gettin' up every morning and riding to philo

It's getting a little bit easier. There's not a lot of traffic at six a.m. The ride up Harrison is really the worst part. There is a stretch of that street that is narrow and has no bike line. Not only that, but there are dangerous grates every twenty feet or so, so I have to ride in the middle of the street. Plus it is uphill and kind of bumpy, as the pavement has a lot of holes in it. From there, riding out to 53rd is kind of bleak. The bald hill path is pretty nice, and sometimes I even appreciate it at that early hour. Many times I have surprised little bunny rabbits that run into the blackberries. The fields look nice. Then when I get onto Reservoir road, there are a couple of bothersome hills. A dead deer has been lying on the road for about three weeks now. Passing that, there is some downhill and some railroad tracks, and then the turn onto the main street, and a little uphill, downhill, and uphill and I am done, and at the little market to buy my coffee. The loggers think I am some Corvallis biker on a ride. Little do they know that I work in town. Or maybe they have figured it out. The coffee is bad, but I'm not going to stop at Java Connection with sweat pouring off of me.
Anyway, the ride takes 30 minutes one way. One hour both ways. So that is a lot of exercise. Plus working all day and trying to practice karate.

Karadzic captured

Yay. Karadzic was taken into custody. That means the Serbs are being more reasonable, and that Karadzic, who was a killer of thousands and a war criminal, will be tried like he should be.

Allergy cure.

I usually suffer from pretty bad grass seed allergies every year, but this year I use a neti pot every day and have had no problems. Without taking any drugs. Snorting salt water up your nose takes some getting used to, but it works. Also works for sinus infections.

"The Getaway", with Steve McQueen is a great movie. Those 70's movies remind me of my childhood, because I remember those cars from when I was a kid.

Work has been taking all my energy, partly because I decided to commute to work by bicycle, so that's riding from here to Philomath every day. I have to get up at five in the morning.

musician at beanery

walkin' around

This is a good time of year for walking around town. The flowers are out and everything is quite green from all the rain. I would recommend this walk in particular: start from Franklin park, walk down Taylor to 12th, and then left on 12th to Jackson, and then walk toward the river and to wherever you might be going. The people residing on Taylor street and 12th street seem to take a lot of care in their gardens. They are nice streets no matter what the season, but particularly at this time of year.

That's me, a modern day Thoreau, except walking through town and not the fields of Concord.

It is not by his high superflousness we know?
To be equal a need
is natural...but to fling
rainbows and pretzel sticks
here and there

books

Hopkins was a talented poet. The other book I was thinking was by Phillip Roth, but I see now it is written by somebody named Henry Roth.

vise that someone made

here comes the flood

I might play this song at the next open mic, if I still feel up to it:

t

academia

The politicized obsession with race, gender and sexuality; the denigration of canonical works by "dead white males"; the callow mocking of convention; the notion that truth itself is merely a construct of power and self-interest -- all characterize the study of art and literature in America's colleges and universities.

This is true. The situation may not be as bad everywhere as this person says it is at Yale. Berkeley wasn't too bad. People studied serious stuff. However, judging from what I can see, the obsession continues.

My opinions on recently read or viewed media

The Will Be Blood: This is a great movie, which is what I would expect from the director of Magnolia and Boogie Nights. It is about oil and the rush for enrichment in the olden days of California. Those were rough times.

A book by Max Hastings on the war in the Pacific. This is a good book, full of little details that grab you. What a major war that was. No kidding.

Sacred Games. This is a murder mystery set in Bombay, India. It is written in English, but a kind of Indian English dialogue with so many unusual words that it needs a glossary. It kind of makes you think of all the places and environments that you don't know too much about. Other than that, it is more or less a standard detective-policework, kind of deal.

Street Kings: Keanu Reeves looking old, playing an alcoholic cop widower fighting his demons, and fighting just about all the mobsters and drug dealers and corrupt cops in L.A. Highly recommended.

The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright: A detailed background on the lives of Bin Laden and Zawahiri. You get a real sense of who they were and how nasty, horrible, and generally psychotic and mean these guys are. Quite depressing. Zawahiri especially. Most of the Bin Ladens are just average businessmen, highly successful builders in Saudi Arabia. Osama is the crazy lunatic exception.

