Red Moon Cafe

Inclusion in St. Louis Jazz Notes

2012-01-24T16:39:00.002-06:00

I am happy to report that the Red Moon Café and its post titled the Best of Jazz for 2011 , which appears below, has been included among the St Louis Jazz Notes’ list of sites offering the best jazz recordings for 2011. This list includes international sites like London Jazz and Jazz Breakfast and many of those domestic locations like AllAboutJazz and Jazz After Hours . Some of the other sites listed are more regional in their concern with the jazz that has been created by musicians in one location, say, Connecticut, Canada, or Australia. Despite my location, a couple hundred miles or so east of Lebanon, Kansas, the geographic center of the contiguous United States, my list contains jazz created in Iceland, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom, proving, once again, how jazz truly is international.

Let's hope that 2012 offers a lot of good jazz.

That Winter Without Snow

2012-01-17T23:54:00.000-06:00

As we prepare our classes for the upcoming semester, my wife and I occasionally get outside to enjoy some of the warm days we have been having. Bill McGibben says that, because of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which, as of December 2011, is now 391.80 ppm , there is no longer anything resembling normal weather, and we certainly know that feature of climate change this winter because of the absence of snow where we live. We have to find delight in things like sunsets, windy bluffs, contrails, and shadows.

After clicking on a picture here, you will be taken to the slide show that is a relatively new feature of Blogger. Once inside the slide show, using the zoom feature will increase the size of each picture. Personally, I keep my screen set at 125% but find that zooming to 200% makes it possible to pick out more of the details available in these pictures.

Best of Jazz for 2011

2012-01-05T17:55:00.000-06:00

My selections for best jazz albums of 2011 appear below but in no particular order.

Helge Lien Trio, Natsukashii, Ozella Music

Sunna Gunnlaugs, Long Pair Bond, Sunny Sky

Nat Birchall, Sacred Dimension, Gondwana

Matthew Halsall, On the Go, Gondwana

Wolfert Brederode, Post Scriptum, ECM

Sebastian Liedke Trio, Zeitenwende, self produced

Julia Hulsmann Trio, Imprint, ECM

Meadow, Blissful Ignorance, Edition

Colin Vallon Trio, Rruga, ECM

European Union Quartet, The Dark Peak, OAP Records

My artist to watch award goes to the Claire James Trio, a piano trio headed by Claire James, a former student of the Royal Academy of Music in Manchester, England. The trio’s EP, Lines (Efpi Records), was released last summer and contains four tracks, all of which can be heard at SoundCloud.

Sitting Bull Prisoner of War: A Review

2012-01-05T12:53:00.000-06:00

Dennis C. Pope seeks to elucidate a little known time in the life of Sitting Bull in Sitting Bull: Prisoner of War. Concentrating on the years 1881 to 1883, what scholars have up to now either ignored or glossed over, Pope addresses Sitting Bull’s surrender and his imprisonment at Fort Buford, Fort Yates, and Fort Randall. Using newspapers, government documents, and manuscripts, Pope provides Sitting Bull’s words and his interactions with the American government, particularly the Army, and those civilians who sought to interview and befriend the aging chief. Arguing that Sitting Bull “learne[ed] how to deal with the white men who now controlled his life and his people,” Pope lets the evidence illustrate what Sitting Bull learned during his imprisonment, principally his using letters, interviews with reporters and the ethnographer Alice Fletcher, and direct negotiations with the Army until he got what he desired for the Hunkpapa. Pope ultimately concludes that “Sitting Bull remained faithful to his heritage until the end of his life” and that he “continued to exemplify the virtues of generosity and courage and to fight for what he thought was best for his people.” This book provides a focused examination on Sitting Bull at this time of his life and brings together the primary sources that had been scattered in various places on the Internet and in government archives. One weakness occurs when Pope attempts to provide Sitting Bull’s own thoughts after his surrender at Fort Buford in 1881. Pope speculates, for example, that “Sitting Bull’s thoughts were not just for himself and his family, but of his band as well.” Pope adds that Sitting Bull was “honor-bound to look after them. As much as he detested the fact that the old free days were gone forever and that reservation life was now inevitable, he intended to look after his people in the best way possible. Would the whites let him?” These passages seem unnecessary and interfere with Pope’s writing of history.

A Path Through a Wood

2011-11-13T02:22:00.001-06:00

Autumn: Observed Locally But From Multiple Angles

2011-11-09T04:18:00.000-06:00

November in Northeastern Kansas

2011-11-09T02:50:00.001-06:00

It seemed as if the drought we have been experiencing would prevent the trees from becoming as colorful as they have in the past. Beginning about mid-October, the leaves started to acquire shades of orange, yellow, and red. Clicking on any one picture will make it larger.

Recent Autumn Pictures

2011-09-25T00:18:00.001-05:00

Each autumn my wife and I make a point of visiting a local farm in Missouri called Red Barn Farm. It's located across the river from where we live. We first discovered this place when we moved to the area in 1998 and didn't have much money but still wanted to do something outside with our four-year-old. Although our kid is now a teenager and prefers to do things with his friends, we still make a point of visiting this place once or twice in the autumn. We typically buy one or two pumpkins, locally grown apples, and a jar of strawberry rhubarb jam. It's a great place to spend a couple of hours on a sunny September afternoon. Some of the pictures from my recent visit appear below. Clicking on each one will make it larger. Other pictures taken at the Red Barn Farm in previous years can be found here and here .

A Quiet Spot in Nature

2011-09-03T03:14:00.001-05:00

My favorite place to walk remains flooded. When I was teaching across town, I used to make a point of walking by the Missouri River every day after class. Some of my best thinking was done sitting on one of the benches in the shade of a ginkgo tree as I watched the river flow south. I used to review my teaching and make plans for what I wanted to emphasize in the days ahead. Occasionally, now, I manage to get outside to one of the quieter parks nearby. The view isn’t as scenic, but it still has its own attraction.

More recently, I have found park benches located next to a hay field. It is a place that I need to revisit in the days ahead, once our recent bout of one hundred degree days come to an end. Judging from many of the pictures in this blog, it is difficult to imagine that the world population has nearly topped seven billion people. I suppose if I lived in a more crowded environment, it would be possible to think my own thoughts undisturbed once I got used to having many other people around. Likewise, I would find places where I like to walk, places that are removed from the concrete and the noise of the city. I know I probably belong in the city because of my interests and political views. Despite that knowledge, I have chosen to live closer to what I grew to love when I was attending high school on the Fens in England--openness, a natural environment, and weather that is often beautiful and unique. If you should happen to stumble across this blog, these pictures are an attempt to share a glimpse of what I find refreshing and spiritually rejuvenating. Enjoy!

Clicking on any one picture will make it larger.

Jazz Selections--Summer 2011

2011-09-02T03:28:00.001-05:00

I am currently in the midst of listening to several different jazz albums, some a little older and others less so. Over the summer, I had the good fortune of winnning a free copy of Colin Vallon's Rruga in a contest held at AllAboutJazz. That album is one I have been listening to fairly frequently while working at home. All of these jazz albums are worth seeking out.

Reconstructed

2011-09-02T03:27:00.001-05:00

This blog has now been reconstructed. Making the changes to this new template did not end up taking as long as I anticipated. I like some of the features of this new template, such as the addition of a picture in the heading and the changes to the fonts and the layout. It was great not having to hassle with HTML code once I figured out how to add links. I trust that anyone returning to this blog will like the changes and that anyone encountering this blog for the first time will find the blog visually appealing and worth returning to once in a while.

Current Jazz Selections

2011-09-02T03:21:00.002-05:00

Instead of hunting out new jazz releases, I have been digging through some of those CDs stacked on my bookshelves. Currently, I have been listening to Dave Holland's quintet--that is, the work featured on Not for Nothin' and Critical Mass. I have been waking up to one and listening to the other one when driving across town to where I teach a face-to-face class. I have a bad habit of buying clothes or shoes and letting them sit in my closet for a few months or sometimes up to a year. The same problem exists with music, too, because I have purchased a few CDs that I have never listened to. Life is often hectic, particularly at the end of the semester, and sometimes my interests change or I return to what I know when I get a couple of weeks off at the end of the semester. These Dave Holland recordings are new discoveries for me, despite having had them for more than a year. A couple of other Dave Holland discoveries await my attention.

A Few Flowers

2011-08-02T16:00:00.006-05:00

Before the heat in Oklahoma, Texas, and the Southwest began heading north, there were a few flowers visible in my yard. Pictures of them appear below; as in previous posts, clicking on any one of these pictures will make it larger.

Missouri River Flooding Redux

2011-07-08T14:01:00.021-05:00

Like many other locations along the Missouri River, the place where I live is experiencing flooding. Only a few parts of the city are prone to flooding, mostly those areas close to the river, such as Riverfront Park, the sewage treatment plant, and Landing Park. Leavenworth, unlike some of the other cities along the Missouri, increases in elevation as one travels west. The bluffs on this side of the river are what led Colonel Leavenworth to violate his orders regarding the fort he was instructed to create. Finding the eastern side of the river to be a floodplain and potentially unhealthy because of the mosquitoes, he chose to enter into Indian territory and to build his fort on the bluffs overlooking the river and, coincidentally, at the same location where the French had created a fort previously.

The photos below of Landing Park record the rising water, beginning in late May, with the earliest ones appearing at the bottom of the post. Clicking on any one picture will increase its size.

Even though there have been health warnings regarding the presence of E.coli because of the sewage treatment plants upriver not treating their waste, there are still people fishing in these flood waters--either for recreation or out of desperation.

Magnolia Blossoms_2011

2011-04-29T18:29:00.011-05:00

My annual collection of magnolia blossoms appear below. Clicking on each picture will enlarge it.

I am a little slow in posting these pictures. All of the magnolia blossoms where I live are gone now. There was only one good day to get pictures because of the high winds and the cold front that moved in that evening and destroyed many of the blossoms. Even getting pictures on this particular day was difficult because of the wind. I was only able to salvage about forty pictures from the two hundred or so that I took that day. Enjoy!

Jazz Releases & 2011

2011-04-29T17:35:00.011-05:00

I have found the first four months of 2011 to be relatively quiet ones in terms of jazz releases. I regularly check the reviews available online and haven’t been finding too much of note. I am looking forward to hearing Wolfert Brederode Quartet's Post Scriptum and Francois Couturier's Tarkovsky Quartet, both of which will be released later in the summer.

My attention of late has been given toward a few older recordings of current piano trios, some of which have been rotated in my alarm clock and serve as what I hear when first waking up. Maria Kannegaard's Camel Walk, which features Thomas Stronen on percussion and Ole Morten Vagan on bass, received only one or two reviews in this country when it was released in 2008. It is what I have been listening to most often. Initially drawn to that recording because of Thomas Stronen's percussion work, I have since been attracted by Maria Kannegaard's piano, particularly the rhythms maintained by what is presumably her left hand, and the somewhat less prominent bass work by Ole Morten Vagan.

Ballake Sissoko and Vincent Segal

2011-03-03T05:55:00.011-06:00

Lately, I have been finding a lot of pleasure in Ballake Sissoko and Vincent Segal's Chamber Music, an album in which they combine African and European culture, with Ballake Sissoko playing the kora and Vincent Segal playing the cello. Go to YouTube if you want to hear samples of the music. I found myself often returning to those clips on YouTube and eventually downloaded the album from Amazon.

The kora, or African harp, is a new discovery for me. My first exposure occurred when I was introduced to the music of Rachael Gladwin, who plays kora on Nat Birchall's Guiding Spirit.

Chamber Music is fascinating because of the interplay between the musicians. One instrument often maintains the rhythm initially while the other one plays the lead before the instrument creating the rhythm takes the lead. Each musician is a virtuoso. This mastery shows. Vincent Segal surprised his audience in the NPR studio when he started plucking the strings of his cello as if he were playing an lute. Although classified as international, aka world music, Chamber Music contains improvisational elements and has been reviewed by some of the jazz websites. The music here is truly beautiful and worth seeking out.

Phil Miller, RIP

2011-02-20T04:13:00.015-06:00

Phil Miller, a poet long associated with the Kansas City area until he retired from a local community college and left to live in Pennsylvania, died on February 14 at the age of 67.

Phil was kind enough to include one of my poems in his online journal The Any Key Review and arranged for my first reading in the area at Prospero's Books. He visited my creative writing class at UMKC on one occasion. On another occasion, he was willing to drive to Leavenworth on a Saturday morning to read his poems in a composition class of mine.

As I mentioned in a previous entry , Phil overcame any difficulties in writing regularly by returning to his obsessions. For that reason, many of his poems address things like cats, martial discord, alcohol abuse, and ghosts. His productivity was something I always admired.

I was lucky to have him submit poems to Cimarron Review when I was on the masthead as a poetry editor. Those poems he submitted were later included in Branches Snapping, his most accomplished collection.

Kansas City has lost one of its most active poets. He will be missed by those of us who admired him and respected his work. The following poem appeared in his obituary:

Life after Death

It isn't so bad, you know,
now that I've packed my bags.
I get along on my own,
pay my rent, hold down
a small job, have a friend
or two, at a distance, of course.
Look, there are my shoes
beside my bed, ready for action,
ready to walk whichever direction.
Who knows, this may be it.

(by Philip Miller, from his forthcoming collection, The Ghost of Every Day and Other Poems, to be published by Spartan Press, Kansas City, MO.)

Phil Heldrich: A Good Friend

2011-02-06T04:41:00.008-06:00

Phil Heldrich, a friend of mine, died last year at age 45, leaving behind a wife and daughter. Unfortunately, he and I had not been as close during the past few years, after he moved to Tacoma, Washington. Most of our communication during the last few years had only been an annual Christmas card.

I first met Phil when he was walking through Morrill Hall at Oklahoma State before the start of classes in 1993. Phil had recently moved down from Manhattan, Kansas where he had completed his MA at Kansas State University. We both were graduates of Kansas State. I had completed my MA about a year before Phil started his. Once we discovered that common lineage, Phil wanted to learn everything possible about the PhD program at Oklahoma State—the professors and their quirks and the structure of certain classes. We ended up talking for several hours that afternoon. I don’t remember what kind of experiences he had that first year in his Intro to Graduate Studies class or his other classes.

My wife and I learned of her pregnancy that fall, and what free time we had was spent going through birthing classes and commuting to Oklahoma City for the gestational diabetes clinic at University Hospital. Phil and Chris occasionally visited us as my wife and I struggled with raising an infant and then a toddler while earning our PhD’s. They invited us to their duplex apartment on occasion but seemed overwhelmed by the chaos and demands for attention that our child made.

One summer night, we took Phil and Chris out past Lake Carl Blackwell to watch for the Perseid meteor shower, and that experience, although somewhat altered, appeared in Good Friday, his book of poems. A couple of the poems in that book were created for the poetry workshop that we took together one semester.

Most of all, I remember how passionately he approached his studies and his drive to publish. That passion showed in his approach to his coursework as he arrived on campus early every morning and spent the day attending classes, teaching his own classes, or studying, writing, and grading in the library, not leaving campus until Chris got off from work. Phil ended up defending his dissertation and going through graduation a semester before I did. He was already teaching at Emporia State when I completed my dissertation. That same intensity Phil devoted to his studies was present in his thriftiness. He once told me that he supported two people on his graduate assistant salary in Manhattan and did the same in Stillwater until Chris started working. Unlike me, I don’t think that Phil ever took out student loans while going through his PhD.

When I was struggling with quitting smoking during my wife’s pregnancy, Phil told me about his own efforts at quitting smoking without any other aids than his own determination. He emphasized how he always kept two cigarettes in the glovebox of his car just in case the craving became too much for him. Following his example, I kept two cigarettes in the glovebox of my car, too, and eventually had to rely on them before my transformation into a nonsmoker was complete.

