Posted by: tuulenhaiven | May 18, 2013

The People Speak – Langston Hughes and Alan Cope

I did manage to track down the movie The People Speak and I watched it over the course of several days last week. Famous actors and musicians lent their voices to the speeches and writings of radical Americans, while Howard Zinn offered a narrative structure, and historical photographs and video footage provided a visual context. A good package, overall, but something about it felt lackluster to me. While the folks involved were suitably impassioned (Marisa Tomei, David Strathairn, Jasmine Guy, and Viggo Mortensen gave several particularly stirring performances each) I couldn’t help thinking that it would have been cooler if the ‘cast’ had been composed of commoners – as if the unremarkable extraordinary everyday folks could bring something more genuine to the project. Of course many of the glittering famous people involved had less than glamorous origins, so I’m splitting hairs here most likely. In the end though, the movie didn’t satisfy me.

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Of course I found other ways to hear the people speak. I picked up Emmanuel Guibert’s Alan’s War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope, which tells Alan’s story in comic book format. Guibert (who produced the excellent graphic memoir The Photographer) met Alan Cope when he was an old man living in France, became good friends with him, and soon found himself setting down in images the stories that Cope told him. Alan’s War is a much quieter book than The Photographer, but it is compelling in its own way. Cope’s wartime adventures seem pretty mellow – he spent much of his time in Eastern Europe (as part of General Patton’s 3rd Army) just driving round the countryside, and only injured himself doing things like falling out of the second story of a barn. He didn’t see much combat, although there was no avoiding some of the horrible and pointless results and aftermaths of battle. He became a soldier as a very young man, and while WWII raged in the background Alan was more focused on personal development and discovery, and on the friends he made. He delighted in coming across musicians and getting them to play, the physical satisfaction of hiking, good meals with local families he encountered, being one of only two guys who didn’t get seasick during the ocean crossing… As can be expected, the war had a lasting effect on Alan’s life, influencing his work afterward, where he lived (he only returned to America for a short time), and his relationships. His storytelling was straightforward, a little bit funny, occasionally eloquent and even philosophically lofty at times. He definitely came across as a fellow I would have liked to chat with, and I thank Guibert for, in a way, making that possible. Guibert’s perfect illustrations and Alan’s simple voice make for a book that catches you off guard – with it’s matter-of-fact style, it takes awhile to build up an emotional punch. It’s understated yet all the more powerful because of that. The day Alan arrived in France and saw the city of Le Havre, utterly destroyed, he had this sudden startling realization:

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Heartbreaking. And yet hopeful. I’m glad to have met Alan Cope.

I’m also very pleased to have made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes. In April, in celebration of National Poetry Month, L of Omphaloskepsis shared her growing addiction to spoken word poetry. I enjoyed many of the youtube videos and TEDtalks she posted, and I was reminded of how much more I enjoy poetry when it is spoken or read aloud. I had Selected Poems of Langston Hughes checked out of the library because he had landed on my post-A People’s History of the United States reading list, and I proceeded to read it out loud – to myself. My housemates may have caught the sound of my voice carrying through the house late at night, because I quickly found that some poems can’t be read softly. Many of Langston Hughes poems really must be exclaimed!

I miss reading out loud. I used to read to my sisters everyday after lunch, until my mother sent us all reluctantly back to our schoolwork. I was talking to my little sister recently about this, and she said that she had an almost perfect memory of the events of certain books that I had read out loud, whereas her memory of other books she had read herself (in the normal fashion) was spotty at best. Interesting. The spoken word is powerful, and oral storytelling is especially so. As I discovered, even when your only listener is yourself, something about reading out loud transforms the whole act. It pulls so many additional senses into the experience, and invites your tongue, your face, and probably your hands (especially if you’re part Italian!) to the party. I so thoroughly enjoyed reading Langston Hughes to myself that I went straight off and got a few more books of poetry to lend my voice to – Alan Ginsburg and Roberto Bolaño are next on the list.

Here are a few of my favorites from Selected Poems of Langston Hughes – read them out loud!

 

Demand

Listen!

Dear dream of utter aliveness -

Touching my body of utter death -

Tell me, O quickly! dream of utter aliveness,

The flaming source of your bright breath.

Tell me, O dream of utter aliveness -

Knowing so well the wind and the sun -

Where is this light

Your eyes see forever?

And what is this wind

You touch when you run?

 

Still Here

I’ve been scarred and battered.

My hopes the wind done scattered.

Snow has friz me, sun has baked me.

Looks like between ‘em

They done tried to make me

Stop laughin’, stop lovin’, stop livin’ -

But I don’t care!

I’m still here!

 

Daybreak in Alabama

When I get to be a composer

I’m gonna write me some music about

Daybreak in Alabama

And I’m gonna put the purtiest songs in it

Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist

And falling out of heaven like soft dew.

I’m gonna put some tall trees in it

And the scent of pine needles

And the smell of red clay after rain

And long red necks

And poppy colored faces

And big brown arms

And the field daisy eyes

Of black and white black white black people

And I’m gonna put white hands

And black hands and brown and yellow hands

And red clay earth hands in it

Touching everybody with kind fingers

And touching each other natural as dew

In that dawn of music when I

Get to be a composer

And write about daybreak

In Alabama.

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Posted in Non-sense, Books, Movies, Reading, Authors, Famous People, Graphic Novels, Poetry, Documentary, Langston Hughes | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: tuulenhaiven | April 30, 2013

April’s Flotsam and Jetsam

I finally finished reading A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. My experience of it has already leaked into several recent posts here, and I know that I’ll be dealing with the frustration that the book filled me with for a long time. It remains to be seen what I will do with the knowledge I’ve gained, or how I’ll draw inspiration from ‘those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.’ Because the book also gave me hope, hope ‘that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.’

