beach photos

Last year's beach trip was wonderful. This year, we're at new place on Kiawah, but still with Jami's mom and sister and our niece. I'm still getting used to being an uncle, but it's great. How could I have lived so much of my life without a niece?

beach reading

One of the joys of being at the beach is the reading that I can enjoy. Two years ago I brought 32 books to the beach, much to Jami's amusement. Last year, since I was flying and needed weight and space to be controlled, I took only 25 books. This year we're driving from Durham and, although space considerations don't dominate as they did last year, the choice of reading is critical.
Karl Barth- CD 4.1 or 4.2 - I'll probably take the latter.
NT Greek and the Metzger textual commentary and Zerwick dnd Grosevnor's grammatical analysis.
Hegel - Phenomenology of the mind.
Levinas - Totality and Infinity.
Whitman - Leaves of Grass.
John Ashberry - Your name here or Can you hear bird.
Donald Hall - selected poems.
Zizek - Parallax or Ticklish Subject.
Kenneth Burke - Attitudes toward history or Permanence and change.
Douglas Hall - Thinking the faith.
Oxford History of Art - 1851-1929 by Richard Brettell.
Keck's Romans commentary. Maybe the final volume of the anchor Exodus commentary?
NRSV
Freud - Ego and the Id, Civilization and its discontents, on art
Satre - Situations
Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of perception
Barbara Kingsolver - Pigs in heaven.
Wm Placher - Narrative of a vulnerable God.
AR Ammons - Glare.
Shakespeare's Tempest.
Milton (maybe?)

Do I want to take the Derrida reader or perhaps Caputo's Prayers of Jaques Derrida?
Is there more fiction I could bring?
Milosz's Treatise on Poetry?
Amos Wilder's Theopoetic?
Perhaps some Roth - Sabbath's Theatre?
Proust's Swann's way?
Every year I bring Finnegan's Wake along - this year too?

And there're so many other books that might catch my eye on the way out the door. I hope to have some balance between theology, philosophy, poetry, fiction. Plus there are dvds and cds to pick out. And my water colors along with brushes and paint. Painting at the beach is quite a treat.
And I have ten different beers to try. Mostly IPAs but some amber ales and a kolsch.
And that's a key: beach reading goes together with beach drinking.

The legend of Icarus

As we prepare for a week at the beach, my mind wanders to Icarus, a young man whose fault in life was to fly too close to the sun, becoming a metaphor for human ambition and unintended consequences. In Bruegel's depiction of his plight, he hits the water, a blip, unnoticed by the farmer on the hill overlooking the bay and unnoticed by the ships sailing out to sea. Since I wrote my library science thesis, the Iconography of the Book, wherein I used a sculpture of Icarus depicted as an open book face down in marble, I have thought about this myth frequently. What is it about this young boy, son of the great architect Daedalus, who crafted the labyrinth and made the mechanical cow for the queen, Pasiphae, to mate with the bull of Poseidon and produce the Minotaur, which had to be imprisoned in the labyrinth (for the good of every one). Is it his fault that his father was so crafty that they had to escape Minos via the device of wings held together by wax? This tale is so messed up that the least problematical aspect is that Icarus fell. It's no surprise that Icarus fell. The injunction to not travel too near the sun or too near the waves guaranteed failure. Or we could say that it required Icarus to fly a very level flight in turbulent circumstances.
Circumstances are weighed against Icarus. That he is criticized for flying too close to the sun, seems a moralistic embellishment to me. Indeed Icarus has no choice but to leave with his dad. He would be dead in the palace, otherwise, under the watchful eye of king Minos, who didn't want to share his crafty father's skill with anyone else. Icarus's father, Daedalus perhaps didn't give his son detailed enough advice. Don't fly too near the sun, don't dip too close to the waves - lacks an exact guide, a definitive course.
In our modern version of Icarus, the boy dives into the waves, only to emerge, blasting back into the air as on a jet ski. Cue the Bond music: !!!. That's an Icarus for today: bold, decisive, suave. The Icarus that simply plummets into the briny deep (the Pinot Noir 2005 dark sea) and is no more heard from is fine for a more romantic time: a time that savors the myth of lost youth and rolls over the memory of what-might-have-been like a loose tooth, delicious and painful at once; but that isn't our time. Our time demands instant resurrection, indestructability - Icarus plunges into the ocean with wings of wax and feathers sewn together; he blasts out with arms turned rotors, like Popeye. Godlike he declaims, "I am what I am." And then he opens a number 10 can of whoopass.

