Sunday, April 29, 2007

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Here’s an odd and interesting little book by the master of magic realism. It’s much more accessible than 100 Years of Solitude seemed to me at first try. I do plan to attempt Solitude again soon, however. The premise is that a 90-year-old man decides to celebrate being 90 by having himself a virgin. But when he arrives, the young girl is sound asleep. He watches her sleep, then sleeps himself. He continues arranging for the same girl for a year, and falls in love with her, although he never sees her awake. Spend the requisite hour or two it will take you to read it and see what you think.Here’s an odd and interesting little book by the master of magic realism. It’s much more accessible than 100 Years of Solitude seemed to me at first try. I do plan to attempt Solitude again soon, however. The premise is that a 90-year-old man decides to celebrate being 90 by having himself a virgin. But when he arrives, the young girl is sound asleep. He watches her sleep, then sleeps himself. He continues arranging for the same girl for a year, and falls in love with her, although he never sees her awake. Spend the requisite hour or two it will take you to read it and see what you think.

Islam notes Part 2

These are not well organized or completely coherent ideas. They are notes gathered and yet to be distilled. I share them for my own benefit—to write them down, review them, organize them and think about them may help me come to some position on the issue.

In Islamic countries in the middle East and in Islamic communities in Europe, poverty, high birth rates, no jobs, and a lot of angry, unemployed young men conspire to create conditions which favor radical Islamic involvement. This gulf between the Islamic countries and the first world countries continues to widen even as China, Korea and other Asian economies begin to flourish in the world economy.


It is easy to blame the Other—the U.S., for conditions under repressive, corrupt rulers whom we have helped to prop up. It is easy to hate foreigners, especially those who have a lot more than you have, and who at the same time live under very different social codes—codes which are portrayed at their worst on the television programs and movies which they see. They blame us for globalization, which seems to be leaving them behind We make a highly visible, focused and hatable target for the radicals.

Yet some Muslims want to join the modern world, to participate in its economies, its ways, its wealth and prosperity. Others say no, we must revert to our traditional ways—ways evolved over millennia in harsh desert lands.


the Saudis use the u.s. and hate us at the same time. They support
madrasa schools with oil money not only in their own countries but also in Europe and American countries, including the U.S. teaching their own brand of Islam suffused with hatred of the modern, hatred of American, hatred of the other.

Traditional Islam is said to be a religion of law--harsh law, but
just law. Penalties are severe for transgressions--but justice,
judgment and conviction are supposed to be part of the process.
Suicide is not only not condoned by traditional Islam, but is
explicitly forbidden by word and action of the Prophet. Dying
by the hand of another during war or assassination is noble, but
dying by your own hand is still considered suicide, including
blowing yourself up.

Islam also forbids the murder or involvement of women, children and other noncombatants in its complex and long-studied and
debated rules of war. Blowing up their own people to get media
attention does not, according to traditional Islam, qualify a
young man for martyrdom and heaven. The Prophet says it
qualifies him to blow himself up over and over again in Hell.

The Islamic world is falling farther and farther behind the rest
of the world economically, in part because of the corruption of
its own rulers. The U.S. has interfered, propped up some of
these leaders, and followed policies which have harmed the Muslim
peoples in the Middle East e.g. sanctions against Iraq which
clearly did not harm Hussein but squeezed the poor dry.

Bin Laden cloaks his messages in terms of Islam, but he has elevated himself to leadership and hero on hate. Hate instilled in young men in Madrasas, refugee camps, training camps. Hate of an America that does not really exist--a place of debauchery,
corruption, dissolution. They should look at his own family for
closer to home examples of corruption, debauchery and dissolution. But he and his kind need a focus of hate, a focus for their cause. Without that focus you can't get people to blow themselves up voluntarily. You can't fuel cells of people to rise
up in rage without inculcating hatred into their bones.

Some of the reasons they put forward for hating us may have some basis in reality. We have since the 1920s interfered in Arab politics, economies and distribution of wealth for the sake of the oil they sit on. We have not backed up our allies when it suited us to bail--the Shah, the Shiites in 1991 in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was our own man at first. Then we ousted, hunted, captured and eventually got him executed.

We have freedoms, material wealth, and customs they do not have. We flaunt them to the world in the over-dramatized visions of television and movies. And they eat them up.