There’s work to be done, and there is neither a switch nor a carrot for me, stubborn donkey that I am. If I learned anything from Zinn’s book, it is that my own small amount of determination to move forward can be relatively effective. A hesitant step, a dainty one, a plodding one, even a stumbling one, is a step in the right direction and there is always, amazingly, someone else willing to tromp along beside you. Who wants to go walking with me?

I found the complete text of A People’s History online here, which led to the discovery of the History Is A Weapon site. This is a great resource for speeches and bits of writing from radical commoners which I’m eager to thoroughly explore.

I also came across the film The People Speak which is based on Zinn’s book Voices Of A People’s History.

It appears that Colin Firth was involved in a UK version of both a book and a documentary about his people’s history – Britain’s stories – also called The People Speak. That’s pretty neat. I want to watch and read both/all.

Lastly (having reached the bottom of this particular internet rabbit hole), I found a clip of Colin Firth, Omid Djalili, and Celia Imrie doing the Constitutional Peasants scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (here if you’re interested) which was quite good – especially Firth’s bit – but here’s the original scene, since…well no one could possibly do it better than them!

In other news, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch did nothing to alleviate my slight phobia of mushrooms (I don’t really mind eating them, but whoa, they’re weird and mysterious looking!) Half noir detective thriller, half…total bizarreness, it’s ‘grey caps’ and their fungal takeover freaked me the heck out. Little Red Reviewer has a more articulate review here (she put VanderMeer’s name in my ear awhile back – thanks!).

artwork by Orion-Zangara

VanderMeer’s staccato style in this book took a minute to adjust to, and a little bit longer to appreciate, but in the end I liked the writing and felt that it suited the story. The oppressive, dank feel to the book fit my mood over the past week, and the rebellious undertone was a nice companion to my reading of A People’s History. I finished that book and this one on the same day, and their endings continue to chime together in my head. Normally I would be loath to reveal the end of a book, but this is an exception. *spoilers* follow, sort of. Read at your own risk:

‘Something stirs in him. A hint of a feeling close to pride. Close to horror. Because he knows, and she knows, that the world has changed. And he helped change it.

It may not be better. It may be worse. But it will be different. …

He sits in the rowboat next to her and watches the end and beginning of history.

Remembers it all.

Forgets it all.’

- Finch by Jeff VanderMeer

 

‘It is a race in which we can all choose to participate, or just to watch. But we should know that our choice will help determine the outcome.‘

- from the Afterward, A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Heavy stuff, really.

To combat it, to buoy my spirits, to distract myself, I resorted to hiking and biking lengthily over the weekend, visiting a community garden and meeting some of the local permaculture guild members, volunteering at Bend’s Community Center, learning to play disc golf, making fried rice, and reading The Crown of Embers by Rae Carson in one sitting (delicious book!)

Lewis’s Woodpeckers seen at Shevlin Park, Bend, OR

And now a whole new month spills out and away from my feet, waiting to be filled with books and work and hikes in the sun, and new friends, and old challenges, and all the rest of the flotsam and jetsam of life.

I’ll leave you with another one of my coping methods – the music of cellist Zoe Keating.

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Posted in Adventure, Authors, Books, Famous People, Hiking/Walking, History, Howard Zinn, Jeff VanderMeer, Music, Non-Fiction, Non-sense, Novels, Reading, State of the World, Wildlife | Tags: , , , , , , ,

Posted by: tuulenhaiven | April 23, 2013

Joseph Campbell and Miriam Schapiro Free Fall

“We’re in a free fall into the future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast. And always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective… Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.”

- Joseph Campbell

I watched a movie called Sukhavati: A Mythic Journey this afternoon, which the filmmakers called a “meditation” on the work of Joseph Campbell. Using audio and video recordings of him speaking, and video footage and still images from their travels round the world, Maxine Harris and Sheldon Rochlin sought to paint a portrait of Campbell’s ideas – or, as Campbell might have put it, his dreaming myth. I’m just starting to explore the “renowned” mythologist’s work, so this served as a nice overview. I have The Hero With a Thousand Faces at the top of my TBR pile and I’m eager to start it. The quote I included above chimes in tune with many other things going through my mind these days, and I look forward to seeing what else Campbell has to say to me.

A Google search for ‘free fall’ imagery led me down one of those odd internet wormholes, and I found Miriam Schapiro’s Free Fall (which appears above) and then the artist herself. I am so glad! She is a very interesting lady, and her artwork is gorgeous. I love her use of color, the inclusion of fabric in her work, and the way she ‘collaborates‘ with other artists (like Mary Cassatt and Frida Kahlo). I am looking forward to learning more about her. Here’s another one of her ‘femmage’ pieces:

I’m Dancin’ As Fast As I Can, 1984

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Posted in Art, Famous People, Movies, Non-sense, Reading | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: tuulenhaiven | April 16, 2013

In Defense of Daydreaming

In the first few months of this year I read in rapid succession 15 books that fall into the YA Fantasy slot. I got a great deal of pleasure out of doing so, but eventually my pleasure turned a little guilty and I deemed it time to take up more serious reading once again. I switched to Chomsky and Howard Zinn (EVER so serious…) but I also picked up a non-fic book by Diana Wynne Jones which turned out to more or less justify my appreciation for fantasy novels.

In her words, here’s one reason that I will continue to read them:

‘It does seem that a fantasy, working out in its own terms, stretching you beyond the normal concerns of your own life, gains you a peculiar charge of energy which inexplicably enriches you.’ – The Children In the Wood, 1981

It’s no shocker that DWJ would make a compelling case for reading fantasy stories, given that she spent four decades writing them. Reflections: On the Magic of Writing collects articles, lectures, talks, literary criticism, and autobiographical antidotes from throughout her career and offers an interesting peak into her thoughts and ideas. It’s an excellent book.

What follows are my own reflections on some of the things Jones talked about.