I have also really been getting into Richard Price.

Samaritan: This is a great book by Price about a do-gooder inner-city teacher who gets assaulted by somebody. The whole book slowly takes you into the lives and environment of the projects in New Jersey.

Lush Life: The new book by Price. I haven't managed to read it yet because I'm 29th on the hold list, but it his escalated to a new level, with his dialogue crossing into literary territory, even though it is basically another police procedural regarding the solving of a murder.

He also wrote Clockers and Freedomland, which have both been made into movies.

major and minor machining mistakes

I made a little mistake, machining-wise, today. We are making vises and I was supposed to shave a 30 degree angle off of one end of the vise, which I did perfectly, exactly according to the print, except I shaved it off the wrong end. Oops. So that was a mistake, but then again, I did quite a few things right. In the real world, you would have to junk the part and start over, but since this is a class, we can get away with a few things.
That is one kind of mistake. A major mistake on a CNC lathe can be much worse, and much more dangerous. Computer controlled machining can seem easy, but if you program the machine wrong, it will destroy itself or cause a major amount of damage before you can stop it.

ripening barberries

Already the ripening barberries are red,
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes,
certain that there is vision after vision
inside, simply waiting until nighttime
to rise all around him in the darkness-
it's all over for him, he's like an old man.

Nothing else will come; no more days will open,
and everything that does happen will cheat him
Even you, And you are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths.
-rilke

music fiasco

I don't have the endurance to play music for an hour without amplification. I managed to play for forty minutes . I played some good songs, for what it was worth.
And what is it worth, but vanity and striving after wind?

Music has giveth me what my iniquity deserveth.

booked to play at interzone

... that's right, I am due to play at the interzone at 8pm, Friday the 11th. I can predict what will happen. I will show up. There will be between 3-5 people sitting there studying. I will set up and start playing, and they will all leave. Thereafter there will be nobody in there but me, and the barista will give me a horrified look every once in a while.

However, it doesn't matter. I don't seem to get nervous these days, and I like the songs. I think they are good.

Fireworks' open mic

The open mic at Fireworks is actually a really nice deal. I don't know how long it has had this atmosphere, but there were a lot of talented guitarists there. I always enjoy those. I went up and did a few songs with a bunch of mistakes in them, but if I know I am actually going to be playing, I can practice a bit more in the future. My nervousness was nonexistent for some reason. I guess I am finally at the attitude where I am just going to go up and play songs I like, enjoy playing them, and not worry about whether the audience liked them or not. In my mind, they are good songs, and that is as good as I can do.
There's also the fact that I occasionally have to get up and teach some karate, so my general nervousness about getting in front of a group isn't what it used to be.

Chris Farrell featured (in his own mind) at Fireworks

I will be playing a few songs at the open mic at Fireworks at 9:30 or so on Thursday. I should be sweaty because I will be coming straight from karate, so don't get too close. Planned songs include the few that I can remember: Peggy-o, Bertha, The First Cut is the Deepest, and maybe Cowgirl in the Sand.

books and compatibility

The new york times has an article on whether people have to like the same books to be compatible. I really don't think so. I mean, on some level, there has to be some intelligence there, but there are all different sorts of interests, and certainly it doesn't matter much of they know who Nabokov is, or some other arbitrary hoop you might want them to jump through. I personally think compatibility is a lot more complicated than it might appear, and if the interests or perceptions are the same on a certain level, then nothing else matters too much. After all, who wants to marry a mirror image of themself? Love is not directed by the rational side of the brain, which can be a little disconcerting.
Then again, whoever you like has to share some of your interests I would guess.

cell phones and reality

I didn't switch to a cell phone until last month, when I realized I would spend less money on a prepaid plan than I was spending on a regular phone. Another factor is that there is not a single pay phone anywhere on LBCC campus any more. I am starting to like the thing, and am realizing how much more convenient it is to try to meet someone in the city if you have one. The thing is, it's expected to have one these days, kind of the new reality, where mobile communication is possible. Sure, we got along without them in the past, but why not use them? It's not necessarily going to improve your social life, but it will make it easier for people to reach you, which can be handy.

