Before dinner Sabrina came upstairs and asked for an old shirt, a smock, in which to paint my Christmas present. I told her I had taken most of the shirts I no longer wore to the second hand store, but took her to my closet, in the bath area. I would find something.
"Is THAT your shower?!?" she asked.
"Yes," I replied.
"Is that the shower door?" she asked of the tan cotton draped across the inside of the keystoned doorway, concealing yet revealing the mottled brown stone walls behind.
There is no door, I told her. Just the curtain. "Don't you remember when we got the curtain rod and drapes at Fred Meyer?" I asked.
I watched the memory return, of the three of us in the curtain aisle of the home improvement section, selecting the rods, thinking about color. I watched the memory fit itself into the present, the pieces falling into place. "THAT's why we bought those?" she asked.
"You have to clean shower doors," she finally said.
"I will throw that in the washing machine," I replied.
I showed her the strange shower heads. The stone. She laughed her laugh of surprised joy. "I SO love this house. It is SO the red string," the abbreviated reference cementing K.C. 's metaphor into our family lexicon, that this steel sided barn house is a red string in a box full of gray string.
As to metaphors, K.C found another one in the truck after we left the coffeehouse on 14th Street late this afternoon. Laura the barista had made the girls some nice drinks, much better than the awful ones we had gotten earlier at the strip mall. Sabrina's Chai Tea was especially a disappointment, thin. K.C. said it was skim milk instead of whole milk.
"You mean really made with skim?" I asked her. She said no, just that it had no flavor.
I told her she had just come up with another metaphor, and she said, "I did, didn't I?" So on the way home we looked for cars that were skim milk, the Malibu's and Accords, and noted even people could be skim milk, or strong coffee.
We talked of people who were easy to see through, as though they were hiding in a water glass. K.C. laughed hard and sudden when she got that one.
The girls put up the lights and ornaments when we got home. K.C. said it was kind of cool having two trees to decorate.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Reflections on a mountain
This morning, long before dawn, after putting on the coffee I turned out the lights to bath in the stillness. There was some wind outside and a slight spitting of snow, but it would be hours before carpenters came to split the morning with power saws and compressors and nail guns. My steel shack was solidly silent, warm.
It is becoming easier to navigate the house in the dark. There are a couple of potential pit falls -- literally. The stairs to my loft are nearly six feet wide -- the adjacent passage back to my bedroom and bath is only four feet. If I turn too soon there will be a tumble to the lower landing.
The cooking island stands right in the middle of the u-shaped embrace of the kitchen. And I don’t always know where the sink might be.
Back in my chair with a fresh cup of coffee and facing the mountains and quiet storm, I think of other homes I have navigated at dawn. It frightens me a little how fresh memories can be. First up is the rental house after the marriage came apart, with its tall white walls and glass fireplace, two sets of sliding glass doors. Two years ago there is a small pine branch blocking the track of one of those doors, and a shampoo bottle clatters to the floor of the shower.
After that the single level house, level only by accident where it was level at all, where I try to cobble together a blended family without any of the proper tools, four stools for four children along the peninsula behind which I cook eggs and sausage, doors that either swing open by themselves or closed, depending on which room you are in, which way the house is tilting.
Years before that I walk into the narrow pantry of the log house, with unfinished stairs leading onto the dirt floor of a low basement or tall crawl space, your call, tucked below the kitchen. I still see gaps in the plaster left as logs settle, heavy pine posts on the deck wobble as wood gives way to moisture.
We moved from there so long ago, lifetimes ago, and yet I can feel my feet slide across the wide-plank oak floor, the cool gray tile of that bathroom, the small splash of pink in tiny flowers outlined in gray, the window sill in the living room sags under the pressure of posts holding up the gable end and curved glass window.
There is the transition house, small twin girls and one bathroom, a tight one car garage for some reason full of camping gear, it is cold with its hollow core doors, rough wood siding of a room added by the previous owner, the smell of chlorine from an indoor hot tub. There is that mysterious cavity between the new and old rooms you can crawl into from where the firewood is stacked and then stand, you could hide in there for days or even weeks with preparation.
Reaching back 25 years, there is the apartment on Lovejoy, with the small white tiles in the kitchen, the narrow plank floors, the bathroom I rough plaster and paint blue, grass wallpaper, a window to the outside over the tub I rig into a shower with a hose, casement windows once painted shut I bang back into use with the heel of my hands in a fierce uppercut, tightly spring roll-up shades.
