Pioneer Square jaunt to hear authors speaking, and other
things...
A tale about two authors I went to hear at the
Elliott Bay Book Company this past Saturday. One is a self-help therapist and
the other is a desert ecologist. Both of them were scheduled on the same day,
different times, and I was downtown to hear these two and do some more exploring
in Pioneer Square area. A few tidbits about other things at the
end.
Saturday afternoon I headed downtown to catch two
authors speaking at Elliott Bay Books <http://elliottbaybook.com>, in Pioneer
Square. A mere 30-minute bus ride even under the worst conditions. It was wet,
on the cold side, and going to get dark real quickly. I was going to catch
Charlotte Kasl <http://www.charlottekasl.com/>at 4:00 pm and
do something, go to the Market for dinner, for an hour or so, and catch Craig
Childs <http://www.alibris.com/search/books/author/Childs,%20Craig>
at 7:30 pm. I've signed up for Elliott Bay's electronic author listing. Each
day they've got one, two and sometimes three authors giving readings or talking
about their book or their frame of mind.
I've decided that I don't have to read someone's book to be interested in what they have to say. If they are going around and speaking about whatever they wrote about then I can go hear them, ask them questions, and buy the book, or not, remember the author as memorable, or not. Plus, it's a great way to spend an hour. Go a bit early and get a coffee and muffin or scone or sandwich (or just coffee) at the coffee shop on the lower level. That's where the readings are, the lower level. They've got a large room off to the side (south) of the coffee shop and lounge area. There's also a street entrance down some steps to the cafe from Main Street. Once you've got your coffee and snack, go inside the author area and find a good seat. I usually sit to the end of the first row, usually the right side, that way I can pull the chair back a bit and turn it slightly sideways to see the author and some of the rest of the audience. I like theater and author readings are a form of minor theater. The author is "reading" or speaking from his/her heart or experience and hope you will be intrigued enough to either listen in or better still, buy the book. They do take questions and a lot of the questions from the sessions I've sat in on have nothing to do with the book but rather the author's points of view.
So, when I got the January newsletter I scanned it to see if there were any interesting authors (those that I've heard of) or any authors whose book or subject was interesting. Turned out there were more than I expected. Remember, there can be two or three a day, as there was the first January date I went to. In all, seven of this month's authors seemed to appeal to some sense inside me. For Kasl and Childs, the appeal was that each seemed to be presenting a powerful, self-directed, approach to life and how to get along in it. I'm always looking for improved methods of coping. My own have been honed over decades and many lives. Mostly they have to do with Zen and physics. Anyone who can provide good incentives or good examples of how and why something works, I'll listen.
Kasl was up first and is a practiced therapist who's written and produced books and videos on a wide range of self-help, self-healing situations. She also still sees patients in her practice in Montana. She's a tough one, too. She appeared to be in her sixties and was absolutely full of energy. She was also late. We'd sat there, me and about thirty others, for the first 30 minutes after it was supposed to start. The Elliott Bay guy kept telling us she must have been delayed in the rain - it was pretty miserable out. When it gets close to 5:00 pm, nearly an hour later, the Elliott Bay guy says he'll cancel it when the hour tops out, "sorry." At just that minute, Charlotte Kasl and what appears to be her assistant come dashing in, coats a-flinging and talking up a storm. She'd misunderstood the time and, like "wow." So, with what were the twenty or so of us left, she climbed up on the small stage and waited to be introduced.
Then she read from her latest therapy book - "If the Buddha Got Stuck - A Handbook for Change on a Spiritual Path." In this book, she condenses several years of therapy sessions into life lessons. The metaphor she's using is that of one who believes in learning - the Buddhist or Zen way of knowledge - who is using that "practice" as a balance against which to see the rest of the world. In this case the Buddha is the person inside yourself to which you ask such questions as "is what I do who I am?" According to Kasl, most folks are stuck inside a realm of illusion and belief. The fears and trepidations of almost all of us originate inside. We might not want to do something for fear we'll fail or we might not like doing it. These are hard walls Kasl says we erect around ourselves. We won't know if we like something until we try it, we won't know if we'll succeed unless we attempt it. Easy, common sense! But, there are more ways out - of being stuck - that is.
