Check in
See Fran write
My writing has turned up in a couple of new places. For Oregon ArtsWatch, I wrote a review of Sleeping Giants, a novel by Portland writer Rene Denfeld. It was a privilege to interview the author; I enjoyed both her and the book.
Set on the Oregon coast and in Portland, it is about lost children and memory, about abuse cloaked as therapy. A young woman, a retired police detective and a lonely polar bear, all lost in their own ways. The settings, the narrative, time now and 20 years past, all are braided and twined, then ultimately untangled. It is a marvelous read.
Creative writing
A meditation I wrote on the obscure word “sere” was published yesterday (May 17) by Juke, a Substack collective of several writers with whom I’m pleased to be associated. Publisher Tonya Morton shepherded my piece through the process and wrote embarrassingly nice things about my writing. I used a photo from my time in Montana to illustrate:
Resolution
What a big word! A rat for the python to swallow. Let’s resolve to do better, to do more. To start over. Why wait for January?
It’s spring—or summer, depending on whose calendar you choose. The time is now. So do it now.
Here’s one resolution:
Try not to
Even though Yoda says “Do. Or do not. There is no try,” I think trying is useful.
Or, today, trying not to . . .
Try not to despair. That one is easy. Maybe I’m an optimist; I swim out of the depths, shrug off shadows.
I didn’t even cry when I got divorced. I was sad and irritated but also intrigued by the new challenges. I knew I could confront them and overcome.
That’s how I do it. One mountain after the next. I’ve summited hundreds. Most of them just hillocks, but, well. Moving hillocks.
Try not to be overbearing in conversation. This is way hard. I’m such a know-it-all and so self-absorbed. I need to look at people when I talk to them. And remember their faces. Reading faces is a challenge for me, a late-life lesson.
Try not to do too much. I’m an utter failure at that. My unread* email has surpassed 1,000. I know I can just ignore the old stuff, but I like closure.
*Predictive typing tried to change “unread” to “undead.” Undead email. I like it.
I like finishing things. Reading books to the last page, getting to genius on The New York Times Spelling Bee, using up the last of the vegetables in the crisper. Binding quilts. Organizing my photos.
I limp through each day, doing what gets done. My list of topics to write about keeps expanding. Each week I start an empty file that fills and then overfills with ideas.
I’m pouring some of them out here. I hope they resonate with you.
Life is messy
Sign in, sign out Remember to floss. Live your life by the book. Deviate—it’s your loss. Unicorns like lavender Married with pink. Just let me scribble In lavender ink. Pink sky in the morning Sun’s on its way. Just do what I do. Not what I say No scratch that—reverse it. Do as I say! I’m here to guide you The straight, crooked way.
Rhodie update
Last week I wrote that rhododendrons in Portland had passed their prime, early this year. Well, some of them have. But others are just coming out. It depends on the plant.
This one is an Exbury azalea These plants don’t have a lovely form; they are leggy. But the blooms can be spectacular. They’re also called Knap Hill azaleas because they were developed at a nursery in Knap Hill, England, in the 1870s.
Made for roses
Roses are coming on in Portland, the City of Roses. They will be out in full force by the first weeks of June, when Portland hosts its iconic Rose Festival.
In her Illustrated Life Substack, Amy Cowen wrote this week about Mother’s Day and her grandmother, and yellow roses. “On the day my grandmother died,” Amy wrote, “yellow roses bloomed in my mother’s yard.”
In my neighborhood, I found bushes of yellow roses blooming profusely. They are profoundly fragrant.
Another adventure
Last week, I wrote about how a Trimet paratransit bus took me on a wild ride through the Nike campus near Beaverton and the new Amazon enclave in North Portland.
This week, I had to travel to Oak Grove, an unincorporated enclave in Clackamas County far south of Portland. To get there, I discovered the No. 70 bus.
A new route
The 70 is my new favorite bus line. Traveling south from Hawthorne, the 70 passes some of the best coffeehouses in Portland, starting with Tiny’s on Southeast 10th.
The bus line cuts through Ladd’s Addition. On the traffic circle in the center is a coffee shop that used to be Palio’s but is now Floyd’s. I stopped in later; it’s only a whisper of the original. Gone are the spacious back room with plenty of big tables, and the desserts, including cake.
On 21st Avenue, the bus scoots by Nossa Familia Coffee at Division (Seven Corners) and People’s Food at Tibbetts. You could exit the bus at Powell Boulevard and walk to Artist & Craftsman Supply, a wonderful store to stoke the creator in you.
New neighborhoods
The bus route jogs along Powell to Southeast Milwaukie. This neighborhood is called Brooklyn. Check out the tiny brick Brooklyn Pharmacy. More coffee and eats: Rose City Coffee, the Warehouse Cafe, Botto’s BBQ, the Brooklyn Park Pub (with a sign that says Whiskeyland), Empire Meat Co., Yukon Tavern, Papa Haydn’s.
Now you’re in Sellwood-Moreland: Westmoreland Ace Hardware, Fairlane Coffee, San Felipe Taqueria, Stickers Asian Cafe, the tiny retro lunch counter known as Bertie Lou’s, Mio Sushi, and the Harney Street Cafe.
Sellwood still has many vintage and antique shops, and the houses in that neighborhood have some of the most interesting front yards in the city.
Walk or wheel a few blocks to the west to Southeast 13th Avenue. Here are Blue Kangaroo Coffee (try the orange-cranberry scones and Cubano coffee) across from the new Sellwood Library.* Check out Savory Spice, where friendly Jim Brown invites you to taste Oregon olive oil, and the Raven’s Wing Magical Co-op for crystals, talismans and herbs.