Once my wife and I moved to northeastern Kansas, Phil called me up to find out whether I would be willing to read manuscripts for the Bluestem Poetry Award. That phone call started a four year relationship with the press as I read through a couple of hundred manuscripts before making an annual selection of three semi-finalists. Phil and I had been editors at Cimarron Review, and he seemed surprised how quickly I could get through a pile of manuscripts. As the editor of Flint Hills Review, Phil accepted some of my poems over a period of several years. Phil was one of my biggest fans. He once encouraged me to submit my manuscript when he was on the board of Woodley Press. It was something I would have done if I had been more confident of my full-length collection.

Up until Phil and Chris moved to Tacoma, we managed to get together about once a year. Whenever my wife and I drove to her home in southcentral Kansas, we stopped in Emporia to visit Phil and Chris, sometimes having dinner at Carlos O’Kelly’s. We got to see Alexandria a few times after she was born. She took a liking to my son’s Hedwig one year and tried to keep that stuffed owl for herself. I was happy to hear that Phil finally bought a house in Emporia after having rented that upstairs apartment for so many years. Knowing Phil, he would have gone over every last detail with the previous owner and his realtor before he finally signed the paperwork. That’s why I was surprised to hear that Phil and Chris were moving to Tacoma. They seemed to have had their house for only six months or so. I thought that his collection of nonfiction and its emphasis on place would be an indication that Phil would remain in this part of the country. He probably would have published more if he had remained at Emporia.

Phil and Chris invited us to Washington on several occasions. It’s unfortunate that we never got to see each other again. At first, we exchanged Christmas cards and recent photos of our kids. Phil’s cards kept coming while I stopped writing. He was a good friend. I’m going to miss him, and I wish Chris and Alexa the very best. His wife lost a husband and his daughter, a father. I lost a friend. And we all lost a poet and a nonfiction writer. Most of all, we lost the fiction—his preferred genre—that Phil never published in book form during his lifetime.

Jazz Selections for 2010

2011-01-22T02:12:00.014-06:00

My selections for 2010 appear below but in no particular order. There are a couple of other releases from 2010 that I purchased and downloaded. I continue to play those releases in the car occasionally and have not yet made a definite decision about them. I admit that there were many other recordings released last year. Unless someone were to send me recordings for review, I am limited to what my budget allows. I usually purchase new releases based on my familiarity with the artist or on what I read about the music in reviews or online forums and on what I sample afterwards in an online video. Ketil Bjornstad is someone whose music I only discovered in 2010 when I read a favorable review at Jazz Breakfast . The forums devoted to new music at AllAboutJazz spoke highly of Nat Birchal's music--both Guiding Spirit and Akhenaten, his earlier release on Matthew Halsall's label. It surprises me that Zbigniew Namyslowski's newest release hasn't gotten much attention in either the US or the UK. I currently have Anat Fort's music in my alarm clock and find a great deal of pleasure in her newest release as I wake up to it. It is possible to deduce from these selections that jazz is truly international in its creation and its appeal.

Jazz Recordings

2010-12-10T23:57:00.006-06:00

Some of the jazz sites have started to release their selections for the best jazz recordings released in 2010. My own selections will be forthcoming later in December or in early January. I have largely been listening to recordings from previous years, such as these two selections from 2009 and one selection from 2004.

I tend to listen to Matthew Halsall's Colour Yes while driving and find much to like in Halsall's trumpet, Nat Birchall's saxophone, Rachael Gladwin's harp, and Gavin Barras' bass. Even after many listens, I continue to wonder how Gavin Barras keeps time with his bass. He seems to come in after every five beats in "I Have Been Here Before."

Jon Hassell's Last Night the Moon Came Dropping its Clothes in the Street is the music I turn to most often when I type up grading comments for my students' essays. I am now starting to discover his earlier Power Spot but haven't yet listened to Maarifa Street / Magic Realism 2.

Jeff Ballard, the drummer for Fly, is truly amazing. His work on "Fly Mr. Freakjar," the second track on this recording, is mesmerizing and rhythmically brilliant. Larry Grenadier's bass on "JJ", the fourth track, is fascinating as well. An admirer of Fly's sophomore effort (Sky & Country), I only recently discovered their freshman effort.

Hay Bales in December

2010-12-10T23:33:00.008-06:00

Traditionally thought of as an early fall activity, cutting hay has extended later into the fall season this year, perhaps because of the prolonged drought that we have been having. I recently found this field when I was out for a walk one afternoon and returned to it yesterday on what may be the last warm and sunny afternoon in these parts for a long time. These pictures continue to show my fascination with shadows. Clicking on any one picture will enlarge it.

James Howard Kunstler's The Witch of Hebron: A Review

2010-11-08T05:51:00.006-06:00

James Howard Kunstler revisits Union Grove and Washington County in upstate New York in The Witch of Hebron, his sequel to a World Made by Hand. Set in an America of the future, after Washington, D.C., has been destroyed in a terrorist nuclear explosion because of this country’s protracted involvement in a Holy Land War, and after the economic collapse has ended all oil imports, the novel spans a period of two weeks in late October. The townspeople inhabit a world without electricity, rely on their own feet or horsepower for transportation, and subsist by exchanging their expertise in a field like carpentry or medicine for food and other necessities.

Kunstler provides enough exposition early in the novel to reacquaint readers with his America and to make it possible for a new reader to enjoy this book without having read the previous one. Having that acquaintance with a World Made by Hand makes it possible to fully appreciate his characters and their interactions.

Often violent, this novel reveals a time when order, particularly outside of Union Grove, no longer exists. Bandits like Billy Bones roam the county, looking for food, sex, something of value that can be exchanged later, or the material that will provide another stanza to their ballad of misdeeds.

Religious faith is often cast in doubt. Characters sometimes turn to the comfort of medicinal herbs and attach magical significance to the associations that we Euro-Americans have carried with us regarding the end of October.

Kunstler doesn’t ignore the sexual lives of his characters, proving particularly adept when describing the intimate relations of married couples. To his credit, Kunstler has created two strong female characters, Jane Ann Holder and Barbara Maglie. Young women, however, often have to give freely of their bodies.

In addition to the occasional sexism, one other drawback to the novel is the medical knowledge of an eleven-year-old, who is able to perform a sophisticated medical procedure after only having watched and assisted his father.

Kunstler, at first, splits the narrative by pursuing the actions of several different characters. At the climax of the novel, these characters are brought together in ways not expected. This control of Kunstler’s over his characters and his plot causes the reader to move through the novel quickly and to desire more of what happens in Union Grove, New York after the America we know has changed so drastically.

Shadows at Havens Park

2010-10-18T03:41:00.014-05:00

Getting outside for me is both calming and rejuvenating. I recently had the good fortune of getting outside after plowing through a large chunk of grading. Havens Park, one of the parks where I live, is especially pretty in the afternoon because of how the shadows stretch across the grass. It was so quiet that I could hear the acorns dropping through the leaves and plonking on the ground. That sound I have carried with me since.

It's unfortunate that the city has plans to upgrade this particular park. I certainly hope that whatever is planned does not result in any drastic change. The addition of a couple of picnic tables would be great; anything else would be too much. The city needs to maintain the integrity of this park, as it exists now, as much as possible.

Autumn Pictures

2010-10-02T02:00:00.013-05:00

Every autumn I manage to visit one of the area farms to take pictures of the various kinds of pumpkins and gourds and to bring back a jar of strawberry rhubarb jam.

One of the farms in Missouri offers quarter shares for those who want a regular supply of fresh produce, and fresh eggs, during the summer. That is something I need to consider investing in. My family doesn't support my preference for giving up meat entirely but would consider eating more fresh produce. Except for packaged ham, we have mostly reduced our meat consumption to buffalo and hamburger from cows that were grass fed and were not injected with growth hormones.

Probably if my yard were less shaded and if I could ensure that the local deer population wouldn't eat the garden, as they do the lilies, I would probably plant my own vegetables, providing that I could find the time to care for them.

One thing I have been looking for is a good spinach recipe as a way of incorporating more fresh produce into my diet. E-mail me if you should happen to know of a good receipe for spinach.

As with the previous pictures on this blog, clicking on each one will enlarge it.

Labor Day, 2010

2010-09-06T03:40:00.013-05:00

As an online teacher, I cannot say that I get a break from my labor very often unless I choose to take time off and don't go near my computer. As my wife says, all we ever do is stay inside our house and work. The opening weeks of the semester are the least busy because students have not yet started to submit their essays for grading. I still have to check the discussion forums once or twice a day to answer questions and to greet students, but I get to choose when I go online. Last Monday afternoon, when other people were returning from work, I managed to go see a matinee showing of Nanny McPhee, a movie my wife wanted to see. It was our last excursion for the summer. Afterwards, we had our dinner outside on the patio of Chipotle's and enjoyed the open air and the weather. It wasn't until returning home that I got online to check up on my students.

Unlike previous summers, I haven't been making much time to go take pictures. I don't know why exactly. When the summer session ended, I continued to sit in front of my computer to create CD covers, using a CD labeler from Memorex, for some of the music that I had downloaded (legally I might add) over the past year or so. It was a chance to do something different than grade essays during the two weeks that I had off. It was also more relaxing than preparing my classes for the coming semester.

Taking a trip across the state would have probably been enjoyable. Peg at Kansas Prairie described a recent leisurely trip she took to Greensburg with her grandson. I sometimes daydream about flying a kite at Monument Rocks or Coronado Heights. Unfortunately, there aren't many places to fly a kite where I live in eastern Kansas; there are too many trees and too few open spaces. That's one of the things that I find disappointing about eastern Kansas.

Taking walks along the Missouri River is a consolation of sorts. I recently discovered that Parkville, Missouri, about a thirty minute drive, offers a much longer walkway along the river. Compared to where I live farther north, the river in Parkville offers a more industrial landscape, with a view of a power plant and a gas storage container. Nonetheless, the city has spent a lot of money on creating this parklike setting. It had drawn a number of people when I was there recently. That kind of excursion is the extent of my travel this summer.

Despite my complaints, I remain thankful that I have employment. Other people aren't so fortunate. The latest figure, I believe, is one out of ten Americans is unemployed. I am also fortunate that I am able to choose my hours. Not many people have that advantage. In spite of my low wages, the amount of hours that I put in once the semester gets underway, the absence of permanent employment with health insurance, and the time spent without a paycheck during semester breaks, I am apparently one of the lucky Americans.

Pictures of the river at Parkville appear below. Clicking on a picture will enlarge it.

No Comments

2010-08-11T23:40:00.003-05:00

In the event that someone reading this blog wants to comment on something that I have added, I have to inform you that I have turned off the comments, at least temporarily, because of the amount of spam that I have been getting from China. Initially, I tried requiring that all comments have to be approved first. When that move caused me to receive the same amount of spam, I had no choice but to turn off the comments option entirely. It is possible to contact me by e-mailing me, however.

I contemplated closing this blog or moving everything to a new blog because of this amount of spam. That line of thinking has kept me from posting much of anything new of late.

Missouri River Flooding

2010-06-28T01:04:00.009-05:00

Like many previous years, the Missouri River has been running high this spring. Flood warnings have been in effect for several weeks now. Once a week at least, the local newspaper runs the headline, "River Going to Crest on Thursday." Afterwards, the river levels drops a little before more runoff from thunderstorms to the north send the river to a new level and what seems like another crest. One of the clerks in a local store has said that her sewer has been backing up because of the flooding. Judging from the number of teeth that she was missing, she probably doesn't have either sewer back up coverage or flood insurance. Poor lady!

A few of the high school seniors, who were celebrating their freedom last month, having been released from school about a week earlier than the other students, were jumping into the water near the railroad overpass. One of them made the mistake of leaving his mouth open during one of his leaps and said afterwards, "That water tastes awful." His friend replied, "You're not supposed to drink the water, dumb ass." I have often wondered since whether that guy ever suffered any health problems as a result of swallowing the water.

Balloons

2010-06-28T00:51:00.005-05:00

Last month, during the few days I had off before the summer session started, my wife and I tried to see the launching of balloons in Gardner, Kansas for its second annual balloon festival. There were so many other people with the same idea that parking was virtually nonexistant. Once my wife and I decided to drive north and west, we managed to see some of the balloons as they drifted overhead. Clicking on each picture will enlarge it.

A review of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

2010-05-28T05:45:00.010-05:00

Bill McKibben in Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet argues that the world we once knew no longer exists because of global warming, which currently includes a one-degree Celsius rise in temperature and an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Although the atmosphere currently contains 390 ppm of carbon dioxide, McKibben believes that the amount of carbon can brought down to 350 ppm, an amount that scientists see as the upper limits of that safe range. McKibben devotes the first chapter to accounts of how global warming has affected climate by examining not only extreme weather events, particularly stronger and more devastating rainfall, but also disappearing glaciers, losses in sea ice, and permanent shifts in climate patterns. These manifestations of global warming will only become more widespread and more destructive. Countries located in the northern hemisphere can reduce the amount of carbon used, he says, by increasing the cost of both gasoline and coal. Those developing nations will ultimately use fewer amounts of fossil fuels if those nations in the northern hemisphere offer alternatives by providing green energy—e.g., wind turbines. Unfortunately, America is too saddled with debt to make significant changes nationally. McKibben also believes that the American government has grown too large because of large nationwide projects like the construction of the interstate system. Now the federal government needs to shrink in size while individual states learn to create their own energy and their own food. This call for simplicity, while also requiring the end of consumerism and complexity on many levels, can allow people to make changes not only locally but also nationally and globally by communicating via the Internet and by working together to make the new world that we inhabit a somewhat more welcoming kind of place. McKibben has created an important book that makes radical statements and that calls for drastic actions. As Americans, the world’s largest consumers and largest users of fossil fuels, we have no choice but to change how we live on this planet.

At times, particularly in the later chapters, it seems as if McKibben wrote the book in haste, perhaps because of the urgency to get the book into print and to make others aware of the topic. It was difficult at times to discern the direction of his third chapter, which is one of four chapters. Personally, I would have preferred more attribution for some of the quotes because some of them are simply dropped into the prose and accompanied with a footnote when the quote, if it deserves to be used, really should be identified within the prose. Despite these criticisms, the book needs to find a wide audience so that others can learn of the severity of global warming and what we can do as a nation, as a community, and as individuals.

Henry Moore and Kansas City

2010-05-02T04:13:00.012-05:00

Recently, I had the chance to tour the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. It had been a few years since my last visit. Kansas City is about an hour's drive one-way from where I live, so I don't often make it to the city. One of my favorite displays at the Nelson-Atkins is the assortment of Henry Moore sculptures outside on the lawn. It's a great location to spend a couple of hours or to take someone visiting the area for the first time. I would probably retreat there with my grading if I lived in the city.

Two of Henry Moore's sculptures appear in the following pictures.

Magnolia Blossoms

2010-04-06T14:33:00.009-05:00

The demands of teaching both online and in the classroom this semester have prevented me from providing more frequent posts. It has been a constant struggle trying to maintain a semblance of control over the grading.

I will be adding a few pictures occasionally, beginning with these magnolia blossoms. Providing the pictures of these blossoms doesn't fully represent the sensory experience of standing within their scent, as the wind moves the branches away from the camera lens, altering the reflections of the branches against the petals.

These pictures come from two days, one when the blossoms had just started to open and one when the blossoms had survived a night of near freezing temperatures and several days of strong winds. These pictures are the best ones from the 450 shots that I took. I used several different settings and tried different strengths and different combinations of close up lens.

