SmokeSound

Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey, was published more than a hundred years ago--in 1912--and it remains one of the most famous of American Westerns literature. Mari and I had tickets to see the premier of what I think is the first opera based on a rip-snorting, Wild West, good-guy, bad-guy, gun-totin', cowboy and cowgirl story, so we downloaded the book itself. It is more the story of a strong and good woman than it is about cowboys and Indians.  All of the Indians in southern Utah seem to have been disappeared before Jane Withersteen inherited her grand, purple-saged ranch.  What was left behind were Mormons and Gentiles, who did not get along any better than cactus and coyotes. Jane is the good guy--strong, decent, good-looking, god-fearing, single, and stubbornly refusing to marry a Mormon man so that her eternal soul could be saved and she could make more little Mormons.  Mormons generally, but a Mormon bishop and elder in particular, are the bad guys.

Once upon an actual time, while living in Berkeley, California-- a student at a theological seminary-- I enrolled in a short course at U.C. Berkeley in beginners' Swedish.  I do not know why. All of my foreskins (as Stan says it) were from Norway.  It might have been because Norwegian was not offered. The instructor laughed pleasantly and said that my attempts to pronounce Swedish sounded Norwegian.  I thought that odd, because I could not speak Norwegian. But then I realized that my father was born in Norway, and my mother's parents and grandparents were from Norway, too. My great-grandmother never spoke English, and nearly everyone else did so with an accent. "Ja," my Dad might have said, but probably didn't, "it kind of sticks vitt you."  It stuck vitt me. I did learn Norwegian, later, in the college where I taught, first from Harald Jensen, a Norwegian born instructor, and later from Audun Jensen, unrelated to Harald, but al

For some years, I taught a course on the Arthurian legends, as a way that England came to define itself. Once, when Winston Churchill was asked if the legends were true--that is to say, historical--he said: "They are true.  They are all true, or they ought to be,  and more and better besides!" I wrote a rather long poem about the Knights of the Round Table, and read it as a chapel talk, there where I taught, thinking to explain, without saying it, how it was not only England that created such myths, built on small fragments of historical fact, in order to explain who they were, what their ideals are; something of themselves and what they ought to be. And in that poem, which I have not seen for years, I recalled that my mother scolded me in the morning, recognizing that I must have been awake, all night again, reading; that there were morning chores to be done, and school to go to.  And I had been awake, reading from a stack of Zane Grey books left behind by a previous

Who is going to explain to President Trump that just to be consistent with himself he is going to have to bring all his hotels and golf courses back into the United States? Make Gary, Indiana great again?  Put one there on the site of an old steel mill.  Right after he takes all of Iraq's oil, he can take a Scottish links course. Bring 'em both home.  Lower his taxes.                                                                    Oh, I forgot.

 When Cooper snaps to attention and hassles us to let him out into the back yard, we usually check beneath the bird feeder first. Cooper, part miniature Doberman Pinscher, part Chihuahua, and part demented politician, has an enormous estimation of himself. When the javelinas come grunting,  hoping that the Gambel's quail or Gray squirrel might have tipped the seed block to the ground, Cooper meets them headlong at the fenceline, with the fence between them.   The javelinas are not terrified so much as surprised, and I worry that one day they may test the fence in their charging. Coyote is quiet, skittish, and really agile. If the day comes, Coyote will leap the fence as if it were not there, as we saw a Rabbit do one day when Cooper spied it up at the round house. And Coyote is not a vegetarian. We can almost chart Coyotes as they work through the neighborhood, by listening to the dogs make foolish threats. When they co

“Look at what’s happening in Europe. Look what’s happening in Germany. Look at what’s happening to Sweden. They have a small section of Sweden which is beyond out of control, all right?” Trump told Stephanopoulos. When I read that, I naturally assumed that Mr. Trump was referring to Norway, out of control ever since they found oil and stuck it to the Swedes by trying to buy Volvo.  But no, there was a small fire at an immigrant community somewhere in Sweden, which the Swedes have not called a terrorist attack, although it did melt some snow.   Mr. Trump once claimed that his grandfather was Swedish, but that did not turn out to be true, either.  The Swedes have called that claim a terrorist attack.   An Out-of-Control Swede

Mari is a marvelous grandmother.  For instance, Jao rarely comes to our home without there being a small toy, or gift of some kind, waiting for him:  a puzzle, a paint set, some tiny characters,  or--recently--a way to mix colored drinks for us all. "You like mixing colors and chemicals, don't you?", she asked Jao.  "Is that what you would want to be when you grow up:  a chemist?" "No," Jao replied.  "A dinosaur." Sometimes grandparenting feels like that, too.