When I close my eyes in the easy chair facing the mountains it feels like I could open them into any one of these rooms of the past and present.
But when I do open my eyes I see lights where there should be no lights. The mountains are shrouded, I think, Black Butte only promising to become visible. The lights I see are halfway up where I know Mt. Jefferson to be. That is wilderness, that is high up the side of a snow-laden mountain.
From my chair in the dark I see rescue teams have marked with lights the location of a lost hunter or climber. They are waiting for dawn to bring in a helicopter for evacuation. It is too early to call the news desk, it would be too much an interference to call dispatch.
For a half hour the lights do not move on the mountain. There are two of them, one slightly brighter than the other. I wished I could see the mountain through the dark to tell how high the rescue teams might be, if they are above or below the tree line, the line-of-life in these and in most mountains.
It is not until dawn starts to gray the skies and I need another cup of coffee that I literally bark in laughter at myself, at these silly musings. There are no other lights. At all. There are no other rooms but this room.
In my predawn, the lights that I thought illuminated a mountain 20 miles away were simply the reflection of an illuminated button on the coffee pot behind me, bouncing back from the double paned window through which I am viewing the world. Memories are just that, too, poorly filtered reflections, fading somewhat slowly with the light of each new day.
It is becoming easier to navigate the house in the dark. There are a couple of potential pit falls -- literally. The stairs to my loft are nearly six feet wide -- the adjacent passage back to my bedroom and bath is only four feet. If I turn too soon there will be a tumble to the lower landing.
The cooking island stands right in the middle of the u-shaped embrace of the kitchen. And I don’t always know where the sink might be.
Back in my chair with a fresh cup of coffee and facing the mountains and quiet storm, I think of other homes I have navigated at dawn. It frightens me a little how fresh memories can be. First up is the rental house after the marriage came apart, with its tall white walls and glass fireplace, two sets of sliding glass doors. Two years ago there is a small pine branch blocking the track of one of those doors, and a shampoo bottle clatters to the floor of the shower.
After that the single level house, level only by accident where it was level at all, where I try to cobble together a blended family without any of the proper tools, four stools for four children along the peninsula behind which I cook eggs and sausage, doors that either swing open by themselves or closed, depending on which room you are in, which way the house is tilting.
Years before that I walk into the narrow pantry of the log house, with unfinished stairs leading onto the dirt floor of a low basement or tall crawl space, your call, tucked below the kitchen. I still see gaps in the plaster left as logs settle, heavy pine posts on the deck wobble as wood gives way to moisture.
We moved from there so long ago, lifetimes ago, and yet I can feel my feet slide across the wide-plank oak floor, the cool gray tile of that bathroom, the small splash of pink in tiny flowers outlined in gray, the window sill in the living room sags under the pressure of posts holding up the gable end and curved glass window.
There is the transition house, small twin girls and one bathroom, a tight one car garage for some reason full of camping gear, it is cold with its hollow core doors, rough wood siding of a room added by the previous owner, the smell of chlorine from an indoor hot tub. There is that mysterious cavity between the new and old rooms you can crawl into from where the firewood is stacked and then stand, you could hide in there for days or even weeks with preparation.
Reaching back 25 years, there is the apartment on Lovejoy, with the small white tiles in the kitchen, the narrow plank floors, the bathroom I rough plaster and paint blue, grass wallpaper, a window to the outside over the tub I rig into a shower with a hose, casement windows once painted shut I bang back into use with the heel of my hands in a fierce uppercut, tightly spring roll-up shades.
When I close my eyes in the easy chair facing the mountains it feels like I could open them into any one of these rooms of the past and present.
But when I do open my eyes I see lights where there should be no lights. The mountains are shrouded, I think, Black Butte only promising to become visible. The lights I see are halfway up where I know Mt. Jefferson to be. That is wilderness, that is high up the side of a snow-laden mountain.
From my chair in the dark I see rescue teams have marked with lights the location of a lost hunter or climber. They are waiting for dawn to bring in a helicopter for evacuation. It is too early to call the news desk, it would be too much an interference to call dispatch.
For a half hour the lights do not move on the mountain. There are two of them, one slightly brighter than the other. I wished I could see the mountain through the dark to tell how high the rescue teams might be, if they are above or below the tree line, the line-of-life in these and in most mountains.
