Quien a hierro mata, a hierro muere

Acabo de leer la autobiografia de Pancho Villa por Paco Ignacio Taibo II.  I will have more to say about this later, I just wanted to comment on this day which must be one of the most beautiful in the history of time.
aqui en Norwell.

Danville High, Walk to Kentucky 1913-1914

My grandmother, Alice Hickman O'Keefe walked from Danville Illinois to Mammoth Caves Kentucky in the winter of 1913-1914 with members of her high school class.  According to Google Maps it is a distance of 164 miles.  She was born in Danville in 1896 but raised her family in Massachusetts.  She died in 1986. 

Mud

Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things—we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us—the new clothes Buck's folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go much on clothes, nohow.

                                                                                                                                          Huck Finn

     We watched the movie Mud the other night.  It is the story of two boys who live in house boats moored by the  Mississippi river in southern Arkansas who befriend a fugitive hiding on a nearby island.    The boys live in a world of romance and idealism and freedom to roam the wilds of the river.  While back in town their parents wrestle with reality: domestic strife, boredom, and regulation,  (if someone moves out of the houses on the river, the river authority dismantles it),  strip malls with Piggly Wiggly stores and motels line the highway.  But there is no sign of civilization out on the river and on the island with the exception of an old boat stuck in a tree, left behind in some flood that must have been of apocalyptic proportions.  The boys do not have helmets for their motorcycle or lifejackets for their boat.  They take risks, deal with responsibility and honor and right and wrong, but not with rules, regulations or authority.  They are young boys becoming men in an unfettered, elemental environment, free to love and dream, to fight, to swear, to make deals, to desire women.  They agree to get the boat out of the tree for the fugitive to use to escape in exchange for the 45 caliber pistol he carries in his belt.    It is Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and Nigger Jim come back to life.

立秋

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird or butterfly
or flower or wearing stone or open eye
when heaven presents in sheets the solid hue.

R. Frost

I sit here, a Sunday morning, observing the blue morning sky and wall of green in sunlight around the yard, sensing just the slightest change of season, from heat to comfortable and cool. 
I will be leaving Duxbury soon after 35 years.  35 years of life with everything of life tempered by the presence of the sea.  Where my greatest pleasure was to walk to the sea or by the sea.  My grandmother once told me that the woods were her church.  But for me there is no place closer to
God and paradise than at the water's edge toes in the sand, terns circling and diving, a late summer warmth and peace, far from the tumult and pressure of everyday existence.  If there was nothing else to put in this blog there was always the tone of grey in the sky as I walked over the bridge, the single duck floating in the fog, the jogger here and there, and in the past the fog horn from Bug Light, and always in the winter the sound of surf.  God has blessed me with this little place, but more and more my observations come from slightly inland and slightly to the north.   

Terminus

last scene of all
that ends this strange eventful history
is second childishness and mere oblivion,
sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste and sans everything.

I am watching the demise of a once proud life
personal dignity stripped from him
nothing remains but to wait for death
but he is loved and cared for.

La Villa Real

Estoy leyendo la biografía de Pancho Villa escrito por Paco Ignacio Taibo II.  Empieza con una advertencia de la incertidumbre de todas historias. Por ejemplo, no dirá cual versión de los acontecimientos del inicio de la vida cuatrera de Villa es la verdadera.   La leyenda es que el joven Doroteo Durango defendía el honor de su hermana contra uno de los Terrazas, la familia latifundera de Chihuahua y tuvo que huir.  Pero todos que relatan la historia incluyendo Villa si mismo varían en los datos, aún en la veracidad de lo todo,  según el autor. 

Ya alcancé la punta media del libro.  Es precisamente escrita, trayendo el lector a los espacios íntimos de Villa y sus generales, y aún al campo de batalla.  Las fotos encontradas en las notas al fin de cada capítulo se refieren atrás a la narración. 

