March 2025
Books read:
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
- The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
- Things That Can and Cannot Be Said by John Cusack and Arundhati Roy
- Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America by Wendy Woloson
- Devisadero loop near Taos (March 2nd)
- Mount Sanitas/Lion's Lair loop (March 10th)
- Eagle Wind loop near Lyons (March 13th)
Song(s) of the month: Oh What a Beautiful World by Rodney Crowell and Light Shine by Jessi Colin Young
March Summary:
What a month this was! The biggest and best news was that our fourth grandchild was born in good health. But it didn’t come easy. His mother (our daughter-in-law) had a serious pregnancy condition called Placenta Accreta Spectrum, and it turned out to be the most serious on the spectrum (Percreta). Once the baby was delivered via C-section, then a harrowing, life threatening operation was performed. It lasted 4 hours. The hospital in Denver (Presbyterian-St. Lukes) is one of the best facilities in the country to deal with this condition. Thankfully all turned out good in the end, but she will be recovering for many weeks. This could easily have turned into a tragic story, as it would have been just 30 years ago or more. Medical miracles never cease to amaze me. My wife and I watched our two older grandkids (aged 2 and 5) for a week after the delivery/operation while our daughter-in-law’s parents and our son focused on her and the baby. I described to my son that watching a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old for a week is 90% fun/easy/boring and 10% backbreakingly hard. With the added emotion of the operation and recovery, it was a difficult week and we are forever thankful to the medical community.
The following week our daughter, son-in-love, granddaughter, and sister-in-law visited for a week to see the new baby, so I was able to snag a photo of me with all four grandkids (see below). During that week I had a procedure done on my leg to remove a chunk of cancer. Now with a very cool 3-inch Frankenstein scar, my mobility has been temporarily limited, so no hiking for 2 more weeks. But I did realize something fascinating about that basal carcinoma. For the past few months, my dog and my daughter’s dogs have been incessantly sniffing that area on my leg! Seriously. This was well before my yearly skin checkup where the dermatologist found a spot that I never would have found on my own. I think dogs can smell cancer. Crazy. And get your skin checked yearly, especially if you’ve lived in Arizona for many years and spent many of them outdoors. This was something I had promised my dad I would do because his best friend died from skin cancer.
And, oh yeah, baseball season officially started this month! I've written before about my love of baseball. I'm not alone, even though sometimes it feels that I am. Rather than say more, I'll point you to two essays I read on baseball recently. This essay, from Tess McGeer had this line: "While it would be great, because baseball is great, if MLB put the money and effort into appropriately marketing the game to people who are not white and not seventy-two and not currently wearing a moisture-wicking name brand golf polo, like, in the meantime, there is a funny and precious pleasure in being deeply emotionally invested in something the broader culture cares less and less about all the time." And then there was Chad Jennings from The Athletic talking about opening day in this story which included this line: "It was Game 1 of 162. A drop in the bucket, but it quenches a winter's thirst." Oh, and March Madness is taking place this month, although I would say that our family has had its own version of March Madness.
As you can tell, I didn’t get any big hikes in, but I was able to go on three different 5-mile hikes, all of which I’ve done before. One in Taos, one near Boulder, and one near Lyons. It seemed like my reading was a bit limited also, but I somehow still managed 4 books this month (although one was only 100 pages). They included a novel about a mysterious woman living in a small English village in the 1860s, a classic novel about the choice of living a conventional life vs a life of travel and discovery, a transcript of discussions between a well-known actor, a great author, and two famous whistleblowers, and a book about unnecessary plastic objects. Enjoy.
Things My Grandkids Say: Kudos to my daughter for somehow getting the above shot of four kids five years old and under, all with their eyes open and not moving (sort of). When my oldest grandson visited his mom in the hospital just after the operation, he said to her: “But where is the hole in your stomach?” Maybe one day she’ll show him the scars…
Song(s) of the month: Oh What a Beautiful World by Rodney Crowell and Light Shine by Jesse Colin Young
Jesse Colin Young died this past month. He was a founding member of the Youngbloods whose song Get Together was an anthem to bring people together during the difficult and divisive years of the Vietnam War. Young didn't write that song, Chet Powers did. We could use some getting together these days. When Young went solo, Light Shine is one of the songs he wrote and recorded. It's a wonderful song, also much needed these days. The first third of the song is a sort of R&B song of hope, and then the last third turns into a gospel revival song of joy. It's perfect for the month we've had as a family. Let's all try to let our light shine.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles – In 2005, Time magazine chose this book as one of the 100 best English-language novels since the magazine began publication in 1923. Some of you probably know about the 1981 movie starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but from what I’ve heard it’s quite good, but it can’t possibly reflect a great 445-page novel in 2 hours. I think multi-episode TV shows are more able to adapt a novel than a 2-hour movie. Overall, I loved reading this novel. There were only two things I didn’t love about it. One, the first chapter is not great, and I imagine there have been many people who tossed it aside after that chapter; this would be a mistake! And two, the poems and quotes at the beginning of each chapter (epigraphs) were, to me, mostly convoluted and hard to understand (but then I've always had difficulty with understanding poetry - my engineering brain). But take away those slight annoyances and the rest of the book was hard to put down. The story itself is great; rich Victorian man plans to marry plain Victorian woman but gets sidetracked by mysterious non-Victorian woman – chaos ensues. But then add three separate endings to the story which the author breaks the fourth wall to describe and it gets really fun. One chapter, I think it was chapter 13, consisted entirely of the author/narrator talking to the reader about his thoughts on developing the characters and how he wasn’t sure exactly how things were going to turn out in the end. There are lots of comparisons of Victorian England in 1867 (when the novel is set) with future times (the novel was written in 1967, a century after its setting, and was published in 1969). Social class and gender were big topics undertaken as part of the story, along with science and religion. One of the great scenes for me was when Charles (the main character) visited a prostitute after a night of heavy drinking. The woman’s baby was in the next room sleeping, she had no other options in 1867 London as an unmarried woman with a child. The entire scene is incredible. And there are many more scenes that were riveting. Great book, here are some lines:
he had an unnatural fondness for walking instead of riding; and walking was not a gentleman’s pastime except in the Swiss Alps. He had nothing very much against the horse in itself, but he had the born naturalist’s hatred of not being able to observe at close range and at leisure.
What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in Nature, not the Bible;
The poor girl had had to suffer the agony of every only child since time began—that is, a crushing and unrelenting canopy of parental worry.
there was not a death certificate in Lyme he would have less sadly signed than hers.
All he was left with was the afterimage of those eyes—they were abnormally large, as if able to see more and suffer more.
(the author/narrator talking about writing a scene, during the scene!): When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy
And don’t blame yourself for falling for that girl. I think I know why that French sailor ran away. He knew she had eyes a man could drown in.
all the larger provincial towns of the time had to find room for this unfortunate army of female wounded in the battle for universal masculine purity.
The stairs were certainly steep; and in those days, when they could rarely see their own feet, women were always falling: it was a commonplace of domestic life
They lay as if paralyzed by what they had done. Congealed in sin, frozen with delight.
Devisadero Loop near Taos, NM – I hiked this 5.5-mile loop back in April 2021. Sadly there was less snow in February than there was on that April day four years ago. It’s been a disappointing snow season for the Taos Ski Valley and for the town of Taos. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges that ski areas are facing; their livelihoods are at risk. But I digress, we weren’t skiing today. The goal for today was to get in a decently long hike with good elevation gain. It was my son-in-love and I along with two dogs. Temps were in the 50s and sunny, so a nice day for a walk. The high point on this trail, Devisadero Peak was used by the Taos Puebloans as a lookout for Apache warriors coming up through Taos Canyon to plunder the villages. There are actually several great viewpoints on this trail, some looking up towards Taos Canyon, some towards the town of Taos and the Rio Grande Gorge and some facing the high mountains where the ski valley sits.