It is not until dawn starts to gray the skies and I need another cup of coffee that I literally bark in laughter at myself, at these silly musings. There are no other lights. At all. There are no other rooms but this room.
In my predawn, the lights that I thought illuminated a mountain 20 miles away were simply the reflection of an illuminated button on the coffee pot behind me, bouncing back from the double paned window through which I am viewing the world. Memories are just that, too, poorly filtered reflections, fading somewhat slowly with the light of each new day.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Let’s talk about it
Confession: Yesterday I called my daughter Sabrina on her cell phone.
She was in the house. Downstairs. I was in the house. Upstairs.
All right, mea culpa. But there are a lot of stairs. The twins, 14, had their music on and their door closed. I was in a hurry and she is on my speed dial, and I use an ear piece. There is no doubt that it was faster to call than to walk downstairs, knock, wait for them to hear the knock, and tell her to come up and see the mountains as the sun rose. She is trying to paint those mountains.
Yes, I called her on her cell phone to come up and look at the view.
But then I started to think about this turn of events. Perhaps what I did is really just the squeezing of inefficiencies by technology, as technology is intended to do.
For some six months I have been among the ranks of those who no longer have a land line. Instantly I can name of four others close to me who no longer have a tether to Ma Bell or any of her children, although one of them has a land line linked to his cell phone in a way I don’t understand. In my case, I have no land link at all, since I don’t get cable or DSL. Everything is wireless by some form of technology standard, WiMax or WiFi or Bluetooth or cell.
In other words, I no longer have a phone. I have a Star Trek communicator. Instead of a hand held device or a badge on my breast like Jean Luc Picard, I have a dongle in my left ear (the hearing in the right a little dim from shotgun reports or rock and roll or the finish grind barrel at the cement plant where I worked eons ago).
And with free family to family minutes, it is more efficient and less costly to tap my left ear twice and ask my daughter to come up stairs. In the 50s and 60s there were intercoms. Stand at a box in the wall of the kitchen and talk to a bedroom. Now I tap my ear and talk to my daughter.
We are on the cusp of being able to do the same upstairs to downstairs, Hawaii to New York, with voice or image, with mass amounts of data on the internet or simply a reference to commonly accessed URL’s.
It’s not a telephone, it’s a communicator. It will soon interface the personal area network (earpiece, iPod, Bluetooth) with the local area network (my house, my printer, my computer) and the wide area network (the internet, my office, you).
And because technology puts the squeeze on inefficiency (while introducing a few of its own, ask any homebuilder watching hourly subs on their cell phones), it will replace the old methods, as surely as it is difficult now to find a typewriter.
She was in the house. Downstairs. I was in the house. Upstairs.
All right, mea culpa. But there are a lot of stairs. The twins, 14, had their music on and their door closed. I was in a hurry and she is on my speed dial, and I use an ear piece. There is no doubt that it was faster to call than to walk downstairs, knock, wait for them to hear the knock, and tell her to come up and see the mountains as the sun rose. She is trying to paint those mountains.
Yes, I called her on her cell phone to come up and look at the view.
But then I started to think about this turn of events. Perhaps what I did is really just the squeezing of inefficiencies by technology, as technology is intended to do.
For some six months I have been among the ranks of those who no longer have a land line. Instantly I can name of four others close to me who no longer have a tether to Ma Bell or any of her children, although one of them has a land line linked to his cell phone in a way I don’t understand. In my case, I have no land link at all, since I don’t get cable or DSL. Everything is wireless by some form of technology standard, WiMax or WiFi or Bluetooth or cell.
In other words, I no longer have a phone. I have a Star Trek communicator. Instead of a hand held device or a badge on my breast like Jean Luc Picard, I have a dongle in my left ear (the hearing in the right a little dim from shotgun reports or rock and roll or the finish grind barrel at the cement plant where I worked eons ago).
And with free family to family minutes, it is more efficient and less costly to tap my left ear twice and ask my daughter to come up stairs. In the 50s and 60s there were intercoms. Stand at a box in the wall of the kitchen and talk to a bedroom. Now I tap my ear and talk to my daughter.
We are on the cusp of being able to do the same upstairs to downstairs, Hawaii to New York, with voice or image, with mass amounts of data on the internet or simply a reference to commonly accessed URL’s.
It’s not a telephone, it’s a communicator. It will soon interface the personal area network (earpiece, iPod, Bluetooth) with the local area network (my house, my printer, my computer) and the wide area network (the internet, my office, you).