Something that emerges from the whole collection with particular fierceness is the intention behind Jones’ writing, the sense of responsibility she felt toward her audience, especially her young readers. Having once been one of those young readers, I feel extremely grateful that she never wrote a “goodie” book, that she never tried to mislead me about the realities of life, that she felt I could handle the rough stuff like pain and death and betrayal and kids using lighters, and that she recognized that I was a wonderful mix of nastiness and happiness.

Reading DWJ’s books and others like them at a young age impacted the way I view the world and my place in it, and continues to do so to this day. I have a hard time feeling hopeless. I won’t accept that ‘the only reality is dull and unpleasant‘ or that ‘being adult is very dreary because the world never gives you half of what you aim for.’ (A Whirlwind Tour of Australia, Lecture Two: Negatives and Positives in Children’s Literature, 1993)

In answer to the question “Why do you write for children?” Jones said:

‘There is one good reason. I would hope to encourage some part of one generation at least to use their minds as minds are supposed to be used. A book for children, like the myths and folktales that tend to slide into it, is really a blueprint for dealing with life. For that reason, it might have a happy ending, because nobody ever solved a problem while believing it was hopeless. It might put the aims and the solutions unrealistically high…but this is because it is better to aim for the moon and get halfway there than just to aim for the roof and get halfway upstairs. The blueprint should, I think, be an experience in all the meanings of the world...’ – Answers to Some Questions, 1997

Jones didn’t agree that adults aren’t really supposed to exercise their imaginations, or that ‘after the age of fourteen at the most, you have to close down one very large area of your brain.’ And even though most adults if pressed would probably say, “Well of course you shouldn’t!” it seems to me that there is a terrible lack of imagination in our current society.

People tend to not aim for the moon. They don’t imagine a different future. They achieve little, because ‘people’s achievements in life depend quite startlingly much on what they expect to achieve.’ You won’t get much if you don’t expect to get much, and so the vast majority of people in this country are stuck in jobs they hate, paying for college educations that cost them far too much, or not getting that education at all due to its price tag, allowing corporations to dictate what they consume, and standing by as obscene amounts of money are spent killing kids in far off countries.

Jones pointed out that her mother’s generation, who were drilled in reality and trained to despise anything that stunk of fantasy, somehow found Hitler and two World Wars to be credible. I’d say, even though Harry Potter has made it socially acceptable to at least read fantasy again, we’re not much better off these days. Most people still don’t bother to imagine that things don’t have to be the way they are.

WHY IS THIS? My brain slams into this wall again and again – because fantasizing and daydreaming come naturally to people. They’re ‘a very important part of the way your mind works.‘ Everyone can agree that humans are tool-making animals, and that a person has to imagine a tool before they can come up with one.

‘...the same sort of half-incredulous “What if?” applies to the most abstruse piece of engineering, except that here the laughter will be subsumed into a sort of keen enjoyment of the chase: “Nobody has done this before, but I’m going to do it all the same. What if I…?” Man, before anything, is a problem solver. We have evolved practically requiring to enjoy solving problems, and foremost among our means of doing so is the half-joking “What if?” of fantasy. … And of course it is fun, solving something. Look at Archimedes, rushing outside dripping and shouting. Naturally we enjoy fantasy.’

‘We also enjoy daydreaming… In some daydreams, our problems are simply miraculously solved. Here, we recognized the problem and lowered the level of pain from it. Nobody ever solved anything while worried and hurting. That is one part of fantasizing. The other part is the actual practicing of situations in our heads. … Both prepare you for a version of the situation in actuality. Without either, you really do not find it easy to distinguish the credible from the unbelievable, the obscene from the silly joke.‘

- Answers to Some Questions, 1997

That kid daydreaming in the classroom, not paying attention, attention deficient perhaps, imagining too much, asking too many “What if?”s, disrupting the classroom, annoying the teacher, annoying their parents – gets diagnosed, gets medicated, and there’s part of the answer to my WHY IS THIS? question.

Such a kid might still read Harry Potter, but will be told that such things lie firmly in the world of fantasy and have no relation to actual life – ‘that what a person has in his or her head does not exist in everyday life.’ Harry Potter actually contributes to this line of thought in a terrible way, by drawing an outrageously thick line between the world of the Muggles and the world of the Magical.

This separation between what you imagine and the real world is dangerous. It allows people to think that what is accomplished in the worlds of these stories isn’t possible in the real world. People are worried that kids (and many adults too) will get so caught up in role-playing games and fantasy novels that they will cease to be able to distinguish these worlds from the real one. Too many people then compartmentalize certain types of behavior, unable to see that there is a place for, and indeed an absolute need, for Frodo and Sam, for Gandalf, for Aragorn in the real world. There are dragons to fight, quests to go on, Dark Lords to destroy aplenty in the real world.

Fantasy isn’t an escape. Fantasy is a blueprint, as Jones puts it.

‘Imagination doesn’t just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful.’ – A Whirlwind Tour of Australia, Lecture Three: Why Don’t You Write Real Books? 1987

‘A further beauty is that in such stories you find all the troubles and problems of this modern age…becoming timeless and distanced, so that you can walk round them and examine them without feeling helpless. This is where fantasy performs the same function as joking, but on a deeper level, and solves your problems while keeping you sane. It is no accident that the majority of folktales at least have a happy ending. Most of them are very deep-level blueprints of how to aim for the moon. The happy ending does not only give you gratification as you read it, but it also gives you hope that, just maybe, a fortunate outcome could be possible.’ – A Whirlwind Tour of Australia, Lecture Two: Negatives and Positives in Children’s Literature, 1993

All of this is pounding through my head as I continue to read A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. Over and over again in this book, he tells the story of a little group of people who dreamed of something better and went after it. And failed, to greater or lesser extent, repeatedly. Aiming for the moon and making it halfway there – so much better than aiming for the roof and making it halfway upstairs! And eventually these people got the things they had dared to imagine – the slaves became free; women got the vote; unions organized and got better pay and shorter hours for the workers. These little people, these Frodos and Sams and Merrys and Pippins went up against the Saurons of the real world, and it was mostly horrible and hard and dangerous and people died, but occasionally they won and got what you could call a happy ending.