*The Sellwood Library seems new to me. But it was rebuilt way back in 2002, 22 years ago. Old age can really mess with your sense of time.
South of Tacoma, Milwaukie becomes Southeast 17th Avenue. The bus slips past the mysterious Garthwick neighborhood before easing into the Milwaukie Transit Center, next to city hall.
I transferred to the 33 bus, which traverses McLoughlin to Clackamas Community College. This sterile throughway slices through unincorporated Oak Grove: anonymous strip malls, big-box stores, a gigantic Fred Meyer with a pink Voodoo Donuts next door, and many businesses selling cars, car parts and service. The Walmart has a motto: “Neighborhood store.”
I made it to Bellevue Medical, where they checked my wheelchair battery. Turned out it didn’t need service.
Another way home
From the Milwaukie Transit Center, I took a different bus home, the 75. Its route along César E. Chávez Boulevard (formerly 39th Avenue) was less interesting than I had remembered, mostly residential.
Ride this bus to Providence Milwaukie Hospital, the Milwaukie Grange, St. Ignatius of Antioch Catholic Church or Cheryl’s Canine Styling (I think they used to call that “dog grooming”).
Eat and drink along Woodstock at Papaccino’s Coffee, Otto’s Sausage Kitchen or the Woodstock Deli. There’s a big Safeway at Powell with a strip club across the street.
Some street names in Southeast Portland: Floss. Roswell. Sherrett. Barba. Wake. Rural. Filbert. Lava Drive.
Back to the bookshelf
I’m listening to the audiobook of Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution.
Helgoland is a windswept, lonely island in the North Sea where the 23-year-old physicist Werner Heisenberg, seeking relief from allergies and having plenty of time to think, came up with the basis for quantum theory. The year was 1925.
This book was on the bookshelf in a small panel in the graphic novel The Infinity Particle, by Wendy Zu. Intrigued by the title, I got the audiobook of Helgoland from the library.
The quantum Mr. Darcy
The narrator is David Rintoul. I remember him as Mr. Darcy from the 1980 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. Wow, that really dates me. Lizzie Bennett was played by Elizabeth Garvey in that production.
BBC reports that it has adapted the Jane Austen novel five times over the decades. The one we may remember best is the 1995 version with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle.
Rintoul went on to do a lot more acting, including episodes of “The Crown” and “Game of Thrones.” He was the voice of McBiscuit in a series of Wallace* & Gromit video games.
I can’t wrap my mind around Mr. Darcy narrating a book about quantum physics. But Rintoul makes it work. He reads with plummy Oxbridge diction, pronouncing “issue” as “issou” and accenting the second syllable in “laboratory.”
It’s a fun listen. Edifying, too.
*On my bus adventure, I passed by Wallace Books. I wonder if Gromit hangs out there too.
Another dip
I’m still experimenting with dipping into books that I know I won’t have the time to read from cover to cover.
This time, I decided on a most weighty tome, a translation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s masterwork of philosophy, Phenomenology of Spirit. This book was published in 1807 in German as Phänomenologie des Geistes.
One day in 2006, while Robert and I were strolling in the Bavarian city of Bamberg, Germany, I looked up to see a plaque on a building that identified it as the house where Hegel completed this book.
I’m proud to have this volume on my bookshelf. It’s Robert’s book, a foundational text of his work as a student and later as a professor of philosophy.
Robert’s life course changed when he walked into the first meeting of his freshman Western civ course at Brandeis in 1956. There he encountered the great German philosopher Herbert Marcuse. As a way of introducing this course, Marcuse was lecturing about Hegel.
Robert distinctly remembers Marcuse proclaiming on that day in his thick accent: “What matters iss not ze negation. It iss ze negation uf ze negation.”
And from that moment, Robert was hooked. He eventually chucked his pre-med plans to take up philosophy, and Hegel’s dialectic became his guiding star.
But, wow. This is one difficult book. Helgoland deals with hard concepts, but it is at least approachable.
I have been perusing the A.V. Miller translation of 1977 and finding it quite obtuse. Robert would have read the yet more obscure 1910 J.B. Baillie translation under Marcuse at Brandeis and later in his graduate work at Harvard.
Other translators
Successive translations of this work may make Hegel more accessible to English readers. A new translation by Michael Inwood was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. I was able to read a few chapters online, and it is less difficult. Nothing will make Hegel entirely easy and approachable, but wrestling his prose into a more modern idiom is definitely helpful.
This book sells for $150 in hardcover. It would take three more paid yearly subscribers to Becoming to raise that kind of cash. Fortunately, a paperback version was published last year for a more reasonable $40. It will be replacing the older translation on my bookshelf very soon.
Check out
I already put in a hint for paying subscriptions, so that’s out of the way.
I haven’t lectured you recently about the joy and necessity of daily writing, either, but you either do or not do. I can only try to remind you.
Dreams
We wonder what dreams mean to us, Yet what do we mean to the dream? Does it care about our dangers and desires? Can a dream even know that we are in it? In dreams, we meet—oh, such a canvas— Mentors, ghouls, our past selves, the odd snake. That youth, the young girl, your dead mother. And dark things we deny when we wake. Maybe our dreams embrace us. Of course, they know who we are! They help shatter our egos, don’t they? But are they benign?—after all The dream world is not of our making . . . Rather it is, but beyond our control. Our lives may be stuff dreams are made of, But dreams are the prayers of our soul.
Dilemma
Neither and both. Having to choose. Which horn will I Pick this time? Have it my way. Have it any way. The secret is: It doesn’t matter. Just pick one.
—30—
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