And because technology puts the squeeze on inefficiency (while introducing a few of its own, ask any homebuilder watching hourly subs on their cell phones), it will replace the old methods, as surely as it is difficult now to find a typewriter.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Directing our own evolution
Stem cells have cured sickle cell anemia in mice.
Hold on to your hats, with at least one of your three hands, because we are about to direct human evolution. The rate of which has already been increasing over the last few millennia.
This is to be both celebrated and feared. Celebrated because it will rapidly take us into the unknown, and we are, after all, adventurers; to be feared because we are going someplace we have not been before, and we will not know our destination until after we have arrived.
This is very much like driving to a new town using only the review mirror to decide how to crank the steering wheel.
But the point is, in the past evolution has had a rate based somewhat on the random effects of change within a dynamic environment, where the feedback was based upon a shortening or lengthening of life span.
Sickle cell anemia is a lousy, painful disease, but confers some resistance to malaria, common in areas where the sickle cell trait is most common. An interesting thought might be to wonder if malaria will be more common if sickle cell is reduced through genetic engineering. One might assume that the advantage of resistance resulted in the increase of sickle cell trait. Those without it died.
That’s how evolution works, in fruit flies, tomatoes or men.
But it seems that evolution has been speeding up, at least in humans. According to research published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and referenced by the BBC (read it here), in the last 5,000 years human genetic change “has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period.”
“Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time,” said co-author Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It's 100 or 200 generations ago. That's how long since some of these genes originated, and today they are [in] 30% or 40% of people because they've had such an advantage.”
And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have introduced something new, something very powerful: pre directed evolution. Because we can imagine and dream, and because we have or soon will have the technology.
We may decide that we want to go somewhere genetically, a decision taken as a community, society, race or a species, or by a despot, and we now have the tools to go there fairly quickly. If not the master race, maybe just a marginally better one.
The last phase of “natural evolution” perhaps moved us from being animals to becoming humans.
The next phase will result in our becoming ... something else.
Hold on to your hats, with at least one of your three hands, because we are about to direct human evolution. The rate of which has already been increasing over the last few millennia.
This is to be both celebrated and feared. Celebrated because it will rapidly take us into the unknown, and we are, after all, adventurers; to be feared because we are going someplace we have not been before, and we will not know our destination until after we have arrived.
This is very much like driving to a new town using only the review mirror to decide how to crank the steering wheel.
But the point is, in the past evolution has had a rate based somewhat on the random effects of change within a dynamic environment, where the feedback was based upon a shortening or lengthening of life span.
Sickle cell anemia is a lousy, painful disease, but confers some resistance to malaria, common in areas where the sickle cell trait is most common. An interesting thought might be to wonder if malaria will be more common if sickle cell is reduced through genetic engineering. One might assume that the advantage of resistance resulted in the increase of sickle cell trait. Those without it died.
That’s how evolution works, in fruit flies, tomatoes or men.
But it seems that evolution has been speeding up, at least in humans. According to research published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and referenced by the BBC (read it here), in the last 5,000 years human genetic change “has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period.”
“Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time,” said co-author Professor John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It's 100 or 200 generations ago. That's how long since some of these genes originated, and today they are [in] 30% or 40% of people because they've had such an advantage.”
And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have introduced something new, something very powerful: pre directed evolution. Because we can imagine and dream, and because we have or soon will have the technology.
We may decide that we want to go somewhere genetically, a decision taken as a community, society, race or a species, or by a despot, and we now have the tools to go there fairly quickly. If not the master race, maybe just a marginally better one.
The last phase of “natural evolution” perhaps moved us from being animals to becoming humans.
The next phase will result in our becoming ... something else.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Christmas lights
It was daughter K.C. who kept up the nagging about Christmas lights. She is 14 and her priorities never cease to surprise me. Just now I put on some music for doing laundry and she looked over the counter and said “Bob Marley?” I could not tell if there was enthusiasm or reproach in her voice.
She had been talking about decorating the house for Christmas. It was more certain to happen this visit, they came to be with me on Thursday. I had been telling the contractors all week we were going to occupy the house this weekend. Not one more week in that trailer, it is too cold and too small and too dingy, I was not keeping life on hold for one more week.
Alan and Larry and Curt and Mike and Rod and Rick and John and Ron, they all made it happen this week. I had been cleaning up a little, a box of debris here and there, and then I just moved the girls’ beds in from the tipi, their sleeping bags from the trailer. So when the girls got out of school on Thursday, we went from piano lessons to buy sheets to sushi to what is now home.