A Tale of the Grotesque

The creation of a John Bulow Campbell Library fan page on facebook has brought to mind a story that I'd heard old timers recount many times at the end of a grueling day of cataloging and technical servicing. This story never failed to send chills up my spine and deliver me into torrid dreams at night, causing me to twist and wake with such a start that I would be in a sweat and gasping for breath, fully alert in the flush of adrenalin, and wide eyed staring into the dark.
I remember the first time I heard this story. I had finished a long day of writing call numbers into a book where they could be referred to for further collation.
I casually mentioned to one of my co-workers that I had seen a book truck tucked in a corner of the stacks earlier that day and when I had gone back down, just before closing, that the truck was no longer there. "And did you see any one working down there?" she asked. I admitted that I had not. Then she told me a story of a phantom book truck that prowls the stacks, seen only to people when they are alone in the stacks, in the periphery of vision, more often heard than seen. Years ago a cataloger, the legend goes, began to rage about assigned Cutter numbers. Leaping up from his desk, he grabbed a book truck crowded with backlogged items, items for repair, and miscellaneous items and realia, and vanished into the stacks. Literally. His last words were, "I'll be back when I've done this right." That cataloger has never been seen or heard from since. True to his vow he is condemned (by Zeus probably, who takes people so seriously in the rashness of their declarations) to peruse the stacks in search of mis-attributed or otherwise defectively cataloged items until the collection is accurately cataloged.
And to this day, this truck prowls the stacks on its lonely voyage, it's pusher, the librarian, after long years of fasting is so thin as to be transparent. Ever living, he, though substantial, can be seen through and presents no palpable aspect. His voice, rasped so long in rage, it now proffers the faintest whisper. All his energy is devoted to the motive force of the book truck in his solitary patrol.

I may have several thousand of these

I don't know how many drawings I have until I begin to collect come for a show. I'll hit 50 and realize that there are so many more to choose from. I'm certain that I could do ten groups of 50. I wonder if I could do 50 groups of fifty? Perhaps. I've been working on this for years. If I were a writer I'd be closing in on Proust. The great American novel in picture form. An extended Portnoy's Complaint. The Great American Nude goes Fishing.

Three figures

W I drew these figures over three years ago. The top image contains the impetus for what became the ridiculous painting: a paean to spring; the middle and bottom paintings explore the dichotomy of being covered and uncovered.

Don't ignore the calculator

Looking at this reproduction I can see some things I want to change in this painting - or else do different in another one. This figure is problematic - too much like a Bond figure, too conventional. I don't know why I didn't see this in the beginning. That's what happens over time. Sometimes things that seem problematic hold up; sometimes what seemed essential isn't really or is the weakest part.

process

The top painting is the finished state of the painting on the bottom. Originally I began a painting of The Endowment: Columbia has portraits all around campus of benefactors, faculty, presidents - but not portraits of what matters so much, what needs protection like a child from the dangers of common life, The Endowment. In the process of painting The Endowment, I played with all kinds of oblique symbolism (symbolism can't be obvious or it's just fatuous). I wanted to distill the essence of The Endowment: it's more than money; it's dreams, projections of happiness, projections of success, a sense of belonging, of being in control. The Endowment sits throned in the heavens, who can but sing.
Instead though, the painting became Hercules at the crossroads of Vice and Virtue. It is in many ways a better painting. Certainly it is more focused, pared down to the relationship between a man and two women: which is virtue? which is vice? And there's some nice painting in there.

