But walking still possible. No problem navigating around the patches of ice where where Frost's "silver lizards" got caught. (Yes, cold, with temps dropping into single digits tonight.)
And speaking of ice, as of now the ice is nice, and should suffice. (for sailing)
In honor of Aunt Janet, 90th birthday, which acutally was last Thursday.
Lunch at the very nice Courthouse Pub...
...which is across the street from the courthouse, and under the Budweiser bottle.
Fense dog all the way up; rather reavy hain in Manitowoc, dlying frizzle on the way home. Luckily no sreezing fleet, which was forecast.
Had to tie my coat around my waist as Pax and I took our big loop walk. Got in some decent furlongs while balanced on two wheels. Puttered in the garage, without numb fingers. Unseasonably warm, in other words.
Rain forecast in a few hours. Could the Zamboni actually work this time?
As George Washington put it, political parties are likely “to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
To Fox Point to catch one of Will's hockey games. Will is quick, never daunted, and likes to score, which he did today.
Will, far right, getting set to score a goal.
After the game, lunch at the new, distinctive, Cafe Hollander in Mequon, where Dutch lessons are provided free of charge in the washrooms.
... and a walk on the wild side.
World's best waffles for breakfast, and then a bit later, a walk in a Kettle Moraine woods, which included lots of fun around a spring-fed creek—replete with tangy water-cress. Pax went rather wild, only rejoining us hikers as we neared the trail-head and after a swim across an icy stream.
Looking here, there, and everywhere for nice ice.
But none found. Above, Williams Bay, Lake Geneva, which looks frozen but which gives way to open water not that far out. On the plus side, we had tasty gyros sandwiches for lunch at Elizabeth's in Delevan.
Very much enjoying the novel, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, about a bookseller, and a child abandoned in a bookstore, being adopted, and growing up amid the tomes.
Ellie's first rate first grade program.
And February is short.
Sun today. And that makes a difference when you have had a dismal January. Even more good news—an hour more daylight now than back in the shadowy solstice.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“It is not fair to ordinary folks — it just confuses them — to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people."
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
...chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
A cordial and interesting meeting with a competent leader who has, I think, a clear vision of the promised land and a good grip on the tools needed to get us there. Let's hope it happens.
I got the feeling (certainly never expressed or implied) that my ideas were a bit on the simplistic or naive side. Perhaps.
Trying to pull all the obstreperous Democratic factions into one team or tribe is a daunting job. The other side has done it, and if we don't we will never be able to compete. Winners get to pass and enforce legislation, take executive action, and make appointments. Losers get to protest and sign petitions.
The new (renovated) snowblower works. Only about two inches, but enought to show that the machine knows what it's supposed to do.
...of winter.
A few hours of sun right after sunrise (a rare occurrence), but then clouding over with snow by afternoon. Cold. Bird feeder topped up to overflowing at 7 A.M. and empty by 5 P.M.
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I'm beginning to have the feeling that we are living through a significant period of American history, with a lot hanging in the balance. Assuming we come out of it with a country somewhat resembling the one we know, this time will be looked back on as something significant, along the lines of the depression, or Watergate or 9/11. Lots of fodder for future historians.
And no shortage of pain.
Lots of bending, lifting, kneeling, crawling, pushing and pulling, and that's before the race. And after. With the ice rough and crusty (in other words, sticky) and the wind variable, it was possible to sail into a patch of doldrums, and I seemed to do so in every race. When that happens, you have to get out and push while the other boats go whizzing by. Years ago I vowed I'd never push again, but in the heat of the moment, I seem to have forgot. Too much strenuousity for this particular frame, and on top of that my thumbs were frozen solid for four hours.
Bri was away, so it was Tony in Solstice and me in Wombat. Tony did well—up with the hotshots.
Meanwhile, in light of the immigration and refugee madness emanating from Washington, Abby organized a protest at the office of another politician of little brain.
Grocery shopping one of the highlights.
Chilly, breezy, gray day, one to make you appreciative of insulation, central heat, and indoor plumbing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My two favorite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.
― Peter Golkin
... in Will's class. Dooly and the Snortsnoot, an old favorite, in which the kid-eating monster is run out of town by a very small giant who quickly becomes a big one through a large act of bravery.