They promise their young men heaven, virgins, and support for their families if they become suicide bombers. Which is more compelling to a young man without a job, no hope of carrying out his God-given duty to support his family in a world where nothing
is certain, and poverty, violence and hatred are all he has ever known? Do they drug them before they send them out? Do they whip them into a frenzy? Or brainwash them so thoroughly that they can carry out the mission?

They despise us for cowardice and weakness. We turned tail and ran in Beirut; we bailed in Somalia; we left our hostages in Iran for 444 days. We cry to the world that we want to bail again in Iraq. Bin Laden will use that too as a sign of our softness, our
weakness, our cowardice, our willingness to surrender, to flee, to bail. We have no backbone and can't finish what we started.

We are the enemy. We deserve part of that and don't deserve part of it. It doesn't matter. But the roots of the hatred are not, I think, only in Islam, or even, I think, in Wahhabiism. They are political, economic, historic, ethnic, cultural, and circumstantial.

We should never have gone into Iraq in the first place. We should have dealt with it in 1991, and since we didn't, we should have left it alone. But now that we're there, we have to find a way to pull it out. If we don't, the region will dissolve into a
morass of bloodshed, violence, and probably end up in another tyranny, because the only kind of leader who will work will have to be a strong military one.



What is our responsibility now? Having started the war, torn down the government, demolished the political structure, and unleashed the jackals, the extremists on all sides, to devastate their own lands and peoples—what do we do now?

Friday, April 27, 2007

I Feel Good!

I feel really good—wonder how long since that’s happened!! Just came home from a bike ride into town, visited a friend who just had a positive diagnosis of M.S.

You wouldn’t think that was good news, but it sort of was, because she’s been worrying about what’s wrong with her for almost four years, worrying that it might be some terrible thing or other. M.S. is no picnic, but now the enemy has a name, and she knows what she should do and what she shouldn’t do (fall mostly), and that it isn’t ALS or Parkinson’s or something. It’s not easy to get used to, but it’s definite and that’s a relief. She got a walker—they really make them slick these days with brakes and baskets and a seat. It will be like my cane for her—you have to remember to grab it and take it along so that when you need it it’s not at the other end of the world from where you are. But if you do, you have security and independence.

Back to the exercise, though—the high is great—and the third round of meds for the sinus infection must finally be taking hold because I really do feel GOOD!! Or maybe it’s just the weather.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Colleagues

He pumped me
for informationI did not have
?As we walked
in the rain
under one umbrella

I wanted to tell him
What I didn’t know
Details
To confirm his suspicions
Facts
To set his mind at ease.

I wanted
To tell him
More than I knew
Who said what
And why

I wanted
To seem important
Knowledgeable
Informed
In

But I didn’t know
So shook my head
And told him so.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Home Office

Home—I love it here. My own space. I’ve spent the entire day in my office working on work (home office day don’t you see) and enjuoying it totally. Why is it I can get everything on my list done today but yesterday the same things never made it to the top? Peace, no interruptions, and the comfort of home. Rain on my windows, wind through the cracks, a good day to hole up and concentrate I guess.

I started playing at basketry a while ago, and Sunday I finished my first complete item. It’s lopsided, misshapen and rather weird looking but will make a perfectly serviceable trash basket. It’s satisfying to work with my hands, to do something with concrete results, even if the results aren’t that good. I learned a lot, after all. While I’m weaving, the cat leaps and grabs at the ends of the reeds, trying to catch and hold them with her clawless paws.

One of the advantages of talking books is that I can read and do something els at the same time. Of course when I do, my concentration is not complete on the book, so it doesn’t work for serious reading. So I’ll just skip serious reading!

Hazel

Hazel

As reliable as the sun
She watches her great-grandchildren
Reads mail for me
Keeps track of time

What do I really know about her?
She doesn’t like cranberries
She has children here and there
She is widowed at least twice
She loves bingo and mushrooms
She gets cold easily.

Is that enough to call friend?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Islam 1

I have decided to try in some small way to understand something about Islam as it affects the current world crises. Is Islam a religion of peace, or a religion of war? Can we live in pace with the Muslims among us? With Muslim nations? Are the troubles in the Middle East rooted in fundamentally opposing, irreconcilable world views, or in the usual struggle for power, wealth and land? Do Muslims really see us as Satan incarnate? Or is this merely the rhetoric of the fringe, the extreme radicals who happen to be in positions of influence at the moment? Is there a parallel I can understand between Muslim radicals and Christian radicals, for instance, or are we looking at two very different animals? What role does the religion of Islam play in potential solutions to Iraq, Iran, Palestine, etc. Is it the religion, or the national or ethnic identity that is at work here?