Kasl says that each of us has to ask ourselves what it is that makes our lives such that we don't want to change. If we want to change something then something about our life now isn't right. "But how do we know", she asks? One way is to spend time not being intruded on and to go through a list of questions about who "I am." Do I like my job because I'm supposed to like it? If I like it does that make me someone who is settling for less? Do I have something I've wanted to do but haven't? Stuff like that. The result would be a view of yourself that was a bit more objective than what we normally carry around inside - so says Kasl, although I'll admit that I also have this same view. If you're afraid of something it's because you have an uncertainty about the outcome and might be less satisfied then than you are now. But, again according to Kasl, if you are always afraid then you are building these self-directed barriers even more stronger and making them even more impervious to getting beyond. One should decide within themselves just how much of a fear factor they want to live with and how much excitement (or risk non-aversion) they want in their lives.
Kasl is a Quaker who follows the teachings of Buddha as that - as teachings. She says she' s a fan of no religion and that the Friends belief that the god is inside each of us is sufficient. She said that the real issue - from her therapist perspective - of those who are fundamentalists is that they have created so many self-directed barriers towards their acceptance of other elements of the real, objective, world. Part of what Kasl practices is accepting the Zen approach that there is "good" and "evil" components of everything and one has to both be aware of and be able to deal with the two realities - or rather the duality of reality.
She's an interesting character who seems to be able to cleave a path through life which suits her and those around her. She was a music teacher for the longest time and grew up in Minnesota before deciding she wanted to be a therapist and moved to Montana. Her previous books also lean heavily on Buddhist teachings and the way of Zen and yet were practical guides to such things as women's sexuality. I was impressed with how many examples from her casework she was able to cite and also impressed with how she didn't seem phased by the most out-of-the-way situation, again, applying her slow and methodical methods to find where the person was inside and whether that was who they were or wanted to be.
I sometimes forget, having a very strong will, that there are lots of individuals who are torn among a pile of conflicting wants, needs, problems, or whatever. And, that even though the answer's inside them that it might not be obvious that is the case. That's where someone like Charlotte Kasl can help. Pulling the inner soul out from behind all the barriers that soul erected to protect itself. One of Kasl's basic tenets seems to be that our own fears are what's mostly holding us back from achieving what we want.
Well, since she started late and went on for quite a bit and had lots and lots of audience interaction afterwards, I didn't have enough time to dash up to Pike Place Market and scrounge around for a dinner. I'd already consumed two cups of coffee waiting for Kasl and talking to two folks in adjacent seats. I figured I'd just wander around Pioneer Square area - I'd brought my camera and one neat thing about Seattle in the rain is that it glistens. I really love the way the lights and rain and slick roadway surfaces play with each other. I walked around a couple of blocks, looking for something which glistened in the night. The right angle along a curb and the streetlights light up and catch the slick road below and begin to look like some oozing yellow blob. Neon signs in the bars catch the puddle in the street just right and it's a surreal landscape of bars rightside up and upside down. I was able to easily waste an hour wandering around, trying to find that perfect angle and then trying to find whatever I was going to use for a tripod, hopefully nearby. Mostly it meant leaning up against trees or putting my camera against a streetlamp pole. Occasionally I'd try and just "be still" - those mostly didn't turn out. That's fine, though. I probably got more than a half-dozen really nice shots. Some of these I'll post on the blog.
I returned to the downstairs author area to find that it had been completely remodeled while I was gone. Instead of seats lined up facing south in a broad and shallow meeting style, they were now lined up facing west with a screen installed on that wall and the seats looking more like a movie house. I noticed there were only about a dozen other folks and hoped the author wasn't going to be disappointed. He actually was messing around with the slide projector remote control and so once I knew who that was, grabbed a seat up front - on the side - and just watched Craig Childs set up the podium the way he wanted. Then he sat down, rustled a little with a cloth case and removed a flute - or recorder - made of bamboo and proceeded to play for about ten minutes, stopping once in the middle and saying that the flute had saved him a few times by using it to stick in the sand in some 800-foot tall sand dunes he had been climbing across in one of his desert jaunts. Then he played another song, reminding me of the wind of the desert and how sound travels a long way over barren land and of the echoes one gets sometimes off a distant canyon which presence was completely unknown - until the echo. Very nice and sort of fit the image I had gotten by reading up on who this guy is.
