Slava

Some things ultimately can't be explained.

I seldom listen to music at my desk. I have an old set of headphones our office administrator gave me a few years ago, and once in a while I listen to a CD or something online, like if the cube farm is noisy and I'm having trouble concentrating. Last week I was listening to Bach's cello suites on a 1995 CD by Mstislav Rostropovich. It's by turns soothing, rousing, sensuous, turbulent, and calming. Something about the cello has a kind of visceral effect that's almost painfully beautiful, like I'm hearing it through the third chakra as well as my ears.

So last week my Wednesday night men's group tackled the topic "What is beauty?" and the six old coots generated some interesting responses. Among other things - sunsets, women, forests, the usual suspects - the Bach cello suites were mentioned in passing. Friday I was listening again while correlating a textbook, and I got so worked up I had to ask my nearest co-worker if she likes that kind of thing, and would she like to borrow the CD some time? She said her significant other might, because he enjoys "otherworldly" music, and we went back to what we were doing.

That evening on the way to Cleveland, I heard on NPR that Rostropovich had died earlier in the day in Moscow. They played short selections of his work on the radio and interviewed Yo Yo Ma, who couldn't say enough about Slava's (his friends called him 'Slava') boundless energy, love of music, critical ear for nuances in a performance, eagerness to share with younger players, and ability to keep learning new pieces well into old age.

To paraphrase the old saying, I don't know anything about music but I know what moves me. JB suggested the possibility that a last burst of Rostropovich's life-force reached central Swingstate all the way from Russia (via the CD drive on a Dell desktop PC). Works for me.

not a story

It has a beginning and a middle but no end, so how could it be a story? No plot, just character(s) and setting. Signs and symbols are everywhere. Language is so secondary, it almost gets in the way. And there's the rub. I'm not sure declarative sentences are possible without distortion. Where does subject end and predicate begin? Did subject X do that to object Y, or did things mutually and simultaneously shape themselves and each other?

Can you dig?

After my meeting Saturday morning, I had a second breakfast and went directly to the compost pile. Something told me it was time for the ritual dismantling of compost from the past year, marrying its remains with the vegetable beds, and thus preparing the garden for this year's planting, amen.

The wooden structure surrounding the compost had been in place for about a year, so it was time to liberate the alchemical stuff to begin its next incarnation as soil. I raked the lower two-thirds out into the bed and spread it evenly over the ground. Now it will settle and mingle, get rained on, blend in, and spread all that organic goodness.

The sun was out in all its glory, so I took my shirt off and got a mild burn, but it was worth it. Like Steve Zink, a friend of a friend at Purdue back in the day, who admitted that listening to Hendrix at full volume on headphones probably caused some permanent hearing loss, but he insists he got the better end of the deal.

It was just a great day to be outside, what can I say, not much. I didn't do much except pull a few weeds, transplant a few perennials from full spots to empty spots, empty the week's kitchen compost scraps into the now nearly empty enclosure, and cover it with a wheelbarrow full of weeds, and call it a day.

Somewhere in there, Gven Golly came outside and we talked about a pergola. Meals were eaten, coffee, water, and beer consumed. Rumor has it more (weeds, compost, soil, vegetables, raking, digging, food, drink) will follow in the future.

Vonnegut

I was lucky to be born in the right time and place to stumble across the novels and stories of Kurt Vonnegut when I hit my stride as a reader and he hit his stride as a writer. There are some things you can't plan and that schools, curricula, and academic advisors can't require. Being set on fire by an incendiary work of art just kind of happens, if you're lucky.

Slaughterhouse Five had that effect on me at a very impressionable time, turning me on to antiwar literature, The New Journalism so-called, and the blurring of genre distinctions between sci-fi, pop, and literary fiction. As a budding would-be journalist myself at the time, this was hot stuff indeed. Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, and Joseph Heller were part of a vanguard of writers my friends and I idolized.

I remember one article in particular, I think it was Vonnegut's review in Harpers of Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, so it must have been the politically nightmarish year of 1972. The review began with a statement something like "Some days I have Hunter Thompson's disease..." the symptoms of which include a mixture of hopelessness, rage, contempt, and disbelief. Another statement in the same review that hit me in the face was Vonnegut's assessment of Thompson's thesis that there had been a sea-change in the two-party system: "It's no longer the Democrats vs. the Republicans, it's the winners vs. the losers, and the fix is on." Subtext: If this is news to you, then guess which side you're on.