Por mí, un aficionado de las biografías desde mi niñez, hay cuatro aspectos de una biografía que son importantes.  Uno, y el principal que tiene esta, es en las detalles de la acción, de los eventos, las personas, las conversaciones.  Este libro tiene esta calidad en abundancia.  El segundo es en su análisis del personaje de la persona.  Quiero saber cuales eran las calidades de este hombre o esta mujer que lo hizo lo que era,  que le dio éxito o que resultó en la tragedia de su derrota.  Tercero, yo quiero saber el ambiente cultural y histórica.  En este libro poco  se dice de la historia de México, o aún de Chihuahua, su pasado, su economía, su sociedad.  Tengo muchas preguntas, quiero leer de Villa con un retrato preciso de su mundo, de su ambiente, de su motivación.  Quiero tener alguna medida de interpretación del hombre y de los eventos y consecuencias de la revolución.  Yo no tengo de estar de acuerdo con esta interpretación sino que me de algún orientación y algo mas allá de los datos de contemplar.

Finalmente y mas importante es que una biografía tenga un aspecto de suspenso.  Quiero tener la experiencia de la lucha, el conflicto, las derrotas antes de la victoria.  Este se puede establecer en el principio del libro aún si ya conozca la conclusión.  El autor tiene que prometer algo que se vaya a revelar.

 

Flash Bang Whiz

Our dog Baylou has a strange behavior linked to thunderstorms.  He is absolutely terrified by them and tries to crawl into the deepest part of the cellar, and woe to the door that blocks his passage.  When the storm is yet in the distance,  he begins to tremble all over, literally quivering in his doggy boots.  Today I returned home after being away during a brief thunder shower to find the casings and door knobs torn off the doors in the basement apartment and part of the jamb and wall chewed away.  Upstairs their was a crazy pattern of pee around the hardwood floor in the living room.  His bladder completely lets go on the sound of thunder.  Once after  a rumble in the night,  we heard the flood gates open as he stood trembling in the middle of the bedroom floor.

It is a mystery to me why he reacts this way to what is just a noise and as far as I know not associated with anything actually bad happening to him.  It is a problem because he becomes so destructive.

Old Saws, Old Knowledge

I have of sorwe so grete a woon
that joye gete I never noon.


Four years into the recession, my tools are all old and beat.  The bills are mounting and it is harder and harder to make money.  I am, in the ways that count, rich beyond measure.  I have the things I really wanted in life,  a relationship with a good and beautiful woman, I have my son and my step-daughters who remain and are close to me.  If I was younger, it would be easier to believe better times are down the road, but at my age, although I have not given up hope, I know the possibility is there that I am all washed up.  I am highly skilled at what I do and fairly well educated and able, but I cannot seem to get business going again or to get an actual job even though I have spent the last 2 years and much money training to teach. I find my faith, which has sustained me throughout my adult life, is failing me. 

I say my faith is failing me in this sense.  I have reached the point in life when one would expect the bread cast upon the waters would have had time to come back to me.  While in many ways it has, far more than I deserve, there have been disappointments and dreams that remain unfulfilled, and still unanswered prayers after seemingly interminable knocking at the door, and I can scarcely say to others "take the path that I have taken, believe in miracles, risk everything to do what is right, Jesus is the Christ, you must know him".  It seems that most who lived practically, who sought material gain over all else, who put God on the back burner, live more comfortably and securely than I do and even often have more moral authority and respect.  There is no evidence of God, but it was never about evidence, it was always about faith.  What I, early on, believed had the most value: wisdom, knowledge, faith, insight, understanding, and sought with all my heart, I find, in my day to day existence to be almost irrelevant.  So it seems to be a two-pronged loss, I have neither worldly success or spiritual authority.  But I believe as absolutely as ever.

I have been working on a short story as part of a class I am taking to learn to teach writing to second language learners.  This is a paragraph from that story.