Zinn’s book casts a glaring light on the fact that it’s always a false ending though – there’s always the next thing, the next injustice, the next quest. The patterns repeat, and some days I feel like nothing has changed or been accomplished. That’s entirely untrue though, as history – both Zinn’s version and that of others – can attest to.

The current state of affairs in this country makes me nervous though. It frustrates me. Sometimes it sends me spinning hair-raisingly close to feeling hopeless. Our medicated, overworked, stressed out, TV-drenched population is restless and discontent, but also comfortable and lazy, and mostly unable to imagine something different it seems. We often can’t even see the damn moon through the smog, so how can we hope to aim for it?

People want to go on quests and fight dragons, as evidenced by the popularity of role-playing online games, video games, and TV shows full of adventure. We’re in the habit of living vicariously through others though – watching other people play sports, travel the world eating weird food, and do strange and dangerous jobs like catch crabs or go logging. Our brains tap into the things we’re watching and allow us to experience them to a degree that seems to satisfy most people.

I am absolutely guilty of this myself at times. I’ve caught myself contentedly watching hour after hour of Doctor Who only to realize that he would never spend even one hour sitting on his bum watching TV. He’d be too busy fighting injustice and saving the world and interacting with people and generally carrying on and having adventures. This realization has caused me to dash out of the house in search of an encounter with a real, complicated person or situation. I don’t want to necessarily demonize television, but it is certainly another part of the answer to my WHY IS THIS? question from before.

My life these days is an adventure in imagining a different world – one where education doesn’t cost so much money, and people live in proper homes, and communities help each other out, and kids don’t have the imaginations medicated out of them, and no one has to eat shitty food. In order to help create this world, I set off on a quest last year and I’m still tramping along. Comparatively it’s been a comfy quest. I have mostly been well fed and warm, haven’t been chased by any monsters or gotten waylaid by highwaymen. I haven’t accidentally wandered into an enchantment. I’ve meet mysterious strangers along the way, gotten hung up in certain small villages for longer than I anticipated, fallen off the wagon once or twice. It’s been hard at times, even the tiniest bit dangerous. I’ve been challenged in ways I never anticipated. My way hasn’t always been clear, but I continue to follow my feet and the road does go ever on and on. I’ve met others who are on their own quests, and we’ve swapped stories and traveled together for awhile. I have hopefully inspired one or two people along the way to daydream about a different world too, and perhaps even to set off and head there and back again.

Thanks to Diana Wynne Jones, Tolkien, the brothers Grimm, Celtic folklore, and the Greek myths, I have a blueprint, a road map for this journey. When you catch me reading a YA Fantasy novel, I’m doing research! The real world is a rough place full of disheartening situations and plenty of dark forces to go up against, with nowhere near enough people willing to do so. Regardless, I have an unreasonable sense of hope and I’m convinced that the hobbits and the flower shop girls will get their small victories. Call me foolishly optimistic all you want, but I think I’ll encounter a happy ending or two in my lifetime – in fact I already have. And I’ve ridden away into the sunset – and into many sunsets after that, and many more to come.

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Posted in Adventure, Authors, Books, Diana Wynne Jones, Doctor Who, Famous People, History, Howard Zinn, Non-Fiction, Non-sense, Personal, Reading, State of the World | Tags: , , , , , ,

Posted by: tuulenhaiven | April 12, 2013

Tolkien Wields a Paintbrush

Sorting through my library books this morning I rediscovered a book I had checked out almost a month ago – J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist & Illustrator. I think I shouted out loud when I came across it initially. When I was a teen and deep in my The Lord of the Rings obsession I read every single book my library had that even mentioned Tolkien – and I inter-library loaned a whole other pile. Somehow I overlooked this one. Today as I flipped through it I was flooded with intense memories, and with the same utter delight of getting to venture deeper into the world of Middle Earth that I experienced as a kid.

Those were the days! I somehow managed to make my obsession count as “school work”, marking hours spent studying history, mythology, linguistics, etc. on the chart my parents used to track my progress. I took meticulous notes while reading LOTR and The Silmarillion, read Beowulf to cross reference, investigated how Tolkien structured his languages and was working on creating my own alphabet.

When Peter Jackson’s movies started coming out I took pleasure in being highly critical, but was somewhat swayed in the end by the epic scope of them and how visually interesting they were. I forgave their glaring faults. Looking back now, I think the movies tamed and even tainted my love for LOTR and I certainly lost sight of some of the things I loved most about the books. My interest peaked and then waned dramatically after ROTK came out. I haven’t read the books in 7 or 8 years.

The release of the first Hobbit movie brought all the pain and passion of that affair back. Even though I hadn’t read The Hobbit in years I remembered it well enough to be more than a little miffed over Jackson’s treatment of the story. I’m going to get really worked up if I go into the issues I took with it here and now, but suffice it to say I had about a dozen WTF moments. Still, Jackson got a few things right…and so I’ll be led once again, lamb-like, to watch the next two movies (seriously, two more?! ridiculous.)

My Dad said something while talking about the Hobbit movie that kicked me in the gut – the movies, with their distorted take on Tolkien (the limitation of one person’s interpretation) do a disservice to a whole generation who deserve better. They deserve to READ the books and think about them and come to their own conclusions, but far too many won’t because, heck, even the Extended Editions take less time to watch than reading LOTR (I watched ‘em in one sitting – took 9 hrs I believe!) That makes me sad…

Anyway, what I really sat down to say is “Hurray for Tolkien’s artwork!” Looking through this book provided a clear reminder of one of the big differences between Jackson’s and Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Jackson does location and sets well, really well at times, but his Middle Earth is darker and heavier by far than the one that Tolkien drew and painted and wrote about.

