some time in the garden... been clipping roses killed by the intransigent japanese beetle... metallic black bug who chomps pink petals... i would spray but am too lazy... and phobic of poison... i will tolerate... i will not make a picture... but here's impatiens... tweaked a bit... of course



the nasturtiums... nasturtia? nasturtii?... boomed in my absence... i took a good look... the soil is too rich and moist for many flowers... just a few... but the leaves alone are fine by me... here's a mix of things...

back from mom's... a few days with people i love... mom, meg, pat and a little time with beth... the days were literally and figuratively cool... thursday found me in the front garden... inexplicably gouging my hand on a tough stem of old weed... we ate cake to celebrate the birthdays of august... and opened elegant thoughtful useful gifts... pat and i went to springfield on friday... to pay respects to prairie archives... musty old used bookstore... pat took his allergy medication and it seemed to work... next time i'll make a picture of the place... no books this time... then we hung around sixth street... strolled past the as-yet-unopened abe lincoln library & museum... had food at a nearby sub sandwich place (in the exact same spot as a previous incarnation of prairie archives)... where pat explained the top secret plan for his new book... exciting... because it's simple and complex... as all good things are... on interpretation... pat likes the stone on the old state capitol... and so do i...

In the cardinal's view, Europe is Christian, so Turkey doesn't belong. ... yikes...

Nobel laureate poet Milosz dies (first noted via tex files)

Some day soon I may hear he has died. ... whoa... this is kind of creepy...

going south... maybe they got some sun down there

...the crisis is not in land use. It's in the lives and the minds of land users. That's why I don't believe it can be helped very much by any kind of official policy. Good land use is going to come about either by hard necessity or by some kind of teaching.

And this community-killing agriculture, with its monomania of bigness, is not primarily the work of farmers, though it has burgeoned upon their weaknesses. It is the work of the institutions of agriculture: the experts and the agri-businessmen, who have promoted so-called efficiency at the expense of community, and quantity at the expense of quality.

United Airlines - Flight status

The Internet Classics Archive | The Georgics by Virgil

a cool day here in lake county... gray mostly... new shoes day... just one pair of fairly inexpensive cross-trainers... mostly for the gym... which requires decent shoes... i stood for a long while in front of the running shoes... thought about my knee... thought about the track the trail the wind in my hair... my knee... so no running shoes this time around...

almost done with eagleton's literary criticism... like it very much... understood more of it than of most of this ilk... but near the end i'm drifting off wondering what it all comes to... how it works or doesn't in classes like mine... theory...

still working on erdrich's last report... i'm gonna finish this sucker... still liking it

virgil's georgics... how to do farming... what could be more arcane for such as me... now it's all about loss... for us... lost time lost know-how lost land... and something else...

sorry for getting so political... just can't resist this sound-off from new york on illinois's new candidate from maryland...
The New York Times > Plan B for Illinois

August 10, 2004

Plan B for Illinois

In the noble tradition of the Marquis de Lafayette, the Seven Samurai, Mighty Mouse and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Alan Keyes is leaving home to go to the aid of a pitiable band of outgunned, hopeless supplicants: the Illinois Republican Party.

The party had been stumbling for months to find someone, anyone, to oppose Barack Obama, a Democrat, in the race for the United States Senate. The Obama Express has been cannonballing to Washington, picking up speed after Mr. Obama's dazzling keynote speech at the Democratic convention. The Republicans opted to overlook minor defects - like the fact that Mr. Keyes lives in Maryland. After all, every other conceivable Republican candidate had either jumped the tracks or politely declined an invitation to be tied to them.

Weeks after losing their primary winner, Jack Ryan, over allegations stemming from his divorce, the Republicans have finally settled on Plan B: Mr. Keyes, a hard-core conservative who has carved out a career as a sort of professional unsuccessful candidate. He has never won office in four previous attempts, two each for president and the Senate.

Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Keyes is black, and the winner will be only the third African-American in the Senate since Reconstruction. But the race now seems likely to turn the Republicans' big tent into something more like the Big Top: Smell the rank hypocrisy! (Mr. Keyes accused Hillary Clinton of being a carpetbagger in her 2000 Senate race.) See the ideological acrobats! (The state Republican chairwoman, who accuses Mr. Obama of being far out of the mainstream, is a moderate who supports abortion rights. Mr. Keyes condemns it in practically every case as "murder in the womb.")

While this page expressed hope that Mr. Obama would have an opponent this fall, Mr. Keyes is not exactly what we had in mind. He did meet the party's minimal qualifications - he has a well-known name and is willing to show up. And he is a polished public speaker. But if the only challenge for Mr. Obama is to appear more reasonable than his opponent - who believes the federal income tax is unconstitutional - the bar will not be very high.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Charlotte Observer | Walden' still vital at age 150
Q. 'Walden' is regarded as a stylistic masterpiece. Did it change American writing? If so, how?
A.Here you've hit upon an important point. In my opinion, it didn't so much change American writing as it modeled what American writing would become within the next few generations. Look at the prose of his contemporaries (Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, James). These latter are fine writers but in a more florid, almost 'European' style. Thoreau's prose is spare, focused and balanced. His unit of thought is the sentence, not the paragraph; and he picks individual words as if he's mining for gems.

August is one big late-term pregnancy. ... with fine photographic demonstration...

The Criterion Collection

DVD Savant Review: The Lower Depths (1936) & The Lower Depths (1957)

Thoreau's Walden is 150 years old today...

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.