Always Something New

Sometimes I think my head is bursting with information. Other times I think I know very little ... certainly about some important parts of the world. I have read what I could about the horseshoe crabs that wash up on "my" [because it's where I walk although it's a conservation area] beach but I only know a little. I have been gathering the poor dead creatures together in bunches, it seems fitting for such a venerable species that they not lie randomly scattered on the beach. Probably that's an act of a fey old lady but it gives me satisfaction.

When I went out this morning for my walk I paused and decided not to take my camera -- of course when that's the decision I always wish I had it. Yesterday and today there were spines that I think must be from eels, they are a kind of rope of disks and lie gracefully curved on the sand. I have not seen them until yesterday and there were a couple more today. I should have taken a photo, maybe next time. Snakes scare me and these are serpentine and eels are too snaky for me to feel comfortable. But these bones have great grace and beauty, I would kind of like to bring one home but would need to wrap it in a kerchief, which I also didn't have. My ignorance is actually boundless.

Last evening after what is a forming habit, at least for the fall months, of Wednesday night dinners when Rachel and I take turns cooking for one another, we walked Molly-dog in the woods around Hathaways Pond and noticed mushrooms sprouting up all along the path. Most were gray/white but these red ones look absolutely lethal -- although I do not know how to tell except that I trust the ones in the packages in the supermarkets, some of which I will have at dinner this evening. Did I say boundless ignorance? There were LBBs at her feeder, I have to call all little brown/black birds LBBs because I don't know their names. It's humility pie for me today.

China Syndrome?

I am in the midst of personal histories of Chinese artists [dancer, singer] born in the '60s who have made good. Last night I saw the new movie about Li Cinciou [I may be spelling that wrong] who was randomly selected out of a poor village school to go to Beijing to learn to be a ballet dancer. He became good enough to be chosen by visiting artistic director of the Houston Ballet Company to study with them for six months. The cultural shock was great but at the end he decided to marry a girl he'd fallen in love with and to defect. There is a fine dramatic scene in the Chinese embassy when he is held against his will and the Houstonians refuse to leave, the lawyer pulls strings and gets the press involved and the Chinese are forced to free him. Of course things change in China and although he isn't allowed to go back, finally his parents are brought to see him dance [it's The Rite of Spring -- talk about culture shock!]. Dancing is beautiful, especially a Don Quixote. The story was as expected-- for me the movie is about the dancing.


A few days ago I picked up a book that's been on my to-read shelf for a couple years, Leaving Mother Lake, the story of an illiterate girl of the Moso tribe in the Eastern Himalayan region in Yunnan who became a popular singer in China. The small tribe is matriarchal and very poor but live a peaceful and ordered existence although some of the other tribes in the region are more traditional and warlike. Of course the revolution comes but mostly they are so poor there are no "class enemies" for the soldiers to arrest or humiliate.

Christine Matthieu obviously did the writing and tells the story dramatically in Erche's voice with considerable skill. I was first drawn to this book because I visited that area and visited a Miaou tribal village and the home of Joseph Root, the American botanist and ethnographer employed by National Geographic who lived in the area about 30 years and is talked on in this book. Very often when I read I am either very glad I have visited that part of the world, or wish all the time I'm reading I could go there.

Saturday Summary #19

Children between the ages of 9 and 12 who get regular aerobic exercise have larger basal ganglia than sedentary children. The basal ganglia is responsible for "executive function", controlling emotions. These children also have bigger hippocampi which are involved in complex memory. The two areas interact making the child more "reasonable." In terms of physically active, this is not talking about hyperactive children.

But what about adult brains? The anterior cingulate cortex is an area that reacts to physical pain. It has been found that it also reacts to emotional pain like acute embarrassment. Lately it's been found that acetaminophen which we know can blunt physical pain [we're talking Tylenol and generics here] has now been shown to also blunt emotional pain. So the next time you call your spouse by your boy/girl friend's name, take a Tylenol -- or maybe give your spouse the Tylenol.