I don't mean to romanticize the writer or the historical situation, because it wasn't the first or last time those things could be said about American society. The last two presidential elections prove it. And there were more sophisticated commentators than Vonnegut among the literati. But I can't think of any during my lifetime who put as much heart into their work while seeing through the lies, deceptions, and rationalizations of power, and yet maintained a sense of humor on the whole macabre spectacle of war and money and the vanity of domination.

He was just a guy from Indianapolis, albeit with the advantages of family wealth and privilege that happen to fall to some people and not others. To his credit, Vonnegut didn't take those happy accidents - or any sense of entitlement - seriously. Good buy, Billy Pilgrim.

On being a walking boomer stereotype

"How should I know, why should I care?"

I've heard that song, which I really like by the way, so much lately, covered by someone, performed in concert on PBS for a nostalgic audience by the old but identical-sounding Zombies, or on TV in a car/drug/phone commercial, that I'm almost sick of it.

"But she's not there!"

More evidence. I own a copy of George Harrison's solo triple album "All Things Must Pass" - not the vinyl but the CD set issued thirty years later with altered cover art, new liner notes, and additional tracks added by the older Harrison who was not long for this world. Not only do I own it but I listen to it and respond to it's over-produced wall of sound, against all reason, like getting the willies from hearing a Puccini aria and not understanding a word of Italian, but still.

Certain tracks, the predictable ones, still speak to me in the same ways they always did, both viscerally and spiritual, if that's possible, and no one can tell me it's not. The first few songs on Disc 2 - Beware of Darkness, Apple Scruffs, Let It Roll, and the knockout punch, Awaiting on You All. I'm a product of my time, and I guess cultural forces (whatever that means) have a real and lasting effect on individuals, try as they might to get outside them.

Don't the songs take themselves a little too seriously?

It can hit you, it can hurt you
Make you sore and what is more
That is not what you are here for

Yet others hold up pretty well...

Let it roll across the floor
Through the hall and out the door
To the fountain of perpetual mirth
Let it roll for all it's worth
Let it roll

I confess, in this confessional space, that songs from 1970 still ring true; that the extreme reverb in recordings by the villainous Phil Spector still shake me up somatically; that I still respect the quiet Beatle; and against all reason still buy into his transcendent vibe.

Dodged a bullet

Or some other fast-moving projectile. Actually it was a large limb from a hundred-year-old Norway maple demonstrating once again that Galileo and Newton were onto something. I really did want it to come down, I just hadn't resolved to take the chainsaw up as far as the extension ladder would go and decisively cut it. Now I don't have to.

We'd had a violent storm two nights earlier with hail and heavy winds that brought down some big branches. One of the branches nicked a gutter but missed the roof, saving us the water damage and expense of fixing a leaky roof. So I had some big limbs to clean up.

While I was at it, there was another limb, lower on the trunk, that I was able to reach with the ladder, and the saw cut through it easily. But it got hung up on the low-hanging curve of the higher limb, and instead of dropping neatly to the ground as I'd hoped, it just hung there suspended.

I still wasn't ready to reposition the ladder, climb it to the top, and cut the upper limb. Is this what they call a gut-check? So be it. So I trimmed the branches I could reach off the cut-off limb, buying time while cleaning up some of the mess I'd gotten myself into. This is why some people hire professionals to do their tree work.

It's just hanging there, right? Maybe if I pull on one end of the cut-off limb, it will tilt itself off the fulcrum of the hang-up and let gravity do its work. Fat chance but worth a try, and as I pulled with all my weight, I felt something begin to give, then a big old CRACK, and sure enough something is coming down. Before I could duck and cover my head or spin away in a ward-off move, I fell forward and felt the other branch hit my calves, just a glancing blow to the gastrocnemius, dontchaknow, and just like that everybody is on the ground where they belong. Me, the hung-up limb I'd cut, and the other limb I hadn't cut.

Not exactly the way I'd planned it, but I'll take it. Which I did, piece by piece, after trimming off the branches, back to the woodpile for next winter, luckily with life and limb still intact.

