Guaranteed Thoughts

 

 

Storm Spiders

 

At night

after the storm 

broken branches

litter the road 

like giant tarantulas.

 

My Grandfather's Gun

I have my grandfather's gun, a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. I don't know if he ever fired it. I also have my other grandfather's gold deputy sheriff's badge for Kent County, Michigan. Both enlisted in the Army in WWI. By WWII, they were in their 40s. As the younger men went off to war, both served as volunteer Deputy Sheriffs. Both had John in their name. Named after their fathers. 

 

Reading About Jack Kerouac

All the life put into him: the books, the trips, the loves, the seasons. And then one moment. like everyone else, it's gone.

 

Expiration Date

 

Time arrives in crates

from a far off distributor

unloaded in the back room

and sold retail.

 

The Optimist Creed

The green light is always waiting for you at the busy intersection.

A TIME OF GIFTS

An all time favorite travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, who wrote among other things, a trilogy of books about his walk from the hook of Holland to Constantinople. He was 18 at the time and crossed through Europe in 1933-4 as it was slowly moving toward a war footing. Fermor is a favorite because of his gift with language -- his travel narratives descriptions are more like poetry than prose. Later, he fought in WWII in a British commando force conducting raids in Germany occupied Crete, including the kidnapping of a German General. He was later knighted for his services. Fermor's writing is truly one of a kind by combining adventure and his gift for language, he keeps you turning the page to see what person or village he would encounter next. I even wrote a Cento poem derived from the first book, A Time of Gifts that was published.

Sharing a random sample of some phrases I like (this is about a tenth of what I underlined):

I was abroad at last, far from my familiar habitat and separated by the sea from the tangles of the past; and all this combined with the wild and growing exhilaration of the journey, shed a golden radiance.

...a hangover from early anarchy.

He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness, which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.

...napkins were half mitres and half Rajput turbans. 

...terrifying glamor.

...steaming rustics. 

...vanished from the scene but deep in the bloodstream nonetheless.

Moody and unbalanced, he lived in an atmosphere of neo-plantonic magic, astrology and alchemy.

a vagabond full of random learning.

... all prospects glowed.

... irredeemable pumpkins.

... fast and ugly deeds.

 

 

BLACK FRIDAY AMUSEMENTS

Every few months I clean out miscellaneous scraps from my journal and set them on the back porch. Offering these up on Black Friday for your minor amusement. 

 

World Travel

 

If I'm sitting at my local coffee shop

it's everday.

If a person from Mongolia is sitting at my local coffee shop

it's world travel.

 

Band Name Generator

 

The Papal Snoods

The Terrible Suggestions

The Eckington Dump

Leper's Squints

Popskull [19thC slang for cheap whisky]

 

Shopping Blahs

 

Low fat 

this and that

 

Memory Climate

 

The cold ember 

of a hot memory

Cento from The Third Coast, Thomas Dyja

It was a voluntary madhouse

a museum of expired vices

a final cry 

for ruined lives.

 

Night Time

 

Sometimes midnight is not 

late enough for midnight thoughts

Maybe 3am or thereabouts

When I can hear the flag rustling 

in the cold wind. 

 

Memorable Names from the book, Journey to a War, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood

Agnes Smedley

General von Faulkenhauser

W. Fitzhugh Brundage 

A Naked Advance

No one never not noticed the nudist.

Cheer Up

His soup was lumpy

which made him grumpy

and his family jumpy

A While Back

 

The sharp dark

of the old park

and a youthful lark.

WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?

If there is a theme for this post it's information, knowledge, and memory. As we're still struggling with the early growing pains of the Information Age, we're trying to understand what effects technology have had on humans changes  and what changes it have on us in the future. We take for granted that the information at hand is correct and easily accessible. But easy access to information is only a recent phenomena. There is an irony here in the Information Age, we are more challenged in understanding whether information is true and correct. It's nothing new that political powers have always sought to control access to information and even to control its existence.  

Here's a short collection of books from the last year or two of reading on the topic.

 

1. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch (2021). In the Information Age, it's hard to believe that we have to go back to basics know how we know things about the world. Philosophers call this area of study Epistemology. Rauch explores how political power is engaged in information warfare. In particular, he focuses on how the digital age of the internet no longer values truth. Democracies, he says, much have a peaceful method for groups to settle disagreements to move forward. He examines the 2016 and 2020 elections as case studies. Bought new.

 

2. When We Are No More: How Digital Memory is Shaping our Future, Abby Smith Rumsey (2016). As a former librarian at the Library of Congress, Dr. Rumsey is my kind of person--she is a champion of books. Her book highlights the importance the creation of books and the printing press had on building civilization. This accelerated the need to build libraries, archives, and museums to tell our story. She takes us up to the digital era where the information explosion has overwhelmed our limited resource -- attention and our ability to understand what's important. She calls for a cultural and digital strategy to determine how to manage the ever growing torrent of information. Bought new. 

 

3. Freedom, Sebastian Junger (2021). This may seem likely an unusual book to include but Sebastian Junger has been exploring big questions of human behavior since Into Thin Air and his several books about soldiers in Afghanistan, Restrepo, War, and Tribe. In Freedom, Junger and three friends walk railroad lines of the mid-Atlantic and into remote areas of central Pennsylvania. Along the way, he uses his encounters as a backdrop to explore competing ideas of freedom and community. His short book, divided into three sections: Run, Fight, and Think. He leads up to a central question: how do governments share power with people you disagree with--may even hate? Bought new.

 

4. Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up? Joshua Fairfield (2021). From a legal perspective, law seems to fall behind the ever accelerating change in technology. Laws on technology on 20 and 30 years old are obsolete. Joshua Fairfield, a professor at Washington and Lee College of Law, believes law can keep up but it's a question of language. This involves more conversation in a community setting and not in the courts. Bought new.

 

5. Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Eric Berkowitz (2021). An example of the adage, knowledge is power, is where those in power try to control information and ideas. Berkowitz takes us back to classical Rome where Roman Law allowed for the politicians and generals to be subjected to damanatio memriae ("condemnation of memory"). All memorials and writings would be destroyed as a way of "un-remembering" a public figure. In 213 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, ordered the burning of books and burying of scholars and supposedly ordered the live burial of 460 Confucian scholars so that history might begin with him.  Modern China now tries to manage the public's memory by removing certain stories within its control on the Internet. Berkowitz finds many examples through history up to current time where lethal outrage is used to obliterate the mere mention of a book. Bought new.