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham – The title comes from an ancient Hindu text which states that "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard." Maugham was interested in Eastern philosophy well before the Beat Generation of the 50s and the cultural revolution of the 60s. He had visited ashrams in India and met people from all over the world trying to understand the meaning of life. He took that knowledge and turned it into this fascinating novel, set between World War I and just before World War II (it was published in 1944).
Before we meet the main character, Larry, we are introduced to his friends and family in Chicago. His fiancée Isabel, her mother Louisa, her uncle Elliot (who lives only for the social scene), and W. Somerset Maugham who acts as narrator of the book and tells it as though he has known all these people in real life. Isabel loves Larry, but tragic events in World War I change Larry’s outlook on life. She sees her dream of having a “conventional” life fading away as Larry wants to travel the world together Lonely Planet style, on a small budget in order to see the real people and places and to learn the meaning of life. She breaks off the engagement and marries Gray, a well-off stockbroker at his father’s brokerage in Chicago. Larry continues to travel the world which included working as a coal miner in France, living in a monastery in Germany, swabbing decks on an ocean liner, and eventually living in India for many years studying with some of the most revered gurus.
Throughout the novel all of these characters and more, meet for periods of time and then drift off as their lives change. The stock market crash of 1929 sees Isabel and Gray losing everything, while Larry is traveling the world. Her uncle Elliot avoided losing his fortune in the crash because his friends at the Vatican told him to turn all his stock into gold in 1928. Because of this he’s able to help his niece, Isabel, recover from the crash to some extent. I loved all the conversations that Maugham has with Isabel, Larry, and Elliot; they are rich in humor, philosophy, and life. He doesn’t comment on whether a conventional life or a life of searching or anything in between is any better than the other. He just describes them brilliantly, with all their good and bad. There were two movie adaptations made, but both were panned by critics, saying neither lived up to the great novel. Here are some lines:
When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.
Wouldn’t it be better to follow the beaten track and let what’s coming to you come?’ And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun, and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and so meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate.
My friends at the Vatican told me that the crash was coming and strongly advised me to sell all my American securities. The Catholic Church has the wisdom of twenty centuries behind it and I didn’t hesitate for a moment.
“I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists. I want to know whether I have an immortal soul or whether when I die it’s the end.” “But Larry,” she smiled. “People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d have been answered by now.” Larry chuckled.
“What are you going to do with all this wisdom?” “If I ever acquire wisdom I suppose I shall be wise enough to know what to do with it.”
Mrs. Bradley had high principles and common sense. Her common sense assured her that if you wanted to get on in this world you must accept its conventions, and not to do what everybody else did clearly pointed to instability.
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
“I gave Larry up for the one and only reason that I didn’t want to stand in his way.” “Come off it, Isabel. You gave him up for a square-cut diamond and a sable coat.” The words were hardly out of my mouth when a plate of bread and butter came flying at my head.
She was a middle-aged Scotch woman, called Miss Keith, with sandy hair, a freckled face, pince-nez, and an air of determined virginity.
I FEEL IT RIGHT to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worthwhile to write this book.
When the spring came I went to the country and stayed at a little inn on a river near one of those beautiful old French towns where life doesn’t seem to have moved for two hundred years.
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?
I have ridden a pony through Central Asia along the road that Marco Polo took to reach the fabulous lands of Cathay; I have drunk a glass of Russian tea in a prim parlor in Petrograd while a soft-spoken little man in a black coat and striped trousers told me how he had assassinated a grand duke. I have sat in a drawing-room in Westminster and listened to the serene geniality of a piano trio of Haydn’s while the bombs were crashing without; but I do not think I have ever found myself in a stranger situation than when I sat on the red-plush seats of that garish restaurant for hour after hour while Larry talked of God and eternity, of the Absolute and the weary wheel of endless becoming.
“Will you allow me to give you a piece of advice, Larry? It’s not a thing I give often.” “It’s not a thing I take often,” he answered with a grin.
His America will be as remote from your America as the Gobi desert.
Mt. Sanitas/Lion's Lair Loop near Boulder - I wrote about this hike in my April 2022 blog. It's a nice 5 plus mile loop that gets you a great workout to start (1.3 miles and 1,300 feet to start), with an easy 4 mile downhill back to the trailhead. This was the week we were watching our two oldest grandsons, but their other grandparents were in town and they watched them for a couple of hours while I was able to get outdoors for a much needed walk in nature after a stressful week. There were lots of trail runners out today and lots of deer. The trail has great views of Boulder and the eastern plains along with some nice glimpses of the high mountains to the west.
Things That Can and Cannot Be Said by John Cusack and Arundhati Roy – Wow, what a disappointment this 2016 “book” was. It’s just over a hundred pages so I hesitate to call it a book. It’s supposed to be a transcript of various conversations held between Roy, Cusack, and two of the world’s most famous whistleblowers: Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) and Edward Snowden (NSA surveillance programs). Arundhati Roy wrote one of the best books I’ve ever read: The God of Small Things which I reviewed in my January 2022 blog. Her talent as a novelist is unquestioned. And she has risked her life in India for her activism on various social topics. She is a formidable person. So I was expecting something great when she got together in a Russian hotel with Snowden and Ellsberg. But all I got were snippets of the conversation, along with some other rants on social issues. I guess all the good stuff, as the title of the book says, were things you cannot say. HOWEVER, there were still some really good lines in the book:
When people say “America,” which one? Bob Dylan’s or Barack Obama’s? New Orleans or New York?
Just a few years ago India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were one country. Actually, we were many countries if you count the princely states. . . . Then the British drew a line, and now we’re three countries, two of them pointing nukes at each other
Cusack: In the United States, we can talk about ISIS, but we can’t talk about Palestine.
Roy: Oh, in India, we can talk about Palestine, but we can’t talk about Kashmir.
The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don’t own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media.
I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power.
the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations.
We were deep into the Russian winter—never credited enough for its part in the Second World War.
when Snowden made his debut on Twitter (and chalked up half a million followers in half a second) he said, “I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.” Implicit in that sentence is the belief that the government does not work for the public.
Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love. So the question is, what shall we love?
An old-growth forest, a mountain range, or a river valley is more important and certainly more lovable than any country will ever be. I could weep for a river valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know . . .
Eagle Wind Loop near Lyons – I’ve walked this loop many times because it’s so close to home and it has great views of Longs Peak. I wrote about this open space area in my March 2021 blog where I wrote this:
“It’s not as steep as Piestewa Peak or Tom’s Thumb back in Phoenix, but it’s close by and it’s got great views of the Great Plains, Continental Divide, and the front range of the Rockies. There are three main trails in this open space in the eastern-most foothills of Boulder County: Eagle Wind (2.5 miles), Little Thompson (1.5 miles), and Indian Mesa (2.2miles). These foothills form a transition zone between the wide prairies to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west. In this transition zone you will find lots of various plant and animal life. I nearly always see deer, prairie dogs and hawks here and I imagine the summer will be filled with wildflowers...and rattlesnakes. The St. Vrain water supply canal bisects the open space (mainly through an underground tunnel) and brings water from the mountains (via Carter Lake) to the cities of the front range as part of the Colorado Big Thompson project. The land was sold to Boulder county in 1984 to be preserved for us all to use and enjoy.”
As noted in my summary at the beginning of this blog I wasn’t able to get away for any big hikes this month due to many interesting events, but at least I was able to get away a couple of times.
Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America by Wendy Woloson - I've been wanting to read this book for some time now, but it only recently became available in digital form from libraries. It's a fascinating look into American's history of consuming what Nanci Griffith calls "unnecessary plastic objects" in her great song Love at the Five and Dime. This book actually tells the history of Five and Dime stores, including the Woolworths that Nanci mentions in the song. I imagine the hard copy version of this book would be more compelling because the author includes several advertisements of products from the 1800s and early 1900s that are interesting to look at. The author is an American historian and professor at Rutgers and spent time as curator of printed books at The Library Company of Philadelphia which was founded by Benjamin Franklin. She spends a lot of time detailing the products, their advertising gimmicks, and the cheap labor associated with their manufacture. But I was mostly interested in why it was that Americans, more than most cultures, were/are so enamored with buying and filling our homes with worthless stuff. She didn't spend as much time in this area, but it seems that it all started with the 2nd Industrial Revolution which brought more leisure time and income to everyday Americans (rich folks had been accumulating stuff for years). Advertisers were able to tap into the middle class needs to "be like the rich people" who had nice things; to tap into a person's desire to collect sets of things (decorative spoons, Hummel figurines, Precious Moments figurines, Beanie Babies...); and to fill their new homes with stuff that made it look...homey. Before this time, everyday Americans only bought stuff they needed like food, hardware to fix and build things, and seed and feed to grow food and feed their animals. I am always amazed when I look into re-created cabins here in Colorado of the 1800s and how sparse they were (no need for shelves!). Marie Kondo would love them.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!
As you can tell, I didn’t get any big hikes in, but I was able to go on three different 5-mile hikes, all of which I’ve done before. One in Taos, one near Boulder, and one near Lyons. It seemed like my reading was a bit limited also, but I somehow still managed 4 books this month (although one was only 100 pages). They included a novel about a mysterious woman living in a small English village in the 1860s, a classic novel about the choice of living a conventional life vs a life of travel and discovery, a transcript of discussions between a well-known actor, a great author, and two famous whistleblowers, and a book about unnecessary plastic objects. Enjoy.
Things My Grandkids Say: Kudos to my daughter for somehow getting the above shot of four kids five years old and under, all with their eyes open and not moving (sort of). When my oldest grandson visited his mom in the hospital just after the operation, he said to her: “But where is the hole in your stomach?” Maybe one day she’ll show him the scars…
The other day I heard a song from an upcoming album by Willie Nelson. It will be his 103rd studio album! He's 91 and has been recording music since the 1950s. The new album will be covers of Rodney Crowell songs. I highlighted Crowell's "It Ain't Over Yet" in my January 2021 blog. It's a great song about getting older. The song I heard by Willie is Crowell's "Oh What a Beautiful World" which he released ten years ago. Willie's version (with Crowell singing background) is really good, but Crowell's original version is deeper, with a nice musical arrangement at the end. I can picture listening to this song while "Sittin' all alone on a mountain by a river that has no end" as John Prine would say. I've provided links to both of them below. After all the events of this month, the words to this song really struck me, emotionally. Yes, the world seems do be in a dark place at times, but when you look around you, at your family, your friends, the mountains, and some of the people fighting for the rights of others, you see the beauty. Here are sample lyrics:
We build our hopes up high, perchance to someday flyAcross a clear blue sky to some place new...
It's the rise and the fall of the clocks on the wallIt's the first and the last of your days flying pastOh, what a beautiful world
Rodney Crowell version:
Willie Nelson version:
he had an unnatural fondness for walking instead of riding; and walking was not a gentleman’s pastime except in the Swiss Alps. He had nothing very much against the horse in itself, but he had the born naturalist’s hatred of not being able to observe at close range and at leisure.
What little God he managed to derive from existence, he found in Nature, not the Bible;
The poor girl had had to suffer the agony of every only child since time began—that is, a crushing and unrelenting canopy of parental worry.
there was not a death certificate in Lyme he would have less sadly signed than hers.
All he was left with was the afterimage of those eyes—they were abnormally large, as if able to see more and suffer more.
(the author/narrator talking about writing a scene, during the scene!): When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis. But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy
And don’t blame yourself for falling for that girl. I think I know why that French sailor ran away. He knew she had eyes a man could drown in.
all the larger provincial towns of the time had to find room for this unfortunate army of female wounded in the battle for universal masculine purity.
The stairs were certainly steep; and in those days, when they could rarely see their own feet, women were always falling: it was a commonplace of domestic life
They lay as if paralyzed by what they had done. Congealed in sin, frozen with delight.
 |
| Nice views of the city below |
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| Taking in the views...or looking for squirrels |
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| Poser |
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| Trail art |
Before we meet the main character, Larry, we are introduced to his friends and family in Chicago. His fiancée Isabel, her mother Louisa, her uncle Elliot (who lives only for the social scene), and W. Somerset Maugham who acts as narrator of the book and tells it as though he has known all these people in real life. Isabel loves Larry, but tragic events in World War I change Larry’s outlook on life. She sees her dream of having a “conventional” life fading away as Larry wants to travel the world together Lonely Planet style, on a small budget in order to see the real people and places and to learn the meaning of life. She breaks off the engagement and marries Gray, a well-off stockbroker at his father’s brokerage in Chicago. Larry continues to travel the world which included working as a coal miner in France, living in a monastery in Germany, swabbing decks on an ocean liner, and eventually living in India for many years studying with some of the most revered gurus.
Throughout the novel all of these characters and more, meet for periods of time and then drift off as their lives change. The stock market crash of 1929 sees Isabel and Gray losing everything, while Larry is traveling the world. Her uncle Elliot avoided losing his fortune in the crash because his friends at the Vatican told him to turn all his stock into gold in 1928. Because of this he’s able to help his niece, Isabel, recover from the crash to some extent. I loved all the conversations that Maugham has with Isabel, Larry, and Elliot; they are rich in humor, philosophy, and life. He doesn’t comment on whether a conventional life or a life of searching or anything in between is any better than the other. He just describes them brilliantly, with all their good and bad. There were two movie adaptations made, but both were panned by critics, saying neither lived up to the great novel. Here are some lines:
When you’re eighteen your emotions are violent, but they’re not durable.
Wouldn’t it be better to follow the beaten track and let what’s coming to you come?’ And then you think of a fellow who an hour before was full of life and fun, and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and so meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate.
My friends at the Vatican told me that the crash was coming and strongly advised me to sell all my American securities. The Catholic Church has the wisdom of twenty centuries behind it and I didn’t hesitate for a moment.
“I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists. I want to know whether I have an immortal soul or whether when I die it’s the end.” “But Larry,” she smiled. “People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d have been answered by now.” Larry chuckled.
“What are you going to do with all this wisdom?” “If I ever acquire wisdom I suppose I shall be wise enough to know what to do with it.”
Mrs. Bradley had high principles and common sense. Her common sense assured her that if you wanted to get on in this world you must accept its conventions, and not to do what everybody else did clearly pointed to instability.
American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
“I gave Larry up for the one and only reason that I didn’t want to stand in his way.” “Come off it, Isabel. You gave him up for a square-cut diamond and a sable coat.” The words were hardly out of my mouth when a plate of bread and butter came flying at my head.
She was a middle-aged Scotch woman, called Miss Keith, with sandy hair, a freckled face, pince-nez, and an air of determined virginity.
I FEEL IT RIGHT to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worthwhile to write this book.
When the spring came I went to the country and stayed at a little inn on a river near one of those beautiful old French towns where life doesn’t seem to have moved for two hundred years.
A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?
I have ridden a pony through Central Asia along the road that Marco Polo took to reach the fabulous lands of Cathay; I have drunk a glass of Russian tea in a prim parlor in Petrograd while a soft-spoken little man in a black coat and striped trousers told me how he had assassinated a grand duke. I have sat in a drawing-room in Westminster and listened to the serene geniality of a piano trio of Haydn’s while the bombs were crashing without; but I do not think I have ever found myself in a stranger situation than when I sat on the red-plush seats of that garish restaurant for hour after hour while Larry talked of God and eternity, of the Absolute and the weary wheel of endless becoming.
“Will you allow me to give you a piece of advice, Larry? It’s not a thing I give often.” “It’s not a thing I take often,” he answered with a grin.
His America will be as remote from your America as the Gobi desert.
 |
| Nice peaks at the Indian Peaks Wilderness |
 |
| Trail art |
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| Trail art with Bear Peak in the background |
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| Trees and peaks |
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| So many deer |
When people say “America,” which one? Bob Dylan’s or Barack Obama’s? New Orleans or New York?
Just a few years ago India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were one country. Actually, we were many countries if you count the princely states. . . . Then the British drew a line, and now we’re three countries, two of them pointing nukes at each other
Cusack: In the United States, we can talk about ISIS, but we can’t talk about Palestine.
Roy: Oh, in India, we can talk about Palestine, but we can’t talk about Kashmir.
The great irony is that people who live in remote areas, who are illiterate and don’t own TVs, are in some ways more free because they are beyond the reach of indoctrination by the modern mass media.
I believe the physics of resisting power is as old as the physics of accumulating power.
the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversations.
We were deep into the Russian winter—never credited enough for its part in the Second World War.
when Snowden made his debut on Twitter (and chalked up half a million followers in half a second) he said, “I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.” Implicit in that sentence is the belief that the government does not work for the public.
Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love. So the question is, what shall we love?
An old-growth forest, a mountain range, or a river valley is more important and certainly more lovable than any country will ever be. I could weep for a river valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don’t know . . .
“It’s not as steep as Piestewa Peak or Tom’s Thumb back in Phoenix, but it’s close by and it’s got great views of the Great Plains, Continental Divide, and the front range of the Rockies. There are three main trails in this open space in the eastern-most foothills of Boulder County: Eagle Wind (2.5 miles), Little Thompson (1.5 miles), and Indian Mesa (2.2miles). These foothills form a transition zone between the wide prairies to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west. In this transition zone you will find lots of various plant and animal life. I nearly always see deer, prairie dogs and hawks here and I imagine the summer will be filled with wildflowers...and rattlesnakes. The St. Vrain water supply canal bisects the open space (mainly through an underground tunnel) and brings water from the mountains (via Carter Lake) to the cities of the front range as part of the Colorado Big Thompson project. The land was sold to Boulder county in 1984 to be preserved for us all to use and enjoy.”
As noted in my summary at the beginning of this blog I wasn’t able to get away for any big hikes this month due to many interesting events, but at least I was able to get away a couple of times.
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| Remnants of ranching activities |
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| Nice views of the front range mountains |
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| Trail art |
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| Trail art |
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| Cemex gravel pit in the foreground (home of a future set of lakes?) |
I actually have a story about Beanie Babies. My wife was a "collector" and when we took a trip to Canada in the late 90s she snagged some "rare" Beanie Babies that couldn't be found in the US at the time. At the border crossing back into the US, they asked if we had anything to declare. Not wanting to declare her giant bag of Beanie Babies, she instead offered up the delicious cherries we had purchased. Those cherries were so good and now they were gone, being eaten with glee by border agents. The Beanie Babies ended up being given away years later. I'm certainly guilty of buying and receiving cheap crap myself, but not as guilty as other people I know....As I've gotten older, I've tried to rid myself of a lot of this (moving from Arizona to Colorado helped). But there's still so much of it, and multiplied by all the households across the country, it has had ramifications for everything from sweat shops in Asian countries, to landfills filled with plastic, to the worsening of income inequality. How do we stop? The Depression stopped this for a while, but it exploded in the boom years after World War II. I'll leave you with a few lines for now because I have to get up and dust all the Day of the Dead knick-knacks we have lining our clothespin-shaped shelves....
Americans have surrounded themselves with crappy things: consumer goods that are typically low
priced, poorly made, composed of inferior materials, lacking in meaningful purpose, and not meant to
last. Such crap has insinuated itself into just about every aspect of daily life, filling countless kitchen
“junk” drawers and clotting garages and basements across the nation.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, Woolworth was spending millions of dollars a year on
goods made by the hands of the young and poor working invisibly day into night.
“Made in Japan” became synonymous with low price and low quality. By the early 1930s variety stores
were chock-a-block with all manner of Japanese-made goods besides just toys, such as chinaware, paper
goods, wirework, bamboo items, rubber goods, figurines, and tinware.
Japan’s manufacturing sector was crippled during the war by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and the firebombing of other major cities. While American consumers initially remained
disinclined to purchase Japanese goods, by 1947 the two countries were working to rehabilitate Japan’s
manufacturing sector.
In the final decades of the twentieth century, the manufacture of cheap goods moved from Japan to
Taiwan and Hong Kong, and finally to mainland China
China’s rapid industrialization in the late twentieth century can be largely credited to, or blamed on,
Americans’ insatiable appetite for crap.
The ThighMaster also, crucially, benefited from the enthusiastic endorsement of Suzanne Somers, a
glamorous yet relatable celebrity. Within five months of launching the product, the company was
selling seventy-five thousand units a week; it sold over six million in its first two years, becoming a
multimillion-dollar business. A mere piece of metal covered in foam, the ThighMaster was so popular
that knock-offs quickly appeared.
Trading stamps were first issued in 1892 by the Milwaukee-based Schuster’s
Department Store with its Blue Trading Stamp System. Each booklet, containing five hundred stamps and representing $50 in retail purchases, could be
redeemed for a dollar in merchandise or seventy cents in cash, the equivalent of a 2 percent discount for
merchandise and 1.4 percent for the cash (similar to today’s cash-back rewards programs)
In 1946 over three million children sent in fifteen cents and a Kix box top to get the coveted Atomic
Bomb Ring promoted by General Mills...The most effective giveaways, in fact, promoted series of things that children could collect over time to
complete an entire set. Eventually, kids harangued their parents to patronize specific gas stations
offering free toys with each fill-up, presaging the sets of “collectibles” offered with McDonald’s Happy
Meals.
Precious Moments...were (until Beanie Babies) the most
popular and successful line of intentional collectibles ever produced, largely because their intense
“sentimental energy” erased their reality as mass-produced things.
By 1995 Ty Inc. began to turn these understuffed beanbag plush toys—some called them “roadkill”—
into serious collectibles. The company created false scarcity by limiting the production of each new
design, without telling collectors that “limited production,” like the “limited firing days” of collectible
plates, might still mean tens of thousands flown in from China and Korea by the literal planeload.
At one point the sale of
Beanie Babies accounted for 10 percent of all sales on eBay...In this way, Ty successfully created a massive collecting craze for a fairly crappy piece of merchandise
produced in staggering numbers.
Not long ago, Americans were recyclers and repairers and reusers. Now we are shoppers and wasters.
Older crap was at least made out of materials that could be repurposed—metal, wood, glass, paper, bone,
and rubber. Newer crap is at once more ephemeral and more long-lived, made as it is from synthetics
that survive in perpetuity but cannot be refashioned into anything useful.
crap had remade China in every possible way. Seemingly overnight, farmland once used to grow crops
to feed families had become “instant cities” organized and populated solely to feed the insatiable
markets for export goods, much of it crap destined for American consumers.
The lives of poorer and powerless workers—whether women and children in Nuremberg who fashioned
cheap dolls, Japanese families who wove wicker baskets for dime stores, the young boys whirling and
dipping Staffordshire pottery, or, more recently, the Filipino teenagers crafting Precious Moments
figurines—have been put in the service of making stuff for more privileged consumers. That their labor
results in crappy rather than nice things makes their exploitation more degrading still. In turn, low paid workers in the West are then put in the service of selling that crap—stocking shelves and tending
cash registers for big-box retailers.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!