 "Can you see," I asked Mari, "whether there is seed in the bird feeder?" I was leaning over the sink, parting the mint leaves growing in a pot on the sill.  My eyesight is no longer as keen as a hawk's, nor a mole, for that matter. As I often do, I filled the feeder, and just for good measure, threw a scoopful on the ground, beneath, for a starter.  Then I watched the Gambel's quail, especially, come scooting back from nearby bush-retreats. Normally, the ground-feeding quail just camp out beneath the feeder, waiting for the picky little buggers on the feeder to kick away what they do not prefer.  A starter scoopful is like Vegetarian Thanksgiving, if you can appreciate that sort of thing. "Careful!", I called out.  "There is a Cooper Hawk in the neighborhood, who is not a vegetarian!" They knew.

"All we want are the facts, ma'am."  --Joe Friday I have been attending a series of lectures at the University, presented by the Physics department:  "Rethinking Reality". It is odd to realize how much the word "reality" is in contrast to the mood of our time.  To use the most obnoxious example, some politicians find it comfortable to speak of "alternative facts".  That is to say, to assert non-facts--just an assertion--as a fact, as if one can simply choose what to call a fact, as one might choose to wear a red-white-and blue tie instead of a green one. It is even stranger to recognize that a couple thousand people are crowding into Centennial Hall for each lecture, as if there were no alternative facts, at all :  just facts. Once upon a long time ago--before there was grass--I sat in a Sunday School class thinking about Moses crossing the Red Sea, or Jesus walking on water, and thought to myself:  "The world doesn't work

This is where we are now: our President is governing by proclamation, and inordinately proud of his signature. Every time he signs a miserably crafted order, he holds it up so that we can see his very bold, decisive, reality-changing signature. That is the problem with Twitter: you really do not have a place for a really good signature. "#TrumpRules!" does not cut it. It is like a ball-point alongside a Montblanc. I will not say that Ego is our President. I will say that Ignorance and Narcissism are. Like many people in business, Donald Trump seems to believe that government should be run like a business; like a car dealership, or a hardware store; like a for-profit college or business school; like a Trump business. Government is not a for-profit business: it is a solemn pact to be a nation; to live in peace and to provide for the common good. Government is how we manage our life together, how we provide for our common defense and civil order,

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Mark Twain told us that, and said that Benjamin Disraeli said it first. Today we might say, "There are lies, damned lies, and alternative facts". Alternative facts are damned lies dressed up in Ivanka Trump's father's clothing no longer sold at Nordstroms.

I do not know what brings this to mind. President Harry Truman's daughter, Margaret, apparently thought of herself as a singer.  Perhaps because she was the President's daughter, she was accorded a chance to sing at Constitution Hall. Paul Hume was the music critic for The Washington Post, and he wrote that the concert did not go well.  Her voice, he said, was pleasant, but of little size and fair quality, and that she could not sing very well; that she sang flat a good deal of the time, as she had been doing for years; that she could not sing with anything approaching professional quality. Mr. Truman, a mean piano player himself, sat down at his desk and wrote to Mr. Hume. Dec. 6, 1950 Mr. Hume: I've just read your lousy review of Margaret's concert. I've come to the conclusion that you are an "eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay." It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such

When the trees were young, I worked with Upward Bound, --one of those dreadful government programs-- that encouraged promising high school kids to consider going to college, even if circumstances had not urged them. A first-generation college student myself, even late in the twentieth century, I knew how easy it was to ignore what were not family and social habits. Ben Bear was from the Mesquakie Settlement, a place in Iowa where Native Americans acquired land for themselves after being shoved around like pawns by the Bishops and Castles, Knights and Kings and Queens behind them. In our little town there was a men's clothing store-- Ben Bear--so I invented a short course called, "The Other Ben Bear", and they were delighted to help us let Ben learn the history of the Other Ben. Ben Bear.  There must be a Bear Clan there; some admiration for, and identification with, everything that makes a bear.  Having come from a codfish family myself, I shoul

Once upon a time, when I was middle-aged and green under the academic boughs, I taught ethics in a midwestern college.  It was in the 1970s--before and after--when the Cold War was not cold.  East Germans had built a big, beautiful wall along their border with West Berlin. [Historical Note:  East Germany is not the same as Mexico:  there is an ocean of difference between them. A wall, though, is pretty much a wall, anywhere.] When our discussions turned to matters of war and peace, cold and hot, sometimes we got bogged down with well-established, life-long political and religious and social convictions, so to loosen up the crystalline points of view, I proposed that instead of a nuclear arsenal large enough to sterilize the whole earth, we build, not a wall, but an arsenal of catapults along both coasts to keep us free from communists coming our way as the dominoes of world domination fell toward us.  I suggested that the catapults be armed with great gobs of green cow shit.  No

"Give me your tired, your poor,  your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,  the  wretched  refuse of your teeming shore.  Send these, the homeless,  tempest-tossed  to me,  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"