Home to Ghosts and Memories

We spent two nights in northern Wales last summer, staying at Galedffrwd Mill B&B near Bethesda. Our host told us about a long-abandoned graveyard near the crumbling foundation of a stone church, and we went to find it toward dusk of a gloomy day. The next morning we returned to take a few pictures, which in no way capture the eerie aura of the previous night's visit.

Bethesda is part of a huge slate quarrying area of Wales. Whole sides of mountains remain ripped and shredded as a result of once-thriving, now lost, industry.

Most of the markers in this cemetery appeared to us to be made of slate. They surely mark the resting places of tough quarrymen and their equally tough families. They seemed to be in as good a shape as they day they were cut and inscribed...lasting monuments to the people whose labor blasted and cut them from earth's grip.




If you want to remember me, make me a grave marker of slate, not granite. In the meantime, if you want to wonderful place to stay in a fascinating corner of the British Isles, book a room at Galedffrwd Mill B&B.

Happy Halloween!

Mid-October Pansy Honors All Late-Bloomers AGAIN

Last week I cut back the sprawling remains of a peony, and this delicate pansy - a leftover from two seasons past - smiled at me. During the summer I had felt sorry for the poor plant’s ungainly stems, no match for the summer’s extremes of heat and rain. It was a being that held no promise. For some reason I decided to let it be, and forgot about it. But on October 10 it stood up to surprise me.

Proof of life’s tenacity? Perhaps, but something more than basic cell survival is at work here. I saw the pansy’s blossoms as proof of beauty’s durability. In the face of adversity beauty, when graciously protected and not yanked from its soil too quickly, can remain...can even surprise us and bring a smile to our faces.

Degrees of Truth

Sunday the Plain Dealer ran a piece by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer in which he took off (as usual) against all things Obama. His last point described the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching,” and as “indignant indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees...” Obama’s crime is understanding their cause.

I can let all of Krauthammer’s searing charges against Occupy’s forces pass except the one about having “English degrees.” ’Tis the unkindest cut of all. Garrison Keillor will not take it lying down. I won’t either.

Why would a columnist who uses the English language to make his living speak disparagingly of English majors? Because he is one of that company of writers and talking heads who abuse the English language to make their points. That way they can make a living off readers who have little regard for language’s primary responsibility to represent truth--literally or figuratively or however truth can be represented.

For Krauthammer and his fawning readers the difference between truth and falsehood is of no consequence if what he writes confirms their mutual prejudices. He uses the English language as a blunt weapon to pummel his targets into submission. He cheapens English by using it carelessly, randomly, and oh-so-very cutely. A person with an English degree who has learned anything at all can spot his kind in a minute and call their bluff. They are called “elites,” though I personally know few English majors who are elite in a convincing manner. But of course, he doesn’t care about them because he’s got his readership, and he’s got editors who have little concern for truth in opinion pieces if it sells papers.

There is a vast difference between an article that reasonably presents cases for and against matters such as Occupy Wall Street and an article that pitches junk words and phrases into the wind and hopes they land on some “enemy” somewhere. English majors know that, which may be why they are protesting corporate excesses that attempt to masquerade as reasonable corporate profit.

The Plain Dealer’s Kevin O’Brien is a second-rate minion of Krauthammer. Rush Limbaugh presides as glorious leader of the pack from out in talk-radio land. Sadly, the left also has those who forge English into blunt weapons: Maureen Dowd for one; Michael Moore for another. 

Krauthammer claims “the real (?) Tea Party”, unlike Occupy Wall Street, has “a program--less government, less regulation, less taxation, less debt.” All together now, you indolent English majors, “Do those things, one-by-one or taken together, constitute a ‘program’?” Not in any sense of that word, no.

One last confession: my bachelor’s degree is in philosophy. No doubt there are plenty of us elite philosophers out there in the streets, too. Something about searching for an honest columnist, I suspect.

apo's'trophe's'

A paper sign posted deep inside Cleveland's University Hospital complex reads:

EMPLOYEE'S

ONLY

EMPLOYEE'S

ONLY

EMPLOYEE'S

ONLY

What behind that door could possibly be some poor employee's only...? I almost opened that door to see for myself.

Franzen's Freedom

Freedom

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is a pretty good book, by which I mean it’s not, in my estimation, a book deserving all the praise it garnered from Time. The writing is generally engaging, and the characters are sharply drawn and almost believable. I read the first hundred pages or so while we were visiting my sister-in-law this summer: it was on the nightstand of the room where we slept. Those opening pages captivated me sufficiently to make me want to get Freedom for myself, which I did by making it my first new-novel downloaded to my Nook. Very liberating.

Around page 300 I was ready to give up. The characters seemed sorry mixtures of cluelessness, heartlessness, carelessness, and overall hopelessness. Page upon page of self-centered stupidity...or is it stupid self-centeredness? Even the noble environmental ideals held by some of the characters didn’t seem likely to save them from themselves (and they didn’t).

Until Joey, around page 388, faces up to his own crap and deals with it. Literally. You have to read the book to know just how literally. From that point on Joey leads the procession toward the “salvation” of the others, whose lives turn around along with his. Freedom lurches forward toward happily ever-after conclusions for most of its main characters.

It is hard to imagine that the same people could be so bad for 380 pages and then so good after a couple of hundred more. No, their transformations are not easy, and redemption comes at a high cost for some. Facing our own crap is not pleasant, even when it’s figurative. But the main characters seem so ideal and idealized at the end that it’s hard to connect the people they have become to the people they once were. Such complete changes in people usually only happen in religiously motivated fiction, which I generally distrust.

Despite my qualifications, I recommend the book. It writes large the frantic search for authenticity many Americans are engaged in today. It may force some readers to check through their own crap, and come to terms with it. Frankly, it did that just a little bit for me. But not enough to make me ideal. Not yet, anyway. Not until I stop grasping for freedom.

Here are some quotes from Freedom I like and why:

“Richard, flummoxed, kept stepping outside to smoke cigarettes and fortify himself for the next round of Berglund fraughtness...” (p. 141 [Nook]) Franzen may have invented “fraughtness” - a great addition to the English language!

“There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it’s never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness.” (144-145) “stillness experiences pain in being broken.” I remember the first sounds of my mother in our kitchen on Iowa mornings.

“The angry words he’d spoken to his father had felt pre-formed, as if there were an aggrieved second self inside him 24/7, ordinarily invisible but clearly fully sentient and ready to vent itself, at a moment’s notice, in the form of sentences independent of his volition. It made him wonder who his real self was; and this was very disturbing...” (252) Ah yes, I know the experience well. “Who am I really, that I could say such things? And who are you that I would say them to you?”

“The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.” (400) I think of the Tea Party; some of you probably think of “ultra-liberals.” We’re all on to something.

“At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart...” (478) Good place to stop, don’t you think?

WAIT! One more...

“Walter had never liked cats. They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries, saluting the uniforms of killers as cat owners stroke their animals’ lovely fur and forgive their claws and fangs.” (491) Can’t think about that one too much either, lest my heart break for our world.

Thanks for reading.