JRR Tolkien's Art

JRR Tolkien's Art

JRR Tolkien's Art

I had seen a smattering of Tolkien’s illustrations, but this book collected a large quantity of everything from sketches, to decorated envelopes, Christmas cards, preliminary map ideas, dust jacket concepts, and completed works. I especially enjoyed seeing the progression from sketch to finished piece, and the variety of styles Tolkien employed.

JRR Tolkien's Art

JRR Tolkien's Art

JRR Tolkien's Art

I’ll have to come back to this book and properly read it someday, but for now I’m content to just lose myself in the pictures, which are surely not worth a thousand of Tolkien’s words, but come pretty dang close!

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Posted in Art, Books, Famous People, Movies, Non-sense | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: tuulenhaiven | April 8, 2013

Smith Rock State Park

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I finally made it out to Smith Rock State Park last Monday, after catching glimpses of the place for months from afar (from Pilot Butte in downtown Bend, over 20 miles away, on a clear day!) It’s a world famous climbing destination but fortunately for me there are also hiking trails. Maybe I’ll scramble up via uncomfortable shoes and ropes and bolts someday, but I was very content to simply tromp to the top of Misery Ridge this day.

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The Crooked River

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Heading up to the top of Misery Ridge

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Monkey Face (400 ft vertical spire)

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In the Crooked River Canyon

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Closing the loop as the day draws to a close too

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Posted by: tuulenhaiven | March 30, 2013

Exercising my right to bear ordinary common sense

A response and reaction to the interviews between Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian collected in Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

I had a startling revelation while reading Collateral Language, an interview from April 5th, 2003. The topic was propaganda, and Barsamian (founder and director of Alternative Radio and a fellow who has been talking to Chomsky on air since the year I was born) asked how one could recognize it. Chomsky replied that there were “no techniques, just ordinary common sense.”

This comment sent me slamming into a memory, one where a good friend of mine with irritating intensity, and not for the first time, was insisting that common sense was no longer (had never been?) taught in schools. He was half congratulating me on having managed to avoid being ruined by a public school education, while he simultaneously criticized my excessive reading habit – my reliance on book smarts – which he felt was no match for common sense. (He wasn’t much of a reader.)

I guess Chomsky is somewhat in agreement with my friend. In that interview he went on to say:

“But you have to be willing to develop an attitude of critical examination toward whatever is presented to you. Of course, the whole educational system and the whole media system have the opposite goal. You’re taught to be a passive, obedient follower. Unless you can break out of those habits, you’re likely to be a victim of propaganda.”

What sort of propaganda is he referring to? The elaborate fairy tale that for awhile spun popular opinion into supporting the invasion of Iraq, for one. As we passed the 10 year anniversary of the war this month, I read a couple of articles that used words like “hoax”, “swindle”, and of course “scandal” to describe how the American people got flummoxed by an onslaught of propaganda, manipulated by government, corporations, and the ruling class. How did we let them sway us? Why couldn’t we see the obvious (no WMDs, no terrorists, lots of oil)?

Because, as Chomsky and my friend both pointed out to me, common sense is almost too simple of a technique to employ, and the development of critical examination skills are hampered from early on. Habits too, as I learned from Proust, are easy to form and hard to break and often hem us in, restrict our actions to the comfortable norm, make us predictable – make us the sort of folks who, having picked a favorite TV news station, will believe without questioning whatever those cheery, familiar newscasters tell us.

Going back to my big revelation… I was homeschooled by Christian parents, who did their best to protect me from some of the evils of the world. My access to media was limited. I didn’t watch TV and the movies I saw were pretty carefully chosen. My family listened to music that almost exclusively fell into the big 3Cs – Christian, Celtic, and Classical. Interestingly, little or no restrictions were placed on what I read. I even remember my Mom questioning one of my reading choices, and my Dad defending it. Which brings me round to the other side of my conservative upbringing.

My Dad insisted that I develop that attitude of critical examination. It used to infuriate me – I couldn’t just watch a movie or read a book for pure entertainment. He always asked me to think about it. And if being entertaining was the only redeeming quality of a movie or book, that wasn’t enough for him – and it shouldn’t have been for me either.

For awhile, as I became a teen and then a young adult and had access to whatever I wanted to consume, I was angry with my parents. I felt like they had stereotypical sheltered me, and that I had missed out on something essential because I hadn’t stayed in step with pop culture through the 90s. I was constantly playing catch up, and I resented that.

Only in the past year or so have I started to leave that behind, to recognize all the good that came from my so-called sheltered childhood. The thought that hit me so powerfully while I was reading this interview, was that my parents prevented me from developing some bad habits! I didn’t spend the most formative years of my life saturated in media propaganda, passively consuming whatever blatant or subconscious messages the government or corporations felt like spewing out that week. And my Dad’s relentless efforts at forging strong critical thinking skills in me have paid off.

I do, as my friend despaired over, turn to books constantly to help me find the truth in the world. This is an aspect of my experience of common sense, and where I differ from my friend somewhat. It doesn’t make sense to me to rely only on my own vision. I want a bunch of eyes to be watching my back, and my front, and everywhere else. So I read books. (That’s how I wound up reading this one!) And articles, and interviews, and I talk to people, and now I do watch TV (sometimes), and whatever movies I want to, and I listen to music that falls well outside of the big 3Cs. And always I am looking for the truth.

In Chomsky and Barsamian’s interview titled Regime Change, from Sept. 11th, 2003, Chomsky said:

“…just tell the truth. Instead of repeating ideological fanaticism, dismantle it, try to find the truth, and tell the truth. It’s something any one of us can do. Remember, intellectuals internalize the concept that they have to make things seem complicated. Otherwise what are they around for? It’s worth asking yourself what’s really so complicated? … How complicated is it to understand the truth or to know how to act?”

And in Intellectual Self-Defense (Dec. 3rd, 2004) he said, “Intellectual self-defense is just training yourself to ask the obvious questions.”