I got a new hat

I'm holding the old hat in the bottom two images: up top, the new one. I received the old one from a friend, while I was at Chapel Hill. He picked it up at a genetics convention in New Orleans. I associated that hat with various Walker Percy personas: Binx, Thomas Moore, Will Barrett. The new hat was bought by Jami while at the Methodist General Conference in Dallas - but it's not so much Percy as Whitman. I've received both hats while living in the Chapel Hill - Durham area.
When I was a kid, a small child, I had a hat from my grand father that I wore every where. It looked just like that hat Jed Clampett wore on the Beverly Hill Billies, with its hole in the top and felt construction, rumpled and misshapen. My parents were apparently embarrassed by it, and one day dad buried the hat out in the woods.
I was distraught. But then my dog, a beagle that I named Beagle, a dog that enjoyed digging in the woods, brought my hat back to me.
Dad was flustered of course. Years later, after I'd forgotten the affair of the hat, he would bring it up to me.
This new hat poses none of the issues of the old hat buried in the woods. It is clean and intact. It smells of the jungle its material was hacked from; the texture of the strong hands that shaped it are oiled into its structure. It receives from me the sweat and shape of my head on its smooth unremarked surfaces. When I walk on the forest path, under the sun light trickling through the forest canopy, my bald summit is shielded from the blistering heat.
Over me, around my head, it forms a halo of golden joy.

A long day

And the best part of the day was walking around the golf course: I walk, Jami runs and meets me, and then we walk on together. What a wonderful Sunday: we went to 1st Presbyterian here in Durham and heard a wonderful sermon from Joe Harvard: God is an extravagant disperser of seed - everything so Whitmanesque lately, but no wonder that God's abundance is without calculation, that it goes everywhere, without measure. We live in a world where many people don't believe that: wanting to believe that the necessities of life are scarce. I say, only because we make them scarce through our anxieties and fear, when we act out of self preservation. We seem culturally wired to disbelieve Jesus' message of abundance and forgiveness, instead believing it is better to hold grudges and squirrel away all we have. For this we go to war, we build fences, we engage in security theatre and polarizing rhetoric. An objective view, a nuanced view - these are drowned out, brushed aside.
Has it ever been otherwise?
Today, after church we went to see Hellboy II. What a great film. There's the sense in this film that humanity never learns its lesson. We found ourselves drawn to Hellboy and his elven protagonist. If demon spawn and elf-brood and goblin can get along, why can't we? Why can't we care about the planet we live on? This trend in super villains, where they've got a good point, is an improvement over the black/white, good/evil dichotomy that's prevailed for so long.
And then, after the movie, for some reason I thought the reception for the vice-moderator was today (it's next Saturday) and we drove from the theatre in Morrisville into Raleigh, only to find an empty parking lot and the doors to the church closed. I would like to blame the weight watchers diet: that it leaves me insufficiently fueled to run my complex brain; but I would have made this mistake on a full stomach - and last night, I did make this mistake on a full stomach - or moderately full.
After we returned home, we went for that walk around the golf course, in the woods, among the trees, on a wide graveled path. All around me nature was green and bright. I am amazed at how beautiful the world is, even close at hand: how water trickling in a culvert among rocks can be transcendent. Whitman and Merleau Ponty ring in my ears: I'm in my body and in the world, moving through time, and I exist in this place, facing this horizon.
Tuesday I will be received into presbytery. And this moment and that moment are tied together. I will stand before my colleagues in ministry knowing and not knowing, forgetting and remembering.
When the long day is over I put my tired legs under the covers and cherish the presence of my wife. Together we laugh. Hearty Rabelaisian laughs.

Have I written about this before?