I have embarked on a series of readings which I hope will give me some insight. I plan to share whatever I discover as I go, so will post here bits and pieces as I go along. Whether I will find real answers is yet to be seen. Walk with me if you will—skip it if you don’t.

My first foray is into a book published in 2003 by Bernard Lewis titled The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

The crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
by Bernard Lewis
Copyright 2003


A significant difference between Islam and Christianity is this: Christianity was founded on principles of pacifism. Turn the other cheek. Love thine enemy. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and render unto God that which is God’s. Islam, on the other hand, was founded on the conquering power of Mohamed in Medina.
He was a warrior, lived by the sword, and preached the sword. He was also a ruler, and the law of Islam is the law, period. Islam makes no distinction between God and Caesar. God is all there is. Therefore politics is an integral part of Islam "Islam is
nothing if not politics," says Ayatollah Khomeini.

"Islam is not only a matter of faith and practice; it is also an identity and a loyalty--for many, an identity and a loyalty that transcend all others."

It carries a mandate in the Kur'an to conquer and convert the
world, and once a land has been conquered and converted, it must remain Islam.

Islam ruled from the seventh century when it was founded until the 18th century when Britain and the west began their ascendancy. The Islamic empire spread from Medina across Asia and Africa and part of Europe, flourishing in power, culture, science etc. They have lost this world dominance in the past 300 years to the West.
Humiliation and frustration resulted, exacerbated by western imperialism and domination. Then they discovered the power they held in the oil reserves. In 1974 they held the world hostage and tasted sweet power as they banded together over the price and
production of oil. They began to travel, and see what they perceive as the decadence of the West, articulated in descriptions of dances, and other events. Their own rulers were supported by the west and were seen as decadent, corrupt, dissolute, and they blame it all on the west.

"Islamic terms offered several advantages: an emotionally familiar basis of group identity, solidarity, and exclusion; [like any respectable cult? But they're too big to be considered a cult, right?] an acceptable basis of legitimacy and authority; an
immediately intelligible formulation of principles for both a critique of the present and a program for the future. By means of these, Islam could provide the most effective symbols and slogans for mobilization, whether for or against a cause or a
regime."

In Islam, there is no system of priests and church officials as in Rome. In every mosque a preacher is free to preach his message to the people without oversight or control by authority. This gives the fundamentalists millions of pulpits from which to preach each his own brand of radicalism.

Lewis says that fundamentalist Muslims need an enemy, a focus for their frustration, their hatred, their disaffections and, I submit, their power base. We have all the requisite qualities, and we are it. Some want us dead and will die to make it happen.
Some just want to live in peace and benefit from western advances. Some want us dead but are willing to use the modern world and bide their time until they can achieve their ends. Lewis warns us no to confuse these last two groups.

Jihad

The concept of Jihad, the Holy War intended to conquer and convert the infidel dates back to Mohammed. It was the basis on which the Islamic empire was built. God--Allah--has mandated that Islam be spread by force if necessary to the world. Those who fight in the Jihad earn everlasting reward in heaven. The shar'ia, the code of Islamic law, expands on this concept. "The presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim
faith or submits to Muslim rule. Those who fight in the jihad qualify for rewards in both worlds-- booty in this one, paradise in the next.”

The shar’ia expands on this concept:

“Jihad is your duty under any ruler, be they godly or wicked. A day and a night of fighting on the frontier
is better than a month of fasting and prayer. The nip of an ant hurts a martyr more than the thrust of a weapon, for these are more welcome to him than sweet, cold water on a hot summer day. He who dies without having taken part in a campaign dies in a kind of unbelief. God marvels at people [those to whom Islam is
brought by conquest] who are dragged to Paradise in chains. Learn to shoot, for the space between the mark and the archer is one of the gardens of Paradise. Paradise is in the shadow of swords."

The shar'ia also goes into great detail about the rules of war, fair treatment of the conquered and prisoners, etc. The jurists warn that the benefits of Jihad are lost if booty and power become the primary goal of the conflict--bringing Islam to the
infidel must remain the primary goal. Throughout history this has been a basic tenet of Islam.

imperialism by the west

The Islamic empire maintained its hegemony until 1683 when its armies were defeated at Vienna. This began the push by western powers to push them back out of Europe. The resounding questions it raised were how could this have happened, and how can we
regain this territory?