Mere living alone does not isolate a man, mere living together does not bring men into communion. The common life can either make one more of a person or less of a person, depending whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd. To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.-Thomas Merton

The Beauty of Things
To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things-
earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars-
The strange beauty of human nature, its thoughts,
attitudes, and passions,
And unhuman nature in its towering reality-
For man's half dream; man, you might say, is nature
dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant-to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express, the
natural
Beauty, is the diversion of poetry.
The rest's elsewhere: those holy or noble sentiments, the
intricate ideas,
The love, longing: reasons, but in counterpose.
-Robinson Jeffers

Jeffers was a strange one, very intense, a son of a minister, who lived in a stone tower on the coast of California, at Carmel, in the 30's. A stone tower that he built himself. His poems more or less focus on natural beauty. He can be somewhat overly unhuman, and that has counted against him over the years.

it's kind of annoying

to have people writing publicly about me on their blog. If you have a problem, send me an email. I will get the message. Plus it's a drag to get into a conflict with somebody you did have some good discussions with and who you recognize as an intelligent person, and I don't say that about everybody.

I'm heading up to Portland today, to watch the people stroll around the Lloyd center, walk around and look at the buildings, hang out with friends, discuss economics, and trade witticisms. It will be nice to get out of town. As a matter of fact, I'm splitting right after I make another espresso and put new batteries in the camera.

how many thousands...

How many thousands of divinity students
have dipped their bodies into the old night of your name.
What the girls waken to is you,
and when the young men dressed in silver weave
and flash in battle-that is also you.

The poets always met.
in your long vaulted corridors.
And they were emperors of pure sound
and moving and deep and assured.

You are the delicate hour at nightfall
that makes all the poets equally good;
you crowd full of darkness into their mouths,
and every poet, sensing he has discovered greatness,
surrounds you with magnificent things.

A hundred thousand harps take you
like wings and sweep you up out of silence
And your primitive wind is blowing
the fragrance of your marvelous power
to every being and to every creature in need.
-rilke, translated by robert bly

Knockemstiff

Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock, is a collection of stories about incredibly poor and messed up people in a small town in Ohio. The author lived in a town by the same name and worked in a paper mill there for thirty years before coming out with this book. The writing is good and shocking, maybe in the manner of a Jim Thompson novel, but the characters are even more decrepit. It is holding my interest and inspiring me to maybe rework some of my stories.

The hail was actually coming down and reminding me of some lines:

The number of his years is past finding out.
He draws up the drops of water,
which distill as rain to the streams
the clouds pour down their moisture
and abundant showers fall on mankind.
Who can understand how he spreads out the clouds,
how he thunders from his pavilion?

books

I've been feeling kind of indifferent towards things today, just a generalized indifference that focuses on nothing in particular. An indifferent indifference. I wasn't indifferent to the rain. Walking around in the rain is something I always find relaxing, and the rain today was quite enjoyable (said like the oregonian that I am). I get a kick out of the quiet of the town this week, and it doesn't seem depressing to me, but more like a kind of portentious feeling, and a kind of opportunity to delve down to the things that really matter, and think of what I really need to be concerned with.

Shotokan seminar with Sensei Smaby, 7th dan

I got up really late today and it is pouring down rain, and the cat was wondering why I was asleep so late. I guess mowing the lawn is out, ....not that I was looking forward to that.
The JKA-US NW, the regional Shotokan organization, has a seminar coming up week after next here in Corvallis, so it will be good to be ready for that. And then next month in Bend is the regional tournament, and I would like to do well and maybe even go to the national tournament. I don't have much competition around here, sparring-wise. I guess maybe I should go around to the other schools to see if visiting is an option.

Nietzsche on scholars

Homer


Nietzsche, from "On Scholars" in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
"I am too hot and burned by my own thoughts; often it nearly takes my breath away. Then I must go out into the open and away from all dusty rooms. But they sit cool in the cool shade: in everything they want to be mere spectators, and they beware of sitting where the sun burns on the steps. Like those who stand in the street and gape at the people who pass by, they too wait and gape at thoughts that others have thought.


Here's one of the best Peggy-O's ever recorded: