Ski finale

Bob, C.Z. and our neighbor finishing up a run

The ski season is now over for the year.  C.Z. and I skied five times altogether, during which we progressed from not knowing how to even walk on skis to, in C.Z.'s case, whooshing down every black diamond on the mountain, and in my case, at least beginning the transition to parallel turns on the greens.  This was, happily, more than I expected. And Bob got to go three times, during which he renewed his long-neglected love of skiing and also meet lots of people he usually only hears us talk about. 

One thing I think we all like about skiing is that it gives a bunch of city kids a relatively safe way to spend the day off by themselves or in groups of three or four, enjoying the outdoors and getting lots of exercise. C.Z. is now almost up to speed with the kids who have been skiing for three or four years.  While I am slower and usually ski by myself, I don't mind that.  I just wave when I see someone and continue ribboning from side to side, practicing turns. On the last run down on Wednesday, I stopped in a meadow halfway down the mountain and spent a few minutes gazing at the Pennsylvania foothills in the distance.  I don't usually look all the way down the mountain, because early on it had a way of making me panic.  But now I'm far enough along that I'm beginning to enjoy where I am, right at that moment, even while pointing downhill.   

Trails as seen from the lodge.  Bob and C.Z. ski all of them, but I only ski the one on the far right. (Bob notes that they all seem steeper in real life.  But of course!)

A note for Western skiers:  From what Bob says, it's a completely different experience skiing there than it is here.  To begin with, most days we were skiing on machine-made snow.  The snow has a way of getting both icy and slushy as the day progresses, I think because the snowboarders push the snow up on each side of the runs, exposing the middle.  So instead of whooshing through powder, you often hear a scrape on the turns. One day it was even so icy that the grooves from the snow grooming never wore down.  Everyone tells me that the trails are all steeper out West, so that our blues are Western greens, and so on.  But one other thing people tell me is that if you learn to ski here, you can ski anywhere.  So, watch out, Western mountains, here we come!  (Be very afraid.)

After a long day of skiing, what better place to stop in for a doughnut before the drive back?

Logistical note: I didn't always want to get up at 5:30 to make lunches and ride two hours in a rental car, because I'd tend not to sleep much the night before.  But once we got our routine down, we enjoyed it. We'd lay out ski people on the floor the night before. Shop for easy-to-pack, high energy food (like chocolate, of course!). Make thermal cups full of coffee for the trip out. And at the last minute, run around the corner to pick up a sack of bagels for breakfast.  We enjoyed sharing a van with our former building neighbors who now live two blocks away.  We enjoyed the ride over the George Washington Bridge and saying goodbye to the lights of Manhattan just as the dawn broke, and seeing the rocky New Jersey countryside emerge beyond the industrial suburbs. And after a long day of skiing, we enjoyed stopping by the bakery above on the way out of town. I'd have something ready to heat up when we got home at around 7 p.m., or we'd pick something up, and we'd all pile into bed to read before falling asleep early, utterly exhausted and very satisfied to have used up every last drop of energy during the day.  We'll be doing this again next year!

***

If I don't post again for a while, it's because we've gotten busy with some doctor appointments. I'll be back again eventually.  

Books on "another sort of learning"

Every now and then, one discovers a new source of wisdom that makes connections between what one already halfway knows and what one hasn't yet imagined.  With my attention lately pulled this way and that by everything from the logistics of running a household to the brain changes of middle age, I particularly appreciate any book or essay that can help me make these connections and bring the half-digested ideas lying around in my mind into a coherent whole.  

I think I've just discovered one of those sources:  The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) Student Guides.  I bought the whole set of them a couple of weeks ago because, knowing how long it takes me to develop my thoughts on any subject, I have begun collecting articles and books on college for C.Z.  Though I've only been reading about college at a leisurely pace over the past three months or so, I've already found my ideas on the subject sharpening.  So it pays to seek out books that help develop one's purpose, whatever your stage of life.

