CURRENT EVENTS

COWBOY MYTHOLOGY

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

Since childhood I have read editorials and op-ed pieces on both sides of the political spectrum. Like conservative David Brooks of The New York Times once did, I also read William F. Buckley. As a result, I read newspaper pieces that make me a little crazy sometimes.

This morning David Brooks posted “How Trump Will Fail”. I’m glad to read his admission that Trump’s “ego, which interestingly makes up 87 percent of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.”

Denali, the highest mountain peak in north America at 20,310 feet (6,190 m). It was named Denali for centuries before a gold prospector named it after a politician in 1896. Alaska fought for decades to return the U.S. name back to what it had been (and remained in Alaska). Image in the Public Domain from Wikipedia: “The Koyukon Athabaskans who inhabit the area around the mountain have for centuries referred to the peak as Dinale or Denali. The name is based on a Koyukon word for ‘high’ or ‘tall’. During the Russian ownership of Alaska, the common name for the mountain was Bolshaya Gora (Russian: Большая Гора; bolshaya ‘big’; gora ‘mountain’), which is the Russian translation of Denali. It was briefly called Densmore’s Mountain in the late 1880s and early 1890s after Frank Densmore, [another] gold prospector who was the first non-native Alaskan to reach the base of the mountain.

I laughed. Well, of course I did! But then all too soon, Brooks couldn’t help but unwittingly slip into fiction. I appreciate cowboy mythology as much as the next person, but let’s not mistake it for history.

I’m glad Brooks once had a Junior year history text*, but he might want to have another read. He makes this claim: “It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones.”

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SHARING

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

David Brooks, as is typical, almost gets the point: “Poverty has been the norm through most of human history,” he wrote in The New York Times a few days ago. “

The question is not ‘Why is there poverty?’ but ‘Why is there wealth?’”

Edward Curtis photo of a Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch with dancers and singers. Kwakwaka’wakw people in a wedding ceremony, bride in centre. Photo taken by Edward Curtis, 1914. Film footage of this same event was used in Curtis’ feature film In the Land of the Head Hunters [also called In the Land of War Canoes]. This image is in the public domain. Note: The film itself is infamous for inaccuracies. “Some aspects of the film do have documentary accuracy: the artwork, the ceremonial dances, the clothing, the architecture of the buildings, and the construction of the dugout, or a war canoe reflected Kwakwaka’wakw culture. Other aspects of the film were based on the Kwakwaka’wakw’s orally transmitted traditions or on aspects of other neighboring cultures. The film also accurately portrays Kwakwaka’wakw rituals that were, at the time, prohibited by Canada’s potlatch prohibition, enacted in 1884 and not rescinded until 1951.”
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AN ORDINARY PERSON

/ janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

My husband and I used to vote in person. After work, Gary and I would drive the curving Highway 101 north in the dark, six miles to the Chamber of Commerce or the City Hall or the Presbyterian church in Cannon Beach to vote. The location varied, the poll workers did not. Older women always worked the polls. We did this in the evening after my husband finished work in Tillamook County, which meant we arrived at the polling station just before eight, near the end of the day. 

I have taken a thousand photos, framed just like this.
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THE DUTY OF CARE

/ janpriddyoregon / 15 Comments

And now. The election. I do care. I do believe I have a duty of care not only toward myself but toward others. I want to make clear that the only people I blame are the Americans who believe that in order to win, “Other people” must lose…

.

I took off all my rings and refused to leave my bed. I worked on revising for NaNo with a kind of despair; read Virginia’s Apple, found delight; waited for Gary while he did errands alone because I had been too depressed to leave my bed; and read a friend’s blog that reminded me I needed to do something,.

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HELLO AGAIN

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

Many things have happened that got in the way of blogging, but the gist is: Facebook, a minor medical issue that got complicated (not mine and mostly okay now), and developmental editing of my novel. Reading. And now NaNo.

I am told I should explain about NaNo. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is November. It is online, motivational (for me), free, as private or public as you want it to be, and I’ve done it before a few times. Each morning this month, I write on my laptop—the laptop I am using to write this long-overdue post—and then I post my progress on the NaNoWriMo website.

Gary waits quietly in the other room.

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OPTIMISM

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

I am at heart an optimist. I was reading books about faith and ethics while I was still a child of ten, looking to find my way toward goodness. I was taught and believed and still believe that goodness matters, that what we call goodness is something to pursue and to praise.

This is a jellyfish, the orange west coast “sea nettle”, Chrysaora fuscescens. I have seen this jelly cast on shore my entire life; it is the one my dad warned me about because they do sting like a bee. [The “moon jellies,” water jelly, Aequorea sp., are mostly colorless or blueish and I herded small ones in the water without harm when I was younger.] This one is upside down and much, much larger than any I saw as a child, though not quite as large as the one we found recently that measured more than 22 inches across. The beach is littered with sea nettles just now, mostly broken but also some whole like this one.
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THE CAT DID IT

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

Our Zora used to lick the butter. If we left it uncovered we’d come down in the morning to find tiny grooves in butter from her cat tongue.

When Gary or I confront something neither of us is willing to admit we did, we say, “The cat did it.” It is a none-too-subtle admission of fault. Sometimes we don’t remember breaking a glass (nearly always Gary) or losing track of something (mostly me), or which of us cut a sandwich on the baking cabinet (me again), or we’d like to blame our children or housebreakers. It was me or it was Gary who did whatever it was because we are the only two living in our house. But even when we are certain who “done it”, we might say: The cat did it. Mind you, we were saying this when we had one or the other cat, and we’ve not stopped saying it merely because our last cat left the planet some years ago. We could have blamed our dog Yeti, but she would have been offended. The cats did not care.

This vine grows on the corner just west of our condo. It has orange trumpet-shaped flowers, and is one of my favorite volunteers. To find out what it is, I did a Duck-Duck-Go search for “orange trumpet-shape flower vine.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what it is: Orange Trumpet Vine (Campsis radicans). It is considered a noxious and invasive species, and “should be planted only where it can be contained” but this one is growing out of a crack in concrete, so I think we’re safe. Someone has recently hacked it back to half size. It’s still huge but with fewer buds.
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MY FAVORITES of the 21st

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

I pledge on Goodreads to read 52 books each year but generally read more. (I actually read 33 from TNYT list, but I didn’t like them all.) My list of “bests” is almost entirely different.

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ALICE MUNRO

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

For years, most of my life, I claimed I’d never been sexually assaulted, and I even believed that was true. I’m angry about it now. And even so, I get it.

“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”

—the last line from Munro’s last book, Dear Life (2013)

I suspect that Alice Munro had been abused herself, most women of her generation and before were [and mostly still are], and she accepted the inevitability of just getting on with life. I’m not making excuses for bad parenting here, but I keep reading younger people and men condemning Munro as if she’d been the abuser herself. She officially found out about the abuse when her daughter was 25. Her ex-husband found out when their daughter was 9 and told no one.

All sympathy with their youngest daughter.

Jenny Munro, daughter of the 2013 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature Alice Munroe of Canada, receives the Nobel Prize in her place from Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf, during the Nobel Prize award ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall in Stockholm, Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2013. The Nobel awards are always awarded on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. The prizes for laureates in medicine, chemistry, physics, economics and literature are awarded in the Swedish capital Stockholm, whilst the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded on the same day in Oslo, Norway.—FRANK AUGSTEIN
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WHY WE HATE THE 4th

/ janpriddyoregon / 7 Comments

Okay, “hate” is too strong. We have mixed feelings for a holiday we both loved as kids. Now we are aware of dangers to our health, sleep, and wildlife. We have legitimate concerns about injuries and the risk to property. We won’t even pretend that the people making all this noise care what they are doing or know how to do it safely.

Gary set up a decoy fort on the sand out front (we don’t go out on the 4th anymore) in order to, hopefully, discourage tourists from building a fire against a new huge drift log. (It’s illegal to burn drift logs, illegal to burn a fire bigger than a beach chair, and illegal to leave a fire unattended, but that doesn’t stop it happening.) This morning the robins sang, the seagulls returned, and we hope our local bats are okay.

That cloud of smoke? Toxic. Fireworks contain poisonous chemicals. Recent and not-so recent research reveals they “emit lead, copper, and other toxins” and “pyrotechnic display particles can produce adverse effects in mammalian cells and lungs” and. Search “toxins in fireworks.”
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