We are home.
It’s not finished yet. Trim boards and paint and lacquer are yet to be put up or applied. But we have heat and sinks and a stove. A refrigerator, a still-unused dishwasher which may not see use even once a week. And a washer and dryer! No more scheduling around laundromat hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., lugging the laundry basket to and fro.
I slept in a nest of blankets on my own mattress placed on cardboard on the floor downstairs on Thursday because I was too exhausted to drag it upstairs. Friday I cleaned my bedroom and bath and Alan helped me to put the frame together when we had to take a break from the technical difficulties of reversing the handle on a dryer door.
It’s been a very rough few weeks since the divorce was final on Halloween, among the roughest, for reasons that will get no elaboration. But K.C. kept bugging me about Christmas lights. At their mom’s house, the girls put up all the decorations. I didn’t have any of my own, of course.
Bob Marley sings, “Take it easy,” after two days of listening to Alegria. We are home.
So yesterday after looking for stuff for their rooms, we stopped and bought some outside lights. This afternoon, in bitter cold, I screwed hooks into fascia shadow board, brass hooks that sit behind the drip line of the corrugated steel roof and that will be there for as long as I live in this concrete and steel mining barn on a hill top facing the east slope of Cascade volcanoes.
The girls handed up strings of lights that we stretched tight. There were enough extension cords on the job site, some of which will be reclaimed tomorrow for power saws and compressors.
But tonight, in a right now that flows outward in time and place and in peace, they power the smallest of lights because K.C. wanted to get it done. She was right, of course.
Sometime this week we will get a tree, Sabrina says it must divide the room against the wall where the window looks out on the mountains. She gets to decide. That works for me, too.
She had been talking about decorating the house for Christmas. It was more certain to happen this visit, they came to be with me on Thursday. I had been telling the contractors all week we were going to occupy the house this weekend. Not one more week in that trailer, it is too cold and too small and too dingy, I was not keeping life on hold for one more week.
Alan and Larry and Curt and Mike and Rod and Rick and John and Ron, they all made it happen this week. I had been cleaning up a little, a box of debris here and there, and then I just moved the girls’ beds in from the tipi, their sleeping bags from the trailer. So when the girls got out of school on Thursday, we went from piano lessons to buy sheets to sushi to what is now home.
We are home.
It’s not finished yet. Trim boards and paint and lacquer are yet to be put up or applied. But we have heat and sinks and a stove. A refrigerator, a still-unused dishwasher which may not see use even once a week. And a washer and dryer! No more scheduling around laundromat hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., lugging the laundry basket to and fro.
I slept in a nest of blankets on my own mattress placed on cardboard on the floor downstairs on Thursday because I was too exhausted to drag it upstairs. Friday I cleaned my bedroom and bath and Alan helped me to put the frame together when we had to take a break from the technical difficulties of reversing the handle on a dryer door.
It’s been a very rough few weeks since the divorce was final on Halloween, among the roughest, for reasons that will get no elaboration. But K.C. kept bugging me about Christmas lights. At their mom’s house, the girls put up all the decorations. I didn’t have any of my own, of course.
Bob Marley sings, “Take it easy,” after two days of listening to Alegria. We are home.
So yesterday after looking for stuff for their rooms, we stopped and bought some outside lights. This afternoon, in bitter cold, I screwed hooks into fascia shadow board, brass hooks that sit behind the drip line of the corrugated steel roof and that will be there for as long as I live in this concrete and steel mining barn on a hill top facing the east slope of Cascade volcanoes.
The girls handed up strings of lights that we stretched tight. There were enough extension cords on the job site, some of which will be reclaimed tomorrow for power saws and compressors.
But tonight, in a right now that flows outward in time and place and in peace, they power the smallest of lights because K.C. wanted to get it done. She was right, of course.
Sometime this week we will get a tree, Sabrina says it must divide the room against the wall where the window looks out on the mountains. She gets to decide. That works for me, too.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Diane’s embarrassment
A lot of boring stuff happened today in the world. Cheney/Bush vetoed a bill that would fund education, job training and health programs, while getting huge sums for war. A muslim country that already has nuclear weapons and is home to thousands of Al Queda, Pakistan, totters on the brink of chaos. The communist running Venezuela and distributing its oil is threatening international banks. The mideast smolders. The U.S. economy balances on a hairline of confidence. China growls.