As is clear from my last post, I would like for other students, including my daughter, to have a better idea of why they're going to college than I did when I went to art school--to be able to form, and then to have the courage to live out, their convictions.  And that is exactly what the first volume I've read, A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning, by James V. Schall, S.J., helps to accomplish. It's really more of a long essay than a book, but it provides a whole framework for how and why one should educate himself in the classics, the books that help one think about what life is about in the big sense. Schall's premise is that there is something wrong with liberal learning as it is presented in colleges these days, especially in elite colleges, so students needs to take matters into their own hands and find an overarching purpose through reading on their own. 

Schall writes:

Eric Voegelin, in his book on Plato, said that after the death of Socrates in Athens, philosophy fled from the city to the Academy. We live in a time evidently when truth is fleeing the Academy.

...While uneasily following, probably for an eventual job, whatever curriculum he has selected or is given, [a perceptive student] will nonetheless begin to look about on his own.  He needs a certain practical good judgment.  At a deeper level, he searches for some way to go; he must, in other words, find "another sort of learning."   

I remember doing just that in college through reading the Bible and the works of C.S. Lewis repeatedly. Disturbed by legalistic street preachers who provided hours of entertainment for the beer-swilling set, I remember discovering Isaiah's passage about the Messiah not snuffing out the bruised reed. Harassed by classmates and professors who espoused a conveniently materialistic worldview, I remember exactly where I was (in a bus barreling down hairpin turns in Tuscany) and how merrily relieved I felt when I read Lewis' argument that miracles are, by definition, not typical according to the laws of nature, so the argument that they're impossible because they break the laws of nature is a straw man. Like people in the first century didn't know the the Virgin Birth was unusual? That much is in Mary's reply to the angel!  

If reading Lewis did this much to help me, what more might I have learned if I'd know about a few other sane authors as well? For I had no idea as yet about the host of other voices out there waiting to be discovered--Chesterton, Belloc, Walker Percy, Russell Kirk, and so many others. They are a cloud of witnesses, not hiding from difficult questions, but confronting them head on and then passing down their wisdom to others.

Schall's book, and all the other student guides on various subjects, are short guides to what the life of the mind should ideally be, but in a framework that isn't likely to be presented in the modern college. Schall's book contains many inset boxes with suggestions for other books "to keep sane by." He says that good books almost always beget other book suggestions. He talks about how valuable re-reading is, because questions that perplex one at 20, 30 and even 40 might become clear at 50 or 60. He even forgives the reader for accumulating more books than he can realistically read. (This is my kind of author!) I wish I'd had these guides when I was 19, but I'm happy enough to have them now. I hope through them to bring together a few more thoughts that will help keep me on the right track, as much in middle and old age as they might have during youth, because my view is to eternity.

Art school (Chapter 8)

I know I should have something to say about this chapter of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes, but getting my experience with art school into a blog post is going to be unwieldy. If it all sounds confusing, that's because it was, intrinsically so I think, and that's my point. And also, I've discovered that spending Tuesday mornings writing about pop culture wreaks havoc with the rest of the week.  So, here goes:

I went to art school at UGA in the early 1980s.  The professors mostly espoused abstract expressionism, while the students preferred kitsch art (this link won't be for everyone).  Some created art seriously, while others were more about the trappings.  But the point that fits in with Myers' book is that there wasn't much respect for tradition. At that time, I took most people seriously who were actually going to the trouble to produce and show work, of whatever variety. I even enjoyed the eerie installations that included rooms full of melted wax, trash, and a child's record player chanting times tables. I took the folk preachers who built exhibits in their backyards seriously (Howard Finster wasn't the only one). The guy I knew who went barefoot all winter, smoked cigarettes while running, didn't speak for six months, and shaved his head, but only occasionally poured some paint on canvas, I didn't take seriously.

I kept very little of my own work, except for some slides--much of it disintegrated. Conservation is a problem even for curators in modern art museums, because since the sixties many artists consider museums to be "homes for dead art" and refuse to think in terms of permanence.  But I don't think there was any danger of my work going into a museum.