Clicking on each picture will enlarge it in a separate window.

Where Are the Warm Days of Years Past

2010-02-17T00:04:00.005-06:00

This year is one in which I am looking forward to warmer weather. One weather forecaster in Kansas City is calling for winter to hang around until at least the vernal equinox. Judging from the kind of weather we have been having, this spring (April especially) looks like it will be an active one when I only want clear skies and quiet nights.

My son tells me that he likes winter and doesn't mind having it continue for a while longer. I remember feeling the same way when I was much younger. Winter used to be my favorite season. The winters I knew in Maryland, in Turkey, and in England while I was growing up didn't prepare me for the winters I experienced when I moved to Kansas. My second winter in Kansas I rented a one-bedroom house in Concordia that had drafty windows and doors, no heating except for an old fashioned gas stove in the kitchen, and virtually no insulation. Although I added plastic sheeting to the windows, that preventive measure didn't make the house any warmer. I spent most of my evenings sitting next to that gas stove. Because I had almost no bedding of my own, a friend also gave me a blanket that he had gotten from the hospital where he worked. The year before I had rented a studio apartment that came supplied with bedding.

Probably my coldest winter was the year that I spent living in a basement in Manhattan. The upstairs tenant had control over the thermostat. He used to go away for the weekend and leave the thermostat at what seemed like a low setting. Fortunately, the landlord lived nearby and adjusted the thermostat for me a few times. He also bought a portable baseboard heater that helped in the evenings when I was sitting at the kitchen table and grading essays as a graduate teaching assistant or writing essays for my own classes.

While living in Oklahoma, I left my office window open in the winter so that I could let a fan pull the cigarette smoke outside. I didn't want to expose my wife to my secondhand smoke. Fortunately, I quit smoking during our second winter in Oklahoma. Shutting the window made my office so much more pleasant. The landlord also installed central heating in that house the following year. My 16th year as a nonsmoker went virtually unnoticed on January 22, by the way.

Housebound

2010-01-09T04:42:00.005-06:00

Like much of this country and like Europe, this part of Kansas has been cold and snowy for three weeks now. Tonight and tomorrow will be our lowest temperatures, approximately -6. It isn't often that the cold weather remains here for longer than a few days.

There is something to be said for having a constant temperature of, say, 75 degrees, from one day to another. That certainty eliminates having to alter one's plans when going outside. I'm not ready to move to Texas or Florida or southern California, however.

I’ve been housebound for four days now. The idea of cabin fever seemed like a strange concept when I first heard the term. When I was young, I actually idealized secluding myself away from the world with a woman, much like Yuri and Lara at Varykino in Doctor Zhivago, not realizing how difficult it would have been finding drinking water and food, without making the trip in the brutal cold to Yuriatin. Since my wife and I are not yet teaching during the coming semester, we didn’t have to commute the past few days. We were lucky. Judging from what I saw on the television, the traffic on the freeways in Kansas City was often reduced to one lane, making it necessary for those commuters to leave the house much earlier in the morning. After these four days of remaining inside, I am looking forward to getting out of the house on Saturday to do more than shovel the driveway. I just wish it were possible to take a walk without risking frostbite.

A Selection of Jazz From 2009

2009-12-31T06:24:00.018-06:00

While I admit having heard only a limited number of the Jazz CD's that were released in 2009, my selections for the best releases appear below.

Eberhard Weber's reissue is particularly important because it brings together those recordings when Weber was involved with the group named Colours. This reissue contains three titles, Yellow Fields (1975), Silent Feet(1977), and Little Movements (1980). If you didn't purchase these albums when they were first released or weren't alive when they were released, I recommend getting them now. These albums are all essential recordings. Prior to this reissue, Yellow Fields was particularly hard to find on CD in this country. I ended up having to order my copy a few years ago directly from Europe.

Like the bassist Eberhard Weber, Jan Garbarek, who plays tenor and soprano saxophone, is another jazz artist who is considered a virtuoso of his instrument and a major contributor to jazz during the past thirty-five years or so; some of his albums are considered essential recordings for anyone who wishes to assemble a jazz library. A previous post of mine goes into more depth about Jan Garbarek.

Vassilis Tsabropoulos is a Greek pianist who trained to play classical music and who has made the crossover to jazz. The Promise is his solo recording.

Anouar Brahem is considered a master of the oud. I have mentioned his album Le Pas du Chat Noir in a previous post. The Astounding Eyes of Rita is less contemplative and less melancholy than that album.

Lars Danielsson, the Swedist bassist, has been gaining more critical attention since the release of Pasodoble in 2007. A thorough sampling of his work can be found at YouTube.

Diego Barber is a young guitarist who has only recorded this one CD as a leader. This CD also features the members of Fly, that is, Mark Turner, Larry Grenadier, and Jeff Ballard. Both Larry Grenadier and Jeff Ballard make up the new Brad Mehldau trio.

One way to test the validity of my selections is to compare them with the other best of lists that will be appearing at other websites like Jazz Breakfast , AllAboutJazz , and JazzAfterHours .

Review of Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America

2009-12-30T06:01:00.003-06:00

Susan J. Marks’ Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America certainly addresses an important topic, one that has been receiving attention in the Great Plains for at least the past fifteen to twenty years and one that has recently been receiving attention nationwide. The book itself presents the information about this dwindling resource but largely seems to be a compendium of what can be found on the Internet about the topic. One thing the book lacks is a strong narrative. It isn’t necessary to include anecdotes from the author’s experience, but as a reader I would like to see the author relating her impressions and observations as she travels to those various locations that are representative of the water crisis in this country. The inclusion of bulleted information quickly becomes tiring and frustrating. In including quotations from various authorities, Marks gives the impression of having interviewed people like “Bill Waldrop, a Tennessee-based hydrologist who has been studying water and environmental quality issues since the early 1970’s” or “Hugh Hurlow, senior geologist for the Utah Geological Survey.” The Chapter Notes, however, don’t reference these interviews and are simply a list of Internet sites, which causes one to believe that Marks has pulled these quotes from those links without having picked up the phone or having made a trip away from her computer. I have to wonder, too, what audience Marks is addressing. Early in the book, she defines words like aquifer as “underground water supplies,” peninsula, “meaning that it is surrounded on three sides by water,” and brackish, “salty,” but doesn’t define a word like desalination, which I suspect needs to be defined if the intended audience isn’t familiar with a word as common as peninsula. Perhaps Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America is meant only for libraries so that someone needing the research can pull information from one or two chapters to satisfy a school assignment.

Insomnia

2009-12-26T07:39:00.003-06:00

Is insomnia unique to each person? For me, when suffering from insomnia, I cannot relax enough to fall asleep in my bed. Just the thought of going to bed makes me anxious. Having the weight of the blankets on my feet or experiencing labored breathing from my asthma causes me to climb out of bed as I have to stand up and move my limbs. Once I calm down, I am able to sit on the edge of the bed but cannot actually lie back and relax. Sometimes when sitting on the edge of the bed, I am able to fall asleep while practicing creative visualization. One morning I woke up and found myself stretched out in the bed. That was a great feeling. More often, I end up getting a few hours of sleep sitting up in front of the television or in my office chair. My office is that place of last resort because once I shut the door and recline in my chair, I am usually able to sleep for a couple of hours. I have thought of getting the equivalent of a hospital bed so that I can sleep while sitting up, but finding the money for such a purchase isn’t easy.

I had thought that I recently overcame the bout of insomnia described in my previous post. My insomnia has returned for some reason, and I don’t know why. It’s not like that I have any serious worries. I have a job and, with my wife’s income, we are able to survive from one month to another. Some people are far worse off than we are. Everyone in my family is relatively healthy. Some students of mine from last semester were dissatisfied with their grades because of problems that they created for themselves. Other students expressed how much they enjoyed my class and how much they learned over the course of the semester. I can’t say that worrying about my students is keeping me awake. There isn’t anything that I can do about those unhappy students because of winter break.

Although I usually don’t drink, I have tried drinking wine to get sleepy. I have also tried taking a melatonin. Even these things don’t work. Sometimes it’s the simplest of things—like sleeping—that create the most problems.

Exhausted but Awake

2009-12-20T06:14:00.004-06:00

I have been absent from this blog because of the grading that characterizes the end of every semester of college teaching. Many things are pushed aside as the emphasis is placed on reading essays and compiling grades. The final two days of the semester I was awake until almost noon before I finally collapsed into bed and got about five or six hours of sleep. Now my sleeping schedule is terribly out of whack because of the changes to my internal clock. I don't know when I'll be able to get to bed earlier in the morning, say, before 2:00 a.m. Anymore, I am most comfortable sleeping when the sun is up because of the pattern that was established during the semester. There were a few weeks when I had the schedule of a normal person, that is, getting up at 6:30 a.m. and remaining awake during the day. That routine didn't usually allow me to get much work done. It was too easy to take a walk or to run errands when I should have been reading through my students' essays or typing up comments. Once the essays started to back up, I began staying awake through the night so that I would concentrate on the grading. After my kid got up at 6:30 a.m., I got his breakfast and took him to school before I went to bed for about six hours. This pattern changed on weekends. Even so, the pattern has become so engrained that it may take another week before my sleeping schedule changes radically.

Buying Nothing

2009-11-27T02:32:00.004-06:00

I certainly wouldn't spend the day after Thanksgiving shopping even if I had lots of money to spend. My day will be spent grading essays with that time broken up by a walk in the afternoon before I come back home and start cooking barbecue for dinner. My stomach hasn't let me digest food cooked outside on a barbecue grill for about ten years now. An alternative I discovered is baking pork ribs in the oven at 350 degrees for a couple of hours after having let them marinate in barbecue sauce for a day or two. Beef ribs are equally tasty. My own homemade ribs are as good as what you can get at many of the barbecue restaurants in Kansas City. My wife agrees.

Froy Aagre and Cycle of Silence

2009-11-27T02:10:00.004-06:00

Froy Aagre has announced that she has signed with the ACT+Vision label and that she will be releasing a new CD in January, 2010. Additional information regarding this release and her touring schedule can be found at her blog . Her blog also contains a downloadable sample of her music from her 2009 performance at Midem. That sample is much appreciated and highly recommended.

Stephan Bormann Band

2009-11-01T02:37:00.013-06:00

Each year more jazz CD’s are released than can be reviewed. As a result, it is not a surprise that the Stephan Bormann Band's Songs From a Small Room received very little critical attention when it was released in 2005 on the Ozella label, an independent company in Germany. A professor of guitar at Dresden’s University of Music, Bormann is currently a member of the duo Hands on Strings, which has released three CD’s in Germany and which also features Thomas Fellow. Songs From a Small Room is Bormann’s third recording as a leader.

Composed of Stephan Bormann on electric and acoustic guitar, Volker Schlott on alto and soprano saxophone, Mohi Buschendorf on double and electric bass, and Jens Dohle on drums, the Stephan Bormann Band performs original material created by Stephan Bormann.

There are a range of styles on this CD, such as chamber jazz and elements of mid-1970’s jazz fusion. Even so, the music remains unique because of its adoption of several different styles, none of which dominate the album as a whole. Some of the details to listen for are the short guitar solo at the close of “Signals,” the saxophone solo on “(song from a) Small Room,” the call and response between guitar and saxophone on “(song from a) Small Room,” the saxophone solo in “Come With Me,” the bass solo and the special effects in “Journey into the Past,” and the bass solo on “Two Old People in a Maize Field.”

Although short at nearly 50 minutes, when some CD's now contain 60 or 70 minutes of music, this CD serves as an excellent introduction to these musicians. It’s unfortunate that this debut effort has not been supplemented with a more recent recording.

I discovered this CD at CD Baby when I was looking for something else, and eventually downloaded the CD from Amazon. It's music that can provide a capstone to an evening or that can break the monotony of a lengthy crosscountry drive. Of late, it’s the music that makes it possible to start writing up my grading comments for student essays.

Track Listing: Nordic Sky, Signals, Taste of Summer, Come With Me, (song from a) Small Room, five 4 two, Journey into the Past, Beyond the Horizon, Two Old People in a Maize Field.

Fall Color in Northeastern Kansas

2009-10-30T10:44:00.008-05:00

With each passing year, I am becoming more reluctant to give up the summer. Autumn in northeastern Kansas came much too soon this year. I was enjoying the warm late summer nights and the incessant singing of the frogs, katydids, and crickets, announcing how much they enjoyed living their lives at that moment,when our weather drastically changed.

When I was in Manhattan, Kansas in mid-October for the festival of high school marching bands, I ended up wearing five layers because of the cold and strong wind. It took as many layers to remain warm the next day when I was at the Renaissance Festival in Kansas City.

I may have mentioned before that the Kansas City area is particularly pretty in the fall because of the changing leaves and in the spring because of the colorful blossoms from the magnolias, redbuds, and pear trees. This part of Kansas (and Missouri), which can get up to 40 inches of rain in a year, has more trees than are found farther to the west.

The oaks have lost most of their leaves already; they were the first trees to change color this year. I am adding a few pictures that I have taken over the past few weeks. Clicking on each picture will enlarge it.

Caught in the Middle: A Review

2009-10-05T04:25:00.003-05:00

Richard C. Longworth in Caught in the Middle examines the decline of the Midwest and what the region can do to counteract the effects of globalism. Beginning in the 19th century, the Midwest served as the country’s industrial heartland. Since the 1970’s, however, many of the factories in this region have either reduced their workforce or have closed down entirely and moved their production lines overseas. These closings have devastated the region, causing many towns to lose their only major employer. Some of these towns, Longworth says, won’t survive much longer except as bedroom communities for those people willing to commute long distances. Only a few cities and towns have managed to thrive. Kalamazoo, for example, has seen new growth since the city, thanks to private donations, has financed a college education for its local high school graduates. Warsaw, Indiana, has survived by becoming the home for orthopedic manufacturers, something Longworth refers to as “clustering.” These success stories are exceptions. In some cases, a city or town looking to replace its industrial base attracts a meatpacking plant, which, instead of hiring the local population for a living wage, brings in immigrants from Mexico who are willing to work long hours for very little money. This influx of immigrants creates a whole series of financial problems for communities forced to provide essential services.

Longworth believes that certain changes will allow the states that make up this region to survive. He foresees a great deal of potential in biotech, particularly the production of ethanol, and biosciences, both of which involve “turning plants and animals into products that go far beyond food.” “Already,” he says, “about one quarter of the Midwest’s corn crop goes for ethanol production.” More than likely, at least half of the corn crop will be turned into ethanol, he adds. Longworth also believes that the biosciences, which has lead to major centers of research in cities like Chicago, Ann Arbor, and St. Louis, will continue to grow and will lead to new lines of production by major corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, and Eli Lilly. For the region to renew itself, Longworth believes that the region needs an educated workforce. The research and manufacturing he foresees will require advanced degrees and if the young people in this region don’t pursue a higher education, the workforce will be imported into the region. Longworth also foresees major growth in the region’s cities if they can attract what Longworth refers to as the “creative class,” the highly educated people who can create the new ideas needed by the region. These cities will need to lose their provincialism and embrace diversity and open-mindedness, things that the region has not previously promoted. This shift to an educated workforce will create large pockets of poverty in the region, causing those who formally held minimum wage jobs to flounder. Ultimately, Longworth advocates more cooperation among the states, including the elimination of individual states in favor of smaller regions that cross existing state lines. Longworth also exhibits a strong bias toward the Big Ten schools, believing that those institutions hold more hope for the region. He also advocates the elimination of duplicate college programs, believing that specialization is the only hope for the major educational institutions.

Longworth’s examination of this region would have been more complete if he had considered the ecological problems that the region will face. Increasing the amount of corn harvested to fuel the demand for ethanol will be accompanied with a greater reliance on pesticides. What consequences will occur when the soil will no longer sustain the yields that corporations like Cargill require? What will happen when the water becomes more heavily polluted? Longworth’s attitude toward water as something to be sold is revealed when he says that “water is the resource of the future, and the Great Lakes states need to be ready to exploit it.” This attitude will only result in another period of bust and one of more serious consequences when the land will not sustain the population and when the water has been polluted beyond hope or sold to cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Ultimately, Longworth’s book is an important one because of its relatively thorough examination of one particular region. The Great Plains states need a similar study because they offer less hope and will experience more widespread devastation in the coming years.

Puzzlement

2009-10-03T03:25:00.007-05:00

That entry devoted to a reclining nude, not the Lucian Freud painting itself but the links to Giorgione, Titan, and Manet, has been generating a lot of traffic. When I did an image search on Google for Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, my blog doesn’t appear anywhere on the first fifteen pages. When I created that post, I expressed surprise at the money that Lucian Freud’s painting went for at auction, examined briefly the meaning behind the image, and articulated the convention of the reclining nude female in painting. Perhaps I should be pleased at the traffic that I'm getting. In researching this post, I have now realized that Google places my blog second in an image search for "reclining supervisor" and the image that accompanies the post is, ironically, Giorgione's Sleeping Venus. That error explains this mystery.

Drugs & Doctors

2009-09-27T03:46:00.005-05:00

Since losing my health insurance more than a year ago, I have been ordering my prescription medicine from overseas. As an asthmatic, I have come to rely on an inhaled corticosteroid although I admit that I need to try and wean myself, after having used this corticosteroid for about three years now, or I need to switch to a less powerful medicine than the inhaled powder that I have been using. Instead of Advair Diskus, I was forced to switch to a generic form of this drug, one made by the same company and only found outside of the US, once I began ordering my medicine from overseas. When I had health insurance, I could get a package of 60 blisters for a co-pay of $30. Without health insurance, this same drug costs $400. at Wal-Mart. Overseas, the generic form is available for $75.

Over the summer, when I experienced a cash flow problem and couldn’t make my usual bimonthly order (my original prescription called for two inhalations per day; I can control my asthma by administering only one inhalation per day), I ended up having to visit the doctor that used to treat my asthma and allergies. For the cost of an office visit, I managed to get enough free samples to last me until I could place another order overseas and wait the two weeks for delivery. Many doctors, I’ve found, are fairly easy to manipulate so that it is possible to get what one wants, at least when it comes to getting a prescription and/or free samples. This doctor’s most pressing concern was getting paid. Apparently, he thought that I wouldn’t be able to pay him as quickly as he wanted.

My wife and I have been fortunate to find a really good pediatrician in this area. My wife refers to him as “the best doctor on the planet.” For me, I haven’t found a good doctor, that is, one who takes the time to listen to me and one who seems genuinely concerned about my health, since leaving Oklahoma eleven years ago.

When my sister came to visit us in Oklahoma and to see her nephew for the first time, she brought along a nasty cold that she passed along to us. Because of the exhaustion of caring for an infant, teaching two classes, and taking two classes as a graduate student, my body didn’t have the immunity that it needed. This cold eventually became bronchitis and then pneumonia. Once I got sick enough, I began seeing a doctor who had his own clinic and his own pharmacy. During the few months I saw him, he gave me enough erythromycin to last two weeks but never enough to cure me. It wasn’t until I went somewhere else that the doctor treated me with what seemed like a more powerful antibiotic along with albuterol and a corticosteroid. My pneumonia ended up lasting about six months before I was considered free of infection. This new doctor ended up treating me whenever I was ill during the four years that I remained in Oklahoma, and recognizing my financial straits, he often gave me free samples instead of a prescription requiring that much more money.

As a sidenote, I have to add that getting pneumonia made it that much easier to remain an ex-smoker, having quit when my wife was pregnant. My sixteen year anniversary of not smoking is coming up in January.

No More Plastic Water Bottles

2009-09-12T01:57:00.010-05:00

No longer buying plastic bottles of water is one benefit that has come from having very little extra money. Probably the three of us in my family averaged three bottles of water per day, sometimes more in the heat of the summer. Drinking that much water caused us to spend about $14.00 every ten days, even though we were drinking some of the cheaper brands. We have now attached a filter to the kitchen sink so as to filter the water that we use for drinking.

This charcoal filter is supposed to significantly reduce the amount of atrazine in the water, a chemical that has been found in our city water on a regular basis. The city says that the highest amount of atrazine detected in our water, which is drawn from wells below the Missouri River before it is purified, is 1.8 ppb, which, according to the EPA, is at an acceptable range. Recent news reports reveal that the amount of atrazine is actually much higher in many parts of Kansas, and these reports call into question the validity of these water tests conducted by certain municipalities. Filtering the water is safer than simply drinking water from the tap.

It is unknown whether the water we were purchasing in bottles had ever been tested for chemicals. Having more control over what we put in our bodies is another reason to make this switch to filtered city water.

Now instead of storing plastic bottles in the refrigerator, we have been refilling glass water bottles and keeping a glass milk jug filled with water in the refrigerator. We also have to make fewer trips to the recycling center to drop off our plastic waste. Although I had been aware of the hazards to the environment that plastic water bottles created, I once doubted that I could ever give up the practice of drinking water from a plastic bottle. I’m happy to say that I have made the transition to a more environmentally friendly practice.

That Link to the World

2009-09-03T23:17:00.004-05:00

This picture reveals where I spend a large part of my time. I'm not the kind of person who requires the latest technology; in fact, I prefer the conventional monitor to the flat screens currently available. I even have a spare monitor tucked away in a closet just in case something were to happen to the monitor that I have been using. Although much of my teaching is done on this desktop, I tend to use my laptop when typing up those comments that I return to my students with their grades. That laptop has been a blessing on nights when thunderstorms prevent me from working on my desktop or when an ice storm causes the transformers in the neighborhood to stop popping.

More Shadows

2009-08-24T22:43:00.007-05:00

Here are a few more entries in my examination of shadows. These pictures were taken in the least used park in the city where I live. The peacefulness here may be changing because the city has come up with plans to change the park in some way. These plans won't be made public until later on this week or next.

I'm in that point in the semester where I'm able to live the life of a normal person. That will change when the grading starts right after Labor Day.

Clicking on any one of the pictures here will enlarge it.

Paul Zimmer and "Bach and My Father"

2009-08-06T17:03:00.008-05:00

One poet I have been reading lately is Paul Zimmer, whose Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems was released two years ago. This collection contains twenty-five new poems in addition to fifty early poems. Personally, I would have preferred a more substantial collection of his poems, but I can console myself with the earlier and heftier version of Crossing to Sunlight, which appeared in 1996, and Family Reunion: Selected and New Poems, which appeared in 1983.

Instead of waiting for a subject, some poets have explored the same subjects, like ghosts or cats or drunkenness, in their poems. This approach allows one to write regularly.

Paul Zimmer in his poems has often used those characters he has created, such as Wanda, Cecil, Lester, and Zimmer, a mask for himself but still not the person who wrote the poem. These characters allow him to explore feelings and situations without simply recalling what he has known or observed. That woman who frustrates her suitors, Wanda is desired but resistant to the cravings of men. She appears in one poem as a stripper, often drinks to excess, and appears bored by the speaker’s interests but remains appealing, nonetheless.

Although not totally absent in Zimmer’s new poems, these characters appear less often. Zimmer now appears more confident in writing about where he lives and in recalling memories, sensations, and feelings while using first person.

Many of Zimmer’s poems contain references to music. Sometimes he places the character Zimmer among the jazz greats of the 1940’s and 1950’s in poems like “The Duke Ellington Dream” and “Diz’s Dream.” One of his new poems from Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems appears below:

Bach and My Father

Six days a week my father sold shoes
To support our family through depression and war,
Nursed his wife through years of Parkinson’s,
Loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
Never kissed me, but always shook my hand.

Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
Was on the stereo. He listened with care—
Brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
Moving his right hand in time. He would have
Risen to dance if he had known how.

“Beautiful,” he said when it was done,
My father, who’d never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
Just in time he said, “That’s beautiful.”

Review of Waiting for Coyote's Call

2009-07-31T06:08:00.008-05:00

Informed by the work of Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and other naturalists, Jerry Wilson in Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-Memoir From the Missouri River Bluff describes his acquisition of acreage where, since the early 1980’s, he has created a home for himself and his family. Wilson devotes the initial chapters to his decision to buy land and build a home. These chapters offer memories of Wilson’s childhood in rural Oklahoma and contain anecdotes of Wilson’s interactions with the rural people who often offer assistance to Wilson and his wife in their construction of a geo-solar home. Portions of the middle chapters contain the history of the region and the history of both the native people and the settlers who have lived on the bluffs overlooking the Missouri River. Wilson mixes this history with his detailed study of meteor showers and the habits of those nocturnal creatures like raccoons and deer. These chapters also contain Wilson’s knowledge of trees and his vivid observations of birds along with the extremes of weather, including an entire chapter devoted to snow. Least satisfying are those final chapters when Wilson looks beyond the bluff where he has made a home to issues regarding the growth of corporate farming methods because it seems as if those issues belong in a subsequent book. Personally, I find the book to be an enjoyable read because of Wilson’s attention to detail and the clarity of his prose. Wilson reveals what he has “watch[ed], listen[ed], and learn[ed]” about a place during the past twenty-eight years and shows his own effort to manage the land where he has replanted native grasses and where he has seen a return of those native species that had not frequented that portion of South Dakota since the days of settlement. He ultimately makes the reader approach the outdoors with wonder and enthusiasm, regardless of where one lives. On a personal note, I originally got my review copy as a PDF file from which I printed out fifty pages at a time. I have since purchased a cloth copy of the book.

Evening Shadows on a Cottonwood

2009-07-28T07:22:00.007-05:00

When I was at the river on Saturday, I managed to capture the shadows climbing up the trunks of these trees over the course of an hour. I find the afternoon and evening shadows especially fascinating and believe that every day can be different because of how the sun casts shadows.

Purple Coneflowers & Bees

2009-07-27T05:55:00.012-05:00

Something I have been meaning to do is take pictures of the purple coneflowers growing in the front garden. My wife and I don't plant many flowers. Our problem is that the deer come into the yard and eat the blossoms. Last year we had a lot of luck in growing a mandeville flower and thought that the deer didn't like the flavor of the blooms; this year we bought two mandevilles, neither of which has kept its blooms very long because the deer eat them. One flower we have discovered that the deer don't eat is the purple coneflower, which is native to Kansas and related to the daisy. Linda Hasselstrom in her books stresses the virtue of growing only native plants, partly because the native plants are able to withstand the hot dry summers of the Great Plains. I suppose I need to consult the extension agent in my county to find out what other flowers will strive in this climate and won't become dinner for the large deer population.

Initially, I took about 350 pictures, using both memory cards in my camera. I'm the kind of photographer who believes in taking a lot of pictures and then culling through them to select the best ones after they have been downloaded to the computer. My camera allows rapid shooting so that I can get several shots in less than a minute. I chose these pictures of the bees because they reveal the amount of detail that can be captured with micro filters.

Clicking on each picture will enlarge it.

On the Road: The Original Scroll

2009-07-26T06:37:00.006-05:00

More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: The Original Scroll. This version is the one that existed before he made the editing changes demanded by his publisher, including altering the original names of his characters. The scroll of Kerouac’s novel contains no paragraph breaks. I initially thought that reading the equivalent of a freshman essay would be difficult, but this stylistic and organizational strategy employed by Kerouac was only a distraction initially. I actually prefer the scroll to the edited version of the novel. It’s more gritty and honest and more in keeping with an extended jazz solo. I found myself bookmarking a number of passages as I was reading. Because of copyright restrictions, I’m not at liberty to include all of the passages that struck me as noteworthy. I’m limiting myself to these two examples:

“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad. All I wanted was to drown my soul in my wife’s soul and reach her through the tangle of shrouds which is flesh in bed. At the end of the American road is a man and a woman making love in a hotel room. That’s all I wanted” (278).

“They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and banks and reduce them to jumbles like the avalanche heap, and we would be as poor as them someday and stretching out our hands in the samesame way." (398).

After On the Road and The Dharma Bums were published, Kerouac was often consulted by the media when he was a private person, took no credit for what transpired in America during the 1950’s and 1960’s, and wanted the opportunity to write books for an appreciative and open-minded audience. I think it’s best to approach On the Road as a novel in reaction to the aftermath of the Second World War. Instead of embracing the militarism and jingoism present after the war, Kerouac wanted to escape into a life of sensation—jazz, women, marijuana, alcohol, and friendship, all of which is a reminder that one is a survivor and alive. The life itself may not be pleasant, but it still needs to be experienced on one's own terms.

Bemoaning the Adjunct Life

2009-07-25T06:20:00.006-05:00

After eight weeks, my summer classes have now come to an end. Whereas a full-time professor may only teach one or two sections in the summer as a means of earning additional money, while still having his/her salary spread out over twelve months, I am only paid when I teach as a part-time instructor. As a result, I taught four sections this summer, approximately seventy-six students. Some semesters the students tend to drift away after the first couple of assignments, perhaps because they find the assignments too structured or too intimidating. This semester more of the students remained in the class. I have also experienced more students desirous of higher grades than what they earned; it’s as if they took a class at a community college as a last ditch effort to maintain a scholarship. My classes are no different than when I used to teach at a four-year university. I make about forty percent of my online classes relatively easy if the students complete the quizzes, participate in the peer reviews, and remain active in the discussion forums; the other sixty percent is earned in writing the essays. For some reason, the students flub up the easy points. My own writing classes were not as well structured when I was an undergraduate. Sometimes the teacher had the class write immediately upon entering the class, without having introduced a topic or assisted the class in brainstorming ideas. These essays were then graded mostly for grammar. Twenty-seven years ago, the teaching of composition had not yet been improved through the research of scholars like Peter Elbow.

Teaching online and grading stacks of essays week after week has ruined my sleeping schedule this semester. After a pattern of not going to bed until after sunrise, I’m not even sure that I can get to sleep before 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. It is something that I need to work on over the next two weeks or so. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with the outdoors and plan on spending some time on Saturday walking along the river. I haven’t totally secluded myself away during these past eight weeks; the last three weeks, however, have been devoted exclusively to either reading essays or typing up my grading comments. It hasn’t helped that I began noticing some floaters in my left eye after watching the fireworks for Independence Day. I know that the two events are entirely coincidental; linking the two things would be a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. I’ve had to adjust the lighting when I read now because, otherwise, I would become more conscious of the black shapes moving back and forth. According to my research, these floaters will eventually fall before my line of sight, but I don’t know how long it will take. Not having health insurance, like so many Americans, I cannot visit an optometrist to have my eyes examined unless I can come up with the money.

Two weeks are available to rest and recuperate. I only wish that the money earned during the summer would last longer. The adjunct life requires a substantial amount of money in savings because so much time transpires between paychecks. Maybe I can find a way to conjure up just enough money to survive until mid-September. Adding a little extra money to pay off student loans, for instance, would be an unexpected bonus.

A Weekend in Southcentral Kansas

2009-06-27T04:29:00.007-05:00

I spent last weekend in Pratt, a town of about 6,000 people in southcentral Kansas where the wheat harvest had been delayed because of the rain. At one point, this developing storm looked like it would spawn a tornado. This cell, I believe, created the tornado that was spotted near Great Bend, located to the north of Pratt, about an hour later. The wheat is visible in these first two pictures.

I was lucky to get this shot of a double rainbow after the storm passed.

This last picture gives the appearance of Pratt containing a lot of water when it actually is a dry place with much less rain that what we get in the Kansas City area.

Clicking on these pictures will enlarge them.

Garage Sale Blues

2009-06-25T04:27:00.008-05:00

I was reminded recently of how much I don’t like garage sales. As a way of getting rid of some of our junk, my wife and I decided to have a garage sale once classes ended in the spring and before my summer classes started. We spent about two weeks going through our closets and drawers. Probably what we found the most of were old vhs tapes. Not realizing that many of them only sell for one cent at Amazon, we had priced many of ours for $1.00 and some for $3.00. Finally, after pricing our items, creating an inventory, paying for a license from the city, placing the advertisement in the local newspapers, and cleaning the garage, we opened up our garage sale at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. The most number of people came during that first hour. Regardless of our prices, we had people offering five dollars less than what we had marked on some of the furniture. Some of them were brazen enough to only offer a portion of what we were selling the item for. Maybe if I had spent more time at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul when I was younger, I would have learned to refuse what someone had offered with only a movement of the head. If we ever have another garage sale, I’m either going to become more firm in getting my asking price or let someone else handle the negotiations during the first hour. After three hours, the number of people stopping to look slacked off considerably. What I enjoyed the most at that point was sitting in the garage and listening to Wolfert Brederode’s Currents . That music was the perfect accompaniment to a quiet late morning/early afternoon. All total, we ended up making about $100., about a third of what we had hoped to raise, which is about the average for each of the garage sales that we have had over the years. Almost none of the movies on vhs sold. Someone stole our dvd copy of Master of Disguise, which, according to the Internet Movie Database, is considered one of the worst movies ever but which we had priced for $1, I believe.

Women in Jazz

2009-06-06T05:01:00.006-05:00

One thing that I have noticed recently is the appearance of more female musicians in jazz. My wife brought to my attention the emphasis on males in jazz. When I was furthering my own education in jazz, early in our relationship, she didn’t share my interest in jazz because of the predominant position of males. Usually, women have been seen as singers in jazz. If someone were asked to list the famous women in jazz, probably the list would include Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, and Rosemary Clooney, for example, all of whom are vocalists.

When I was first discovering jazz, both Urszula Dudziak and Flora Purim were known for their singing. Ruth Underwood, on the other hand, made a name for herself as a member of Frank Zappa’s band, but she didn’t, to my knowledge, pursue an independent career as a musician.

Carla Bley and Joanne Brackeen, of course, were creating music in the 1970’s, but I was only familiar with Carla Bley from Gary Burton’s music.

More recently, I have seen Iro Haarla, Marilyn Mazur, and Julia Hulsmann emerge as leaders. Two younger women who have been gaining attention and earning accolades as composers and musicians are Anat Fort on piano and Froy Aagre on saxophone.

Both Anat Fort and Froy Aagre have released two CD’s of their work. Anat Fort’s most recent recording A Long Story, released by ECM in 2007, continues to receive a lot of good press. See this review , one of six, at All About Jazz. Let's hope that her next recording will be released soon. Froy Aagre’s recordings, Katalyze (2004) and Countryside (2007), have not received as much attention. Froy Aagre, however, is more rapidly available on YouTube. I recommend these two samples in which she plays with Mathias Eick: Long Distance and Factory . I like to think that ECM will be releasing Froy Aagre’s next recording.

Jazz is renewed with the presence of these women. I think the coming years will see more women gain attention as composers and musicians.

Irises

2009-05-25T02:01:00.007-05:00

Irises, at least in this part of the world, are associated with Memorial Day, a day set aside for remembering the members of the military who lost their lives. Using a series of extension lens that add up to 7x allows me to get a closer shot than the flower setting on my camera. Just like the other pictures on this blog, clicking on the picture will enlarge it.

End of Writing Block

2009-04-20T11:50:00.004-05:00

Thanks to NaPoWriMo, my writing block has come to an end. I have managed to write regularly for part of the month before I had to stop (albeit temporarily, I hope) and devote nearly all of my time and energy to grading essays and preparing taxes. Even sleep has to be sacrificed when in the throes of grading.

None of the poems written recently are ready for public consumption. If anyone reading this blog wants to see older samples of my work, click on the following links: link , link , link , and link .

Participating in NaPoWriMo

2009-03-28T05:16:00.001-05:00

I haven’t been successful in fulfilling my resolution to write a new poem once a month. As a result, I have decided to participate in NaPoWriMo, which requires the writing of a new poem every day during the month of April. If anything can get me to write, it will be the necessity of producing a new poem every day. That kind of pressure will prevent me from stressing too much over what to say or how to say something. I wrote best in graduate school when I had to produce regularly and in short periods of time, sometimes only giving myself a couple of hours to write a new poem for that week’s workshop. I’ve decided that I waste enough time during the day in checking the news on the Internet or in watching TV and that that time can be better spent writing. I cannot guarantee that I will post my poems, but I will let my readers know about my progress as the month of April progresses.

Magnolia Blossoms

2009-03-24T02:10:00.013-05:00

My annual photographs of magnolia blossoms appear below. Click on any image to enlarge it.

Unfortunately, this part of Kansas will be returning to winter during the weekend. We're under a winter storm warning for Saturday and may get up to eight inches of snow. The National Weather Service is even calling for thundersnow, which is something that I haven't heard since I was a kid and living in Istanbul during the early 1960's. The American military brought in trucks to take us home from school that day. It was quite exciting. Later during the storm, my dad hiked from the Fourth Levent to the American exchange facilities somewhere near Taksim Square and brought back groceries. We didn't buy much of our food locally. The military added bleach to the drinking water at the snack bar and encouraged Americans to rinse any produce bought locally with bleach water.

Now, I would prefer to have a sunny spring day when it is possible to enjoy the blossoms on the trees. Even the pear trees are in bloom now. What winter we have had this year has been marked by sudden shifts in temperature and very little moisture. I still think there is merit to having a climate where the days remain the same. There would be no uncertainty about what to expect from one day to the next.

My History with Tea

2009-03-05T02:14:00.004-06:00

Unlike my son, who says he hates the taste of tea, I acquired the tea habit as a child. Other families may have served a beverage like milk or juice or soda with their meals. For my mother, she served us tea. It was a habit that she acquired growing up in Northern Ireland.

Whenever we visited our Irish relatives, we were served tea from a pot of loose leaves. The tea was often poured at the same time as the milk, creating a beverage containing half tea, half milk. With experience, one learns not to drink the last inch or so because of the loose tea leaves. The tea remaining in the pot gets stronger as the second or third cup is served.

Offering a guest a cup of tea is a sign of courtesy in Ireland. Even if there aren’t any little cakes or cookies to go with the tea, offering someone a cup of tea is the slightest that one can do for someone coming inside the house. Not getting that courtesy is an insult that isn’t easily forgotten. Recalling the memory of someone can be summed up with the remark, “She wouldn’t even offer me a cup of tea.”

In this country, my mother usually only made a pot of tea with loose leaves when someone came to visit. More often, we brewed our tea individually with teabags, waiting to add the milk and sugar until we achieved the desired strength. My sister and I learned through practice to fish out the teabag with the spoon and to use the tab of the bag to squeeze out all of the liquid. Wrapping the string around the bag as it sits in the spoon is another option for squeezing out the liquid.

My mother gave me a Brown Betty when I left home. Most often when I was single, I used it to store my teabags. At times, however, when money was tight, I used loose tea instead of teabags and put this Brown Betty to use. To this day, thirty-five years later, I still have this Brown Betty and used it recently to brew a pot of tea using five bags of PG Tips. Having a potful of tea on the stove, covered with a tea cozy to keep it warm, makes it possible to grab a cup in the midst of grading or cleaning house.

There were few options in this country other than Lipton thirty or forty years ago. Lipton, in fact, has been my tea of choice for most of my life. Occasionally, when I had to watch my money while living on my own, I resorted to using Tetley or Red Rose, but I switched back to Lipton whenever I could. A year or two ago, I bought some of the tea at a local store of imported English foodstuffs. Since then, I have grown more fastidious in my choice of tea. While I still use Lipton and Tetley sometimes, I have been trying some of the other tea available at the grocery store. Beginning with Bigelow English Breakfast and Twinings’ Irish Breakfast, my choices have also included Ahmad English Breakfast and Tazo Awake. Probably my current favorites, other than Tazo Awake and Ahmad English Breakfast, is, surprisingly, a generic blend of organic black tea that is distributed by the Associated Wholesale Grocers in Kansas City. A box of 24 bags sells for $2.34 at some stores. This tea actually seems much stronger than the other teas I’ve tried and gets my highest recommendation. When served with milk and sugar, it’s a bit of heaven at a reasonable price.

Money & Economic Collapse

2009-03-01T03:36:00.000-06:00

Although the alternative press that I have been reading for the past few years predicted the economic collapse at least a year before it occurred, no one knew then how severe it would become. Economists and various other prognosticators predict that many more jobs will be lost in this country over the next twelve months. With the exception of the public schools, where school districts like Leavenworth have not been renewing the contracts of some of their teachers in the elementary and secondary schools, education is one of the few remaining careers with some degree of security. For so long as there are college students to teach, I can probably remain employed.

If I were to give advice to a young person leaving high school, I would recommend education and medicine as two careers with a future. There isn’t much else left in this country unless one has the money to go into business for oneself and even then one has to rely on those people with jobs, and with disposable income, for one’s livelihood.

I don’t know how much worse the economic woes affecting this country will become. Economists are stumped, too. One economist I saw quoted recently said, “It will get worse before it gets worse.” In other words, no one really knows what will happen. Without a manufacturing base and without a source of fuel that doesn’t have to be imported, this country may have to alter its entire economic system. Our consumer culture cannot continue when it is based almost entirely on credit.

When I was sick recently and relying on a year-old prescription of cough medicine to sleep through the night, I dreamt that aliens decided that we could no longer care for ourselves. Once they came to this planet, the first thing they did, besides crippling us by making us deaf, was stop our reliance on money. They initially made their presence known by sending messages across television screens and across windows. We were crippled physically so that we wouldn’t react in fear and attempt to fight back. In place of money, we were presented with the chance to devote our energy to bettering ourselves and given replicators to fulfill our immediate needs—i.e., food and clothing. While some of these ideas seem based on old episodes of Star Trek, I have to wonder whether the six billion people on this earth could ever stop worrying about having enough money. What would so many people do with themselves?

Music for a Postcoital Afternoon

2009-03-01T03:23:00.003-06:00

In hunting for music that makes it possible to grade essays at the same time, I have discovered more of Anouar Brahem, particularly Le Pas Du Chat Noir . It’s such a beautiful album. While typing up my student comments, I find myself imaging that this music is meant for those postcoital afternoons in spring and summer when it’s warm enough to remain outside of the blankets.

One Resolution for the New Year

2009-01-24T00:56:00.002-06:00

One thing I have resolved to accomplish this year is to write more often; in fact, I have decided that I will write a poem at least once a month. Although I wrote a draft of a poem one evening while waiting in the car for my son to return from his music lesson, that draft remains unfinished. I haven’t written and polished a new poem in several years now. This period of silence comes after once having a more regular writing habit and after having completed a creative dissertation. More than ten years have now passed since I completed my degree. Whatever baggage I have carried with me as a result of my education has since been discarded, I believe. It seems as though I can now write without hearing the voices of my teachers in my head and without articulating their prejudices. Whatever they once had to say about my writing no longer matters anymore.

When I was teaching in the classroom and commuting, I thought about poetry more often and often composed poems in my head while driving to classes, writing them down once I reached my classroom. Once I finished teaching during any one day, I was usually too exhausted to return to those creative thoughts; most of my efforts were initially spent reviewing my classes, at least during the first twenty minutes of the commute; afterwards, during the remaining twenty minutes or so, it took all of my effort to remain awake. Extreme sleep deprivation made driving a struggle.

Teaching online has made it more difficult to compose poems in my head. I only have to walk down the hall to reach my home office, to switch on my computer, and to call up the Internet. Somehow I need to find the discipline that will let me focus on a poem when it is most quiet in my house—either before I start working on my classes or after completing that task. Writing, I decided, will prevent me from idling away my time surfing the Internet as a way of postponing having to look at my classes. I have been teaching the same classes for so long and have been teaching so many sections year after year that I approach the grading of essays with dread, often delaying the task much too long. It seems that fulfilling that creative impulse to write for myself will allow me to return to the demands of my job with a more positive outlook.

My wife thinks that these feelings regarding the grading of essays mean that it’s time to put teaching aside. Sometimes I wish I had fulfilled my original idea to gain secondary certification after completing my MA. If I had secured a teaching job afterwards, I would be at a point now where I could think about retiring, having completed twenty years of service.

My immediate goal now is to put together a full-length collection of poems and to get it published. There are about thirty poems of mine from the dissertation that I am happy with. I now need to write more so that I can put together a complete collection, possibly eliminating all of the poems that I wrote so long ago.

Only a week remains of January, and I have not yet fulfilled my quota for this month. I need to get busy. I cannot delay putting this resolution into play. The grading begins in February.

Jan Garbarek & Dis

2008-12-29T05:33:00.002-06:00

One person who stumbled upon my blog recently had been looking for information on Jan Garbarek’s Dis (1977), an album that I include as a desert island pick in an earlier posting . This person apparently had doubts about the album and wondered whether other people find the album boring.

Often, the American critics discount the merits of Jan Garbarek, the majority of whom equate Garbarek with the so-called ECM sound, believing that this sound is characteristically lacking in emotion and representative of the stark arctic regions of Scandinavia. When exploring jazz, particularly European jazz, it’s best to compare the critical evaluations in a discography like the American All Music Guide to Jazz to the ones in The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, a discography created in Britain. Richard Cook and Brian Morton, authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, believe that Garbarek’s Dis is a “beautiful album,” one composed of “spells and riddles on soprano saxophone (and wood flute) and a deep, mourning tone that floats and drifts over the rhythm.” The All Music Guide to Jazz, on the other hand, doesn’t devote any attention to Dis and simply awards it two stars out of five.

Dis is unique because it combines Garbarek’s saxophone with the recorded sound of a windharp, one that was positioned to record the gusts coming off the North Sea. Like the Aeolian harp in Romantic literature, this windharp, according to the information that accompanies the album, is “an instrument with strings that are brought to vibrate by the wind, thereby creating tones and overtones, which, in turn, are enhanced in a resonant body.” While the windharp isn’t present on the entire album, it does appear on three of the six songs.

This music makes it possible to approach poems like Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” and “Dejection: An Ode” with a greater understanding of what the speaker was hearing while he wrote those poems.

Garbarek’s music interests me partly because of its innovation. Dis includes the music of a windharp; Photo with Blue Sky, White Cloud, Wires, Windows, and a Red Roof (1979) contains songs giving voice to the images and sounds associated with those objects in a photograph; It’s Okay to Listen to the Gray Voice (1985) interprets lines from the poems of Tomas Transtromer; Madar (1994) pairs Garbarek’s saxophone with Brahem’s oud; In Praise of Dreams (2004) pairs Garbarek’s saxophone with Kashkashian’s viola; Ragas and Sagas (1992) combines Garbarek’s saxophone with the traditional music of Pakistan and India; and albums like Legend of the Seven Dreams (1988), Twelve Moons (1993), and Visible World (1995) incorporate Norwegian folk tales and landscape. What these albums reveal is a musician who remains committed to exploration.

Lately, I have been sharing some of Jan Garbarek’s CD’s with my son’s saxophone teacher who has been wondering why he hasn’t heard more of this person. At the same time, my son’s teacher has been sharing music by people like Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh, people that have been unknown to me until now.

Ice Sliding Down River

2008-12-29T05:22:00.007-06:00

Other parts of the country have been experiencing much more severe cold and more significant amounts of snow than what we have known here in northeastern Kansas. One local weather forecaster says that we have come to an end of one twenty-five day period of active weather, with the next round of severe weather, spread out over a twenty-five day period, not set to arrive until late January. One feature of our weather this winter season has been the rapid changes in temperatures, with sudden drops of thirty degrees or so in a matter of hours. It takes a sustained period of warmth for the ice to completely disappear from the Missouri River.

Dudziak and Urbaniak at CD Baby

2008-12-18T01:30:00.003-06:00

In checking the traffic figures related to this blog, I have discovered that people have been looking for information about Urszula Dudziak and Michal Urbaniak, possibly because they are looking for links to download music from RapidShare. One night when I was idly surfing for information about those records that had not yet been released on CD, I discovered that CD Baby now offers Urszula Dudziak’s Future Talk and many more selections by Michal Urbaniak, including Fusion III , which was originally released on the Columbia label, and the Inner City recording Urbaniak , which features both Urszula Dudziak and Zbigniew Namyslowski. If my own cash flow problems ever come to an end, I hope to add these records to my collection. I’m also hoping that Urbaniak’s Atma and Namyslowski’s Air Condition are eventually made available at CD Baby, too.

In Lieu of More Topical Comments

2008-11-01T05:50:00.008-05:00

In lieu of commentary about the upcoming election, for example, I have added these pictures of autumn in eastern Kansas. More postings are forthcoming once I get out from under the backlog of grading essays.

Fear

2008-10-10T01:25:00.003-05:00

One night recently I ended up watching the last half of Mississippi Burning on one of the free movie stations. I had seen parts of the movie before but had never seen all of it. It’s easy to say that America has come so far in its acceptance of all people of color since the Civil Rights Movement. Personally, I think that the bigotry and racism depicted in the movie remains a part of this country today, albeit just below the surface. Sure, there are places where people are progressive and willing to embrace diversity, but that open-mindedness can be found in only small areas of the country like Vermont and San Francisco. I’m tempted to include Lawrence, Kansas in that list of places, but I know from having lived in Lawrence years ago how deep-seated the negative attitudes toward Native Americans remain and how much risk the students run when they leave the campus of Haskell.

I think the smear campaign directed toward Barack Obama by Palin and McCain, one in which they label him a terrorist and a traitor, and one in which members of the audience yell out, “Shoot Him,” will end up causing some gun-toting Republican to take that campaign too far. James Howard Kunstler said in one of his columns early in the campaign that Obama could possibly end up losing his life if he were elected President. If Palin and McCain continue to hide their own ineptitude and continue to evade the more important issues facing this country (like the ten trillion dollar national debt) by finding fault with their opponent, it’s possible that the racism and bigotry lurking in this county will resurface in the kind of violence that I lived through in the 1960’s when political figures and cultural leaders were gunned down. If such an event were to occur, I don’t think that McCain and Palin would ever accept the responsibility but would instead delight in ridding the country of someone not like them.

Greasy Rider: A Review

2008-10-01T05:41:00.003-05:00

I recently signed as on as an Early Reviewer at LibraryThing. My first review appears below.

Greg Melville’s Greasy Rider describes the author’s effort at converting a 1985 Mercedes wagon to run on used fry grease from restaurants and driving it from Vermont to California. Encouraged by the prospect of locating free energy, Melville opts to operate his car exclusively on fry grease instead of biodiesel, which still contains a percentage of petroleum. As a test of the feasibility of this alternative fuel, Melville decides to emulate the cross-country trip of H. Nelson Jackson, who, as Melville says, was the first person to cross the country in a car running on petroleum. Relatively challenged by auto mechanics, however, Melville enlists the help of Iggy, his former college roommate, to help maintain the engine and to help fill the container in the trunk with waste restaurant grease.

Prompted by Iggy, who gives Melville various challenges or errands to discover more about green energy, the narrative is broken up by six of these errands, most of which occur after the initial trip and are included as addendums or side-trips, so to speak. These errands include research into Al Gore’s own 10,000 foot mansion to determine whether his house is heated and cooled with green energy; how a few Minnesota farmers are in the midst of making wind power profitable; how cellulosic ethanol, the conversion of plants into energy without using corn and without using the expensive distillation process currently employed to create ethanol, could, according to Lee Lynd, a professor at Dartmouth, significantly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; a visit to Google’s headquarters where solar energy is generated and could, conceivably, power a portion of the buildings on the Google campus if the energy weren’t sold to the energy grid in that area; the creation of geothermal energy at Fort Knox; and a visit to a green Wal-Mart in Texas. These explorations reveal not only the hypocrisy of Al Gore but also the individual and corporate efforts at adopting green alternatives.

Often humorous because of Melville’s initial attempts at locating restaurant grease at fast food restaurants, the narrative describes the system that Melville and Iggy adopt to fill their fuel container. By the time that these two guys reach California, it is possible as a reader to smell the grease stored and emitted by this Mercedes, a smell which is so strong, Melville says, that every article of clothing he brought along for the trip became permeated with the smell. Coupled with this problem, the narrator finds it difficult to remain in such close quarters with his former college roommate, eventually exploding at what he considers as his friend’s irritating mannerisms.

While this narrative proves that it is possible to make a cross country trip on the grease gathered from restaurants, it also calls into question the viability of such an alternative to gasoline because of the potential run on restaurant grease if enough people converted their own cars to operate on the same alternative fuel. It may be possible to subsist on this fuel when driving locally if the car owner reserves a constant supply of this fuel supply. Should the restaurant close down, or once enough other people start clamoring for the same fuel, the possibility of relying exclusively on this free fuel becomes remote.

Ultimately, I would have liked seeing more exploration into alternative fuels and green energy. If the narrative were widened to include what’s being done elsewhere in the world and how the oil corporations have resisted pumping their billions into green energy, the book would have been more than a trip across the country, one containing the adventure of pumping restaurant grease, the difficulty of maintaining a lengthy car trip with another male, and side trips to consult other mavericks and other sites of green energy.

Political Paragraphs

2008-09-06T03:44:00.005-05:00

For anyone who may be looking for political commentary on the recent conventions and the upcoming election, it may be best to go elsewhere. Both conventions were unnecessary in my view since the presidential candidate for each party had already been decided prior to the convention. The conventions seemed like a waste of money that could have been spent elsewhere and on more important things than political rhetoric.

I ultimately think that the political system in this country is deeply flawed. Both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are funded by corporations, who seek to ensure that the elected candidate rewards each donor after the election. Neither candidate will put real change into place, despite what they say, and neither candidate will address the problems affecting this country, that is, to name just a few, global warming, overdependence on fossil fuels, and the trillions of dollars owed to foreign powers.

It's unfortunate that two months remain before the election and another two months will pass before the inauguration. I'm so tired of hearing about each candidate.

I sincerely doubt that whatever happens will be the result of a fair and honest election. We have already seen how the last two presidential elections were manipulated. More than likely, this one will be, too. Maybe some other country needs to teach us about democracy because we certainly don't have it here. If democracy existed, we would have a system in place that would allow third party candidates to assume office--within the state, in Congress, and within the executive branch. The election itself would be one in which the people, not the electoral college, decides who wins the election based on the number of votes. No real change will occur until such a transformation takes place.

Imagining a Dragon

2008-08-04T13:15:00.003-05:00

Exhausted from the summer session while, apparently, still stressed, I was unable to sleep more than four hours at a time during my first week of vacation. Such a warped perspective caused me to imagine that I was looking at a dragon when I was out taking pictures last Friday. Am I wrong to imagine such a sight? (Click on the picture to see it enlarged.)

End of Summer Teaching

2008-07-31T01:22:00.002-05:00

My summer session of teaching finally came to an end. Although I have taught four sections of writing in previous semesters, this one was particularly hard because the number of students remained constant. A large amount of attrition usually occurs in online classes. Two of my classes this time remained large because so many of the students were either transfer students from other schools or students about to start college elsewhere. Some of the students apparently postponed taking my writing class until they approached the end of their sophomore year; it’s possible, too, that some of the students may have taken the equivalent of my course at their home institution but found that class especially challenging. My course was no less challenging. I suspect that the intensity of the class was greater than the students probably imagined would occur in a course offered during the summer.

Two problems for students this summer were documentation and the bibliographic information required for a citation in MLA Style. About a third of the students couldn’t find the editors of the anthology we use in class. The names of the editors appear on the front cover, on the spine, and on the title page. For some reason, the students preferred to ignore that information and listed the acquisition editor or the editor-in-chief at the publishing company as the editor of the textbook. Some of them thought the editors had given their names to the publishing company or that the publishing company had the same name as the place of publication. I continually reminded students of their misinformation and provided citations of an article found in an anthology in the sample student essays. The handbook included examples; the students were quizzed over this information, and the class provided links to the Writing Center at Purdue University. None of that information was sufficient. The students managed to provide parenthetical documentation when working with one to three sources. Once the students began working with more than three sources and began using sources that were not found in the textbook, some of them thought that documentation meant providing the name of the source in which the article appeared. I wish I knew why these things proved so difficult.

One consolation of this online teaching, despite the frustrations and the difficulty I faced in completing the grading in a timely fashion, is having one tankful of gas last about seven weeks. When going to the movies or shopping, we usually took my wife’s car; her Camry is more comfortable and younger than my Corolla. I would have used more gas, of course, if my car had served all of our transportation needs. Typically, I go through a tankful in a month's time.

An Update at Last

2008-07-17T06:51:00.007-05:00

I managed to get outside for a little while on Wednesday. My life for the past month has been spent grading essays. Teaching four sections has made me busier than I remember from previous summers. Last summer, after several summers of teaching four sections, I had a somewhat lighter load by only teaching three sections. Apparently, that experience last summer spoiled me because it has been extremely difficult keeping up with the grading this time. I won't be out from under these freshman essays for two more weeks. Until then, I have posted two pictures of bees collecting the pollen from the purple coneflowers in my yard. Clicking on each picture will make it larger. I recommend enlarging the first picture so that you can fully appreciate the pollen visible in that picture.

Missouri River Pictures

2008-06-16T04:51:00.011-05:00

My blog has gained more popularity of late—all because of that painting by Lucian Freud that I added a few weeks ago. Nearly everyday now, there are people directed to this site because of their search for that particular painting and other paintings of naked women. That degree of popularity makes me lose interest in blogging. My relative obscurity was more appealing. This entry marks my first attempt at updating this blog in several weeks.

My heart goes out to those people flooded out of their homes in Iowa and those victims of tornadoes in Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. A natural disaster, and losing one's home, compounds the heartache that many of us have known because of a job loss, high gas prices, and economic uncertainty in general. Our weather in this part of the country has been particularly severe. We haven’t gone a week without rain this spring. The Missouri River in this part of Kansas has been running high since May.

The first two pictures are the most recent while the other ones here record the extent of the flooding in May. Because much of the rain this spring has either been to the south or to the north, the Missouri River hasn't been as destructive as the Des Moines River or the Cedar River. The flooding around here occurred earlier in the season last year, with the greatest amount of destruction occurring along the Platte River (in Missouri) and downriver along the Missouri.

Even though Colonel Leavenworth in his 1827 expedition to create a fort on the eastern side of the Missouri violated his orders and crossed into Indian Territory, he, in hindsight, had the sense to build the fort on the bluffs overlooking the Missouri instead of on the floodplain on the eastern side. Flooding does occur here, nonetheless. Several downtown businesses were flooded out a couple of years ago when one of the creeks that empties into the Missouri grew so swollen that it left its banks and backed up to a height of at least six feet.

Back in May, the current on the Missouri was so swift that I had to use a faster setting on my camera to avoid having my shots of the river blur. The triangular cable tie-ups on the white dock in these pictures were buffeted by the current so much that the rapid up and down motion created a kind of music, making the movement of the river audible.

Computer Programs and Recommendations

2008-05-27T04:19:00.007-05:00

Both my desktop and laptop were experiencing problems recently. Trend Micro, a combination firewall and anti-virus program, was slowing down each computer considerably. It seemed as though the file for Trend Micro had gotten so large with its various updates that it was taking up much of the gig of Ram on my desktop. When I had about six Word documents opened up and attempted to save one, after altering the margins, the process of saving that file caused the computer to come to a virtual standstill for up to a minute. I have since deleted Trend Micro (its subscription was about to expire) and added PC Tools Firewall Plus, which is freeware available at Major Geeks , and I have found the performance of each computer has improved tremendously. It’s now evident that I have gotten Turbo (10mbps) added to Road Runner (7mbps), which can be acquired for about ten additional dollars a month. The extra speed is worth the expense. I have also added the PC Tools Anti-Virus Free Edition, which is freeware available at Major Geeks as well.

I found it unfortunate that Ad Aware updated its programming in 2007. The previous version worked without any problems. Once I discovered that updates were no longer available for the previous version, I installed the 2007 version and experienced a lot of problems, such as the program not loading, despite repeated efforts, when I wanted to delete cookies, malware, and spyware. In an effort to find a replacement, I went through several different programs before I discovered Super AntiSpyware, the free edition, which is also available at Major Geeks .

Super AntiSpyware, PC Tools Firewall Plus, and PC Tools Anti-Virus get my recommendation.

Myself as a Tree

2008-05-27T03:25:00.006-05:00

My spring semester finally came to a close last Wednesday. I was thinking the other day about how wonderful it would be cultivating the life of a graduate student this summer, this is, taking lengthy bike rides through the city and engaging in a regular habit of writing. Unfortunately, I will be teaching four sections of college English this summer, beginning in a week’s time. Nearly all of my classes are already full and have been for about a month. Sometimes I feel as weary as the box elder in the picture I’m enclosing; it’s located in a park about a couple of miles from where I live.

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I’m hoping to submit my poetry manuscript to yet another chapbook contest before the end of the month. I’ve been thinking of changing the title and reexamining the poems. It has been a year since I last submitted any of my poems. Unlike Jilly Dybka , I haven’t yet sworn off all poetry contests even though I know that my manuscript hasn’t been given much if any attention at some of the contests I’ve entered. I had considered entering a recent chapbook contest that a friend from graduate school oversees, but such an action would have been unethical. A blogger named Anne Haines has her chapbook coming out from Finishing Line. My chapbook was accepted by Finishing Line, too, almost two years ago. I declined the offer because I couldn’t see myself getting the necessary sales prior to publication. My wife and agree that I probably should have bought those copies myself and then sold them at readings after my chapbook came out, assuming, of course, that we could have come up with the money. But I would prefer having my book accepted without stipulations. Wish me luck.

Topeka, A City of Contrasts

2008-04-27T03:55:00.009-05:00

Topeka was especially pretty when I was there last week. These pictures all come from Gage Park, which is the location of the city zoo. The zoo itself, like most small zoos, is depressing because of how only one or two representatives of a species are caged within a confined space. The humane thing would be closing the zoo down and sending the animals to larger facilities where the animals can interact with more members of their species within an environment resembling their native habitat. Some people were snapping pictures of the animals. Seeing these zoo animals reminds me of that scene in the recent version of King Kong where he, as the last surviving member of his species, sits among the bones of his ancestors and gazes toward the sunset, finding but a few minutes of beauty in a life of loneliness and heartache.

What I found particularly worthy of note in Gage Park were the flowers. Topeka, unlike the capital city in other states I've visited, seems to care about its appearance. Take a look at the following pictures. Clicking on each one will enlarge it.

Soon after leaving this park, I encountered members of the Phelps' church holding a demonstration on one of the street corners, one in which kids, with the adults looking on, were holding up signs proclaiming bigotry and hatred as worthy virtues. No one was harassing them, I noticed. I cannot speak for what transpired during the entire length of the demonstration. When I drove past that street corner about two hours later, no one remained from that demonstration.

Magnolia Blossoms

2008-04-17T03:17:00.006-05:00

Photos of the magnolia in my yard appear below. These photos reflect my efforts at capturing individual flowers, using the macro setting on my camera. Not of all of the blossoms have opened up as of yet, so I was limited in taking shots of only a few blossoms. As with the other photos on this blog, clicking on each one will increase its size.

Travis Ford Bites Boone Pickens' Carrot

2008-04-17T03:12:00.002-05:00

Travis Ford, the men’s basketball coach at U of Massachusetts, has been hired to coach the men’s team at Oklahoma State. Mike Holder, the athletic director, will make the official announcement on Thursday. Oddly, Travis Ford had told UMass last week that he would be staying after having dangled an offer from Providence as a way of forcing UMass to increase the $400,000 compensation he had been receiving annually. Ford experienced a problem with money when he left Eastern Kentucky for UMass in 2005; he ended up having to repay Eastern Kentucky $150,000, apparently because he had been paid up to 2007, according to news reports. Although it’s doubtful that Ford was offered the $750,000 that Sean Sutton was making per year at Oklahoma State, I suspect that it’s the money that caused him to leave UMass, despite having agreed to remain there. Holder said he wanted to hire a person of integrity, a person who won’t bring shame or controversy to the program. One has to question the kind of person that Travis Ford is, having gone back on his word so quickly when more money was dangled in front of him.

Ever since college when he first enrolled at Missouri as a freshman and then transferred to Kentucky for the remainder of his undergraduate years, Ford has been moving every few years. His coaching career began at Campbellsville University in 1997 before he left for Eastern Kentucky in 2000 and then left for UMass in 2005. It’s doubtful that he will remain at Oklahoma State for more than one or two seasons. He currently has a record of 123-116 in the Division I league (both Eastern Kentucky and UMass) and a 190-146 record overall. I foresee a mediocre season next year at Oklahoma State, with the Cowboys only reaching the NIT yet again.

Addendum: For those of you looking for the amount of money that Ford has been promised for heading the men's basketball program at Oklahoma State, that amount has not yet been released. During his news conference today, Ford says he told his UMass players that he is taking the job at Oklahoma State because he wants to win a national championship and can achieve that goal at OK-State. I'm sure his players felt great hearing that. Why can't he win a national championship at UMass? It's doubtful that the Big XII is any easier than the Atlantic conference, not with Kansas and Texas as part of this conference.

More Odds & Ends

2008-04-16T03:36:00.003-05:00

Mike Holder, the athletic director at Oklahoma State, has been discovering how difficult it can be finding someone to coach the men’s basketball program. Both Bill Self of Kansas and Chris Lowery of Southern Illinois have now refused Holder’s offer. I still think that forcing Sean Sutton to resign was a bad decision. It’s fortunate that Holder’s action is slowly coming back to haunt him. Sean, at least, will be getting $20,000 per month as part of his settlement with the university. The university cannot pay him what remains on his contract in one lump sum although it could offer Bill Self a six million dollar signing bonus along with a four million dollar a year contract. A clause to stop paying Sean if he were to get another coaching job was removed from his contract, fortunately.

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Some of you might remember that I mentioned the exorbitant amount of money that Amazon was charging for Marilyn Mazur’s CD Elixir. The cost of that CD has since been reduced significantly. An excellent review of this CD appears at All About Jazz . Not yet owning a copy, I cannot add whether I agree with the critic.

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The character development that I mentioned wanting in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was present in the novel. I just hadn’t reached that portion of the novel when I added my earlier comment. It’s actually quite a good novel and contains a lengthy climax, one that reveals an intimate awareness of Utah’s landscape.

I am currently reading Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel and enjoying this nonlinear narrative. More comments will follow.

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The magnolia blossoms where I live are slowly opening up. I hope to post photographic evidence sometime soon unless the high winds we’re having and the rain forecasted for Thursday and Friday destroy the blossoms. These blossoms, miraculously, survived the freeze that we had Sunday night/Monday morning.

Something, at least, has managed to escape those "thorns of life" that cause so many of us to apply pressure to our wounds.

Sean Sutton and Oklahoma State

2008-04-04T04:00:00.003-05:00

Sean Sutton, the basketball coach at Oklahoma State, has been asked to leave after two years of a five year contract. Mike Holder, the athletic director who is essentially controlled by Boone Pickens, apparently had differences with Sean and wanted him replaced. Someone has suggested that Bill Self, the basketball coach at Kansas and an Oklahoma State alumnus, would return to his alma mater for the right amount of money, but that idea won’t go anywhere. Bill Self says he is happy at Kansas and will probably get a substantial pay increase after the NCAA tournament ends.

At $750,000 a year, it seems as though Sean will be leaving Oklahoma State with $2,250,000, the amount of money remaining on his contract. He wouldn’t have to work at all with that kind of money, but he probably will find a more responsive program to his kind of coaching. If Sean had been given a chance, he would have done good things with his team next year. Oklahoma State was one of the few schools to beat Kansas during this past season. Things were looking up for the program.

I wish Sean all the best. It would be great if his players were to go elsewhere next year and let Oklahoma State flounder, just to prove to Mike Holder the folly of his ways. The players have said they will stay, however. It's possible that the Oklahoma State team will encounter Sean Sutton again at some point next year; that pair off would be as enjoyable as seeing Bill Self face Roy Williams on Saturday.

Stalling, aka Odds & Ends

2008-04-04T03:22:00.006-05:00

Work has connotations of tedium and repetitiveness. Grading freshman essays certainly fits those connotations, and I sometimes can think of anything I would rather do instead. Writing this entry serves as a way of delaying having to grade evaluations, which usually turns out to be a difficult assignment for students. Establishing criteria and supporting criteria with evidence are not easy tasks for my students.

Like many Americans, I have been finding ways to reduce my spending. Instead of buying new books, I have been going through my shelves to find those books I have not yet read. My wife was shocked when I started reading another novel so soon after having read Kunstler’s World Made by Hand. I’m currently reading Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Edward Abbey remained unknown to me until a few years ago when I saw his books listed among what some writers consider as environmental classics. Soon after, I picked up a remaindered copy of Desert Solitaire and enjoyed it immensely. Abbey, unlike Barry Lopez, is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. Abbey articulated a hatred of corporate America and the environmental damage wrought by development before some of us were awakened to those concerns. The Monkey Wrench Gang contains characters who attempt to stop the spread of this environmental damage. My only criticism of the novel, at this point in my reading, is that the characters aren’t fully developed. While it’s true that Seldom Seen Smith, for example, acquired that name because of his absence from his three wives, it would seem as though the narrator would have Smith return to one or more of his wives during the novel. Smith, too, hasn’t taken tourists on a river raft trip since early in the novel. The narrator focuses almost exclusively on the eco-terrorism perpetuated by this gang of four. But it may be too soon for me to comment on the novel, not having completed it as of yet.

Last Christmas, when I was using a gift card for Barnes & Noble, I picked up Dave Holland’s Prime Directive. Dave Holland has such a strong reputation, beginning with his playing bass on such Miles Davis albums as In a Silent Way, Filles de Kilimanjaro, Bitches Brew, and Big Fun, that his albums are sure to satisfy. Featuring Chris Potter on saxophone, Robin Eubanks on trombone, Steve Nelson on vibraphone, Billy Kilson on drums, and Dave Holland on bass, and containing about seventy-four minutes of music, Prime Directive is a worthy introduction to the Dave Holland Quintet, which has released about four CDs, including Extended Play, a live recording. Some critics have compared Dave Holland’s quintet to Charles Mingus and his band around the time of Mingus Ah Um and Mingus at Antibes. This comparison applies to a quintet being lead by a bassist. Mingus’ music was often topical as in “Fables of Faubus.” Holland on his CDs shares the writing with his band mates and while it would seem as though songs composed by a particular musician would feature extended solos by that musician, the opposite is true because there is a strong group dynamic within the songs, with each member contributing. Prime Directive is currently in my alarm clock, and, periodically, I change the song that I initially wake to. It’s difficult to oust myself out of bed, however, because I want to continue listening to the music.

When I’m grading, I want music that will keep me on task. Lately, I have been typing up my grading comments while listening to Manu Katche’s Neighborhood and Playground and Stephen Micus’ Twilight Fields and Wings Over Water. These two Micus CDs feature him playing flower pots filled with water among other instruments. Some people discount Micus and place his music under the New Age label. These two particular CDs interest me because of the innovation, that is, his ability to create music from something seemingly so ordinary.

My classmates from high school in their postings at various locations on the Internet, like the Dayroom Years , still seem enamored with the music of the late 1960’s. My thirteen-year-old son loves the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band. Some of those songs are good and bring back memories of that time in my life, but when I want to stretch my imagination, soothe my world weariness, or start up and keep myself motivated to get my work done, I turn to music that I’ve discovered since high school.

Corporate Radio

2008-03-31T04:06:00.005-05:00

One thing I’ve noticed lately is how corporate radio pollutes the work place and public spaces. The excessive amount of commercials, the repetitive range of songs, and the format itself create a truly mind-numbing experience. When I visited the office of a new optometrist recently, I had the misfortunate of hearing a Christian station—AM, presumably—in which all of the songs glorify one’s religious faith. Since I’m not usually exposed to the radio, I had a hard time tuning out what I was hearing. It was really ridiculous when some caller received airtime to say that she was giving praise to her God while listening to this station at work.

Similarly, when I was at a local pharmacy to get a prescription filled, the radio, when not devoted to excessive amounts of commercials, which took up most of the airtime, played popular songs from previous decades, something like Diana Ross and The Supremes. Most of every song was devoted to the refrain.

I frankly don’t know how people can stand listening to corporate radio. My workplace, if I were the boss in a commercial operation and had control over its ambience, would not subject the employees to the radio. Each employee could bring a radio or CD player and listen to that device through a headset so long as no other employer would be subjected to someone else’s idea of music.

I gave up listening to the radio in the car several years ago. Now, more often than not, I drive in silence, not having a CD player in my twelve-year-old car. When I was commuting, I occasionally tried listening to the public radio stations, one in Lawrence and one in Kansas City, but neither station helped in keeping me awake, and I grew weary of hearing someone talk at me. Silence was more appealing and comforting.

There are no FM stations in Kansas City worth hearing. The radio shows in the mornings are devoted to talk and commercials. I last remember having a pleasant radio experience when I was living in Oklahoma. KRXO, a classic rock station, had triple-play Thursdays and featured Lisa Mirick during the day. It was worth taking a longer route through town on Thursdays just so that I could hear the radio station a little longer.

Anymore, the radio has become as devoted to commercials as the television, with its five minutes of commercials after ten minutes or less of programming. It seems as though we Americans have chosen to entertain ourselves by either listening to or watching commercials. I would be willing to adopt the British system of paying a tax for every radio and television that one owns so that we can receive commercial-free programming. Such a change would cause the corporations to lose so much revenue that they would probably find a way to ensure we are held immobile as our heads are filled with messages that voice an unfulfilled longing for more crap in our lives.

World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler: A Review

2008-03-23T00:53:00.012-05:00

James Howard Kunstler is best known as a novelist, social critic, and prognosticator. Two recent works of nonfiction of his are The Geography of Nowhere, a critique of American architecture, suburbia, and the absence of city and community planning, and The Long Emergency, an examination of those problems that will accompany the forthcoming absence of fossil fuels. Howard’s newest novel, World Made By Hand, creates a time and place where his characters have to negotiate an America without government, without oil, and without any goods or services except for what the people grow themselves or offer in trade.

Set in Union Grove, a small community in upstate New York, the novel occurs at a time when both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have been “bombed” because of what the narrator refers to as a “Jihad,” brought about because of America’s role in a protracted war in the “Holy Land.” Although the military had ousted the president that kept the country embroiled in the Middle East, the bombing of Washington, D.C., destroyed the last visages of government and its “revolving cast of political characters.” Oil-producing countries seem to exist within this fictional world, but they aren’t trading with the United States; this absence of imported fossil fuels has caused the country to collapse in on itself. “Everything was local now,” the narrator says. Any news about the world outside of Union Grove is brought by travelers and is either outdated or filled with rumor.

Narrated by Robert Earle, a former marketing executive for security software, and now a carpenter and musician, the novel occurs within a single summer. Widowed by the Mexican Flu, “when every community was shuttered up in desperate quarantine,” and which killed a large portion of the population in Union Grove and elsewhere, Robert lives alone when the novel opens and finds moments of comfort in the quick but amorous liaisons with Jane Ann, the preacher’s wife.

Those townspeople who have lost hope work for Mr. Bullock, someone who provides them with shelter and food in return and who has created a prosperous enterprise on the land he owns outside of town and who sends goods down river to Albany. Wayne Karp provides a similar umbrella operation for people and has them either digging through the former landfill for what can be salvaged and what can be sold or traded or has them scouring the county for building supplies and whatever else can be carried off by horse from the deserted houses and the barren retail outlets.

Religion, as to be expected because of the comfort it offers, is omnipresent in this world. Preachers prepare the people for the apocalypse in their radio broadcasts. The narrator keeps his radio on constantly, even though “the electricity had been on for half an hour all…month” and powers nothing but these reminders of mass communication. Brother Jobe, the leader of a religious cult, has brought his people to Union Grove, after having lived in Virginia and Pennsylvania. This religious cult purchased the old town high school, which they begin to renovate. Loren, the town preacher, and Robert meet Brother Jobe outside of town as the novel opens.

Robert works on improving the town after he is elected mayor and seeks the help of both Brother Jobe and Mr. Bullock in his first project, renovating the town's water supply. Robert and Brother Jobe’s followers later assist Mr. Bullock in finding and returning the crew of a boat that had carried cider to Albany. This journey allows the narrator to provide a clearer view of the hopelessness and fear that prevails among the people on the route to Albany.

While reading the novel, I had hoped that Daniel, Robert’s adult son, would return from his travels through the country with Evan, Loren’s son, to provide a larger view of what had been occurring elsewhere in America. In keeping with its focus on the local, the narrator emphasizes what occurs among the people in Union Grove and how they work together, in spite of conflict and loss, to improve their environment.

This future of the Long Emergency is one punctuated with violence. It’s this violence that might repel some readers. Not merely an observer of the violence, some of which is told in too much detail, the narrator is a participant. Fortunately, there is plenty of marijuana and home-brewed alcohol to make this future more tolerable. The narrator, too, is sexually active and descriptive in its liaisons, which is a strong element in the genre of science fiction.

Ultimately, the novel provides a unique look at our future and, while focused on the particular, allows the reader to visualize what could happen in this country in the years ahead and causes the reader to wonder whether it would be possible to survive solely on oneself and others in a time when nothing else that currently makes up our society exists. Would we exploit those weaker or sell our labor to someone more powerful? Would we be willing to sacrifice our notions of right and wrong? Or would we do whatever it takes to maintain a semblence of normalcy?

One Million Four Hundred Thousand Snow Geese

2008-03-11T19:27:00.002-05:00

Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge , near Mound City, Missouri, reported on Monday that 1,425,000 snow geese are laying over at the refuge in their migration north. How the resident biologist comes up with number is not readily known. In any case, this Wednesday, with forecasted daytime high temperatures around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, would be a great time to take the mile long walk to the observation tower at the refuge and to take pictures of that mind-bogglingly number of geese. I only wish I could spare the time.