He's a desert ecologist, for one, and apparently shows up quite frequently on NPR's Morning Edition, disclosing some new tidbit or fact or tale of the Southwest. He lives in Colorado but spends most of his time in the northern deserts of Arizona and the southern deserts of Utah. He likes to go out for 10 or 20 day "walks" which involve him and maybe a partner or two going out ahead and leaving caches of supplies and food and water (if necessary) in strategic places figuring they'll find a way to get them when they need them. He also writes for some of Art Wolfe's naturalist series of photography books about Colorado and other places in the Southwest. And, he also writes of his adventures in the desert - he's published two previous books and was going to talk about his latest book "The Way Out: A True Story of Ruin and Survival."
Craig climbs up on the stage after he's finished his flute pieces and is introduced by the Elliott Bay guy. Craig starts talking right away about his new book, the third one he's written, two previously to critical acclaim. This one, he says, is about a guy he'd been hiking with for about ten years and how the two of them came to some grip on their lives. Craig Childs hikes the desert for something line 120 days at a clip, with cleverly hidden caches and notepad in hand to record every nuance of the desert. He's a real desert ecologist who, seems like he lives in the desert. This companion of Craig's on this particular 20-or-so day hike went with him on a Northern Arizona desert reservation try to find a most sacred place. Craig had met the guy about a decade ago at some meeting going on in Reno (or somewhere where wilderness types meet). This other guy, Dirk, had been a big-city cop who had apparently killed too many people and had to "get away." The two would go on these two, three, four-week hikes into different parts of the southwest Colorado-southern Utah-northern Arizona desert region - the Sonoran desert.
Craig said that he never was really sure about Dirk, that he always wondered when the guy would blow a gasket, and yet the two of them met about once a year for these excursions over rilles and through canyons where 10 hours buys you three miles, if that. He told of the two of them on this particular last trip and how they would crawl all day over these rilles, some as high as 300 feet above the adjacent canyon, only to find themselves facing a one-way trip across a thousand-foot chasm and spend the rest of the day retracing and trying to find another connecting rille. He showed slides of the area, saying he doesn't usually take a camera along but this trip was special because they wanted to see the sacred place where a local tribal family successfully hid for a decade after the famous long walk of the Navajos <http://www.viewzone.com/day3w.html>. They really were impressive rilles and canyons, and like so much of Northern Arizona, from a distance it looks merely "hilly" and you've no idea that the bottom of these dimply hills is a couple hundred feet below. Nor are the deeper canyons and wider chasms readily visible from afar, either. This is harsh landscape this author and naturalist and danger-lover has decided he wants to live in. I do know, I've hiked there, and I've hiked a lot more in the Chihuahuan Desert <http://museum.utep.edu/chih/chihdes.htm> for up to a week, but not anywhere near the four weeks or or that Childs hiked. This guy is definitely a study. Some of the pictures show a "rock" that looks like it's three or four feet across and then he showed a sequence of pictures with Dirk approaching the "rock" and it's a boulder twenty feet high. Very deceiving landscape.
Craig then tells us about how when you spend that much time in a landscape a hundred times bigger than you with non-human-scale dangers all around that you begin to realize that you're "seeing" with your hands and fingers and feet. Before you climb up or down some seeming-rock formation, you want to take a piece of it and see just how strong it is or whether, like so much else in the desert, it's just compressed dust. Good points, indeed, but the idea of seeing one's world with ones eyes and hands and feet was certainly an enlightening idea. I'm glad he spent a fair amount of time discussing the tactile nature of the desert, the times you absolutely have to use your hands - for balance or to help pull you over something - and just how imposing this fragile landscape is. You could be standing on a balanced boulder, just another rock at the bottom of a canyon, and your movement could cause the rock to start rolling, causing a cascade of rocks in a small place where the average rock is bigger than you are.