Jim Hightower tells us explicitly what we already vaguely knew

Just in case there's any doubt, let's find out why we're in Iraq.

The future is in eggs

A play by Eugene Ionesco, if long-term memory serves me. The so-called Theater of the Absurd, it must have been freshman year, and it was a whole new world of literature that rang true in my adolescent mind. I think it was the sequel to "Jack, or the submission," in which Jack takes his place onstage alongside a girl (Jill?) as their families press in from both sides, and others (stagehands?) gradually fill the stage with eggs. Those ideas occasionally resurface, reminding me of the value of a hodge-podge liberal arts education.

The scene at the rec center Thursday night, which sparked the title which led to the blog that lived in the house that Jack built, was a trip and a half. It was my first time at the rec center's home away from home for a year or two while the building on High Street - the real rec center next to the library - undergoes renovation. It will be a wonderful space when it's finished, and for now all the programs will take place in an older building , a former elementary and middle school in the middle of an aging neighborhood between Clintonville and Worthington, built in 1945.

An architectural walk down memory lane, the brick and block structure sits on one end of a small park lined with mature spruce and maple trees. Woodwork is dark, polished, beautiful. Floors are tile inlaid with letters of the alphabet and animal figures. Lots of glass bricks everywhere letting in light. It's definitely old school and a source of nostalgia, even for the neighborhood people who went to St. Michael's up the street. Rumor has it that it's destined for the wrecking ball, since population is shifting and schools are closing, and the city wants the space for parkland.

My classes ran their course in an unheated upper room, succeeding in what the first class of the quarter wants to achieve. To wit: get to know the new students enough to gauge the vocabulary that will register with them, find a pace that will be challenging but not intimidating, find out where they're coming from and what they're looking for. And if the stars align, get a workout, get a clue, learn something new.

I guess the stars aligned, because it was a highly satisfactory two and a half hours in the city that knows how to keep a secret. As the advanced students were winding down from a long, slow short-form, teenagers with flashlights were scurrying around the yard outside our windows searching for eggs among the trees and flowers, making noise and having fun under the watchful eyes of rec center staff and parents huddled in doorways and hallways, waiting patiently for closing time.

Good Friday came and went. I proofed pages and found correlations. Instead of going to a movie, I ended up staying late to respond to an e-mail by making a motel reservation for a small-town homecoming, family reunion, and memorial service beginning midsummer night in LaCrosse. Saturday I cleaned, baked bread, made soup.

Easter Sunday arrives, bittersweet. The bags under my eyes lift a little after I've had coffee and moved around. It's still cold outside, so the trees and flowers that started to open up last weekend are in a state of suspended animation, tulips drooping over looking at their shoes. I forget to bring a cut flower and trust that there will be extras.

The packed sanctuary is a mixed bag of rambunctious kids, parents who don't set boundaries, other kids afraid to look sideways, and parents with nothing but boundaries. I recoil just a bit from the cute story about bunnies seeking bunnies, and the country-rock arrangement of "Amazing Grace" isn't working for me, so I begin to feel like the perpetual first-time visitor judging everything about the service and deciding whether to ever come back to the Church of Existential Doubt.

Then I notice two young families two pews in front of me, parents whom I kind of know, and their beautiful kids whose hair and eyes and stature and manner echo or embody their parents' past, present, and future, like time-traveling while sitting still. Rev. Susan notes in passing that this is the 150th Easter Sunday service in this building. Her reading (Mark 16) tells a familiar story, but what I hear this time is the question, "Why do you look for the living among the dead?"

I start to plan a quick getaway, but the kids save the day by passing out flowers to each person in the congregation; a young lady in jeans, whose dad I know from committee meetings, hands me a long-stemmed carnation. Instead of bolting, I make my way to the hubbub of the back room for coffee and run into a friend from a drum circle. She wants to talk about a relationship she's dealing with after the fact, and I appreciate her willingness to connect on any level - musical, intellectual, platonic. She goes back for more coffee, and I stop at the social justice table to buy two bars of Fair-Trade Very Dark Chocolate, which will be, like the coffee and the carnation, kind of a sacrament tonight after quiche and sourdough and Chardonney.