In 1798 Napoleon invaded Egypt and was routed by the British. This inaugurated the era of imperialism, primarily by the British and French. Imperialism is bad when it's the west doing it. It's good and beneficial to everyone when the Muslims did it and
wasn't called imperialism when they conquered half of Europe and
Asia. They were simply carrying out their mandate from God to conquer and convert the world. The Christian west was creating apostates among the saved, and thus was evil. Apostates and those who influence their behavior must by shar'ia law be killed.

Bin Laden believed that by defeating the Soviets in Afghanistan, his forces destroyed the Soviet Union and brought the cold war to an end. He saw the Soviets as imperialists, atheists etc. and thought America would be a much softer target now that the
Soviets were out of the way.

Discovering America

The United States was not really recognized or paid attention to by the Islamic countries until after WW2. At first, through cinema, television, and travel people started seeing glimpses of America and wanting our post-war products. But U.S. policies
began to interfere with Islamic countries. Setting up the Shah in Iran for instance, controlling oil wealth, etc. But outspoken critics of our way of life began to have serious impact on the way Muslims viewed America. Set against Muslim culture and law
regarding contact between the sexes, for instance, is a vivid depiction of a dance in a church hall where young men and women mixed, danced, touched, all to music and dimmed lights. What
could be more scandalous, more appalling, more sinful than that to a people with such strict sexual codes? Add this to what you see on TV and what apparently they see on TV as well, to diatribes against us by first German and the Soviet propaganda, our failure and thus weakness in not supporting our puppet Shah after he was overthrown, and the fear by the fundamentalists that our culture is polluting the morals of the high-minded Muslims, and you have plenty of ammunition for fear, contempt and loathing.

"By now there is an almost standardized litany of American offenses recited in the lands of Islam, in the media, in pamphlets, in sermons, and in public speeches. A notable example was in an address by an Egyptian professor at the joint meeting
of the European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference held in Istanbul in February 2002. The crime sheet goes back to the original settlement in North America, and what is described as the expropriation and extermination of the previous inhabitants and the sustained ill treatment of the survivors among them. It continues with the enslavement, importation, and exploitation of the blacks (an odd accusation
coming from that particular source) and of immigrants in the United States. It includes war crimes against Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, and elsewhere. Noteworthy among these crimes of imperialist aggression are American actions in Lebanon, Khartoum, Libya, Iraq, and of course helping Israel against the Palestinians. More broadly, the charge sheet includes support for Middle Eastern and other tyrants, such as the shah of Iran and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, as well as a variable list of Arab tyrants, adjusted to circumstances, against their own peoples.

Yet the most powerful accusation of all is the degeneracy and
debauchery of the American way of life, and the threat that it offers to Islam. This threat, classically formulated by Sayyid Qutb, became a regular part of
the vocabulary and ideology of Islamic fundamentalists, and most notably, in the language of the Iranian Revolution. This is what is meant by the term the Great Satan, applied to the United States by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. Satan as depicted in the
Qur'an is neither an imperialist nor an exploiter. He is a seducer, "the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men" (Qur'an CXIV, 4, 5)."

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Jokes

Why is it that I can never remember jokes? Except a very few, all dirty? I know some people who can lob them back and forth across a dinner table like
playing volleyball. Is it my brain, which remembers generalities, not specifics? Or the fact that I don't try to remember them until later—after they’ve drained away from my short-term memory. I had to emcee an event. My boss remembered the joke I told last year—I didn’t!! I asked a group of women friends if they knew any good jokes. None of them could remember a single one. Is it a female brain thing? Men do seem to be better at remembering jokes, in my experience.

Women remember stories. Here’s one that one of my friends offered in lieu of a joke.

Her friend was volunteering to teach CCD to little Catholic children preparing for their first confession. The children were nervous about it, and the teacher promised them repeatedly that nobody would hear their sins except the priest and God. They were convinced, and stood obediently in line, heads bowed, hands folded, while their classmate at the head of the line went into the confessional and faced the priest. Their eyes grew big as saucers as they heard “Bless me Father for I have sinned. This is my first confession. I pulled the cat’s tail and made her scratch my brother, …” coming over the public address system in the church. Father had forgotten to turn off his wireless microphone.

Wicked--a book review

Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West—Gregory McGuire


‘wicked is an easy read, based on a familiar story. The author attempts to define what makes a person wicked. what happens to them? What portents, conditions, outside and internal influences make a simple green baby with shark's teeth turn, eventually, into a vengeful, greedy, angry witch. Okay, simple green baby with shark’s teeth is a bit over the top but the author presents her as, well if not lovable, at least believable. She is a horrible baby but grows into an obedient and loving sister. She loves a man; she loses him.

The book doesn't rise to its own challenge. The adolescent discussions of evil are inset and superficial, and the witch's decline from a good and loving sister to her final unhappy self is put down to the lack of forgiveness for causing the death of her lover. Then she refuses to give the same forgiveness to Dorothy for killing her sister. But does her lack of forgiveness cause her descent into jealousy and evil?

It's challenging to take a completely unsympathetic an “historic” character like the wicked witch of the west and make her into a living, breathing, real girl, and then bring her back at the end to her wickedness. The decline didn't work for me. But the story
was relatively entertaining.

It's not a book I would give as a gift, but it will make an interesting book discussion, which is why I read it in the first place.

Can security and freedom coexist?

Security. Safety. And Freedom. Can they coexist? Can you be safe in a free country? For that matter can you be safe in a totalitarian country?

I was distressed by the bashing the police got after the tragedy on Monday. Why didn’t they know, why didn’t they evacuate the campus or lock it down or something beforehand? Why couldn’t they have been there when it started? Why didn’t they notify all the students right after the first incident? How could they have failed so completely to avoid the “worst tragedy on a campus in U.S. history?” We don’t live in a police state, and we don’t want to. So how could the police, who give us our freedom to come and go, to live our lives, possibly have done other than they did?

Why wasn’t he in a mental hospital somewhere? People knew he was disturbed. This is a bigger question. Our laws protect all kinds of privacies. Information about us is at one level supposedly protected to the Nth degree, as in our medical history. Parents, spouses, children, cannot obtain medical information on a mental patient over 18 without his written consent. I have been in that situation and found it impossible. We struggle to maintain our privacy in other arenas such as credit—ha ha ha--. Does it make sense that my credit report is available to anyone who wants to see it and pay a little fee? My salary and work history are public information? My property, including whether I put in another bathroom, are matters of public record. So are the terms of my divorce. My comings and goings are routinely logged by the airlines, the traffic cameras, parking police, everyone. But my serious mental illness cannot be discussed with the people who might be able to help me, who might care enough to help monitor it, or at least be in a position to see the warning signs if they only knew what they were? The way things work a person has to do something that endangers himself or others—kill a couple of people, try to commit suicide—before any intervention is possible. And yet, and yet. The loss of control more ope n information could impose on people regarding their medical issues is the other side of that coin. Is

We leap to implement measures to insure against a repeat of this kind of tragedy. Yesterday somebody got past the security measures at NASA—we assume NASA is as secure as other federal institutions? He traumatized one person, killed one and killed himself. Every time something happens, we implement another measure of security. We take away another freedom—the freedom to keep your shoes on at the airport after one isolated incident—the freedom to carry toothpaste in your carry on after one incident. Has it helped prevent another shoe bomber? Has it helped prevent a mid-air explosion? I don’t know. Has it cost a great deal of money in terms of security personnel, time and inconvenience for all passengers, and more mechanisms for screening? I suspect it has.

So what shall we do now—how will we react to this terrible, terrifying and tragic event? Give our campus security guards guns? Well, frankly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me to have security guards who can’t do anything. Will one of them run amuck and be the next shooter? Doubtful. Will this cost schools a lot more? Yes. Will it guarantee against another killing? No. Is it a reasonable measure? Perhaps. But reasonable measures should not be implemented as knee-jerk reactions. Public leaders are required to do something. If they just say what I’m saying, they are quickly discredited. They have to do something in response to a tragedy of this magnitude. The problem is that each something done in response to an event, even a horrific one like this, piles on top of other measures, creating an uncoordinated junk pile of measures, some of which work, some of which don’t. And still there’s no way to know what might have happened.

Every time I go to the airport they tell me that the security level has been raised to orange. Am I glad we have security measures in place at airports? Yes. Do I think they will guarantee against another tragedy like 9/11? No. There are no guarantees.