Growing Spring Indoors

2008-03-05T00:54:00.010-06:00

My wife has been growing tulips and crocuses indoors this year. She had some left over after planting bulbs in the fall and decided to try growing them in a pot. She has them in the kitchen underneath a grow light. The tulips have slowly been opening up over the past couple of weeks while only one crocus has started to bloom. I find them especially pretty. Since the bulbs she had planted last year were killed by a late freeze soon after they opened up, it probably is a good idea to grow them indoors because it gives us a chance to appreciate them for a longer period of time. Those ephemeral moments of beauty can be savored a bit longer under certain conditions.

The sawblades in the background of the first two pictures were created by my mother-in-law. It's called tole painting in this part of the world. We have five of her sawblades along with one of her watercolors on the same wall in the kitchen. We started to collect her artwork about ten years before she died. We now consider ourselves quite fortunate to have this small collection of her art. I think she would be pleased.

As with the other photos on this blog, clicking on each picture will enlarge it. The last one here is especially gorgeous when enlarged.

Memoir in Six Words

2008-02-29T15:43:00.003-06:00

Land Mammal has challenged her regular readers to come up with a six-word memoir. After several days of gestation and several attempts that I rejected, I came up with the following effort: Once alone, naïve, impulsive, now not.

Sleep and Sleeplessness

2008-02-25T02:57:00.004-06:00

Many people I know have been talking about their problems sleeping. A niece says she has only been able to sleep for four hours at a time. This basic bodily function is often the most difficult one to obtain at length and to enjoy. It’s no wonder that the advertisements on television late at night are for more comfortable beds or sleep aids. Advertisers are targeting those of us who spend so much of our lives sleep-deprived.

One misconception many of us used to have about sleep is that it cannot be made up once it has been lost. Sleep researchers now have admitted that any sleep debt we incur will continue to accumulate until we find a way to repay what we owe. My sleep debt dates from graduate school—beginning about twenty-two years ago.

Before I started teaching the remainder of my five sections this semester, I was having a recurring dream in which it’s the end of the semester, and I’m late in posting my students’ grades, having failed to make the deadline for submitting my grades online. It seemed as though I was concerned about updating my online classes, even though a couple of weeks remained before the remaining classes got underway. After three or four hours of sleep, during the long weekend in mid-January, I woke up from this dream and couldn’t get back to sleep. Even the attempts to picture myself in a favorite place didn't help to bring on sleep. It got to a point when I couldn’t remain in bed and couldn’t relax enough to rest my head on the pillow. This inability to remain in bed has now occurred often enough that I refer to it as the crazies; usually it happens when I’m forced to sleep away from the house. I ended up sitting in the living room on those nights and reading The Long Emergency while surrounded with our three cats, only getting back to bed after the sun came up.

Going without sleep can be so draining. I can usually get through the day if I am forced to remain awake (with the aid of vitamins, herbs, and caffeine) but finding enthusiasm or interest in anything is extremely difficult. It’s as though I’m one of the zombies that my son and his friends find so fascinating and so frightening.

Lunar Eclipse

2008-02-21T00:41:00.006-06:00

My own attempts at photographing the eclipse were not successful. I can make a few recommendations, however. For a time lapse view of the eclipse, click on this link . Notice this picture , too. For other views of previous eclipses, try these links: here and here .

Living with the Second Amendment

2008-02-19T12:43:00.006-06:00

The best analysis I've seen regarding the school shooting last week at Northern Illinois U, and the three additional shootings that occurred in the US last week, appears at the World Socialist Web Site . Something is terribly wrong when four people in one week pick up guns and shoot others. Obama, at least, recognizes that something needs to be done, but he refuses to tamper with the Second Amendment, fearing, apparently, that the gun lobby will organize against him. Having the right to bear arms, I guess, means accepting that crackpots will suddenly kill and injure others, as a means of crying out in pain, before shooting themselves. I don't think the founding fathers had in mind murder and suicide (away from the battlefield) when creating the Second Amendment.

Work to Live

2008-02-13T03:23:00.001-06:00

Revising two online classes caused me to neglect this blog for a few weeks. Once again, I am teaching five sections and have already gotten the first assignments to grade in three of these classes. The grading will now be constant until the end of the semester.

All I really want to do is write. I was once naïve enough to think that I could solicit funds from someone by placing an advertisement in the newspaper for a wealthy patron. I had been reading the poems of Sir Philip Sidney, along with other poets of England in the 15th and 16th centuries, and thought that maybe someone with a sizeable amount of disposable income would fund me to produce nothing but poems. No one in Wichita, where I was living at the time, cared enough about the arts to help out a hungry poet. There are, of course, grants available. Someone I once knew had gotten a federal grant of $20,000. per year for a period of two years. That amount of money would help by at least allowing me to reduce my teaching load, but I don’t foresee a time when I will get that kind of money for my writing.

Presidential Politics

2008-02-12T17:11:00.000-06:00

It’s difficult getting excited about the presidential race this year. Almost seven months remain before the election, and already there are very few options remaining. It’s quite possible that each of the major parties will only have one candidate by March or April. What’s the point?

When commenting on the pancake race and the accompanying celebration on Fat Tuesday in Liberal, Kansas, someone in England said that only Americans can turn a thirty-second race into a four-day event. That’s nothing because we used to turn a national election into an eight-month event.

John Edwards and Dennis Kucinich, my two choices, are already out of the running. It made no sense to participate in the caucus last week because, as a registered Democrat, I was limited to Tweedle-dee or Tweedle-dum, neither of which appeal to me at the moment.

Come November, I will be voting, of course. Either of the Democratic choices will probably be better than what we have currently for a president and will be better than the Republican candidate, but I don’t foresee a great deal of change next year after the swearing in ceremony. Change disturbs the status quo, and it’s the status quo that rules.

What's in a Name

2008-01-26T02:16:00.000-06:00

This blog experienced more traffic than usual on Friday morning. The great majority of hits came from the navigational bar in Blogger, which is one way to discover new and interesting blogs. Perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to have some of the people who happened by return to my small corner of the Internet.

I don’t remember ever having seen a red moon and haven’t ever visited any of the restaurants or bars in Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere named the Red Moon Café. This blog title comes from a sidewalk café that once existed in Paris and may still exist. I discovered the name when I was studying French as an undergraduate and found the name appealing. It wasn’t revealed how the café earned its name. If I were to create a literary journal, I would probably name it the Red Moon Café. Similarly, if I were to create my own press and publish a chapbook of poems annually, I would probably use the name Red Moon Press. That name has stuck with me because of its associations with poetry and magic.

Although I haven’t had much interest in traveling overseas, I would like to visit Paris at some point in my life. Even before Michael Moore created such an idealized view of France in his documentary Sicko, I have wanted to see some of the museums of art, to walk along the Seine, and to get out into the country. My son, on the other hand, wants to visit Canada. He has taken down some of his Star Wars posters and replaced them with a large flag of Canada. Canada appeals to him because of its socialized medicine, its history as a place of refuge from the militarism in this country, and its allure of freedom from the policies of George Bush and other politicians in Washington. He would love it if his mom and dad were to get jobs in Canada.

Huddled in a Deep Freeze

2008-01-25T01:41:00.000-06:00

The Arctic blasts of air descending from Canada have made this winter unusually cold for what seems like a longer period of time. These chunks of ice on the Missouri River are not solid as of yet because they create a hissing sound when they hit against the shoreline as though the impact causes them to decrease in size. A brief patch of sun appeared on the opposite shore when I was at the river yesterday afternoon. Another cold blast of air made its presence known an hour or two later, causing the temperature to fall below zero last night.

Acquiring Jazz & Money

2008-01-25T01:04:00.000-06:00

Jazz Times has now made available online the selections for the best jazz CD’s released in 2007. If you click on the link in the previous sentence, you’ll be able to see what about thirty-five jazz critics have chosen as their picks for the past year. Downbeat, unfortunately, doesn’t make its selections available online and requires the purchase of the magazine, a trip to the library, or access to a university library database.

Discovering the current releases in jazz has only been a recent interest of mine. As I worked at putting together a collection of those classic jazz albums, my interest was more in the timelessness of jazz, that is, those jazz albums that remain worthy of attention today and that exemplify the best work of certain musicians within specific periods of time, such as John Coltrane’s work during the years he recorded on the Atlantic label (as in Giant Steps, My Favorite Things, Coltrane Plays the Blues, Coltrane’s Sound, and Ole).

When my son’s saxophone teacher recommended that I go back and listen to Joe Henderson’s Double Rainbow, an album that I had previously neglected in favor of So Near, So Fear, I discovered that Double Rainbow is indeed worthy of attention. I apparently hadn’t been ready for it when I heard that album initially. I have now been rediscovering some of the other albums previously neglected in my collection.

I also need to see whether my local library carries any jazz that I have been looking for. Perhaps I’ll get lucky. I didn’t discover Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker Live at Carnegie Hall until I rented it from a library about ten years ago. Kenny Wheeler’s Deer Wan has been on my list for twenty years or so. A new copy of Wheeler's classic is now much too expensive, running about $25., probably because of the declining value of the dollar (the cost of CD’s imported from Europe will continue to get more expensive, unfortunately).

I can see that my cash flow problem will lead to alternatives in acquiring music. That tax relief from the government, if it indeed comes, has already been budgeted toward our state and federal taxes. But it's possible that it will be intercepted by our student loan people. If it were up to me, I would just as soon see the government do nothing more than increase unemployment benefits with some of the $155 billion it has ear-marked for its tax relief program. This country can ill-afford giving away money to its citizens when it already owes trillions of dollars to those foreign governments holding treasury bonds.

Another Semester Online

2008-01-16T02:58:00.000-06:00

After nearly a month away from my students, I start teaching again on Wednesday when three of my five sections start up. In some ways, I’m lucky to have an additional two weeks before the other two sections begin because it gives me time to prepare those classes well and to get used to the classes that I’ll have at first. Usually, I have little time to devote to each class and struggle to get the grading completed in a timely fashion.

If I were teaching in the classroom, I would only need to have the syllabus prepared for Wednesday. My students, on the other hand, will be able to see the entire course when they log into the class for the first time. An online instructor, I have to devote a portion of my break to altering and preparing my classes. In an effort to eliminate the confusion my students have had with some of the assignments, I made some corrections in the hope of making these assignments clearer. Analysis of a text and evaluation in general are particularly hard for freshmen. I have also altered the due dates and made a few other corrections in the forty or so pages that make up each class.

As much as I might grumble about my teaching schedule, I am actually fortunate to teach online. Online courses fill much quicker than classes meeting onground, ensuring that my income will remain steady because I lose money whenever a course is cancelled for insufficient enrollment. My twelve-year-old car would not perform as well if it were driven three hundred miles a week, so I save money on repair bills and manage to forego buying a newer car and making payments. The amount of money spent on gas would take a significant portion of my income. I’m currently only having to fill up about once a month. If I were also teaching in the classroom, I would have nothing to wear because my clothes anymore are only suitable for extremely casual Fridays—blue jeans, t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc. With the weather forecasters now calling for about four weeks of cold and snowy weather, I am fortunate at not having to deal with the hassle of negotiating the ice and snow packed streets. I would like to say that more and more jobs in the future will be performed online; that statement assumes that the workers have the education and training that will allow them to transmit their work through the Internet. Many people, unfortunately, are limited in what they can do for a living. I appreciate my degree the most when I compare my work life to those other people I encounter at the grocery store, for example. In the long term, I am at a disadvantage by not working for a retirement income; in the short term, I benefit in ways that others would probably relish if the opportunity were available.

Probably the people who see me at the grocery store mistake me for someone who works in a warehouse because of how I am dressed. I was surprised recently when the checker and the man behind me in line started talking to me. I’m not one to put on airs or to think of myself as privileged; my wife and I struggle as much as any other family if not more so because of the massive student loan debt that hangs over our heads. It’s as though these people accepted me as a Kansan and as a regular working stiff, which are things I have wanted a good part of my life. At long last, I have finally blended into my environment, and it has only taken fourteen years of college, three degrees, and an online teaching schedule to accomplish that feat.

Jazz From 2007

2008-01-08T02:32:00.000-06:00

Anyone visiting this blog in the hope of finding a list of jazz CDs worthy of attention from the year 2007 would be better off visiting All About Jazz , Jazz Times , or Jazz After Hours . I only purchased one CD released in 2007, and that is Manu Katche’s Playground.

My other purchases were released prior to 2007, such as Eberhard Weber’s Pendulum (2001), Anouar Brahem’s Barzakh (1991), Anouar Brahem’s (with John Surman and Dave Holland) Thimar, Manu Katche’s Neighborhood (2005), Iro Haarla’s Northbound (2005), Arild Anderson’s (with Vassilis Tsabropoulos and John Marshall) Triangle (2004), and Dave Holland Quintet’s Prime Directive (1999). This last year was an exceptional one because I don’t usually buy that much music during any one year.

Only Jim Wilke, as of this writing, at Jazz After Hours recommends Playground. Manu Katche’s new CD has been receiving more attention in Europe.

Jazz Times hasn’t yet released its critics’ list of the best CDs; one CD the critics at All About Jazz nearly all agree on is Michael Brecker’s Pilgrimage, which is something I haven’t heard in its entirety as of yet. My son’s saxophone teacher recommends Pilgrimage, too. We’re fortunate to have the option of purchasing either recent or older CDs; only Tomasz Stanko’s CDs (like Leosia) seem to become scarce over time. Vinyl records were even harder to find within a couple of years of their release date--at least within this particular genre.

Favorite Movies of 2007

2007-12-30T03:05:00.000-06:00

Some of my favorite movies from the year 2007 appear below. Occasionally, my reasons for choosing these movies appear ideosyncratic although I attempt to achieve objectivity in my comments about these movies. My choices are limited to those movies that have appeared at area multi-plexes. If I were living in a larger city or a university town, I would have access to both European releases and independent productions created in this country.

Best Comedy: Mr. Bean’s Holiday
A genuinely funny movie in which Mr. Bean, without his knowledge, becomes responsible for so many problems. The scene of Mr. Bean dropping the oysters he ordered in a Paris restaurant into a woman’s purse cannot easily be forgotten.

Best Animated Feature: The Simpsons Movie
Nearly every moment contains another gag. It will take several viewings just to discover all of the humor.

Best Computer Animation: Beowulf
This depiction of the old English poem contains a lot of good things. At one point, a bard in the mead hall is reading from Beowulf in Old English. Most fascinating of all is the music that only appears when Grendal’s mother is interacting with Beowulf. The alteration of the poem’s plot creates a convincing argument.

Best Action/Adventure: Live Free or Die Hard
John McClane returns for another adventure in which computers play a large role. Justin Long’s character offers exposition and comic relief. The action remains intense as McClane and Matt Farrell (Justin Long) piece together those clues that will prevent the economic collapse of this country.

Best Drama: 3:10 to Yuma
This update of an earlier western develops the story in more detail by adding more characters and giving Ben Wade and Dan Evans (the two main characters) more human characteristics while framing the movie around the violence in the opening and closing scenes.

Best Musical: Across the Universe
The director manages to weave together the music of the Beatles so as to create a story of two lovers. The cinematography is often surreal and recreates the allusions to LSD in some of the music. Look for the hand of Uncle Sam reaching out of a poster to grab young men for the war in Vietnam.

Best Family/Children’s Movie: The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
The character development in this story, combined with the mythic elements and the Scottish setting, sustains one’s interest throughout the movie and prevents this movie from simply being another one in which the characters talk to imaginary creatures.