When a friend of mine, Karl's wife Rebeca, informed me that women don't lounge around nude, languidly watching TV, reading a book, drinking coffee, cooking, but at least like to wear large T-shirts, I did do a short series of figures where I had women wearing at least underwear. I drew big floppy T-shirts as well.
Rebeca's assertion has haunted me over the years, even as I've gone back to drawing nudes. Nothing is more interesting than the bodies God gave us. Male and female: we are knit together with bones and muscles and covered with skin. What is more incredible than that our consciousness is embodied. Merleau Ponty goes to great length in his Phenomenology of Perception to describe, to set out, how the consciousness is in the body and how as body and consciousness we exist in the world, as points with horizons. And so I have to agree: how do I exist in time? Isn't it a wonder that the point I am now was preceded by such points as a child playing in the yard, a teenager caught in a rainstorm in the mountains, an adult in graduate school drinking in a coffee shop?
This wonder is found also in Whitman's Leaves of Grass. As I've combed through his lines (now I am investigating how his 1855 edition changed into the edition we have in the Norton anthology), I wonder at the consciousness of a human being in 1855 having the sense of himself that Whitman does. To say that he is both victor and conquered; lost and found; and that he is to be found under our boot soles, filter and fibre for our blood. And many more such things - these amaze me in their inclusiveness. Whitman has written a phenomenological description- and Ponty does describe the way the body exists with its consciousness as a work of art - a poem.
The body and soul together are works of art. Each human life is a work of art. Do we sense that? Do we see how this honors the image of God? When we see ourselves and others statistically, we lose that sensibility - we reduce others and ourselves to ciphers, caught in the metanarrative of market forces (the idolatry of the day).
Do we understand that we live in works of art? That our very living in the bodies we do is a work of art itself? The child kicking a ball; the old man walking with his cane; the couple walking by a shore; as well as bored and anxious people waiting in line; or refugees in Palastine. We are works of art - tragedy and comedy.
And God gave us such bodies to act in Her creation.

fragments of an idea

You can go to a museum and see old paintings of Mary and the kid. They follow a program of representation that goes back to depictions of Horus and Isis. Something about her fascinates me - but only in so far as alterations are invited: alterations that mirror the modern sensibility: that she smoke - as in the bottom image; that she be really pregnant when depicted - as in the middle; and that, as in the top image some ambiguity rest on the image. The mirror is my own preference for implying this. Mirrors have a long history in art. I think of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding for starters and more currently Brockhurst's Adolescence. Picasso used a mirror in a depiction of Mary Louise Walter.

process

This painting, which I refer to as a variation on Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew, now hangs in Jami's office. I worked several years on this painting, off and on, rolling it up and putting it away only to unroll it and work on it - I alternately hoped and despaired over it. For over a year it was in Casey Thompson's apartment in The Village. And when he left CTS I rolled it up to put it out of my mind: I thought that I would gesso over it and painting something new on the canvas one day. And so it was, when I moved into my studio in Decatur, that I unrolled it, restretched it and began to work on it again. And what happened is that I figured out what to do in the middle of the canvas. The bottom is the final and current state.
Among the curiosities about this painting now, is that I've stretched it and restretched it so often that in the final stretch, I discovered that it was no longer square. The black edge along the bottom that tapers along the side going up s an attempt to reconcile this offness in the finished piece.

the ridiculous painting

I've posted this painting before, pictured here in my old Decatur studio. It now is on the wall in our living room. I had drawn this type of praying figure before, and when I painted it I initially had it in a mandala of flame. I wanted to leave off detail from the figure, giving it a reference to the wax sculptures of Medardo Rosso. I painted this in the spring around the time of Pentecost, and so orange on a blue background relates to a Pentecost banner I'd painted for my church back in Covington. I added lilies and various other flowery references, and a speckled snake - a fantastic creature that refers to no animal in nature. Note that I painted our cat, Cleo, into the painting - as well as a bunny. Note also the black cat painted onto my studio wall. Note as well the word "paint" painted onto the paint on my studio wall. The band of stars refers to Velesquez's painting of the Immaculate Conception. The crescent moon refers to Turkey and French pastry. When I finished this painting, I realized that its iconographic program was so tendentious and overwrought that it was indeed ridiculous.