It didn't take long for Will to figure out who the mystery reader was. Costume, put together in almost no time, by Mimi.
Actually a little snow last night, enough to require a light shovel this morning. Not enough for a snowblower, although I am anxious to try the big two-stage donated by neighbor Kathy. But also not enough, one might hope, to crust up what remains of ice on local lakes. I'm predicting a regatta—not this weekend, but the one following.
As an alternative to news I've been looking over Shakespeare's sonnets, and being astonished, once again, at the skill of the Bard. Sonnets are hard to write. Would it not it be fun to hang out with William for a week or two, looking over his shoulder as he was writing—writing something like this:
Sonnet 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
One bit of fun is to try reading this out loud. It's not easy, especially the amazing line 10. After that, another bit of fun is reading it along with a skilled reader, like this:
...trying to be snow, but mostly failing. Slick walks melting down to bare pavement, but otherwise dismal outdoors.
The Socratic method can be defined as cooperative argumentative dialog. And that leads me to this:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Socratic
H. D.
"They cut it in squares,
sometimes it comes
in little jars"
"O—?"
"Under the trees—"
"Where?"
"By his sheep-pen."
"Whose?"
"The man
who brings eggs:
he put it
in a basket with moss."
"What?"
"Why,
the little jar."
"What for?"
Why,
to carry it over—"
"Over where?"
"The field to Io's house."
"Then?"
"Her mother took it out
of the moss,
and opened it—"
"What?"
"The little jar."
"And then?"
"We each had some."
"What?"
"Why the thing
in the little jar
they got
from the straw huts."
"What huts?"
"Why,
the little huts
under the apple-trees
where they live—"
"Who live?"
"Why,
the bees."
And Mr. Paine also said, "Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered."
A number of these signs have popped up around town. I don't know who's behind them.
We as a country are in a difficult position right now. As Andres Rondon says in the article excerpt below, contempt, disdain, and ridicule of Trump voters (the unwashed middle) just strengthens their hand by giving them an enemy to hate.
However, it is essential that a slide into fascism (alternative facts, faked news, scapegoating, etc.) be resisted. As Sarah Bakewell points out in her book (excerpt below), even intellectuals can find themselves sinking into totalitarian quicksand.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"How to Culture Jam a Populist in Four Easy Steps"
Andres Miguel Rondon
Caracas Chronicles, January 20, 2017
Don’t waste your time trying to prove that this ism is better than that ism. Ditch all the big words. Why? Because, again, the problem is not the message but the messenger. It’s not that Trump supporters are too stupid to see right from wrong, it’s that you’re much more valuable to them as an enemy than as a compatriot.
The problem is tribal. Your challenge is to prove that you belong in the same tribe as them: that you are American in exactly the same way they are.
In Venezuela, we fell into the abstraction trap in a bad way. We wrote again and again about principles, about the separation of powers, about civil liberties, about the role of the military in politics, about corruption and economic policy. But it took our leaders ten years to figure out they needed to actually go to the slums and to the countryside. And not for a speech, or a rally, but for game of dominoes or to dance salsa – to show they were Venezuelans too, that they had tumbao and could hit a baseball, could tell a joke that landed. That they could break the tribal divide, come down off the billboards and show they were real. And no, this is not populism by other means. It is the only way of establishing your standing. It’s deciding not to live in an echo chamber. To press pause on the siren song of polarization.
You will not find that pause button in the cities or the university’s campuses. You will find it precisely where you’re not expected.
Only then will your message land.
There’s no point sugar coating: the road ahead is tough and the pitfalls are many. It’s way easier to get this wrong than to get this right, and the chances are the people getting it wrong will drown out those getting it right.
But if you want to be part of the solution, the road ahead is clear: Recognize you’re the enemy they need; show concern, not contempt, for the wounds of those that brought Trump to power; by all means be patient with democracy and struggle relentlessly to free yourself from the shackles of the caricature the populists have drawn of you.
It’s a tall order. But the alternative is worse. Believe me, I know: I’m from Venezuela.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At the Existentialist Cafe
Sarah Bakewell
Then came Sartre’s year in Berlin, but for most of it he was so absorbed in his reading of Husserl and others that at first he barely noticed the outside world. He drank with his classmates and went for long walks. ‘I rediscovered irresponsibility’, he recalled later in a notebook. As the academic year went on, the red-and-black banners, the SA rallies and the regular outbreaks of violence became more disturbing. In February 1934, Beauvoir visited him for the first time, and was struck mainly by how normal Germany seemed. But when she went again in June and travelled back with him from Berlin through Dresden, Munich and the Nazis’ favourite city of Nuremberg, the military marches and half-glimpsed brutal scenes on the streets made them both eager to get out of the country for good. By this time, Sartre was having nightmares about rioting towns and blood splattering over bowls of mayonnaise.
The mixture of anxiety and unreality that Sartre and Beauvoir felt was not unusual. Many Germans felt a similar combination, except for those who were Nazi converts, or else who were firm opponents or direct targets. The country was steeped in the sensation that Heidegger called ‘uncanniness’.
Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last. Karl Jaspers was one of those who made this mistake, as he later recalled, and Beauvoir observed similar dismissive attitudes among the French students in Berlin. In any case, most of those who disagreed with Hitler’s ideology soon learned to keep their view to themselves. If a Nazi parade passed on the street, they would either slip out of view or give the obligatory salute like everyone else, telling themselves that the gesture meant nothing if they did not believe in it. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm —yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.
The journalist Sebastian Haffner, a law student at the time, also used the word ‘uncanny’ in his diary, adding, ‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner thought modernity itself was partly to blame: people had become yoked to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on.
Heidegger’s former lover and student Hannah Arendt would argue, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, that totalitarian movements thrived at least partly because of this fragmentation in modern lives, which made people more vulnerable to being swept away by demagogues. Elsewhere, she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the most extreme failures of personal moral awareness. The phrase attracted criticism, mainly because she applied it to the actively genocidal Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the Holocaust, who was guilty of a lot more than a failure to take responsibility. Yet she stuck by her analysis: for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. It amounts to disobeying the one command she had absorbed from Heidegger in those Marburg days: Think!
Some ice breakup on the Bark River. Pax and I watched several floes revolve slowly and crunch together in an ineffective effort to move downstream.
Skies remain gray and the temperature is slowly slipping back toward freezing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There's something special about brief poems, and this one, consisting of two tercets, is rather fun to puzzle over.
As Bad as a Mile
Philip Larkin
Watching the shied core
Striking the basket, skidding across the floor,
Shows less and less of luck, and more and more
Of failure spreading back up the arm
Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,
The apple unbitten in the palm.
By noon we were already two hours behind schedule, even though we didn't have one. And then, the hurried-er we went, the behind-er we got.
Dampness dominates. Even yesterday, during the brief bit of sunshine, all was damp. This is when the desert beckons.
Attendance is down at the bird-feeder. This might be because all the snow is gone and more natural forage is available. Or, possibly the avians (like me) like their seeds crisp rather than soggy. Or, possibly, it's because of a big, old, sharp-shinned hawk, possibly the one who has struck terror here in previous years. Yesterday I saw an ominous, slope-shouldered shape high in a tree several back-yards away. The binoculars revealed a sharp-shinned. Today, as Pax and I were walking along the creek we noticed a troop of noisy crows mobbing an ominous, slope-shouldered shape high in a tree. Yes, a predator prowls.
And, yesterday I killed one. Driving along a country road I saw what appeared to be a road-killed 'possum dead ahead. I steered to center over it without a touch, when I suddenly saw a raptor right on top of it. Before I could react the bird was forcibly removed from the carcass, and turned into one itself. I'm still feeling bad about that, but figure the little ones at the feeder outside the kitchen window don't really mind.
Last night we went for dinner and some old fashioned folk music at Cafe Carpe--with our flag-waving neighbors across the street.
Noting like a protest rally to get the day off to a good start...
...in Fort Atkinson, in the morning fog. An estimate of 250 on the bridge in this small Wisconsin town.
(The Janowiec family attended the big rally in Madison, where Abby reports the crowd extended the length of State Street from Bascom Hill to the Capitol.)
Heartening to see all the other protests around the country and around the world.
And, on that bright note the sun came out and the thermometer rose into the upper 50s. Good for car washing and some time on two wheels. But worrisome for ice.
Video of the Fort Atkinson protest from the local paper:
All day drizzle.
Our good neighbors across the street, obviously in great distress.
It is my intent to never say two certain words in the same sentence. One of them is president....