November, 2006 Archive

Adventures with Ethan

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

A Walk to the Confluence of Warm Springs Creek and Big Wood River

What do you call a guy who does the Luge? Click mvi_7408.AVI for the answer. Then run the Quicktime movie backward.

Babysitting in Idaho 2

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

Monday November 13, 2006 12:30 P.M.

Abel sleeps, second nap this morning. I fed, changed, carried, played with him since 9:00 when Amy and Joe left with Ethan for school. He got tired in my arms, turning to jelly, eyes closing. While I worked at the computer he sat in his rocker and talked, and when he complained, I just tapped the moon and star rattles.

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Babysitting in Idaho

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

Friday November 10, 2006

img_0107b.jpgIsabel is in the third hour of her weekly cleaning Joe and Amy’s house as I sit on the couch in the slant sun illuminating the back sides of the bare aspens in the front yard and creating complicated patterns on the walls through the many windows in sight. North November light.

Inga swearingen croons through the sound system. Four year old Ethan is in nursery school and ten week old Abel is deep asleep. I held, rocked, played with, sang to, fed and changed him for two and a half hours until he drifted off in my arms. As he relaxed, his body got heavier while his consciousness thinned and floated away–along with my own. Now he’s awake again. Only a forty minute nap.

12:10 Abel sits in his bouncy seat listening to the Bruch violin concerto. He’s waving his hands and feet, fascinated with the soft moon, star and blue dog on his toy bar. He stares at them, his own movements rocking him, occasionally furrowing his brow, swatting and talking, and I talk back.  Now the sounds intensify. They could lead to crying or just be self-expression, cheering at the ball game.img_0115.jpg

I have nothing to do but attend him. Behind the music, the sounds of the Spanish soap opera from the tv in the kitchen as Isabella cleans. We conversed a bit in Spanglish: she has five children, aged 22 to 7. She looks youthful and moves fast.

It’s three days after the election, after the national headlong plunge into darkness has been arrested, after the citizens of San Luis County voted overwhelmingly to approve a huge shopping center on prime ag land with no environmental review. I flew here for a week to provide some support for Joe and Amy as she returns to work.

Terry Tempest Williams

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

Friday November 17 enroute Salt Lake City to L.A.

Last night Terry Tempest Williams spoke and read at the Wood River Presbyterian Church. The day I arrived in Ketchum, when I saw this event announced in the paper I’d bought tickets for me Joe and Amy to attend on our last night. The large parking lot was full, the sanctuary of the church, which houses Ethan’s preschool, is a large wood panelled cavern with side windows giving on a view of the dashing river just outside. I’d read Williams’ canonical ecoliterary text, Refuge, years ago and essays in Orion along with her collection, On the Open Space of Democracy. Eloquent and informative, her writing is driven by urgent personal grievings and celebrations, by the need to formulate dilemmas without resolving them, and by an activist’s unrelenting drive to battle for what she believes in. I would have gone out of my way to hear her speak in California, and yet here she was at the doorstep of our home away from home.

On the way into the hall, Joe and Amy introduced me to people of many ages they knew. I was glad to have nudged them in the direction of folks interested in writing and ecology among their own extended circle of neighbors, especially after talks about Amy’s community involvement on the board of directors of Ethan’s school and her strong opinions about the error of demanding twenty percent rather than fifteen percent from developers to create affordable housing.

ttw_reading.jpgTerry was introduced by a young woman who sat on the Ketchum Arts Center board that sponsored her talk in connection with a display of photographs on the theme of nature and place that I wished I had known about. The bad setup of the p.a. system made her hard to understand, and for the first part of the program I was irritated to the point of distraction that in such lavish surroundings and at such a pricey occasion, nobody was taking responsbility for the sound. Terry took the stage, and with an apology for shakiness due to diarrhea from food poisoning, sat down to deliver her presentation. I was surprised by her appearance, for some reason expecting a dowdyish presence from the Mormon wife of a contractor, but instead finding a svelte, blackbooted, silverhaired beauty.

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Kenneth Adelman

Saturday, November 4th, 2006

I got an email this morning from a colleague who’d organized a panel at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America on uses of Shakespeare by the military. He’d asked me to present because I’ve published and lectured on the subject of Shakespeare’s anti-militarism. Also on the panel was Mr. Kenneth Adelman, who teaches Shakespeare at Georgetown University in his spare time, but who is widely known as one of the architects of our Iraq war policy.

My colleague’s email referred me to a new article in Vanity Fair, circulated on the web, which contains an interview with Adelman repudiating Bush and the war.

This was my reply:

I thought of us in Philadelphia when I read this on the web last night. These days, I’ve been heavily addicted to Truthout, Slate and that junkfood for liberals, Huffpost.

Notice Adelman’s signature self-congratulation for being invited to Rumsfeld’s house even as he betrays his host:

“I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance.”


Part of my addiction are repeated Dantean fantasies of how these people will fare in hell.

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This is some of what I said on the panel with Mr. Adelman last April:

In his book, Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard’s Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, Kenneth Adelman reads Shakespeare’s account of the war against France as follows:

The family business has not been going well. Henry’s father, Henry IV had a woeful reign notable for rebellion ¦. His advice to his son was succinct: Go for an acquisition, even if it entails a hostile takeover. In fifteenth century England that meant finding someplace to attack”it didn’t much matter where”in order to ˜busy giddy minds’ at home ˜with foreign quarrels.’ Like any new and especially young executive, Henry longs to make his mark. War offers a great opportunity to do so”but only if he wins. (p.4)

The sinister strategy Shakespeare brings to light here is presented by Mr. Adelman as exemplary to those who benefit from war”the leaders and succeeders in charge today who regard the nation born in this city of brotherly love as their family business. The book’s co-author, Norman Augustine, is CEO of Lockheed Martin, one of the largest arms manufacturers and defense contractors in the world. And Mr. Adelman, among his many other leadership roles, sits on the Defense Policy Board, which traditionally served to strengthen ties between the private sector and the Pentagon, and which contributed significantly to our present administration’s disastrous middle-east foreign policy. Indeed, war provides “great opportunity” for these people–win or lose, and “it [doesn’t]¦ much matter where.”

Erasmus was recognized as the greatest scholar and thinker of early Renaissance Europe. He was given a seat at the tables of the Great, who were tutored by humanists and loved their culture. Erasmus tried to persuade the Movers and Shakers to give up their bellicose power games and to devote themselves to the protection and welfare of all their subjects. The policies that he championed”outlawing war, arbitrating international disputes, disbanding standing armies–never took hold. But his voice still speaks, along with Shakespeare’s, to guide and inspire those engaged in a battle of true worth.

Macbush (with apologies to Barbara Garson)

Saturday, November 4th, 2006

An editorial set to appear on Monday — election eve — in four leading newspapers for the military calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

from Macbeth, Act 5 scene 2:

Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

from the editorial:

“These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority. And although that tradition, and the officers’ deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it.”