I'm an artist

I have been drawing most of my life. I remember when I was 9, I gessoed a piece of hardboard and painted the height of my aspirations: a pirate, in my closest approximation to what I thought Rembrandt did (albeit with no idea of glazing and scumbling techniques) - a painting that still hangs in the hall of my dad's house.
These three images are more recent. The bottom one has been reproduced here before: "out of chaos" is a painting I performed during a week of chapel services at CTS right after Katrina. Karen and Bruce Miller now own it and it hangs in their front dining room/parlor.
The middle image is a small painting (the out of chaos is 4 x 5 feet, this painting is more like 16 x 20 inches) of an interior at a bar. Chester Topple now owns it and where he has it at his house, I don't know.
And the top image is a water color (the other two paintings are acrylic) about 8 x 10 of Lucretia, holding the knife, about to plunge it in. It's unsold and it's lying around here somewhere.
I realized that I haven't posted much art lately - actually June was pretty slim for me posting anything.
Enjoy.
There are certainly aspects of these images, the process used, the subject matter, that I hope to combine and continue. Right now I have an easel set up on our screened porch and I'm going out there soon and begin to paint. I haven't painted (I've drawn plenty) since I closed my studio in Decatur.
Mostly I've drawn complex scenes with multiple figures on a 12 inch square sheet of paper, scenes influenced by Breugel and Thomas Nast: scenes satirical, bombastic, and large scale/small size.

More eating at the Federal

While I reveled in my pork sandwich and Hennepin, Jami enjoyed a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and had mussels, savory mussels, garlicky, wonderful, former denizens of the deep made succulent, embodiments of maritime mysteries.

The Federal's pork sandwich

The Federal is my Twain's substitute here in Durham. They do not have wings like Twain's (and few places do have them like Twain's, though the Federal doesn't have them at all) but they do have something I wish Twain's did have: a pork sandwich of ineffable culinary richness and mystery. I go into the Federal and immediately order a Hennepin, which I first drank with Chuck Campbell at the James Joyce (the place that's ignorant of Bloom's day but still has a good beer supply). A Hennepin is brewed at NY state's Ommegang brewery, which also brews Three Philosophers. Hennepin has a creamy head and a light piquant taste - plus 7 per cent alcohol. Anyway, I get one of these and order the pork sandwich. I first noticed the pork sandwich when we went to the Federal with our friend Paul for pork bellies. Since they didn't have pork bellies we had to order something else. I ordered carnitas, which were great; but I noticed Paul's pork sandwich had more pork and more jalapenos and a heap of garlic fries. It was all that was good about carnitas for a buck less - and more of it! Since then I've dedicated myself to quaffing pork sandwiches and swilling pints of Hennepin and other beers, like the French Broad brewery's Kolsch or various red ales.
Of course on our Weight Watchers' plan, I have to leave room for 20 points, just for the pork sandwich and fries. God help me, the beers are three points each, probably 4, but I'm still living in a bit of denial. For most of the day leading up to the Federal, I have to eat as little as possible. I particularly have to cut down on my consumption of Grafton Village 2 year old reserve cheddar - the cheese that changed my life. Now it's impossible to go back, damn the expense. Weight Watchers does insure that I don't consume as much as I'd like though - saving me money.
Still this pork sandwich is not just bar-b-que, not just cooked pork, not just a garnish of jalapenos. It is a symphony, an opera, an excursion to the outer reaches what bread can hold.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

Jami bought me a new Panama hat (though these things are not - as I've been informed - often crafted in Panama now a days). My old hat, which I had received from a friend back in 1989 had become very brittle from weather and neglect and over use, covered with grime and a patina of paint and oil, pocked with holes and threatening to become a visor. So I needed a new hat for the summer, and Jami found it when she was at the Methodist general conference on business for Duke Divinity. It is a magnificent specimen, broader of brim and more snug in its fit, rounder and not as fedora-like in style. It goes well with my white linen shirt. Inspired I began reading Whitman's leaves of grass - posing myself as near as I could remember in the famous title page photo that graced the first edition.
I can't believe that I'm 48 and only since January, when I saw a PBS American Masters on Whitman, have I immersed myself in his work. He's extremely interesting. "I celebrate myself and sing myself" - penned in 1855 and revised until 1881 before his death. Amazing that such a thing would be written in America in the 19th century, much less before the civil war.
Sure this poem has things often referred to: the "barbaric yawp" for instance - but it is much more. I especially find touching this last section, 52.