And Diane Sawyer is leading the news with a story on the death of a rap star’s mother after a tummy tuck gone bad.
This is the best indication that things are going from bad to worse. Or not, if you are one of those who hold that “the media” (there is no such thing) makes things bad. In that case there is much to rejoice: Few are paying attention, most couldn’t care less, others don’t believe it affects them, and the rest can’t wait to see if Britney will finally lose the right to drive with her kids in a car when she isn’t getting down with Paris Hilton.
Diane Sawyer’s story is a symptom, not the problem. You are the problem. Well, not you, readers of “eyeonoregon,” but those others. You know who they are.
And Diane Sawyer is leading the news with a story on the death of a rap star’s mother after a tummy tuck gone bad.
This is the best indication that things are going from bad to worse. Or not, if you are one of those who hold that “the media” (there is no such thing) makes things bad. In that case there is much to rejoice: Few are paying attention, most couldn’t care less, others don’t believe it affects them, and the rest can’t wait to see if Britney will finally lose the right to drive with her kids in a car when she isn’t getting down with Paris Hilton.
Diane Sawyer’s story is a symptom, not the problem. You are the problem. Well, not you, readers of “eyeonoregon,” but those others. You know who they are.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
To Beauty
Ah, welcome back, legalchick. Again your intelligence sparkles, your perspective educates.
And you have flown off the target. “Well, well, well. Any doubt that eyeonoregon and anonymous are men?” Gratuitous and irrelevant. (See comments in previous post.)
The topic of the day actually was reading, of compelling prose. The paragraph about beauty was offered because I thought it beautiful, in prose and insight. It was an illustration, only.
“Anonymous” took issue with the example, and the thread meandered. That is all well and good, debates and exploration of ideas is what this “place” in Oregon is about, these kinds of discussions, not simply about raising children in a trailer, sunrises and the Law of Comparative Advantage.
“What is the beauty of women in such matters,” she asks. As an illustration of prose, it is but an illustration. As a topic of its own, it is also worthy.
Legalchick proves this by asking, “What is the beauty that lies upon women and what is a beautiful woman? Is it her eyes or the luminous secrets veiled by lashes that sweep her cheek? Is it the curve of her lips or the next whisper she breathes? Is it the grace of a lithe arm and the line of her legs or is it the artistry of her strength and endurance?”
Exactly right. Of what beauty are lovely eyes without luminous secrets, lovely lips that pass ewe-like bleats, a lithe arm that has no endurance?
The nature of beauty is a driving force of mankind and one of those great undefinables, along with “truth,” and “quality,” these traits, if they are traits, these attributes, if so they be, are definable only in terms of themselves, hence their definition must be incomplete, or contradictory.
“Beauty is that which is beautiful,” “truth is that which is characterized by being true.” We offer questions like these, we ponder. We like it.
Of beautiful women, and beauty takes many forms, I annotate Helprin: of those told they are beautiful and come to believe it, only the truly beautiful know that beauty is a gift received, and temporary.
And you have flown off the target. “Well, well, well. Any doubt that eyeonoregon and anonymous are men?” Gratuitous and irrelevant. (See comments in previous post.)
The topic of the day actually was reading, of compelling prose. The paragraph about beauty was offered because I thought it beautiful, in prose and insight. It was an illustration, only.
“Anonymous” took issue with the example, and the thread meandered. That is all well and good, debates and exploration of ideas is what this “place” in Oregon is about, these kinds of discussions, not simply about raising children in a trailer, sunrises and the Law of Comparative Advantage.
“What is the beauty of women in such matters,” she asks. As an illustration of prose, it is but an illustration. As a topic of its own, it is also worthy.
Legalchick proves this by asking, “What is the beauty that lies upon women and what is a beautiful woman? Is it her eyes or the luminous secrets veiled by lashes that sweep her cheek? Is it the curve of her lips or the next whisper she breathes? Is it the grace of a lithe arm and the line of her legs or is it the artistry of her strength and endurance?”
Exactly right. Of what beauty are lovely eyes without luminous secrets, lovely lips that pass ewe-like bleats, a lithe arm that has no endurance?
The nature of beauty is a driving force of mankind and one of those great undefinables, along with “truth,” and “quality,” these traits, if they are traits, these attributes, if so they be, are definable only in terms of themselves, hence their definition must be incomplete, or contradictory.