     Envolvió la mano con una camiseta de su mochila, y se tomó un trago largo del agua,  La  pena penetraba por su brazo y se sintió una ligereza envolverle. Su pulso se corría desenfrenado.  Sabía que tenía que alcanzar su coche estacionado al base de este colmo volcánico que él había decidido a subir hace unas semanas habiendo perdido su trabajo de los últimos quince años.  Desde su juventud quería regresar a esta región del desierto del Altar que por su gran dureza y soledad parecía ser el antídoto a la ansiedad y presión integrantes a la vida de la ciudad.  Mientras que pensaba en su hija Mara y como iba a castigarle por este nuevo más reciente aventura,  ahora, como las otras, fracasada.  Pero esta vez  sabía que ella tendría razón, sabía que estaba en verdadero peligro una hora del coche y al punto de desmayarse. 

Minor Family History

Made weak by time and fate,  but strong in will
To strive, to seek to find, and not to yield.
                                               
                                              Tennyson


I was, on ancestry.com, able to find the census document from 1940 of the street my father grew up on which listed him, 3 brothers and his mother and father as residents.  He was 16 at the time and his best friend "Colley" lived next door.  Colley was killed in the war.

I met with my 83 year old aunt today in Middletown CT.  I asked her for a little family history as she is the last relative I have on my mother's side, the O'Keefe side who was actually born an O'Keefe.  She told me that two of her mother's brothers had been gassed in ww1 and had never been the same after the war.  She also said that her uncle Bob was born 13 years after my grandmother and that he always considered my grandmother as his mother because she had taken care of him.  Frank, the one most severely wounded was an alcoholic.  He had married a women who was heir to some of the Dodge family fortune and had a daughter Rosie born to him.  Rosie was about my aunt's age and they had played together whenenever my aunt and my mother went to Illinois to see the Hickman side of the family.  Rosie's mother died shortly after she was born and because her father would not or could not care for her she stayed for a while with my great grandmother and then was adopted by a family named Fletcher.  The lawyer in charge of the trust left to her by her mother stole most of the money from the trust,  some of the land she had in the trust was sold to create OHare airport.  Rosie's adopted brother was so angered by this that he set out to become a lawyer and bring the man to justice.  He actually did succeed in becoming a lawyer and brought suit against the man who had robbed the trust.  This man committed suicide before the court date.  Rosie did receive some money from the life insurance that the man had.  Interestingly enough he had bought the insurance through my grandfather at my grandmother's urging.  I had never heard this story before.  Rosie had been injured as a child when a large tire fell on her and crushed her hip.  She never married and has since died. 

My grandfather was an accountant for an insurance company in Boston.  I guess he was the head accountant and the firm had offices all over the country.  He also studied for the bar but never took the exam.
On my grandfather's side,  I had asked about his brother Harry who had died when I was a child and I remember my grandparents inherited a cadillac and a collection of cut glass from him.  I believe my grandfather was also the executor of the estate.  Harry had made a fortune providing heavy equipment for the city of Boston.  He was a friend of James Michael Curley. 
Another thing my aunt told me was that my great grandfather OKeefe had been killed when he fell under the wheels of a trolley when my grandfather was 16.

para esto aperecio el hijo de dios, para deshacer las obras del diablo

Last week we were working on a house half way down the slope of monument hill, in sight of the bay and the distant beach.  About 5 pm I happened to look up and saw an amazing sight.  High above were hundreds of seagulls circling in a great flock in the light of the setting sun.  Their wings glinted white as they wheeled and turned in slow, graceful interwoven patterns.  They were at such a height that at first I only saw bright flickering white lights before I realized it was birds.  When  I was a boy living a stone's throw from the Charles River I remember the gulls would also congregate in flocks high above the river at the end of the day.

Es, pues, la fe la certeza de lo que se espera, la conviccion de lo que no se ve.


I am beginning a new course at Umass Boston and I will occasionally post bits from the writing I do for that course.  The first one is below.