"The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless.
And filtre and fiber your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you."

Whenever I come to that last line, my eyes get watery. Certainly I'm prone to sentimentality. But I believe it is more: Whitman has crafted an odyssey, a journey of the poet among the people, and after declaring that "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" in the third line, he is stating that his presence, or the presence of his muse, his daemon, or his prophetic sensibility, exists forever and remains - that death is not an end - we have only to look for where that presence waits for us. The tone of the end is comparable to the end of Prufrock - which I would not be surprised to learn that Eliot had lifted the form from Whitman: "I have seen them [the mermaids who had be singing] riding seaward on the waves/ combing the white hair of the waves blown back/ when the wind blows the water white and black//We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ by seagirls wreathed in seaweed red and brown/ till human voices wake us and we drown." The elegiac voice, but without Whitman's hope, Whitman's expectation and willingness to remain and wait.

But this poem has more. From the first line we are encouraged to celebrate ourselves - as does the poet, who enjoins us the be aware of his journeying among us. I am amazed that a man, living in America in the 1850s could be so aware of his body, his being and the being of others and the earth, and declare it on paper. It's scarcely possible today to imagine such transparency. How unhealthy is our puritanism: not just in discussing matters sexual (and the puritans were somewhat frank on that - unlike their descendants) but in being embodied, in not being governed by an over weening sense of shame. I feel that this call to celebrate and sing is missed today. Certainly there are people who promote themselves - but Whitman's distinction is that he is not of the promoters, the advertisers, but simply singing himself - not a cause, not an ideology. Winnicott gets at this with his distinction of the authentic and the false self, obsessed with what others may be thinking of it. Whitman is proclaiming that he is about living authentically.

I celebrate myself and sing myself.
Wearing a straw hat and white linen shirt as I enter my 49th year on life's arc.
Earlier I'd written 48th, but I've completed 48 years. When this year is over I'll be 49.

We live in the forest

Our apartment is part of a small development along a road that goes through Duke Forest, part of several large tracts of wooded land that Duke owns and maintains. In this forest several trails meander for miles and miles - only the Eno River trails offer more scenic treks. One of the things that I've noticed here, besides how peaceful and relaxing it is, is that many deer freely and wantonly roam among the trees. It is not unusual to see five or six deer go loping off a nearby yard when I'm driving to work in the morning. The other day one walked right by me as I was carrying groceries out of the car and around back to our place.
When I was growing up in the country, living east of Atlanta, deer were rare. In fact, years later I was told by a forestry grad student that the deer had been hunted out of Georgia by the 1940s or so and that the deer we see today were descendants of deer transported from Minnesota. I don't know if this holds for North Carolina, but it gave me pause about Georgia.
An argument could be made that deer are more noticeable now because of increased development: that they've been chased from their habitat and now live among us in the suburbs. But Duke Forest is witness to how recently forest growth has been allowed back into the south: most of its trees are less than 60 years old - and I could say that about several tracts of forest I grew up around. Most of the forest land we see in the south today was farm land at the turn of the century. Certainly the habitat is shrinking, but deer have never had that much habitat. There are simply more - I haven't checked an animal census, but I feel that that is true. I remember a 60 Minutes report several years ago about a Long Island community where deer were walking around in people's yards: they couldn't hunt them out. The deer had discovered that they could take refuge in populated areas.
These deer today are certainly less skittish seeming than the ones I grew up witnessing and hearing about. I remember in my youth hearing people talking about hunting season: how they would take their guns and go sit with their father or a friend in a pine tree on a couple of planks, waiting for the deer to appear so they could kill it. The preparations for the hunt were meticulous and needed the perfect weather conditions and conditions of attitude to be successful. First, it needed to be dark and cold, preferably foggy with a threat of rain, with at least a continuous misting. Second, a meal of cheese and sausage should be hastily prepared, along with a thermos of black coffee. Once stocked with supplies the hunters head off for a stretch of forest, making sure to walk through damp, waist high grass, tripping several times in the dark. Once at the stand, the ascent begins, followed by the long wait. When the hapless animal ventures into view, the hunter, most likely a 12 year old boy, must blast away, downing the graceful creature. If only wounded the beautiful horned ungulate might scamper away and the hunters will be forced to leave their perch and stumble after it.
Such tales as this, that I heard frequently enough in my youth, witnessing the photos and mounted heads adorning the dens of my classmates (proof of their prowess at negotiating the threat of scarcity in the world and providing meat for the family), are themselves scarce now a days; it is no wonder why: as I described above the deer are nearly domesticated, inured to dwelling among humans where they eat the tomatoes and beans we set out for them in our gardens. It takes no more now than for the hunter to grab a skillet and walk up to the deer, maintaining a friendly demeanor, whacking it on the head, and since a skillet was brought along, frying it right there.
What about dressing the deer. Again, today this operation is simplified from the task requiring knives and blood ceremonies that I was entertained by as a child. Recently I dressed a deer as it walked out of the woods and into our parking lot. I happened to have some boxes I was taking to GoodWill in the trunk of my car, and since the deer was right there, I managed to get a sports coat and khakis on it. We drove around for the better part of the afternoon, parting company towards early evening, as he had a stag function to attend.