“Beauty is that which is beautiful,” “truth is that which is characterized by being true.” We offer questions like these, we ponder. We like it.
Of beautiful women, and beauty takes many forms, I annotate Helprin: of those told they are beautiful and come to believe it, only the truly beautiful know that beauty is a gift received, and temporary.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
The authors
At a lovely bookstore a few weeks ago I picked up a book of short stories, “The Pacific” by Mark Helprin. He became one of my favorite authors after I read “Winter’s Tale” a decade or so ago.
A great author like Helprin stuns with insight; not just the ability to weave together words into an exquisite and balanced tapestry, but in the way that tapestry displays deeper truth.
Keep your authors of the Northeast, their tales of profundity and their affairs, contrived significance. Annie Dillard can peer into souls and each time bring home a new message; Kesey gave us life and death and courage right at home in fir-paneled honkey tonks; Robbins’ metaphors leap out their chairs and dance on the tables; and this great author Helprin offers us meaning.
“... Women who are told that they are beautiful and come to believe it not only lose delicacy of soul and sharpness of wit, they forfeit the appealing privacy and loneliness without which real beauty cannot exist. They hardly reflect, as everything reflects upon them, and this makes them dull.”— Mark Helprin, Prelude, “The Pacific.”
Turn off that damn TV.
A great author like Helprin stuns with insight; not just the ability to weave together words into an exquisite and balanced tapestry, but in the way that tapestry displays deeper truth.
Keep your authors of the Northeast, their tales of profundity and their affairs, contrived significance. Annie Dillard can peer into souls and each time bring home a new message; Kesey gave us life and death and courage right at home in fir-paneled honkey tonks; Robbins’ metaphors leap out their chairs and dance on the tables; and this great author Helprin offers us meaning.
“... Women who are told that they are beautiful and come to believe it not only lose delicacy of soul and sharpness of wit, they forfeit the appealing privacy and loneliness without which real beauty cannot exist. They hardly reflect, as everything reflects upon them, and this makes them dull.”— Mark Helprin, Prelude, “The Pacific.”
Turn off that damn TV.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Greenspan's warning
“If the pernicious drift toward fiscal instability is not arrested and is compounded by a protectionist reversal of globalization, the current account adjustment process could be quite painful for the United States and our trading partners," warned Alan Greenspan on Sunday, October 20 in a speech on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings (read it here).
There is cause for great alarm in that sentence. Partly because of the incompetence of Bush/Cheney. Partly because of the tendency of both Democrats and Republicans to pander.
The “drift toward fiscal instability” is the deficit that Cheney/Bush has run up during its term of office. They are not conservatives. They are statists drawing power from the moral right. They favor a big government profiting special interests, they have run up huge deficits with tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy while not paying for their war in progress.
The left is not much better. Their hatred of other people’s money makes them economically illiterate. If they get control of government on an agenda that includes opposition to liberal trade, Greenspan’s “protectionist reversal of globalization” could launch another worldwide recession.
At the end of which, China will be even more clearly the most significant economy in the world. If we start banning their T-Shirts, they may stop buying our debt. We need them more than they need us, and some of the recent market chaos may be related to China’s displeasure with our politics. We did not need to fete the Dali Lama.
The Law of Comparative Advantage proves that trade makes all nations wealthier. Protectionism extended the depression and made it worse. Democrats need to recognize that by trying to save in California jobs more cheaply done in Mexico, we hurt U.S. consumers, Mexican workers, and U.S. workers who can not make things for sale to a Mexico that can not pay for them.
Greenspan is giving us another warning. We are walking an edge. Only by more wisdom than we seem to possess, and a great amount of luck, shall we avoid a fall.
There is cause for great alarm in that sentence. Partly because of the incompetence of Bush/Cheney. Partly because of the tendency of both Democrats and Republicans to pander.
The “drift toward fiscal instability” is the deficit that Cheney/Bush has run up during its term of office. They are not conservatives. They are statists drawing power from the moral right. They favor a big government profiting special interests, they have run up huge deficits with tax breaks to large corporations and the wealthy while not paying for their war in progress.
The left is not much better. Their hatred of other people’s money makes them economically illiterate. If they get control of government on an agenda that includes opposition to liberal trade, Greenspan’s “protectionist reversal of globalization” could launch another worldwide recession.