Asking the obvious, telling the truth, critically examining things, using simple common sense. All fairly straightforward, all tools (weapons?) that you should have close by (clipped to your belt, clasped round your wrist, tucked in your backpack) as you sally forth, turning words into actions. Because activism, as Chomsky (and Sherlock!) said, is just “elementary.”

“There is an enormous amount of human suffering and misery, which can be alleviated and overcome. There is oppression that shouldn’t exist. There is a struggle for freedom all the time. There are very serious dangers: the species may be heading toward extinction. I don’t see how anybody can fail to have an interest in trying to help people become more engaged in thinking about these problems and doing something about them.”

- Democracy and Education (Feb. 7th, 2005)

What can you do?

“It’s only in highly privileged cultures like ours that people ask this question. We have every option open to us, and have none of the problems that are faced by intellectuals in Turkey or campesinos in Brazil. We can do anything. But people are trained to believe that there are easy answers, and it doesn’t work that way. If you want to do something you have to be dedicated and committed to it day after day. Educational programs, organizing, activism. That’s the way things change.”

“You aren’t supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about changes of consciousness and understanding. That’s a very dangerous idea, and therefore it’s been wiped out of history.”

- Collateral Language (April 5th, 2003)

A friend recently told me to read a book – A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn – and in it I am discovering for the first time a whole lot of the history that Chomsky claims has been stifled by the folks in charge. I read a lot as a kid. My education was subject to my whims, but I definitely hit on all the key points. In addition to whatever history book I was perusing, I read tons of historical fiction. I read about kids whose settler parents were scalped by Indians, kids who were indentured servants, drummer boys for the Revolutionary Army, kids who were runaway slaves, girls who worked in the mills, children who rode in wagons across the country to Oregon, Laura Ingalls Wilder etc., young ladies wearing bloomers and becoming the first lady doctors, black and white children going to school together… I felt like I had a good sense of American history – and I did, but perhaps not the best understanding of it.

With Zinn’s help, and Chomsky’s, and various and sundry others (my TBR pile is as massive as ever…) I’m getting closer to understanding I think. And it is dangerous. Reading about the labor strikes, about woman suffragettes, about people who strove so hard and long and sometimes achieved their goals is inspiring, and terrifying, and I can see why the folks in charge might want to keep the population dumbed down, numbed by a cheery onslaught of patriotic and religious propaganda.

“…you have to eliminate the threat that people might get together and try to achieve things like decent health care, decent wages, or anything that benefits the population and doesn’t benefit the rich.”

- Another World Possible (Feb. 8th, 2005)

And it’s been helpful to keep us afraid, and exploit that fear (one reason they succeeded in pulling off the invasion of Iraq…and why they’ll probably manage to do similar things in the very near future.)

“…for whatever reasons, the United States happens to be a very frightened country by comparative standards. Levels of fear here on almost every issue – crime, immigration, you pick it – are just off the spectrum.”

“It probably has to do with the conquest of the continent, when you had to exterminate the native population, and slavery, when you had to control a population that was regarded as dangerous, because you never knew when the slaves might turn on you.”

- Collateral Language (April 5th, 2003)

A fear-based society seems inevitable when you examine how things went down in this country, starting with Columbus and treading heavily to the present day. We’re a country full of various types of oppression, where “the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself.” (Intellectual Self-Defense, Dec. 3rd, 2004) Yuck.

Those tools I mentioned? We desperately need them – I desperately need them to help me fight against “a huge pressure to turn people into pathological monsters who care only about themselves, who don’t have anything to do with anyone else, and who therefore can be very easily ruled and controlled.” (Intellectual Self-Defense, Dec. 3rd, 2004)

We’ve got to start caring a whole lot more. We’re facing an epidemic of isolation, of not giving a damn. Community as something only the hippy-dippy types believe in, instead of being one of the single most powerful concepts in our tool bags. Caring for the people around us is a principle that “is considered subversive and has to be driven out of people’s heads”. It’s becoming a dying concept – “that we have a communal responsibility to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves, whether they’re children or the elderly” or destitute, or just need a little help. “That’s a community responsibility and, in fact, the community benefits from it collectively.” (Intellectual Self-Defense, Dec. 3rd, 2004)

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I’ve been working in a neighborhood in Bend, OR, building a fence, and dozens of folks who live there have driven slowly by, checking out the progress. A few have stopped to actually chat, and without fail, they have all assumed that it’s my house – that I live in their neighborhood. They can’t tell me apart from their real neighbors because they don’t know their neighbors. And frankly, I can’t claim to be better than them. I just met one of my next door neighbors yesterday, although I’ve lived here for nearly 2 months.

On the other hand…and maybe I’ll end this increasingly meandering collection of thoughts here, with a cheery story. Actually, one last thing from Chomsky, which leads into my story. In the final interview in the book – Another World Possible (Feb. 8th, 2005) – Barsamian referenced the World Social Forum, whose theme was that title phrase, not a question but an affirmation. He asked Chomsky, “What might another world look like that you would find attractive?”

To which Chomsky replied, “You start with small things.”

Armed with your tools, and expecting to be in it for the long haul, working slowly but relentlessly to shift people’s perceptions and break their habits, real change can happen. Tiny acts are revolutionary ones. Telling the truth. Caring about people.

My story is this: One of the neighbors who stopped by to investigate the fence inquired about where we got the fence rails. There were a bunch of 12 foot long rails from the old fence, heading toward a landfill somewhere I assumed, so I told this lady (I’ll call her Carry) that if she was looking for some, she should call the owner of the house and just ask if she could have these ones. Carry simply wanted to fix a bit of fence on her own property, and the cast-off rails were in decent enough shape. The idea hadn’t even occurred to Carry – to just ask for them – but she did, and the owner was only too happy to have someone else deal with their removal.