But in terms of things you want to preserve forever, like childhood photos [home videos?] important papers, there is a Swiss bank that, for only $399, will store your memorabilia in a vault that is guaranteed to withstand nuclear attack.

"Bacha posh" is the Dari [and Afghan language] for a girl who is raised as a boy. This is a long established practice that cuts across social and economic lines. Families with several girls and no boys will dress one girl as a boy, send her to school, let her chaperons her sisters as a boy would, etc. The only twist is that when they find a husband for her, she has to take off the shalwar kemise and put on a skirt like the other girls and revert to all the strictures of being female. We can imagine what a psychological shock that has to be.

Dollar stores are thriving beyond the success of many other kinds of retail outlets, including the big box stores. They especially are selling food items and believe it's the "end of the month" problem of people running out of money before the next paycheck. Stores like Wal-Mart are attempting to compete by having many items packaged for them in smaller sizes so they can sell them at dollar store prices.

A story I liked but can hardly believe: in 1860 a possibly mad scientist had the idea that whalers could attach glass vials of prussic acid to their harpoon and quickly poison their prey. A ship off Iceland was equipped with such loaded harpoons, a whale was discovered, the harpoon shot accurately and it sunk deeply into the whale which immediately sounded [dived deep]. Within some minutes it floated back up to the surface, quite dead. The whalers on that ship were so appalled they chose never to use a poisoned harpoon again. I guess it took all the fun out of the hunt. Perhaps they also needed some Tylenol.

End of Summer - a Dawn to Remember

"The dawn came up like thunder..." said Kipling. I would say this one came up like a gospel chorus singing "hallelujah!"

These three pictures are all the same dawn reading from right to left. I was not quite so stunned that I couldn't grab my camera and take three pictures to capture the whole sky. My view is broad and curves in a little at the left. As you see the whole sky blazed.
And so the last lovely day of a lovely summer began. And a lovely autumn is entirely possible.

I have read this was the warmest summer on record for the northern hemisphere. I know many people suffered from the heat but I did not. I loved this summer.

Kunitz poem, The Abduction

I am taking a class studying four contemporary poets, the first is Stanley Kunitz whose work I like very much but have not read in depth. It is a large class with a great deal of discussion -- not exactly a lecture -- by the very erudite "coordinator" -- a man who likes Kunitz very much. He clarified the poems we read last week for me. Today again, several poems explicated helpfully. He was about to skip over "The Abduction" but one of the women in the class wanted some discussion. The poem was assigned as part of our reading to show Kunitz in a somewhat mystical mode which the teacher does not especially care for.

Near the beginning of the halucinatory first part are these lines:
... when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn,
and a blood stain on your skirt.

The teacher did not make much of this image. One woman said she found it horrifying, as it described a rape to her. I had felt exactly the same thing as I read it. There was slight discussion but it was largely passed over. When the class was over the woman sitting beside me said she read it as a rape also. I went to the woman who had made the remarked and said two of us agreed. Immediately two other women nearby also agreed. As the class ended I said to the teacher that several of the women very much agreed with the first one -- we all thought the lines describe a woman who has been raped. He was open minded but said it had never occurred to him before.

I am stunned that a person who reads carefully seeking meaning as this man does, should not even think the image was a woman who has been raped. For heaven sakes -- a woman stumbling out of the woods, is not making a fashion statement with her torn blouse and blood on her skirt! What about the title of the poem?

Occasionally the vast distance between men and woman catches me by surprise. I expect intelligent and sensitive men [surely a retired professor of literature is a sensitive man] to be attuned to such overt signs of a woman's violation. But apparently not. Here we are fifty plus years after The Feminine Mystique and even thoughtful men are still blind.

Beyond this discovery of blind spots, the class is fascinating both for the poems we are reading but because there are about 35 people in it and the average age is something around 75. These are people who have been taking poetry writing classes and who have learned to truly think about poetry and how to read it. They are not settled comfy into watching golf and playing bridge. They have active and acute minds and read real literature. It's wonderful to look around and listen to their interjections about their own readings of lines and poems. This is what continuing education can do for "the best and brightest".

