Voldemort Defeats Me Too

I've been paying a smidge of attention to who is watching Game of Thrones and who is not.  I am not.  By the time someone told me I should tune in, there were 40 hours of show to watch.  I had already made the decision not to read the books, with their thousands of pages accumulated.  The sheer volume of it all was overwhelming.

The truth is that there's never been so much quality stuff to watch, and it should be easier than ever.  But I find myself appreciating old fashioned TV, where I can watch an episode here or there, and if I don't tune in for 6 months, I can easily drop back in.  And if I don't, that's fine too.

When Harry Potter was big, I was the only one in my circle who hadn't read the books.  Even my friends without children read the books.  I did see the first several movies, but I stopped somewhere along movie 5, where the movie was literally too dark to see on my TV screen.  Life is too short to squint for 3+ hours.

But a few months ago, I read Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny:  Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.  In chapter 9, "Be Kind to Our Language," he says, "One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J.K. Rowling's, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  If you or your friends or your children did not read it that way the first time, then it bears reading again" (pp. 62-63).

I decided it was time to try to enter Harry Potter's world again.  I had hopes that my familiarity with the movies might help me understand the plot and the characters.

But I just can't keep going:  130 pages, and I'm confused and frustrated and wondering when the action will happen.

 

I'm throwing in the towel.  Life is short, and there's so much to read.

 

I am happy to have retrieved a memory.  When I read Voldemort's name, I was reminded of a president at my old school who was stymied and when he wasn't stymied, he made progress at what appeared to be an attempt to destroy what we had all built.  It became clear that we should be careful when we talked about him, even if we thought no one could hear.  And so, we named him Voldemort.

 

It probably fooled no one.  In retrospect, those of us talking probably were beneath his notice.  But the memory of us adopting that name for the one who seemed to be an arch villain made me smile--while also making me wince.

 

Would that be a useful nugget for the collection of short stories I'm writing?  One hundred years from now, will the reference to Voldemort be understood?

 

How much a part of popular culture will these books remain?  I suspect that they have serious staying power.

Good Reading for Sleepless Nights

The last few nights have been somewhat sleepless.  I'm the first one on the list of people the alarm company calls when the alarm goes off at school.  We've had calls two nights in a row about the same classroom.  The first night, Friday night, it took me 2 hours to fall back asleep.  Last night I had trouble sleeping, but when the call came, I did manage to fall back asleep.

The first night, I got up and read two chapters of the last Harry Potter novel.  I'm finding myself frustrated in the same ways (moments of delight at the inventiveness punctuated by long spells of boredom when I think about scenes that could be eliminated or condensed) that I was with the first 2 novels, and I don't know if I'm up for 700+ more pages of this.

Last night, I read Love, Henri:  Letters on the Spiritual Life, a collection of Henri Nouwen's letters.  What a delight!  I'm not done yet, but it has captivated me--I can't wait to return to it.

I had hoped that it would be this kind of reading experience.  I've always loved Nouwen's journals more than his more intentional writing.  And when I've read work pulled from letters he wrote, I've loved that too. 

His letters are full of warmth and honesty, no matter the audience.  They're also full of good advice, even now, decades after they were written for someone specific.  Here's an example:  ". . . we would do well to think about what pastoral care for nostalgic people means.  After all, don't we all desire to return to paradise?" (p. 8).

I was also intrigued by his work/academic/pastor life trajectory:  not serious to get tenure at some schools, not theologically minded enough, not focused on regular pastoral life, so hard to please everyone.

The beginning material by the woman who compiled the text also provided fascinating insight into his writing life, his letter writing life.  He was so meticulous, and even though his letters may talk about how long it has taken him to respond, he was responding to lots of people and staying connected.

I wish I could say that after reading his work, I fell into a blissful, non-worried sleep, but that was not the case.  I read his book and wanted to write letters or theology or stay up late praying.  To me, that's the mark of a wonderful book.

Birthday Report

My birthday got off to a rousing start:  a few Facebook birthday good wishes and then off to spin class, where my spin class buddies sang "Happy Birthday" to me.  We had a vigorous spin class--it was great.

No one at work realized it was my birthday, which was fine with me.  Every so often through the day, I checked on Facebook, where everyone knew it was my birthday.

I had planned to have our regular Friday meal:  my favorite meal of burgers and wine.  I thought that in honor of my birthday, we'd have a better quality of wine.  But it didn't come to the wine store in time, so in some ways, it felt like a regular Friday.

We spent some time in the pool.  I feel like we've spent the summer fixing the pool, with no time to be in the pool, so it was lovely to finally have a pool evening.

We may grill flank steak this week-end, but primarily because it was on sale, not because of my birthday.  We'll have the better quality wine with the flank steak.

 

In short, it's likely to be a quiet-ish birthday week-end, but I'm truly OK with that.  I spend so much of the week feeling tired and rushed and overextended that the idea of quietness at home, with better wine than I could afford at a restaurant, is truly happiness to me.

 

I've watched other people get upset over how people remember or don't remember special days.  I've watched people spend gobs and gobs of money, often money they don't have, in an attempt to have a high holy day of activities and gifts.

 

So yes, it will be a good birthday week-end.  But it won't be vastly different from most week-ends--and that's what makes me feel truly fortunate.  I don't have a life that's so difficult that I need to make birthdays such a focal point. 

 

Plus, as I age, I realize how lucky I am to be here to celebrate another year.  So I try to inject that awareness into each and every day, even if it's just appreciating my petunias on the porch or a glass of wine at the end of the day or how wonderful that first cup of coffee tastes in the morning.

 

 

Of Bastille Day and Birthdays

Today we have another chance to celebrate the human thirst for liberty and to ponder who gets to enjoy equality and who does not.  It's Bastille Day, the French equivalent (sort of ) of our Independence Day. I see this historical event as one of many that launched us on the road to equality. It's an uneven success to be sure. More of us in the first world enjoy more liberty than those in developing nations. But that thirst for freedom and equality found some expression in the French Revolution, and I could argue that much liberation theology has some rootedness in that soil (yes, it would be a problematic argument, I know).

Today is also my birthday.  Even though it's a Friday, we'll probably enjoy this Friday the way we enjoy most Fridays:  burgers and wine and a quiet evening at home.  I will stop at Hollywood Vine in downtown Hollywood to get a better quality of wine than we usually drink on Fridays, but that will likely be my main culinary celebration.

I will go to work because work is not onerous.  Why burn a vacation day for a birthday?  I spent many a lonely birthday as a child or teen because my birthday was in the summer and everyone was on vacation elsewhere.

We'll have a relatively quiet birthday week-end.  My spouse began his second summer session classes behind, so we're trying not to schedule too much.  I will go to my quilt group tomorrow, which will be a treat.  We may grill flank steak, but not because it's my birthday week-end but because it was on sale.

I will also listen to the music of Woody Guthrie because it's his birthday too.  I've long been fascinated by Woody Guthrie, probably ever since childhood, when I realized we shared a birthday. When I went to elementary school in the 1970's, we sang "This Land Is Your Land" far more than we sang "God Bless America." In fact, Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land Is Your Land" in direct response to "God Bless America." "This Land Is Your Land" is a much better song, but of course, I'm biased.

As elementary school children, we didn't sing the most radical verse:

"As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there
And that sign said - no tress passin'
But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!"
Those verses are fairly radical, the idea that the land belongs to us all. I love it.

I find Guthrie fascinating as an artist. Here's a singer-songwriter who doesn't know music theory, who left behind a treasure trove of lyrics but no music written on musical staffs or chords--because he didn't know how to do it. For many of the songs that he wrote, he simply used melodies that already existed.

I think of Woody Guthrie as one of those artists who only needed 3 chords and the truth--but in fact, he said that anyone who used more than two chords is showing off. In my later years, I've wondered if he developed this mantra because he couldn't handle more than 2 chords.

I love this vision I have of Guthrie as an artist who didn't let his lack of knowledge hold him back. I love how he turned the deficits that might have held a lesser artist back into strengths. I love that he's created a whole body of work, but his most famous song is still sung by schoolchildren everywhere, and how subversive is that?

Tag Team Life

I don't have as much time to write this morning.  I met my Hindu writer book lover friend for dinner at Panera, stopped in at Trader Joe's on the way home, and drove home, keeping a wary eye on the sky.

The clouds were purple and black and glowing--once I would have said, "It's a Steven Spielberg sky."  Now I'm not sure that people would know what I meant.  It was the kind of sky where I expected the clouds to part in a swirling hole that would reveal an alternate world.

Instead, it just opened up to rain.  We have the remnants of a tropical system over us, which is better than having a developed tropical system over us.

I stayed up late to make sure that my spouse got home from his class in Miami--and then we stayed up, in part because he's always too wound up after teaching to go to bed, and in part, because we wanted to catch up.

My spouse and I will do tag team chicken and dumpling making this morning.  I have a chicken in the pot, and the house smells wonderful.

It's not as stormy as I thought it would be this morning.  But even if the skies clear completely, it will be good to know that a pot of chicken and dumplings awaits at the end of the day.

Chocolate Potlucks and Other Adventures

Yesterday was a great day at school.  We had a chocolate potluck day.  There's always that fear that we won't have enough food, although for an event like this, we're not serving a meal--it would be enough if everyone just had a taste.  I  brought a Mississippi Mud cake to share. It's the heaviest cake I've ever made, dense and sweet as a recipe that hails from the 1970's should be. I cut it into very small pieces, since I knew it may be a bit much for modern palates.

We had 5 batches of brownies--every single brownie devoured.  Half of my Mississippi Mud cake was left, along with some cookies--we saved those for the evening students. I have heard that they feel left out of these events, so I've been trying to remember to include them.

And as they arrived to class, they seemed pleased, although I'm not sure they realized that a chocolate potluck was planned for the day.

I'm calling this event a success!

I'll post the recipe later, in case you want to make one for yourself or for someone you know who needs to put on weight.

I also had a chance to talk with people about other ideas I've had.  I'm still working with the idea of a food pantry or bags of food that they can get.  One of our instructors just had her father die, and he was the kind of man who stocked up on lots of canned goods, the kind of food that the instructor and her daughter aren't likely to eat, like ravioli or vegetables.  When she's ready to sort them, we'll talk more about starting a food bag initiative.

I talked to a student who wanted a copy of his schedule.  I noticed that he had an odd-for-our-students with a class Tuesday morning and a class Tuesday night.  He said that he'd had some issues with his car, and he would be more likely to make it to class if he could keep it all on one day.  I'd been thinking about a ride share board, and he and I talked about whether or not it could work.

I had worried that students might take advantage of each other, by charging too much to share a ride.  But we agreed that students are adults who won't have to accept terms and conditions if they don't like them.  We agreed that there's risk of an accident, but they'd have that risk with Uber or Lift.  I didn't tell him about my fear that someone might be driven somewhere and attacked, but I do worry about that.

So at today's management team meeting, I'll bring it up.  We have extra bulletin boards--it wouldn't take much to launch this idea.

I like being at a place that's small, where I can actually do activities to make the school better and to keep the students feeling more connected.  I feel very lucky.

Apocalyptic Scenarios

Yesterday afternoon I read this article on the coming environmental apocalypse.  It begins this way:  "It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today." 

The piece of click bait that worked on me was this nugget:  "The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade."

It's a sobering article accompanied by some interesting art pieces, yet it didn't tell me much that I don't already know.  Of course, I've been thinking about these issues for a long time now.  Ironically, it was global climate change that convinced us to move to southern Florida rather than the desert southwest.  In the middle 1990's when we were making these decisions, I didn't include sea level rise in my calculations.  It wasn't expected to be that bad in our lifetime.  Now, it might be.

I expect that most of us will leave the area long before the sea swallows the land.  It's hard to tell what will drive the bulk of us away first.  Housing is pricey, and a large part of that price is the insurance that it takes to live here.  We are upper-middle class people, and each year when I open the homeowners insurance and wind insurance and flood insurance, I spend several weeks wondering how long we can continue to live here.

At some point the cost of drinking water may become unsustainable.  For now, we have a wonderful aquifer that runs below us.  We won't drink up all that water in my lifetime, but saltwater intrusion will likely happen--and then we'll have to pay much more for the water.

Why live here?  For one thing, it's a matter of sunk cost--we've already invested a lot, so we may as well enjoy it while we can.  And it's not like there's lots of jobs further inland and upland.  But it's mainly because I haven't gotten a clear sign that it's time to go.

Of course, once I get that sign, it may be more difficult.  The first house that is declared uninsurable will mean that the rest of us can't sell our houses.  The first taste of salt in the drinking water may lead to panic.

As the article comes to an end, the essayist wonders why we're not seeing climate change in our creative writing:  "So why can’t we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t become major subjects of contemporary fiction — why we don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.” “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ” His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate."

I'm not sure I agree with the premise, yet I can't summon non-science fiction works to rebut the claim. I would argue that we see poetry exploring these ideas far more effectively than most genres.

It's an interesting call to artists.  Let me ponder it.