Carry has recently retired, and is in great shape and is very active, but the thought occurred to me that she might like some help fixing her fence. I have to constantly challenge myself to leave my comfort zone and interact with people (not just people in books…!) so it took me a few days to sort of work up the courage to ask her – and then I chickened out and ended up just leaving a note on her door, offering my services for anytime that coming Saturday.

Carry called me Saturday morning, super enthusiastic, and asked me to come over. I did so, and we had a lovely time chatting and made short work of the fence fix. She said more than once that it was so nice to have the company, and that she could have done it herself, but working with someone else made it so much more fun. She fed me enchiladas and a beer for lunch afterward, and insisted on paying me too.

Through our continuing chat over lunch we discovered a whole slew of common interests. She promised that my otherwise car-less self could tag along on any weekend hiking trips she goes on this summer. Sweet!

It gets better. The following week on a horridly rainy, cold day, Carry poked her head out her door and ordered my boss and I to come over for a lunch of hot chicken noodle soup. My boss was flabbergast. I was beside myself with joy.

THIS IS HOW IT WORKS! Building community is so easy. My little offer of an hours work led to lunch, and a few gifted piece of furniture for my barren room, and an upcoming house-siting gig, and, apparently, adoption. Carry is going to adopt me, so Mom, as I was instructed to tell you, rest assured that there is an adult looking out for me here in Bend! :)

—-

This book was a pretty powerful first encounter with Chomsky. It is exhilarating to hang out with him – walking a jagged line between inspiration and outrage, definitely getting charged and sharpened. I’m grateful to him.

And I’m grateful to my parents, for teaching me to love knowledge, to bravely go out seeking it whenever I choose to, and for helping me discover the tools that I’m still using today, as I travel this road – the one less traveled I think, as Frost said – through this big crazy world. Thanks!

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Posted in Adventure, Authors, Books, Famous People, Local/Community, Noam Chomsky, Non-Fiction, Non-sense, Personal, Reading, Scholarly Pursuits, State of the World | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: tuulenhaiven | March 25, 2013

Diana Wynne Jones and Her Amazing Striped Tights

Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011)

Diana Wynne Jones (1934-2011)

Thing are going round and round in my head, or maybe my head is going round and round in things. – Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

March is Women’s History Month and coincidentally, women have been much on my mind lately. I’m reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which gets up close and personal with the type of stories that the government and the ruling class would rather you didn’t learn about in school (according to Chomsky – more about that in a later post, I predict). Early on in the book he writes that one of his intentions is to find ‘those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.‘

I feel a sort of mission welling up inside of me, a powerful urge to start telling stories again. As a kid, homeschooled and left mostly to my own devices, for History I loved to research a famous person and then write a story about them, usually weaving in some magical elements which would allow me to time-travel into their daily life and have a random encounter. Such fun! I want to do this again, to some extent, and I’m drawn to the idea of seeking out interesting women who have been obscured by the way the history books are written, their stories lost amid the jumble of a male dominated society. I’d like to have some random encounters with some of the bad ass women of the past. That’s one idea.

The other idea that has been fermenting in my brain is taking my paper obsession to a new level and making some moves to improve my artistic skills. I’ve been wanting to go beyond drawing and my marker/colored pencil combo, and had toyed with the idea of taking up painting. I’m too broke to get the materials necessary for that endeavor however, so I turned to paper and the piles of catalogs that land in my mailbox every day. Free art supplies! A large library with a juicy arts and crafts section turned up Julie Nutting‘s Collage Couture, which set me off down a path that so far seems like the right one.

Something about making collage pictures of women, featuring fun clothes, to accompany or maybe even fully embody the stories I want to tell, feels completely right. We’ll see where I go with it!

I would like a pair of these tights!

I would like a pair of these tights!

The piece above and to the left was my trial run. It seemed appropriate to kick my project off by composing a celebration of Diana Wynne Jones (since it is DWJ March). I found a photo of her included in the blog post Neil Gaiman wrote soon after she died, (which never fails to make me cry,) where she was sporting these outrageously wonderful striped tights. Perfect.

I have lots of room for improvement when it comes to the execution of these pictures, and could use a few additional or different tools, but for today I’m pretty pleased with the results. It was great fun to put in lots of elements from the Howl books, and I got a kick out of cutting the clothes and hair off of catalog models and transforming them into DWJ and her worlds. It was an utterly satisfying project.

I have a copy of DWJ’s Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, and perhaps after I’ve read it I will get in my time machine and pay her a visit! Although she may not seem significant in the big picture of history, her quiet life of writing stories made a huge impact on how I understand the world. She’s exactly the sort of woman I hope to continue encountering as I dig into the pages of the past, excavating the spaces between words and the pauses at the end of sentences, where the buried women of history are waiting to leap out, shake the dirt off their clothes, and stand revealed – beautiful and powerful.

Let DWJ be the first in line!

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Posted in Adventure, Art, Arts and Crafts, Book related, Books, Diana Wynne Jones, Famous People, Fantastic Females, History, Howard Zinn, Non-sense, Reading, Scholarly Pursuits | Tags: , ,

Posted by: tuulenhaiven | March 19, 2013

Lava Tubes and Cinder Cones

Geological niftiness abounds in Central Oregon. The landscape around Bend is peppered with buttes, volcanic craters, cinder cones, and lava tubes. Nearby Newberry Volcano was active as recently as 1,300 years ago, and it’s prolific activity then and before that is evident in huge calderas and a mile long obsidian flow.

Such geological features thrill me and I can’t wait to explore every nook and cranny of the wilderness round my new home. Being on foot and bike has made my adventuresome pace significantly slower than usual, but this week I have access to an acquaintance’s car and have been making use of it!

My friend’s dog checks the perimeter

With a friend I found my way to a cave last Friday and was totally blown away by the bizarreness of these underground tunnels formed by molten lava (as the surface of the lava flows cooled the hot stuff on the inside kept flowing until eventually the tubes drained out and long, narrow tunnels were left behind.) There are over 300 such caves in Deschutes Nat’l Forest, and more riddle private lands. The one I visited was near Big Sky Dog Park and was hard to find. Even the entrance surprised me – it was more or less a huge hole in the ground, and if we hadn’t been searching high and low for it, we’d have surely missed it.

It was dark and quiet and cool inside this cave (45 degrees or so year round). The floor was sandy and the roof varied in height from high above to so low we had to crawl. Graffiti and bottles and other evidence of human mischief was a common and unsurprising sight. The walls curved and we had to pick which passage to explore at a fork. I started to feel like I had wandered into Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and suspected a prehistoric critter around every corner. Sadly (fortunately?) we didn’t even see a bat, and although it felt like we ventured deeper and deeper underground, in reality we probably went less than a 1/8 mile and probably not many feet. Still, it felt EPIC. I’m eager to check out another cave soon!

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Yesterday I took advantage of the early evening sunshine and drove out south of town into Deschutes Nat’l Forest, to catch the sunset from Bessie Butte. (A butte is a pretty specific land formation, but out here it gets applied liberally to isolated hills – or in this case, an extinct cinder cone.)

The Cascades from Bessie Butte

I love the orange light of pre-sunset and was delighted by how it set the green hillside of manzanita bushes glowing. This area burned in the 18 Fire of 2003, but has been replanted with little trees and is looking far from devastated at this point – although some rather dramatic reminders of the fire still exist.

What remains of Lodgepole Pines

The 3/4 mile trail wound up Bessie Butte offering great views of the Cascades, the city of Bend, and the surrounding area in all directions. Sunset behind Mt Bachelor was lovely and the purple twilight (it really was purple!) followed me back down to the car, where I lingered for awhile watching the stars come out, looking at the moon through my binoculars, and searching for the comet PANSTARRS (I’ve been looking for it since the 11th with no luck still…and running out of time. *sigh*)

And now it’s high time I scooted out of the house and set off on another adventure! Where have you been hiking lately?

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Posted in Adventure, Book related, Hiking/Walking, Non-sense, Photography | Tags: , , , , ,

Posted by: tuulenhaiven | March 17, 2013

Believing is Seeing: Seven Stories

by Diana Wynne Jones

Over at We Be Reading, Kristin is hosting some DWJ love, celebrating the author’s work throughout the month of March with readalongs, group Twitter viewings of Howl’s Moving Castle, guest posts, and giveaways. I welcomed the reminder to seek out some new-to-me DWJ, for although she is one of my favorite authors, I still have a lot of her back catalog to work through. When she died in 2011 I was glad that I had so many of her worlds left to explore, since her ability to create new ones had come to an end – at least, as far as we know! I don’t doubt that if she can, she will find a way to tell her stories from beyond the grave – and at the very least we who love her will go on sharing her stories.

Actually when I heard about DWJ March my first thought was to reread Howl’s Moving Castle, a book that has been on my Top 5 list since I finished reading the first chapter many years ago. I have owned a copy of it at various times, but it is a book that I give away the moment I discover someone hasn’t ever read it. My last copy went on its merry way late last December. Therefore I had to trip over to my local library, and even though they had the 1986 hardback which features my favorite cover art, I managed to talk myself into reading something new-to-me (as I said, I needed the reminder!)

Believing is Seeing features 7 stories written by DWJ between 1982 and 1996. Her introduction to the collection is fun, giving some background for how the stories came about, which is always of interest to me. I was tickled to find out that more than one of them started out as dreams. I used to write stories based on my dreams all the time. (I should probably start doing that again…!)

All of the stories are wonderfully inventive, with a light tone, but hitting some more thoughtful notes as well. In “The Sage of Theare” the gods try to outmaneuver Fate, and young Thasper dogs the steps of the mysterious Sage of Dissolution, who questions If rules make a framework for the mind to climb about in, why should the mind not climb right out?

“The Master” is a really strange, especially dream-like story of a young female vet’s encounter with a strange Fool in a house watched by wolves. “Enna Hittims” spells out the consequences of letting your imagination get the best of you (watch out for Magic Markers!) “The Girl Who Loved the Sun” is a rather haunting tale of a girl who can’t accept that she is lovely and lovable as she is, and insists on turning into a tree in order to win the Sun’s affection.

IMG_2483It’s hard to really pick a favorite from among the 7, but the last 3 seemed especially gripping. In “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” 14 year old Siglin has awakened into some powerful skills which are considered dangerous to posses – those who are discovered to be ‘heg’ are often killed by the Dragonate. On her way to be officially tried, Slavers attack and Siglin’s skills prove to be rather useful. The story is good, but what really struck me was DWJ’s ability to bring an entire world, military system, and a whole slew of characters into sharp and vibrant focus in just a few quick jots of her pen.

And then in “What the Cat Told Me” DWJ succeeds in instantly perfecting the voice of a cat, who while lazing about on a convenient lap and being stroked to her exacting commands, tells the tale of her years of enspelled servitude to wicked Old Man, and how she and Boy escaped their imprisonment.

Finally, in the utterly delightful “nad and Dan adn Quaffy” I was treated to a glimpse into what felt like a bit of DWJ’s life as a writer, complete with her most frequent typo problems. Sci-fi writer F. C. Stone experiences a bewildering afternoon when a voice coming out of her word processor appears to be that of a character from one of her books, and she is suddenly caught up in a story not quite of her own making.

Short stories aren’t always exactly how I like my tea, but this collection left me grinning (and a bit thoughtful) and also yearning to dip my own pen in some ink and get scribbling. I think that’s a reaction that would please DWJ. And I hope she really is still writing, somewhere beyond the grave, firing up the imaginations of whole other worlds.

We miss you here on Earth, DWJ, but we sure hope you’re having a blast wherever it is you’ve wound up!

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Posted in Authors, Book design, Books, Diana Wynne Jones, Non-sense, Reading, Short Story | Tags: , ,

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