Seems to me that most people want to control their universe and here's a guy who wants his universe to control him and teach him new things about itself. He's an amazingly fast-paced human to come across as relaxed and convivial as he does. He doesn't really conclude because you're supposed to read the book, but he read three separate pages from his book during his time and they were visually rich and digitally - tactile - rich. He captured a few moments of reflection and self-doubt from Dirk and him and the imagery he evoked was convincing. He writes well - he captures a lot of what's in a place (situation) and has a wonderfully expansive vocabulary and way of using it.
He also has an interesting perspective on life and that's what I came to see. Both he and Kasl were so differently captivating and hit different chords within me. Both were singing a song of exploration - go beyond, test yourself, learn something. It was still drizzling and cold outside but I'd had four coffees by then and was pretty buzzed. Plus, I've begun to feel intuitive about the bus runs and right along then came my bus home.
I do like the idea of hanging around a place and hearing something new and different. When I moved back to DC from Houston in the early 80s, I used to go downtown after work and stay late because the National Archives had this speakers series two or three evenings a week (I say evening, they were starting at 7:00 pm). I'd sit in on one or two a month and had discovered they also had a couple evenings a week when they showed archive films. I went to the archive films more than the lectures. Those were fun days of being illuminated for free. I consider Elliott Bay Books' author series to be the same. I know there's more of this going on and there's schedules everywhere - lots of free and lots of "low cost." But, the Elliott Bay Books approach is based on reliability. Sort of like the Monorail of ideas. If you didn't catch the last one, wait, there's another coming right up. Now that I've been hooked I'm beginning to see what I'll call Elliott Bay regulars hanging out with certain authors. Or at least I've seen them a couple of times before when I want to hear a particular author. Another phenomenon to observe, like who're the regulars on the bus.
End of Elliott Bay report! It's just that going to hear these people is getting me outside when it's dark and dreary, and that alone is a good thing, but it's also giving me someone else's perspective on something I think about, which is better. I've been continuing with the pastels and acrylics. I've now done enough that I'm starting to hold off and allow a pastel or acrylic to develop on its own. I'm just as impatient with art as I am with anything else and I want what I'm looking for to come out after the initial effort. Sometimes that doesn't satisfy me - it's "not right," or it's now there yet. All this is because I've started probably too many different drawings at the same time and did one linoleum block and set of prints. But, with several pastels and four different canvases, letting the art speak back to me allowed me to see where I wanted to go. You've got to start somewhere, might as well put paint on canvas and see what you think. My problem is that I use a lot of shapes and colors which I like so by using them I'll naturally be able to please my own sense. That may not be the same for someone else viewing it. I think I have a good eye for what's nice or appealing or striking or whatever. I'd love to own some Monet or Renoir or Van Gogh or even Calder or Rothko. In this life I can't, but since I know what it is in those other artists' vision that I like, I can try and create those same things for myself. Art as pleasure. I fear that this being Seattle, a lot of the artists might be interested in art as politic, or art as society, or art as storyteller/village idiot, or a lot of other plausible and worthy metaphors. Me, it's just art for art - something to look at. Something to take my mind off whatever it's on and cause me to gaze - reflect, ponder, imagine. Or, it's just pretty. Like I said, I like colors and shapes, I'm a simple art fan.
Continuing to rip through my LP collection. I've been transferring all this stuff regularly to my remote-controlled iPod ($29 for an IR remote which slips on the top of the iPod - let's you control all the functions from across the room) and what's so neat is to be able to hear old Rolling Stones get mixed in with Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire. Recently added some Graham Parker (well, probably six albums worth out of ten albums) and and bought some new stuff from iTunes store (Black Key, Joseph Arthur) and have just been getting the greatest charge out of all this music. It's always on random play. I mean, it wouldn't be on the iPod if I didn't like it, would it? So, what difference does it matter who comes next or what genre it is. It's totally freaky to be listening to a string of Motown or Seattle Alternative or New York Punk or whatever songs and have the middle movement of one of Haydn's fabuluso symphonies come blaring forth for the next seven minutes. Yes, it wouldn't be on there if it wasn't something I'd stop and listen to. Next I do Magical Mystery Tour and Abbey Road and maybe a few tunes from a few other albums. One of my Rolling Stones LPs is 38 years old. Good grief, is this ancient technology or what?
So, that's what I've been up to.
More, later
Chas
I've decided that I don't have to read someone's book to be interested in what they have to say. If they are going around and speaking about whatever they wrote about then I can go hear them, ask them questions, and buy the book, or not, remember the author as memorable, or not. Plus, it's a great way to spend an hour. Go a bit early and get a coffee and muffin or scone or sandwich (or just coffee) at the coffee shop on the lower level. That's where the readings are, the lower level. They've got a large room off to the side (south) of the coffee shop and lounge area. There's also a street entrance down some steps to the cafe from Main Street. Once you've got your coffee and snack, go inside the author area and find a good seat. I usually sit to the end of the first row, usually the right side, that way I can pull the chair back a bit and turn it slightly sideways to see the author and some of the rest of the audience. I like theater and author readings are a form of minor theater. The author is "reading" or speaking from his/her heart or experience and hope you will be intrigued enough to either listen in or better still, buy the book. They do take questions and a lot of the questions from the sessions I've sat in on have nothing to do with the book but rather the author's points of view.
So, when I got the January newsletter I scanned it to see if there were any interesting authors (those that I've heard of) or any authors whose book or subject was interesting. Turned out there were more than I expected. Remember, there can be two or three a day, as there was the first January date I went to. In all, seven of this month's authors seemed to appeal to some sense inside me. For Kasl and Childs, the appeal was that each seemed to be presenting a powerful, self-directed, approach to life and how to get along in it. I'm always looking for improved methods of coping. My own have been honed over decades and many lives. Mostly they have to do with Zen and physics. Anyone who can provide good incentives or good examples of how and why something works, I'll listen.
Kasl was up first and is a practiced therapist who's written and produced books and videos on a wide range of self-help, self-healing situations. She also still sees patients in her practice in Montana. She's a tough one, too. She appeared to be in her sixties and was absolutely full of energy. She was also late. We'd sat there, me and about thirty others, for the first 30 minutes after it was supposed to start. The Elliott Bay guy kept telling us she must have been delayed in the rain - it was pretty miserable out. When it gets close to 5:00 pm, nearly an hour later, the Elliott Bay guy says he'll cancel it when the hour tops out, "sorry." At just that minute, Charlotte Kasl and what appears to be her assistant come dashing in, coats a-flinging and talking up a storm. She'd misunderstood the time and, like "wow." So, with what were the twenty or so of us left, she climbed up on the small stage and waited to be introduced.
Then she read from her latest therapy book - "If the Buddha Got Stuck - A Handbook for Change on a Spiritual Path." In this book, she condenses several years of therapy sessions into life lessons. The metaphor she's using is that of one who believes in learning - the Buddhist or Zen way of knowledge - who is using that "practice" as a balance against which to see the rest of the world. In this case the Buddha is the person inside yourself to which you ask such questions as "is what I do who I am?" According to Kasl, most folks are stuck inside a realm of illusion and belief. The fears and trepidations of almost all of us originate inside. We might not want to do something for fear we'll fail or we might not like doing it. These are hard walls Kasl says we erect around ourselves. We won't know if we like something until we try it, we won't know if we'll succeed unless we attempt it. Easy, common sense! But, there are more ways out - of being stuck - that is.
