With Will in the afternoon at his class at the Audubon Center. Windy, wintery day for outside play and hike, but these kids are tough. Sue helped Ab with her major painting and redecorating project—the house is coming along and looking elegant. Prior to dinner Katy, Will, and I got in a good bit of poker (one card stud) and I lost my ten penny stake. Then Katy beat me in Sequence—twice.
Once again, the semi-annual chore.
And clogged they were. It's a cold, wet, thankless job, but rather satisfying, in a way. Apparently all the rain we got yesterday made it through the clogs and down the spouts. It was a significant amount of moisture, and WW creek is full almost to overflowing. Precip good for the big lakes, of course. According the the Canadian Gouvernement weather app, Manitoulin last night got upwards of 3 inches of rain, along with wind gusts of 50 mph. That would have been fun to see.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the correspondence department:
Kory Kozloski
Executive Director
Democratic Party of Wisconsin
Dear Mr. Kozloski:
Disappointment doesn’t quite cover it. And more of the same clearly won’t turn things around.
With the demise of unions and the loss of blue collar white voters, the Democratic coalition has shrunk. Further, the Democratic message (as presented this past election) is not resonating with a large group of people for whom it should be.
I therefore believe it is time for Democratic leadership to concentrate on thinking and acting strategically. The millions of voters who misplaced their core values and lost sight of their self interest, need to be co-opted, or more charitably, reeled back in. This isn’t going to happen through continued “identity politics” or through the current practice of sending emails to the Dem base about this or that latest outrage (and then asking for money). (I’m sure many other liberals are like me in getting tired of the constant barrage of donation requests; instead ask for monthly, semi-annual, or annual contributions and leave it at that.)
We Democrats have to begin talking in ways that don’t immediately turn a bunch of people off. While not compromising on our core values, we need to focus on areas of agreement, and speak in ways that bring potentially reasonable people back to reasonableness.
We need to de-fuse hot button social issues and concentrate on concrete things that ordinary folks can see as sensible and beneficial. We need to rephrase the agenda/re-write the platform. We need to focus on the wellbeing and quality of life of everyone.
We need some kind of inclusive, team-themed overall approach:
We are all on Team America. There is much we can all agree on to build our country and keep it strong. We can stop bickering and we can pull together, and that way we will all prosper. If we don’t come together as a team we will lose to other competitors. Just as everyone in the U.S. is a Cubs fan, so we can all be America fans.
Attached is an initial attempt to draft a winning agenda.
Best,
JBN
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The New America Platform
1. We are pro-life. Abortion should be avoided if at all possible. This means good sex education and accessible and affordable birth control, both male and female. It means pre-natal support, parental leave, childcare support, and strong adoption programs. The final decision, however, must rest with the woman, her doctor, and her faith—government needs to mind its own business.
2. We are pro-gun. Americans have the right to own guns for recreational shooting, home protection, and hunting. We are also pro-life and we back the badge, so guns must not be available to terrorists, the mentally ill, and those on the do-not-fly list. Military-style assault weapons belong in the military only.
3. We are pro-privacy. The government should not be eavesdropping on our phone conversations or snooping in our email without a warrant.
4. We are pro-family. The government has no business in our bedrooms. Sexual preference is a private matter. Who we love and how we love is up to us.
5. We are pro education. America should have the world’s best public schools. Public schools have made us a nation. We can’t afford to lose jobs overseas, and can’t afford to have other countries out compete us.
6. We are pro-health. A healthy nation is a productive and prosperous nation. All Americans, rural or urban should have quality health care. We need to stop the big corporations, insurance companies, and drug companies from making health care unaffordable.
7. We are pro-country. It’s time for America to get busy rebuilding itself—roads, bridges, water and waste management facilities, and the like.
8. We are pro transportation and communication; all Americans should be connected, and all should be able to move quickly and affordably around the country and from home to work.
9. We are pro environment. It’s time to reclaim our fields and forests, our lakes and rivers, from polluters and exploiters. Americans deserve clean air and water, good places to hunt and fish. We, and our children and grandchildren deserve a planet that is safe from overheating.
10. We are pro jobs, and think that investment in education and training, health care, infrastructure, transportation, communication, and clean energy will create many well-paying opportunities.
11. We are pro secure borders and sensible immigration policies, and believe those living, working and paying taxes in this county should have a path to citizenship.
12. We are pro defense and pro service. America needs a strong and efficient military. All young people should have a two-year service requirement, either military or civilian (such as the Civilian Conservation Corps).
13. We are pro universal basic income (UBI). No more welfare. Every citizen receives a basic income sufficient to meet the cost of living. Those who don’t need it or want it can turn it back in. In the face of continuing automation and foreign competition, UBI gives Americans strength and security, the ability to follow their dreams, the ability to be entrepreneurs. UBI will grow the economy.