I am a yankee doodle dandy

Last night we saw fireworks after the game. We saw the game too: an illustration of the importance of pitching. The local nine played well, scoring all their runs in one inning; however their pitching could not hold the other team within one run. In a world of six billion people, where at least 500 million in this hemisphere are familiar with baseball (and Japan and Korea, where major leaguers are beginning to show up from as well), you'd think that there'd be more than 20 people who have the wits and skills to get professional batters out consistently. But you'd be wrong. One of those 20 people did not pitch the 6th for the Bulls last night, which was a pity. It amazes me that in this vast population set, how rare pure baseball skills are.
For instance, I've been able to catch the Braves on TV 3 times this summer, usually on ESPN or WGN, when they play the Cubs, and each of those times I've turned the channel on and there was one of the Braves pitchers, pitching in the 7th or 8th inning, protecting a one run lead with less than two outs and a runner on first; each time disaster has followed. It think it's been the same reliever, MA, and I can only wonder, "Do we not have anyone else we can send out to protect a one run lead - someone who might actually be able to protect a one run lead would be good." Here's a major league club with a reasonably large payroll, and they can't find a pitcher in 500 to 700 million people who can ensure that the starting pitcher gets the win.
Still there's something wonderful about going to the ball park rather than staying at home and watching the game. Even minor league games are a treat. The next best thing is sitting in a local dive, at the bar, eating some wings and watching the game on a flat screen, engaged with the other patrons, swilling down Hennepins and Rogue Rivers. Aside from the wave, which no bar patron would ever do, the experience of being outdoors, in the bleachers, looking through binoculars or trying to guess what just happened when I looked away at my Merleau-Ponty, (last night a squeeze play occured - they pulled off a squeeze; which made the experience of the pitcher giving up three runs in the next half inning more bitter) is without parallel. I hate the wave - it has never seemed like a good idea or much fun: more an insistence on joining the crowd, the mass of sheep being lead to the slaughter: "Join us in our lemming like inertia; give up your brains and attentiveness to what's actually going on." - they seem to say. A siren call that crashes the game, the odyssey of the season, onto the rocks. " No I'll not be part of your wave! I will not join in your totalitarian group think." Giving up three runs took the life out of the team, and it was apparent that from the 7th inning on, that the players were in a hurry to see the fireworks.
The Braves in the 1990s had that mentality, that even giving up three runs, they would not give up. Glavine expemplified this, as did Smoltz, that they would hold onto the game like a bulldog with a steak. If the other team did win, they would be mentally spent. I knew I was seeing something special back in that decade. Something I may not see again for a while. Certainly the Braves have some good young starting pitchers in Jurrjens, Campillo, and Hudson (who's not really young anymore), but the bullpen remain problematic. We've been swept by the Phillies twice (we're supposed to be sweeping them). The only thing more frustrating than being a Braves fan must be being a Mets fan. They're supposed to be running away with the division. We've swept them! And we're awful. That's a comparative awful - an awful phrased in terms of being in contention. Before the 1990s the Braves had been awful for most of the 1980s - an awful phrased not in terms of contention, but in terms of playing fundamental baseball. I believe that awful in terms of contention is tolerable, even enjoyable, but awful in terms of being fundamentally sound is nightmarish and not enjoyable.
Baseball is a team game, a game where players must come together to play mentally tough: no card games back in the clubhouse, no looking at the ant hills in right field, and no throwing a fastball over the heart of the plate on a 3-2 count (and no swinging at 3-2 curveballs in the dirt). Those 1990s Braves taught me never to give up. That the opposing batter is hoping you'll give in to anxieties about throwing a strike and give him something easy; that the other team hopes you'll stop extending at bats when you're down by three runs - that you'll stop thinking and give into desperation. What a beautiful thing that mindset of devotion to a goal was to see back then. And it's true that the current Braves team could get it together and come back The NL East is a weak division with four teams in the mix.
But it seems unnecessary. I no longer project my longings onto a baseball field. When I was a kid, I projected strongly - as if Hank Aaron at the plate or Niekro on the mound were the sum of my hopes for nailing down my identity: alas, too many Jim Nashes and Biff Pocorobas populated those teams, all too ordinary and frail human beings upon whom no one should project their hopes - not that projecting hopes on the performance of others is healthy - it isn't. Those 1970s Braves teams are one reason I'm seeing a therapist now. In the 1970s Atlanta's sports franchises left a deep masochistic scar on millions of children: why else would anyone go to a Van Brocklin coached Falcons game but for the shear punishment factor: the brutally ineffectual running game, the wasting of Tommy Nobis's talents; and then the Pat Peppler/Marion Campbell coaching debacle. How did Rankin Smith make so much money in the insurance business if his running of that team was a reflection of his running of his business. And the Falcon's are still bad. Blank now runs the team as hopelessly as RS ever did. This last season may have been the Falcons most aimless and futile ever.
When we moved to Durham, one of the ministers we went to hear preach openly declared himself a Falcons fan. He's a good guy, intelligent, earnest, with a touch of humor; how then could he make that declaration. At first I thought it was some verbal slip, but he's since repeated it. I remember how in the 1970s or early 80s the Falcons threatened to move to Jacksonville - and I thought, "please, please." I also wondered how any town with any sense would possibly want the Falcons. The Falcons were like that L'll Abner character with the consonant heavy name, who constantly had a cloud over his head and whom disaster followed everywhere. I didn't care about the bare economic value of a major league team, no matter how hapless.
It's wonderful being in Durham now where I don't have to care if the home team wins. Minor league games don't count in the same way as major league games count. The minors, as I've written before, exist in a mediate place, non-ultimate. The fact that the games are not ultimate make them more enjoyable and for different reasons: the narrative of careers beginning and careers ending; the curiosity of the final score - how little it really matters in the grand scheme of things, the relationship of how the club's fate is tied to the needs of the major league club. The major league club can take that young righthanded starter and put him in the bullpen or give him a start; or take that 1st baseman to fill in for an injured starter. The minor league team cannot take anyone willingly off the major league roster. Is the minor league team in a pennant race? Doesn't matter. If someone roots for a minor league team with the ultimate concern of winning a pennant, then they've misplaced their hopes. This is what Niebhur talks about when he (and I think the idea is original with Kierkegaard) speaks of sin as giving ultimate concern to things that are not ultimate; and giving non-ultimate concern to objects that are ultimate: treating one's relationship with God as one thing among others.
Anyway, last night we're at the game, and I've tried to save as many weight watchers points as I can for beer and hot dogs. We went for a brisk walk on the American Tobaccy Trail and I was ravenous by the time we got into the ballpark. I ordered a Red Hook ESB and two hot dogs (it was $1 hot dog night) - I had enough points for one more beer and a cup of pop corn - the infamy! The Humanity! By the time the game was given up for good in the 7th inning I wanted another hot dog or two, some fries, another beer. But we soldiered on in solidarity.