Culture is probably as complex and multifaceted as language, deeply engrained in every individual save perhaps feral children.  As such, a definition is going to be hard to come by without some serious consideration.  But what we immediately think of when asked to define culture is the particular way that a particular group of people do things.  Culture has to do with group identity, it is a set of shared characteristic behaviors.  On one level cultural differences are easy to detect,  language is probably the principal identifier of culture, followed by cuisine, social manners, music, shared mythology, taboos, religions, world views, religious views, rituals and rites surrounding festivals and feast days, coming of age, marriage, childbirth and death.  As part of our nature, we human beings form cohesive social units that enable our survival in the primitive world, fortify us against enemies, let us overcome obstacles impossible to scale  individually,  that constrain us on one hand and on the other release immeasurable creative potential for all manner of things both good and evil.  Culture is the glue that holds us together as a tribe, a people or a nation, and perhaps, transcending tribalism at some ethereal level, as human beings.

Tu le peux si tu le veux, lui disait-il
                          
                               Marcel Proust

You can get it if you really want
                          
                               Jimmy Cliff

锄禾日当午

汗滴禾下土

谁知盘中餐

粒粒皆兴苦

To the Farmers

Plowing in the midday heat                  

Sweat drips into the tilled soil
Did you know in a bag of wheat
Every grain is gained by toil.

By Min Yong,

My translation

I have started another blog where I will attempt to write political and social commentary.
franmaloney.blogspot.com

I am therefore precisely a thinking thing
                                               Rene DesCartes


The following is excerpted from a paper I did for a course in applied linguistics I am taking at UMB

For the philosopher or the theologist, there might be no compromise on the issue, but when it comes to human behavior, most scientists take a stand in the middle and admit that nature and nurture function together to determine the behaviors we exhibit. No child is born with a propensity to speak German over Chinese but that child will speak one or both of those languages depending on the environment he or she is born into. On the other hand, no one would deny that many traits we have are exclusively genetic. The distinction is less clear when we address language acquisition itself. There are many universals common across all cultures which some attribute to genetics as do Chomsky and other Innatists. Because the scope of language research ranges from the microscopic biochemical level of genes to the macroscopic level of socio-cultural environment, it is necessary to narrow our focus with a discussion of the nature of language itself.

All animals seem to be endowed with specialized anatomy perfectly suited to their role in the environment and to the ecological niche in which they exist; ants have mandibles for biting and carrying food, mosquitos have probosci for extracting blood to feed their eggs, sharks have rows of razor sharp teeth for ripping flesh, the sandpiper on the beach has little legs for running along the water’s edge and sharp eyes to spot tiny crustaceans which it stabs with its specialized beak. Human beings, in many respects similar to the other animals, have two highly specialized traits which are also adapted to highly specialized roles; these are two hands with opposable thumbs and the ability to use language, each connected to a neural array in the cortex without equal in its complexity and adaptability. As marvelously designed as a mosquito’s proboscus is for extracting blood, it remains, in essence, a simple tool. This is not true for language; unlike the mosquito, there is no exchange of fluids involved or extraction of material sustenance. Language use is not even primarily utilitarian but rather its purpose is to construct and to communicate identity. Descartes verified his existence by reference to his thought processes; “Cogito ergo sum”, “ I think therefore I am.” Language is used to exchange the essence of our existence, that which what is in our minds.