Simon Boccanegra, Verdi

Today's opera in my ALL class was Simon Boccanegra, an opera Verdi wrote at the very center of his life, age 44 [he lived to 87]. The picture above is Placido Domingo in the title role and I would have preferred to see a DVD of this Royal Opera House performance. Instead they showed a Met 1987 performance with Domingo as the young lover, Adorno - a lesser role. I have heard this opera many times on Met Saturday broadcasts and never paid much attention to it because it lacks the beautiful arias of earlier Verdi and it is very political - which is mainly meaningless simply in Italian on the radio. But on DVD it becomes clear why this was a success [the second time around, actually] -- it has a political message of peace that becme an extremely grand finale.

The Italian peninsula [and Spain also] was for many years so torn with warring families, with the ideas of honor and vengeance, that peace was very hard won. This was a major theme of Verdi's in many of his operas. Oddly, in this opera the tenor has a small role, while Boccanegra and two other important characters are baritones -- it gives a ponderance and foreboding to the entire opera -- there is no lightness, not even in the love duet. No wonder I've never listened to it carefully before. I'm so glad I'm taking this class that shows these DVDs and in a way forces me to watch operas I've ignored. I've now seen Simon Boccanegra and may never see it again but am happy to have it in my memory and to understand it at last.

Saturday Summary #18

The word "bling" hadn't been invented in 1987 when Liberace died of AIDS; but his lifestyle was the very essence of bling; the rhinestone covered piano, the mirrored Rolls Royce and his costumes, on and off stage! He shimmered and glittered and sparkled when he moved. His shiny effects are on display in a museum in Las Vegas where he epitomized the over the top bling of the place. But the light is going out; the museum will be closed. From an attendance of 450,000 a year it's now down to 50,000 a year. His fans are dying off and lately it seems even the idea of bling is getting tarnished. Ho-hum.

Freak wind storms occasionally attack certain areas of New York City. This week hundreds of trees, from young saplings to grand old historic trees in Queens and Brooklyn were uprooted. One woman was killed when a big one feel on her car but otherwise people were all right only the trees were lost. Two years ago an equally freaky wind uprooted about 500 trees in Central Park but most of the rest of the city was okay; a couple of years before I moved from there, a wind storm attacked the trees of Riverside Park -- not a very big park but vulnerable to wind off the Hudson -- felling a couple of hundred trees. In a different environment homes would be ruined, but the solid bulk of the buildings in New York protects the people [their purpose of course] It's sad to see trees disappear in an urban environment where they are such a necessary visual softener in the landscape.

Austria, which is a landlocked country about the size of Maine, is 2/3rd Alpine. The Austrians love their mountains and welcome tourists to share their outdoors. They have approximately 680 high peaks, 13,660 miles of downhill ski trails, over 10,000 miles of cross country ski trails and over 500 high mountain huts. I have been there and can attest that the there are also mountain restaurants one chances upon where a hearty bowl of soup and a cool beer is a great treat for a hiker or skier.

Wikipedia, as we know, can be added to and amended by anyone with information. Recently pranksters amended the biography of one Judge Roger Vinson by including the "fact" that he is great outdoorsman who has shot three grizzly bears and had their stuff ed heads hung in his courtroom to show offenders what a tough guy he is. In fact,he has never hunted,let along killed a bear. Judge Vinson isn't happy with his bio.

Also not happy with Wikipedia are the heirs of Agatha Christy. In the 50+ years The Mousetrap ran in the West End of London, the actor who played the character who "done it" would always step out at curtain call time and ask the audience not to ruin the show for others by revealing the end. For the most part London critics and audience honored this injunction all those years so approximately 10 million people had the thrill of being surprised at the end. But on Wikipedia the plot is summarize and the ending reveled for anyone to read. Boo-hisss!