Kasl says that each of us has to ask ourselves what it is that makes our lives such that we don't want to change. If we want to change something then something about our life now isn't right. "But how do we know", she asks? One way is to spend time not being intruded on and to go through a list of questions about who "I am." Do I like my job because I'm supposed to like it? If I like it does that make me someone who is settling for less? Do I have something I've wanted to do but haven't? Stuff like that. The result would be a view of yourself that was a bit more objective than what we normally carry around inside - so says Kasl, although I'll admit that I also have this same view. If you're afraid of something it's because you have an uncertainty about the outcome and might be less satisfied then than you are now. But, again according to Kasl, if you are always afraid then you are building these self-directed barriers even more stronger and making them even more impervious to getting beyond. One should decide within themselves just how much of a fear factor they want to live with and how much excitement (or risk non-aversion) they want in their lives.
Kasl is a Quaker who follows the teachings of Buddha as that - as teachings. She says she' s a fan of no religion and that the Friends belief that the god is inside each of us is sufficient. She said that the real issue - from her therapist perspective - of those who are fundamentalists is that they have created so many self-directed barriers towards their acceptance of other elements of the real, objective, world. Part of what Kasl practices is accepting the Zen approach that there is "good" and "evil" components of everything and one has to both be aware of and be able to deal with the two realities - or rather the duality of reality.
She's an interesting character who seems to be able to cleave a path through life which suits her and those around her. She was a music teacher for the longest time and grew up in Minnesota before deciding she wanted to be a therapist and moved to Montana. Her previous books also lean heavily on Buddhist teachings and the way of Zen and yet were practical guides to such things as women's sexuality. I was impressed with how many examples from her casework she was able to cite and also impressed with how she didn't seem phased by the most out-of-the-way situation, again, applying her slow and methodical methods to find where the person was inside and whether that was who they were or wanted to be.
I sometimes forget, having a very strong will, that there are lots of individuals who are torn among a pile of conflicting wants, needs, problems, or whatever. And, that even though the answer's inside them that it might not be obvious that is the case. That's where someone like Charlotte Kasl can help. Pulling the inner soul out from behind all the barriers that soul erected to protect itself. One of Kasl's basic tenets seems to be that our own fears are what's mostly holding us back from achieving what we want.
Well, since she started late and went on for quite a bit and had lots and lots of audience interaction afterwards, I didn't have enough time to dash up to Pike Place Market and scrounge around for a dinner. I'd already consumed two cups of coffee waiting for Kasl and talking to two folks in adjacent seats. I figured I'd just wander around Pioneer Square area - I'd brought my camera and one neat thing about Seattle in the rain is that it glistens. I really love the way the lights and rain and slick roadway surfaces play with each other. I walked around a couple of blocks, looking for something which glistened in the night. The right angle along a curb and the streetlights light up and catch the slick road below and begin to look like some oozing yellow blob. Neon signs in the bars catch the puddle in the street just right and it's a surreal landscape of bars rightside up and upside down. I was able to easily waste an hour wandering around, trying to find that perfect angle and then trying to find whatever I was going to use for a tripod, hopefully nearby. Mostly it meant leaning up against trees or putting my camera against a streetlamp pole. Occasionally I'd try and just "be still" - those mostly didn't turn out. That's fine, though. I probably got more than a half-dozen really nice shots. Some of these I'll post on the blog.
I returned to the downstairs author area to find that it had been completely remodeled while I was gone. Instead of seats lined up facing south in a broad and shallow meeting style, they were now lined up facing west with a screen installed on that wall and the seats looking more like a movie house. I noticed there were only about a dozen other folks and hoped the author wasn't going to be disappointed. He actually was messing around with the slide projector remote control and so once I knew who that was, grabbed a seat up front - on the side - and just watched Craig Childs set up the podium the way he wanted. Then he sat down, rustled a little with a cloth case and removed a flute - or recorder - made of bamboo and proceeded to play for about ten minutes, stopping once in the middle and saying that the flute had saved him a few times by using it to stick in the sand in some 800-foot tall sand dunes he had been climbing across in one of his desert jaunts. Then he played another song, reminding me of the wind of the desert and how sound travels a long way over barren land and of the echoes one gets sometimes off a distant canyon which presence was completely unknown - until the echo. Very nice and sort of fit the image I had gotten by reading up on who this guy is.