In order to discern how biology relates to culture in language acquisition, we need to begin with the basic biology behind this specialized trait. At first glance, we seem to have the same facial anatomy as many other mammals; tongue, teeth, voice box, nasal cavity, nose. Notwithstanding that they might have little to say, with appropriate training, one might expect chimpanzees to form words if only for the banana they would receive. If this were possible, we would be inundated with showmen and their talking animals. However, it is not. No animals can speak in any sense of the way that humans speak either through intelligence of discourse or intricacy of phonetic expression. The anatomy behind language in humans is extraordinarily specialized and complex. Sound is produced by air passing up from the lungs through the vocal cords, the sound is then modified by the action of the tongue, and lips and by the shape and resonance qualities of the oral cavity and the nasal cavity. Hundreds of muscles work in coordination to achieve the multitude of sounds required by speech, and the muscles are controlled by areas in the brain, Broca’s area being the chief area of the cortex associated with speech production. Speech production is only half of the story, however, the other half is comprehension; there has to be a part of the brain that initially processes the linguistic information coming in through the ears before, another part of the brain formulates a response. But, on this level, we are still only talking about mechanical aspects related to making and receiving the sounds that make up language. We still need to answer the question, “what is language?”.

Is language simply a code for the transmission of information through sound waves? “There are three cows in that field” is a simple sentence, but only a human being could be consciously aware of the reality of three cows in a field. A machine could add three more cows, it could translate the sentence into another code, it could store the information, send it around the world to another machine, but could it wonder, “what is a cow?”, could it understand a sentence like:

So much depends upon a red
wheelbarrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
             
                William Carlos Williams.

 A joke is funny to the teller along with the hearer because they both discern in the words a commonly understood reference to something comic and absurd that goes beyond the information carried by the words themselves. That is where we begin to move into the cultural aspect of language.

Generally when we learn a new language, we are attempting to learn the code consisting of vocabulary and grammatical words, and desire to acquire that code as part of our verbal repertoire, that is to say to be able to fluently express ideas using that code and to understand what is written or spoken in that code. Much of the accompanying cultural information cannot be taught in a classroom and, in fact, may not need to be taught in the classroom. Many Americans take a foreign language in High School or College they are taught by an American teacher who speaks English as his or her first language and they learn surrounded exclusively by other English speaking students, yet most do acquire some ability in the new language. Throughout the world English is recognized as a lingua franca and many people learn English as a second language entirely within their own culture and will commonly speak English outside of any English language culture. To conclude this introduction then, let us define language as a highly complex audible code originating in the neural and physical anatomy of human beings and designed to communicate thoughts and ideas between human beings; the higher level meta-communication associated with language is not here included as part of language itself. We can now take a look at some of the current research in the field of language acquisition.

For the Pickin'

Every evening near Hall's Corner as the sun sets this tree or one nearby fills up with turkeys.  In the day they wander in the neighborhood yards afraid of nothing but when the day is done, one by one gobbling on their way they flap up into the tree for the night.  It is an unusual sight.

I Don't Mind Winter

One must have a mind of winter
to regard the frost and the boughs
of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

Wallace Stevens

I have not been writing.  It hardly seems important to me, although it is the one thing I keep coming back to.
There is so little that I write that has any importance or lasting significance.  My friend has finished a novel and it will soon be published by Paragon House Publishing.  He has worked long and hard on this project and he has endowed the story with meaning from a deeper struggle about faith.  Stories have the most significance and are along with poetry the only writing that lasts more than a generation in the minds of men.  This post is just to ramble on and perhaps to take up with writing again or should I call it the attempt to write.  I have been laid up with a herniated disc in my back for 3 weeks.  I am someone who loves to walk and who works with his body.  So I have been really set back, unable to work in the most difficult time of the year for a carpenter.

Wyoming

Passing through Cheyenne Wyoming, we ran into a hail storm that caused the car to hydroplane badly.  We did not go out of control but a car and a tractor trailer were off the road.  The trailer ploughed into the median strip and into the car in the oncoming lane.  Cheyenne seemed dark and dirty in part because of the rain.  We passed an oil refinery.
     Approaching Laramie, it was nicer, snow was still visible on the mountains.  We arrived in Laramie about 5 pm.  First impression : Nice little college town with tree lined streets and nice buildings.  There are lots of people and shops, many book stores, just the opposite of  DesMoines.