At the end of which, China will be even more clearly the most significant economy in the world. If we start banning their T-Shirts, they may stop buying our debt. We need them more than they need us, and some of the recent market chaos may be related to China’s displeasure with our politics. We did not need to fete the Dali Lama.
The Law of Comparative Advantage proves that trade makes all nations wealthier. Protectionism extended the depression and made it worse. Democrats need to recognize that by trying to save in California jobs more cheaply done in Mexico, we hurt U.S. consumers, Mexican workers, and U.S. workers who can not make things for sale to a Mexico that can not pay for them.
Greenspan is giving us another warning. We are walking an edge. Only by more wisdom than we seem to possess, and a great amount of luck, shall we avoid a fall.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
In the Valley of Elah
“In the Valley of Elah” is not entertainment. It is not an action film, it is not a detective movie. It is an outstanding film about a father looking for his boy, who has gone missing after returning from the war in Iraq.
The acting is supberb. Tommy Lee Jones is understated as the father looking for his soldier son. We are so used to his smart dialogue in other films, here his face tells the tale. Charlize Theron is quite believable as the police detective aiding in that search, and Susan Sarandon owns every one of the few scenes she is in.
Early in the movie, as Jones sets out on his search, he comes upon a school employee of foreign origin who has run the U.S. flag up the pole upside down. Jones educates the man with a soliloquy that requires attention. Listen to his words, to his quiet passion, his love of country.
The movie grinds on in places. It heads full speed at a cliché or two, swerving only at the last minute, especially with Theron’s relationship with her fellow police officers. But the film never loses its believability, the bad guys are not always so bad, the good guys never that good.
We don't find out until halfway through the movie, during a casual conversation in a diner, just how significant the loss of the missing son might be. A lesser director would have played that card, that of the second son, much earlier in the film.
Emotionally, this movie is quite graphic. Not in the blood, guts and gore sense with which so many movies indulge themselves, in that ever-escalating game of overcoming the sensibilities of the audience. Not in the superficially manipulative way that directors of lesser talent whipsaw our emotions.
This movie is emotionally graphic because the emotions are so real, and so honest. Sarandon gives us a mother's loss that will be hard to forget, that should not be forgotten.
Some will see “In the Valley of Elah” as a political film. It actually celebrates values while taking a good look, and makes no apology. “Elah” shows the nobility of the soldier, both active and retired. Tommy Lee Jones, as Hank Deerfield, loves this country, he has sacrificed for this country.
“In the Valley of Elah” helps us understand that war matters. It matters to all of us, it matters to the boys and girls we send to fight in places like Iraq, where the enemy may be hiding behind a child playing in the street. What we ask our young fighters to do has an impact on them, and on us, our culture, our great nation.
The acting is supberb. Tommy Lee Jones is understated as the father looking for his soldier son. We are so used to his smart dialogue in other films, here his face tells the tale. Charlize Theron is quite believable as the police detective aiding in that search, and Susan Sarandon owns every one of the few scenes she is in.
Early in the movie, as Jones sets out on his search, he comes upon a school employee of foreign origin who has run the U.S. flag up the pole upside down. Jones educates the man with a soliloquy that requires attention. Listen to his words, to his quiet passion, his love of country.
The movie grinds on in places. It heads full speed at a cliché or two, swerving only at the last minute, especially with Theron’s relationship with her fellow police officers. But the film never loses its believability, the bad guys are not always so bad, the good guys never that good.
We don't find out until halfway through the movie, during a casual conversation in a diner, just how significant the loss of the missing son might be. A lesser director would have played that card, that of the second son, much earlier in the film.
Emotionally, this movie is quite graphic. Not in the blood, guts and gore sense with which so many movies indulge themselves, in that ever-escalating game of overcoming the sensibilities of the audience. Not in the superficially manipulative way that directors of lesser talent whipsaw our emotions.
This movie is emotionally graphic because the emotions are so real, and so honest. Sarandon gives us a mother's loss that will be hard to forget, that should not be forgotten.
Some will see “In the Valley of Elah” as a political film. It actually celebrates values while taking a good look, and makes no apology. “Elah” shows the nobility of the soldier, both active and retired. Tommy Lee Jones, as Hank Deerfield, loves this country, he has sacrificed for this country.
“In the Valley of Elah” helps us understand that war matters. It matters to all of us, it matters to the boys and girls we send to fight in places like Iraq, where the enemy may be hiding behind a child playing in the street. What we ask our young fighters to do has an impact on them, and on us, our culture, our great nation.
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