He's a desert ecologist, for one, and apparently shows up quite frequently on NPR's Morning Edition, disclosing some new tidbit or fact or tale of the Southwest. He lives in Colorado but spends most of his time in the northern deserts of Arizona and the southern deserts of Utah. He likes to go out for 10 or 20 day "walks" which involve him and maybe a partner or two going out ahead and leaving caches of supplies and food and water (if necessary) in strategic places figuring they'll find a way to get them when they need them. He also writes for some of Art Wolfe's naturalist series of photography books about Colorado and other places in the Southwest. And, he also writes of his adventures in the desert - he's published two previous books and was going to talk about his latest book "The Way Out: A True Story of Ruin and Survival."
Craig climbs up on the stage after he's finished his flute pieces and is introduced by the Elliott Bay guy. Craig starts talking right away about his new book, the third one he's written, two previously to critical acclaim. This one, he says, is about a guy he'd been hiking with for about ten years and how the two of them came to some grip on their lives. Craig Childs hikes the desert for something line 120 days at a clip, with cleverly hidden caches and notepad in hand to record every nuance of the desert. He's a real desert ecologist who, seems like he lives in the desert. This companion of Craig's on this particular 20-or-so day hike went with him on a Northern Arizona desert reservation try to find a most sacred place. Craig had met the guy about a decade ago at some meeting going on in Reno (or somewhere where wilderness types meet). This other guy, Dirk, had been a big-city cop who had apparently killed too many people and had to "get away." The two would go on these two, three, four-week hikes into different parts of the southwest Colorado-southern Utah-northern Arizona desert region - the Sonoran desert.
Craig said that he never was really sure about Dirk, that he always wondered when the guy would blow a gasket, and yet the two of them met about once a year for these excursions over rilles and through canyons where 10 hours buys you three miles, if that. He told of the two of them on this particular last trip and how they would crawl all day over these rilles, some as high as 300 feet above the adjacent canyon, only to find themselves facing a one-way trip across a thousand-foot chasm and spend the rest of the day retracing and trying to find another connecting rille. He showed slides of the area, saying he doesn't usually take a camera along but this trip was special because they wanted to see the sacred place where a local tribal family successfully hid for a decade after the famous long walk of the Navajos <http://www.viewzone.com/day3w.html>. They really were impressive rilles and canyons, and like so much of Northern Arizona, from a distance it looks merely "hilly" and you've no idea that the bottom of these dimply hills is a couple hundred feet below. Nor are the deeper canyons and wider chasms readily visible from afar, either. This is harsh landscape this author and naturalist and danger-lover has decided he wants to live in. I do know, I've hiked there, and I've hiked a lot more in the Chihuahuan Desert <http://museum.utep.edu/chih/chihdes.htm> for up to a week, but not anywhere near the four weeks or or that Childs hiked. This guy is definitely a study. Some of the pictures show a "rock" that looks like it's three or four feet across and then he showed a sequence of pictures with Dirk approaching the "rock" and it's a boulder twenty feet high. Very deceiving landscape.
Craig then tells us about how when you spend that much time in a landscape a hundred times bigger than you with non-human-scale dangers all around that you begin to realize that you're "seeing" with your hands and fingers and feet. Before you climb up or down some seeming-rock formation, you want to take a piece of it and see just how strong it is or whether, like so much else in the desert, it's just compressed dust. Good points, indeed, but the idea of seeing one's world with ones eyes and hands and feet was certainly an enlightening idea. I'm glad he spent a fair amount of time discussing the tactile nature of the desert, the times you absolutely have to use your hands - for balance or to help pull you over something - and just how imposing this fragile landscape is. You could be standing on a balanced boulder, just another rock at the bottom of a canyon, and your movement could cause the rock to start rolling, causing a cascade of rocks in a small place where the average rock is bigger than you are.
Seems to me that most people want to control their universe and here's a guy who wants his universe to control him and teach him new things about itself. He's an amazingly fast-paced human to come across as relaxed and convivial as he does. He doesn't really conclude because you're supposed to read the book, but he read three separate pages from his book during his time and they were visually rich and digitally - tactile - rich. He captured a few moments of reflection and self-doubt from Dirk and him and the imagery he evoked was convincing. He writes well - he captures a lot of what's in a place (situation) and has a wonderfully expansive vocabulary and way of using it.