14. We are pro fair taxes. Corporations need to pay taxes on the wealth they generate in America rather than hiding money offshore. No loopholes for billionaires. The wealthy need to pay their fair share.
Warm front last night bringing rain. This morning, when it stopped, we walked to the library, only to get drenched— with Pax a soggy doggy by the time he got home.
Back to the Aquatic Center (more water) in the afternoon, having been absent since April. Nice to see significant upgrades—new carpet, new and brighter lighting, and new equipment in the workout area, including five new ellipticals! Furthermore, since we have Silver Sneakers, there is no cost—and, so, therefore, no more excuses.
Below, a bit of drizzle, or is that drivel?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mr. Penland’s Curse
He looked and spoke like Hamlet,
Here in small-town Illinois.
We, callow high school students,
Were enchanted by his voice.
Last term, last year,
With decisions to be made,
He bade us read and talk and think,
and try to explicate.
Oh, instant intellects we became,
heirs to culture, and the arts—
research and exposition—
all literature was ours.
Thinking deeply, writing sure,
We saw a future large
Of knowledge without measure—
And all the world a stage.
So on to higher learning,
The groves of academe—
Beowulf and Chaucer
And Shakespeare’s famous scenes.
But while I’m reading Rasselas,
Someone else is writing code,
Unwinding DNA to genomes,
Or walking on the moon.
Two roads diverged. And I chose
What seemed impossible to resist.
If it weren’t for Mr. Penland,
I’d have been a scientist.
—JBN
Gray and raw in the weather office, with light rain predicted to begin any moment. East wind suggesting that the forecast might be right.
Morning walk aborted due to distant gunshots. (Deer season is almost over, I think.) But long afternoon walk around the deserted campus when things were quieter. Pax romped and hunted, and almost caught a rabbit.
For dinner—Baked Miso-Glazed Tofu With Wild Mushrooms—as an antidote.
Sunny, warmish, nearly windless. Perfect for dog-walking and bike riding.
Mounds and mounds of corn (Zea mays). The bins are full and the temporary holding pens are overflowing, but still it comes. Destined for what? I'd say basically three things: inappropriate animal feed (I mean what creature evolved to eat corn besides weevils?); ethanol (with, after all the petroleum involved in making this pile, a net energy gain of approximately zero); and high fructose corn syrup (soda pop and other junk food).
Of course, some of it is headed to the distillery to be converted into sour mash, but that is okay, I guess.
Speaking of ethanol, the price of gas here in Whitewater remains below $2. Who knows what's coming.
And, speaking of who knows what's coming, I am trying hard not to write about what I think. I like many others, I have dialed back the news and switched from Huff Post, and CNN to poetry. Poetry is timeless and uplifting—making one relatively glad to be a human.
Recuperation; and good memories. Uninspiring weather, however—chilly, gray and damp, with various parties in some quarters expressing the wish that the misty drizzle was, instead, snow.
Now, after a full recovery, on to the leftovers.
Big group, big fun, lots of music. Great food.
And, of course, someone got whipped-creamed.
Obviously, it doesn't work to wait to the last minute. So, tonight, pies, squash, cranberries, rutabaga, and Brussels sprouts.
Ice/not-ice interface.
Dark, damp, drizzly day, but not so bad indoors. Even unlimbered the clarinet, in anticipation of tomorrow.
Question: in the photo above the willow branches droop down to about two feet of the surface, so what causes the uniform pruning?
Frozen, Cinderella and other Disney favorites. Katy and Will were great.
Katy, front row, right.
Will, back row, middle.
Damp and chilly, with the threat of rain.
Low near 20, and wind gone. Ergo, ice.
And, in the poultry department, a retelling of the myth of Baucis and Philemon, the old couple noted for their hospitality. In the myth, Jupiter spares the goose, but here, three days before Thanksgiving, the twenty-one pound turkey now chilling in the basement fridge had no Olympian to intercede. (btw, B&P ended up as trees, which, compared to the alternative available, was good.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Tree
I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
that grew elm-oak amid the wold.
'Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart's home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.
Ezra Pound
Perfect day for breakfast in Oconomowoc, followed by a UWW campus walk in the afternoon.
Breakfast contingent hiding from the photographer. Unfortunately for concealment, the cover is a bit sparse.
Now for some poetry discussion—some exegesis. Abby sent me this poem, which her book group is discussing:
Skunk Hour
BY ROBERT LOWELL
For Elizabeth Bishop
Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she’s in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season’s ill—
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
---------
And I respond to Abby with:
The Armadillo
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP
for Robert Lowell
This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,
rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.
Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars—
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,
or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,
receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.
Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair
of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.
The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,
and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.
Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!
The Armadillo came first, which means the skunks came later. And what do the poems mean, and are they good? I'll leave that up to the reader.
~~~~~~~~~~
And which is better? No question about that.
But fewer and later than last year.
Coats, hats, and gloves, and even so equipped, the wind was harsh.
Chilly day for a football game, which was what happened at the stadium today. The halftime band performance, with al its heavy drumming, did not sit well with Pax who is already terrified that deer season is open.
...come late this year.
The darker the color the higher the wind.
The Edmund Fitzgerald sank on November 10 (1975).
So...We are at the clinic in Janesville for annual checkups. Sue is in first. Therefore Pax and I have a long walk on a path high above the Rock River, waiting our turn. At the appointed time, I let Pax back into the car and head in to the appointment. And, a few minutes later, right about the time I'm being cuffed, the heavens open up with what sounds like the crack of doom (and I'm not talking about Trump here). How do you keep your blood pressure down when you know your dog is freaking out?
Looking at the wind map, I do believe there may be enough to finally strip the leaves from Vi's pear tree, which will, in turn, allow me to do my fall gutter clearing.
...could have been, anyway with the temp in the low 70s. Nonetheless (I like that word because it is actually three fused together (and so is that one), I continued work on the iceboat plank while Sue continued T'giving prep. {Probably should have been out with the Sioux trying to stop the Dakota access pipeline.}
Pax continues to be increasingly nervous, anticipating, I think, the start of gun deer hunting, the day after tomorrow.
So many cones came down last fall (it was a mast year) that we have been overrun. Saving them proved messy and inconvenient, and they're prickly. Sue bagged them all, and, even after today's burning, we still have one bag full, if anyone is interested. They do burn nicely and make a bright flame.
T'giving prep (Sue) and Wombat iceboat plank work (me). Frosty, foggy morning, but warming to sunny and pleasant afternoon. Not at all conducive to ice formation. But the forecast looks much more wintry.
Long call from Irene for Sue and long call from FLOW friend Eric for me. Commiserating.
Previously I had used a shovel as a broad-fork to open up the soil to at least a shovel's depth. Today I worked the mini-tiller over the bed, tilling in a fair amount of previously mowed leaves. I have yet to rake things level and tidy up—due to insufficient time. Once smoothed out, it will be ready for frost and snow, freeze and thaw, to finish the preparation. And then, come spring, just the tiniest incisions where seeds need to go.
I'm thinking I may have outwitted (or at least out-waited) the galinsoga, so next summer it's all about beets—some squash and some tomato, yes, but heavy on the beets. This year, for the first year in memory, we have no picked beets, and our menus are much poorer as a result.
Last evening, quite after dark, our odd, across-the-street neighbor (who some think is a vampire) came out with his lawnmower to attack the the thick layer of leaves dropped in his yard by a big, old silver maple. He mowed and he mowed, and this morning I found most of the residue out in the middle of our street. Not to worry, it is no longer there.
But we gave it a shot.
Gaillardia, still somewhat gay.
No moon here.
In honor of the exceptional moon, we went with neighbors Dave and Sylvia out to the Whitewater industrial park, where we could find an unobstructed eastern horizon. We found it, but blocked by a rare occurrence of cloud. I turned the camera to the west, where the sky was clearing, but saw little evidence of moonrise there.
Even a cloudless rise would have been, however, not quite like a moon over Mudge.
...window cleaning, and lunch. (All at Fox Point)
Gearing up (and there is a lot of gear).
In the white helmet. What a stance; he's a natural.
Fast, too.
Last night's moon. Looking forward to tomorrow's.
Katy, her friend Esme´, and I had a lively game of Qwirkle, interrupted a few times by fruit rollup shenanigans, and other hijinks. Abby, with Sue's help, got almost all the first floor storm windows cleaned while Tony attacked mounds of leaves with a blower strapped on back, repaired doors, etc.
Leaves, storms, ice...'tis the season.´
But still lovely fall weather.
Three trailers-full of tightly stomped (by Sue) leaves delivered to the Ww compost site, and pitch forks and shovels needed to hack through the compacted masses and get them off-loaded. What's left in the yard will be ground up and tilled into the garden.
The iceboats came out of Roger's barn today (in anticipation of winter), and the sad thing was—his farm is being sold. We will miss Roger, and his beautiful barn. Roger is a fine fellow, and his farm is the source of the fabled Susie Pea. (It was on the burn pile.)
Roger, being a farmer, pays close attention to the weather, and he let us know, in no uncertain terms, that winter is actually coming. So, perhaps, although there has been no snow or rain, our preparatory efforts will not have been in vain.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My November Guest
My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
—RF
Or is it coffee? We had both this morning, as an anodyne. Good day for housecleaning, Sue, and garden turning, me.
Actually, these are rose hips, at Kathy's next door, with even more vitamin C than oranges.
The garden being turned.
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
—Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, 1923
Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she's half-crazy but that's why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China...
—Leonard Cohen, Suzanne, 1966
Goodbye Leonard, I liked your work. (You too, Wallace, of course.)