AS ONE STILL NEW TO the Serious Blogging Experience, I don’t know whether or not it’s tacky for one to link to nice things said about one by others on their blogs. If it is, skip to the previous post. If not, then you may enjoy Gina Cuclis‘ account of the last Sonoma City Council meeting I attended. Gina’s known me since the halcyon days of 1995 at (at KSRO in Santa Rosa), and we were amazed to re-meet when she served on the Sonoma Planning Commission (which I used to write about for the Sonoma Index-Tribune). She cares a good deal about Sonoma, and acts on that care; I’m glad she’s still part of the scene.
Bookshelf: Larry Niven
ONE NICE THING ABOUT BEING laid up is the chance to reacquaint myself with some old childhood friends; e.g., Larry Niven and his Known Space series.
For those who don’t know, Known Space is a 60-light-year-diameter bubble and a thousand to a billion-plus years of human history. It’s also a pile of novels and short stories written in a breezy 1970s-Southern-California style depicting a leisure-filled vision of cheap space travel, engaging aliens and lifespans in the centuries.
I started reading Larry Niven when I was eight years old. Then, I didn’t understand much beyond the cool spaceships and moving sidewalks. Now, I can appreciate his familiar descriptives (“The beach was a perfect beer-party beach.” “Ever notice how all spaceships are starting to look the same?”), ledes (“It was noon of a hot blue day.” “Then, the planet had no name”) and occasional asides to the reader (“Harry Kane used a word your publisher will probably cut”). I also like how fannish his stories are, filled with references to everything from filk to fanspeak.
But these days I find I’m enjoying his immortals. Cheap longevity, in Niven’s universe, makes philosophers of us all (except for those it makes bored and master-criminally ambitious), and the dialog between those of double- and triple-digit age captures the instant impetuousness of the former and thoughtful wisdom of the latter. At 47, I’m beginning to understand why it takes so long to acquire wisdom (or something that looks like it) — it can take years of repeated exposure to varied but thematic circumstance before a human being begins not to take the Universe personally. Even then, it’s a crapshoot whether or not he’ll learn what else it can teach; until then, it’s difficult to learn anything at all.
But Niven shows us that learning is easy — as well as fun, and occasionally profitable. Here’s to Known Space and the brave souls which it inspires!
Dinner: Inadvertent Hobbitry
AS HOBBITS AND THOSE WHO love them know, nothing makes a meal like a heap o’ mushrooms. Around here, that usually means skilleted with garlic, onions, tomatoes and a big sausage and lovingly ladled atop fettucine or capellini. But last night, I forwent both garlic and pasta for a little something I call the Inadvertent Hobbit (serves 2):
– Two big Italian turkey sausages (sweet, unless you like spicy)
– Four slices turkey bacon, diced
– Vidalia onion, roughly chopped
– 12 crimini mushrooms, quartered
– Olive oil
– Sherry
– Pinch of rosemary, thyme, basil, salt
Brown sausage on all sides, about 10 minutes. Add enough olive oil to brown the bacon and turn the onions translucent, then do that too. Add herbs to taste (I use a smaller pinch of rosemary than of basil and thyme). Deglaze with sherry and add mushrooms. Revel in the homey aroma, then cover and simmer for another 10 minutes. Line two rustic-looking dishes with the non-sausage ingredients and put the sausage on top. Contemplate life’s simple pleasures, and enjoy.
Leaving room for silence
Of all the apparent opposites which Judaism wrestles to reconcile — free will v. predestination, universalism v. particularism, applesauce v. sour cream — one of the most paradoxically fertile is words v. the Wordless.
Maimonides, the great 12th century rabbi and commentator, wisely stayed out of this fray — he was more comfortable describing God in terms of what God wasn’t than in telling people what God was. Maimonides wasn’t the only one who felt this way; in fact, much of our liturgy describes the indescribability of God at great and poetic length.
Take, for example, the following words of the Chatzi Kaddish, which our ancestors loved so much they used it to mark the transition between different parts of every prayer service (translation from the new Reform siddur, Mishkan T’filah): “Blessed, praised, honored, exalted, extolled, glorified, adored, and lauded be the name of the Holy Blessed One, beyond all earthly words and songs of blessing, praise and comfort.”
Even more to the point is Nishmat: “Even if our mouths were full of song as the sea, and our tongues full of joy in countless waves, and our lips full of praise as wide as the sky’s expanse, and were our eyes to shine like sun and moon; if our hands were spread out like heaven’s eagles and our feet swift like young deer, we could never thank You adequately, Adonai, our God and God of our ancestors, to bless Your name for a ten-thousandth of the many myriads of times You granted favors to our ancestors and to us.”
If that’s the case, then why bother? If God can’t be talked about, why do we keep talking?
One answer, from Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, is, “A little is also good.” Since nobody can really appreciate God on a Godly scale, that means a level praying field for everybody. But just as each thing helps us understand its apparent opposite, perhaps our seemingly ceaseless God-talk is also one half of a whole picture: and why our most central prayer, repeated twice daily, begins: “Shema … Listen.”
An Apology to Douglas Rushkoff
In my previous, I made a cutting remark about Douglas Ruskoff’s “Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.” While my opinion remains that the book is deeply flawed, as noted by, among others, Zeek.net), I didn’t intend to be dismissive. For one thing, Rushkoff obviously cares enough about Judaism to want to help keep it relevant; for another thing, his book is aimed at people who don’t know that the tradition wants to be questioned. If “Nothing Sacred” encourages even one Jew to say, “Maybe there’s something to this after all” and start studying on his or her own, how is that a Bad Thing?
It Started With Fingerprinting
Actually, it started two weeks ago, when I was interviewed by two Sonoma County Law Enforcement Chaplains who asked me why I wanted to become one of them.
"To tell you the truth," I said, "the whole idea terrifies me. But it's the sort of terror which compels further exploration."
They laughed. "You couldn't do this if you didn't feel that way," one replied.
Or maybe it started in 2000, when I interviewed a Sonoma Valley man who had just graduated from the 85-hour program in order to be able to sit with victims of crimes and accidents and help them cope when they'd otherwise be alone; or in 2001, when first responders in New York walked into two burning buildings, perhaps knowing they weren't coming out. I'd been writing about police and firefighters then for long enough to think I knew why they did that — and right then, I wanted to help those who help. But it wasn't until earlier this month that the opportunity arrived in the form of a newspaper blurb looking for chaplaincy candidates and urging the interested to fill out the form on http://www.sonomalawchaplains.org.
Anyway, whenever it started, this grey cool morning found me in Santa Rosa, at the county sheriff's headquarters, being fingerprinted with three other chaplain candidates.
The woman who runs the fingerprinting machine said she didn't like it at first. She was of the ink-and-roller school, and said she only adjusted to the new technology when they took her roller away. Now, she said, she couldn't imagine taking fingerprints any other way. The LiveScan fingerprinting machine is a digital camera, which takes a group shot apiece of the four fingers on each hand, and then one of each finger and thumb which the technician rolled gently across the cleanest glass plate I've ever seen.
"Just relax," she said.
There's a lesson in that, and one which I'll be thinking about next Tuesday evening the training begins in earnest with a weekly three-hour class until April. More about that subsequently, God willing.
There’s WATER on ‘ing MARS.
“We have water,” said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA. “We’ve seen evidence for this water ice before in observations by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and in disappearing chunks observed by Phoenix last month, but this is the first time Martian water has been touched and tasted.”
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080731.html
(Is it just me, or did the Universe suddenly get a little more friendly?)