The fact is there are no absolute guarantees of safety. No one is safe in Baghdad, or Palestine in spite of all the measures people are trying to take to make them safe. Am I safe in my home? If someone wants to come in here and kill me, my guess is that they’ll get the job done whether or not the doors are locked. I rely on the general goodness of my neighbors, the protection of my guardian angel, and luck. And I know that I am not safe. Bad things can happen.

I think to guard against what happened in Virginia, the laws regarding privacy where severe mental illness is concerned should be changed. I think families should be allowed and encouraged to know what’s going on, so they can support, protect, and when necessary warn others about, their loved ones. The level of serious mental illness that should come under this heading needs to be carefully evaluated, but if a person is known to lose control of the illness if he stops taking medication, it seems to me that is serious enough.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Ideals and Heroes

The Thomas Jefferson Building

I attended a ceremony at the Jefferson Building yesterday. It houses the Library of Congress and is a monument to American ideals. As a public space, a place that belongs to us all, it is impressive. Marble from Italy, France, everywhere--even Tennessee!! Mosaics, paintings, carvings, stained glass—endlessly decorated. Marble, gold leaf, pillars, frescoes, domes, courtyards, fountains, columns, everything. You can take a virtual tour of it at www.loc.gov/jefftour . Sayings, names of ancient and modern (890s) authors, poets, philosophers. Representations of the ideals on which our nation stood in 1890. Female figures representing the ideal; men representing the achieved. In the main reading room, “Eight giant marble columns each support 10-foot-high allegorical female figures in plaster representing characteristic features of civilized life and thought: Religion, Commerce, History, Art, Philosophy, Poetry, Law
and Science.
The 16 bronze statues set upon the balustrades of the galleries pay homage to men whose lives symbolized the thought and activity represented by the plaster
statues below. Included are Moses and St. Paul (Religion); Christopher Columbus and Robert Fulton (Commerce); Herodotus and Edward Gibson (History); Michelangelo
and Ludwig van Beethoven (Art); Plato and Francis Bacon (Philosophy); Homer and William Shakespeare (Poetry); Solon and James Kent (Law); and Isaac Newton
and Joseph Henry (Science). and Joseph Henry (Science). The circle of knowledge is completed by the reader desks, as users of the Main Reading Room make their own contributions to the various fields of knowledge represented by the paintings and statuary in the room.”

It’s like the cathedrals and mosques of Europe and Asia in a way—a temple to our ideals.

Have those ideals changed? What would we paint today to represent who we are? Who would we immortalize in bronze?
They didn’t leave any room for new names, like Mark Twain for instance. Or new fields either. It is an inspiring place all the same—good to know it is ours, and that it represents what we want to be, even if we fall short.

It’s good to declare ideals and heroes.

Digging to America by Ann Tyler

I read this book yesterday while flying to and from Washington, D.C. Its themes spoke to me—themes of belonging and not belonging—not feeling like you belong no matter how hard you try; being different, and the same; people asking, prying, about things you take for granted; culture; a need to please; over-sensitivity—things we all carry one way or another whether we’re Americans, immigrants, or something else. The premise is two families, one Iranian and one WASP adopting Korean children and becoming friends. Who are we, and how do others see us, the Americans? And the immigrants among us, the Iranians, the Koreans, what place do our cultures hold? Where do they mesh? Clash? What constitutes tradition? How do traditions come to be? Why do some stick and others fade away? Can you change tradition and still have it be valid? Do we become like our mothers? Do we become our mothers?

I recommend it.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Calendars--I hate them!

I hate my calendar. I remember a time years ago when one day, one week, one month was all the same as another, except maybe Sunday when I went to church. Up to my eyeballs in diapers, toddlers, toys, cooking, cleaning, nothing much happened that needed a calendar.

Now I’m a slave to the blasted thing, keep two calendars which I don’t always remember to synchronize, and have to plan eons out to find blank space.

Example—yesterday a friend called me—“Wanna go to the writing festival with me this summer. June 10-14. We could share a room.” Yes, yes yes!! I have been thinking about going to that thing for several years. So I went on-line, found the choices, agonized between “the novel,”: “The novel as craft” and “Metaphors.” Finally I decided on Metaphors, although the Memoir class was taught by someone whose book I really loved—Barbara Robinet Moss. OK, before you send in your $500, better check the calendar, just to be sure. And wouldn’t you know, right in the middle of the week, on Wednesday afternoon, I have a one-hour commitment at work. ONE HOUR! Get out of it? Probably not wise. Trouble is, they said, “You did such a nice job on this last year we want you to do it again,” and I agreed already. Damn!!

I also want to do RAGBRAI—all of it. But again up jumps the calendar. On Thursday of that week, scheduled last fall, is another one-hour speaking engagement. One lousy hour (that took someone a lot of work to arrange.) So maybe I will do some RAGBRAI, but not a whole, carefree (no doubt miserably hot and painful, but really, who cares?) week.

I could just take a week off and write. Yes I could. Yes I could. I could. I might. I …

Calendars—I hate them!

Thursday, April 12, 2007

The Perils of the Interview

I was interviewed on TV today, a two-minute opportunity to ask for volunteers to help with a critical work project. It was live, on the daytime news show.\

The interview can be an amazing thing. The person who interviewed me live today had to take exactly what I said, in context, without spin or reshaping. I think I like live interviews, even though you have one big chance to screw up and none to recover. However, the taped interview, and the newspaper interview can spin what you say so completely that you can’t find yourself in it. The last time this same person interviewed me, the lead-in, the commentary, and the basic story put what I said so far out of context that I sincerely wished I hadn’t agreed to the interview. From now on, live interviews only!! Or none at all!!

Guess I should remember that when I write feature stories of my own, huh?

Word for the day—Atavistic (I always have trouble with this one)
reverting to or suggesting the characteristics of a remote ancestor or primitive type. Throwback.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Things

Wind chimes

I have always loved wind chimes. Years ago X made a set of wind chimes out of varying lengths of copper pipe. They had a lovely, mellow tone in a gentle breeze. They spoke to me of place, of home, and served as a locator. But when the wind got to whipping them around, they clanged like the proverbial “clanging cymbal”, clanging, bashing, clattering, crashing together. I can’t remember what happened to them. I got a set of bamboo chimes—they clicked peacefully in a breeze and got totally tangled in a wind. When I moved here, people gave me wind chimes-the theme was clear—I’d need them to find my way home. I got a tiny, tinkly set from #2’s in-laws, and a somewhat larger set from a fellow at work. I got a tranquil, pleasant set of bamboo from #6, and I got a set of copper chimes from my daddy. Right now the copper chimes are ringing the weather, announcing that the wind is from the southeast, bringing rain. They have a deep, mellow, homey sound, a tink, or a melody on a D seventh chord. I love them.

Treasure the tiny joys, the little tinkling pleasures, the beautiful in a familiar sound, the just-right touch of the keys, the glint of light on a windowpane. Notice, and love, each in its turn.

The Pump Lamp

The pump lamp sat on a lamp table on the west wall of the living room when I was growing up. It was one of those so familiar objects, part of the room, part of the world. It has a brass cylinder for a base, very neatly wrapped and tacked around something else cylindrical. At the bottom is a little spigot with a tiny bucket hanging on it, and at the top of the base is a pump handle which pulls the chain that turns the light on and off. It was always the pump lamp. I knew its name before I really understood the significance of the pump handle and the bucket and the spigot. It just was. It was made by my Uncle Charlie, the real grandfather figure in my childhood. I always loved it, and this Sunday my mother gave it to me. The shade I remember is gone, cracked and broken through years of use. It needs a new one—one like the old one, with horses and wagons forever circling the light. I need to find it a shade. And a place to stand proud and reminiscent. Sentimental—I guess so. It’s good to have things that connect memories to places and people, and to love.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Easter Sunday

I heard the sermon twice—more or less the same thing at the Easter Vigil and again this morning at Mass. Take up your Cross and follow me,” or “You can’t avoid the crosses God has planned for you so you might as well embrace them and put them to good use by offering up your suffering for good.”

I was introduced to this theme as a small child. My mother explained to me that I had a heavy cross to bear. I didn’t understand it then, and the entire concept of bearing my cross made me angry. Not because I had something that could be so easily named my cross, but that God who is supposed to love me would deliberately introduce pain and suffering for the purpose of seeing how I held up under it. What kind of a father would do that? What kind of a loving God would demand suffering of his people, his children? His Only Begotten Son.

Hearing the old, familiar theme again today, I bristled yet again. Yes, pain and suffering happen to people. My dear friend gets ovarian cancer for no good reason. Except that in the physical world where we live, cancer happens. Blindness happens. Death happens. People cope with their pain and suffering each in their own ways. One of my beloved uses hers as a battering ram to open the gates of heaven, and a bludgeon to drive her children through. That is too harsh. She follows Father’s advice and offers her pain and suffering, emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual pain and suffering, to bargain for the “lost” souls of her children.

I think my problem may be that I haven’t really experienced pain and suffering that qualifies as a cross to bear, to offer up for sins, atonement for sins, or payment somehow for favors. I am a stranger to real, debilitating pain. I’d like to stay that way. And suffering outside of physical pain is whatever you make of it. Do you count the annoyance, the frustration, and the limitations of blindness as suffering? It seems to me that that raises it to a dangerous level of importance and prominence. If I “suffer”, it will take over my life, become the centerpiece, the most important thing. I don’t want it to be that. So it doesn’t qualify as suffering, just an annoying, inconvenient pain in the ass. That takes it out of the realm of cross to bear, pain and suffering to offer up for the salvation of my soul, etc. Perhaps I’m throwing good capital down a rat hole?
Personal tragedies? I’ve had a few major tumbles. Do they qualify? Does God take my baby away to induce pain and suffering the way a parent induces vomiting for a child who has drunk a bottle of grape-flavored cough syrup? To purge and cleanse and save? And what do I do with that ipecac? Turn it into empathy for others or hold tightly to my loss? I suffered, I guess,--it hurt to lose her. At the time I could not have offered the hurt and anger up for anything. I was sucked down and drowning in an emotional maelstrom, fighting, raging against the God to whom I was supposed to offer it up?
Today, I choose to remember the tiny hand that clutched my finger, the soft lush hair on the tiny head, the beautiful miracle of her fleeting life. I recognize that in this loss were the roots of understanding of many things. But now my little one is not a cross to bear. She is a vine growing, supporting, flowering and fruiting in unexpected ways. She is a gift, not a cross.

So again I ask, what kind of God calls himself loving and forgiving and yet demands a brutal, bloody sacrifice to appease him?

Happy Easter!

Saturday, April 7, 2007

The Worst of Times by Timothy Egan

fI’m reading an interesting book chronicling the Dust Bowl of the 1930s through historical and eye-witness accounts. I wonder if the sandstorms my nephews experienced in Iraq are similar to the dust storms in the Texas panhandle in the early 1930s. It was interesting that they generated so much electricity that cars shorted out and you could see it traveling along the barbed wire fences if you could see at all. The worst one happened on a day like we’ve had this week, with temperatures in the 80s (last week) dropping like a rock and the winds coming from North Dakota on down, picking up dust as they went.

The causes of the Dust Bowl were thre-fold—the boom in wheat prices in the 1920s, up to $2.00 per bushel, the consequent plowing up of all of the prairies on the high plains of Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma to plant wheat, the Depression and subsequent fall in wheat prices which caused a lot of the people who came to this area to farm wheat to abandon the land, naked of its grass cover and naked of any other cover crop, and a drought which lasted several years in this area. The drought was part of the usual weather cycle, and the grasses of the prairie had evolved to withstand droughts of this kind, reviving when the rains finally came.

The book tells the story through the eyes of several families in the region and is quite interesting and readable.

It’s sobering to realize that we as a nation created the conditions that caused such ecological, economic and personal disasters. People died of dust pneumonia. Went crazy. People went broke. And within my parents’ lifetimes which at this point in my life doesn’t seem so long ago! Should I take global warming more seriously? Will the prophets of doom who warn us of ice ages to come brought on by our greed and cavalier disregard of the ecology of Mother Earth be vindicated in my, or my grandchildren’s lifetimes?

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Tortilla Curtain

I think I have found a book that rivals The Grapes of Wrath. It’s The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle. Finished it yesterday and still vibrating. The writing is excellent, but it’s the content, the look at the complex situation of Mexican immigrants in California ( elsewhere), the dream that draws them north; the validation of jobs that keeps them coming, even jobs that are underpaid, uncertain, and sporadic, and the hostility of the very people who hire them dirt cheap to do work they can’t get Americans to do, at least without paying a living wage. Like preying on like on both sides of the wall as well as unlike preying on each other.

The solution to the blind baby was a bit too easy, but otherwise …

In the Beginning

This is my first post. I've been practicing off-line for three weeks, trying to decide if this is for me. Now that I'm finally trying it on-line I hope it turns out to be worth the effort. This interface doesn't work very well with a screen reader, which is frustrating. If I can paste in from Word it will be okay.