He also has an interesting perspective on life and that's what I came to see. Both he and Kasl were so differently captivating and hit different chords within me. Both were singing a song of exploration - go beyond, test yourself, learn something. It was still drizzling and cold outside but I'd had four coffees by then and was pretty buzzed. Plus, I've begun to feel intuitive about the bus runs and right along then came my bus home.
I do like the idea of hanging around a place and hearing something new and different. When I moved back to DC from Houston in the early 80s, I used to go downtown after work and stay late because the National Archives had this speakers series two or three evenings a week (I say evening, they were starting at 7:00 pm). I'd sit in on one or two a month and had discovered they also had a couple evenings a week when they showed archive films. I went to the archive films more than the lectures. Those were fun days of being illuminated for free. I consider Elliott Bay Books' author series to be the same. I know there's more of this going on and there's schedules everywhere - lots of free and lots of "low cost." But, the Elliott Bay Books approach is based on reliability. Sort of like the Monorail of ideas. If you didn't catch the last one, wait, there's another coming right up. Now that I've been hooked I'm beginning to see what I'll call Elliott Bay regulars hanging out with certain authors. Or at least I've seen them a couple of times before when I want to hear a particular author. Another phenomenon to observe, like who're the regulars on the bus.
End of Elliott Bay report! It's just that going to hear these people is getting me outside when it's dark and dreary, and that alone is a good thing, but it's also giving me someone else's perspective on something I think about, which is better. I've been continuing with the pastels and acrylics. I've now done enough that I'm starting to hold off and allow a pastel or acrylic to develop on its own. I'm just as impatient with art as I am with anything else and I want what I'm looking for to come out after the initial effort. Sometimes that doesn't satisfy me - it's "not right," or it's now there yet. All this is because I've started probably too many different drawings at the same time and did one linoleum block and set of prints. But, with several pastels and four different canvases, letting the art speak back to me allowed me to see where I wanted to go. You've got to start somewhere, might as well put paint on canvas and see what you think. My problem is that I use a lot of shapes and colors which I like so by using them I'll naturally be able to please my own sense. That may not be the same for someone else viewing it. I think I have a good eye for what's nice or appealing or striking or whatever. I'd love to own some Monet or Renoir or Van Gogh or even Calder or Rothko. In this life I can't, but since I know what it is in those other artists' vision that I like, I can try and create those same things for myself. Art as pleasure. I fear that this being Seattle, a lot of the artists might be interested in art as politic, or art as society, or art as storyteller/village idiot, or a lot of other plausible and worthy metaphors. Me, it's just art for art - something to look at. Something to take my mind off whatever it's on and cause me to gaze - reflect, ponder, imagine. Or, it's just pretty. Like I said, I like colors and shapes, I'm a simple art fan.
Continuing to rip through my LP collection. I've been transferring all this stuff regularly to my remote-controlled iPod ($29 for an IR remote which slips on the top of the iPod - let's you control all the functions from across the room) and what's so neat is to be able to hear old Rolling Stones get mixed in with Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire. Recently added some Graham Parker (well, probably six albums worth out of ten albums) and and bought some new stuff from iTunes store (Black Key, Joseph Arthur) and have just been getting the greatest charge out of all this music. It's always on random play. I mean, it wouldn't be on the iPod if I didn't like it, would it? So, what difference does it matter who comes next or what genre it is. It's totally freaky to be listening to a string of Motown or Seattle Alternative or New York Punk or whatever songs and have the middle movement of one of Haydn's fabuluso symphonies come blaring forth for the next seven minutes. Yes, it wouldn't be on there if it wasn't something I'd stop and listen to. Next I do Magical Mystery Tour and Abbey Road and maybe a few tunes from a few other albums. One of my Rolling Stones LPs is 38 years old. Good grief, is this ancient technology or what?
So, that's what I've been up to.
More, later
Chas
Posted: Wed - January 19, 2005 at 03:37 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM