deck seems to be stacked against him (hey, I can use, broadly speaking, sports metaphors, too!).
* From Jess Walter’s Citizen Vince (2005, p. 5, 171, & 239).
Posted at 2:59 PM |
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