 

I do remember my art school days fondly (outside of classes, I had a lot of strange adventures, but they were mostly innocent because I had strong self-boundaries), and I even think it was valuable in some way (I taught myself a lot), but its most lasting effect was burnout.  I remember sitting on a bus one day during my senior year thinking, "Why do I have to reinvent the whole world to be an artist? People have already done that. I'm supposed to think that no one is authentic but other artists, but I think I'd rather be learning organic chemistry or something. Organic chemistry is hard, but at least it doesn't make you feel dizzy and isolated. I'm tired of everything being ironic and edgy."  So, after a bit of a post-graduation crisis, I picked up a second major in design, got married, got a job, and didn't think about painting again for at least three years.  And when I did paint again, I did portraiture, a type of painting that has a very long tradition and lots of craft behind it.  I'd had it with restlessness as a statement.

Myers quotes Jacques Barzun:

If ones elders are willing to be "permissive" and "flexible" about one's every excess, it soon becomes clear "that there is nothing to push against but the empty air, a feeling which is at first agreeable, then is disconcerting, and ends by causing the anguish of pointlessness--the horror of the absurd."

I was never particularly interested in indulging in every excess, though I was certainly encouraged to.  What bothered me was more whether there was any way to produce art at all without respect for natural form.  As might be expected from someone who later painted portraits, I enjoyed figure drawing better than anything else.  I was much better at capturing a form quickly and loosely on paper than I was at inventing a vision far removed from nature in my head.  But that was supposed to be "derivative."  If I had had some help that respected my interests, it might have become something more, but the philosophy of the school was quite the opposite of my inclinations, and I was too young to know what I needed educationally.  My absurdity was that so few respected what had brought me to art school in the first place--a talent for natural form.  

As Myers defines it, what my college experience lacked was a sense of high culture.  It focused on the new, not the timeless.  It relied on instant accessibility, rather than training.  It celebrated fame (shock value, alternative music) more than ability.  It constantly alluded to something else (usually kitsch, and particularly Southern kitsch). And there was little discontinuity between life and art.  

As I read over this, it sounds quite critical of my college experience, but I think that's because I'm discussing a chapter in a book that emphasizes the difference between high culture and pop culture, and thinking back over that experience in retrospect.  At the time, I hardly knew the difference. Discontinuity between art and life could be fun, lots of fun, but is that why one really goes to college? Was it worth four years of school mostly to develop a strong sense of irony? I understand that it was a studio program and that therefore I was working within the "tradition" of modern art, but I was stuck with the strong discontinuity between modern art and most of previous history. Meanwhile, there was so much more craft I could have learned, if only I'd known it was out there, but previous generations had thrown it out so completely that it was barely mentioned. At least I went to Italy.  

Here's what struck me in this chapter of All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes:

I do think that there are still differences between high art and pop culture, but the past fifty years have done a lot to blur the line.  This is partly because much of high art is a statement about pop culture.  Thus art no longer imitates human nature, but culture itself, usually by adding a layer of irony.  I'm not sure art believes there is such a thing as human nature anymore.  Was it Dorothy Sayers who said that we're using up our intellectual capital?  This is what she meant.

Pop culture's emphasis on the eternal now is completely different from the Eastern idea of zen.  I am not highly trained in Eastern art, but I understand its sensibility, and the difference is one between serenity and restlessness.  This is what makes me wonder if Madonna knew what she was talking about when she said she was a Buddhist Jew, but I won't go there.

The chapter ends with this quote:  

The aesthetic of immediate and constant entertainment does not prepare the human consciousness well for recognition of a holy, transcendent, omnipotent, and eternal God, or to responding to His demands of repentance and obedience. 

What I was struggling with last week when I posted was that such quotes feel, at first, like a sort of works righteousness.  I find it much, much easier to live outside the mainstream myself, or even to talk about what I've been doing in terms of day to day life, than to talk about it in expository terms.  This isn't because I can't make the necessary abstractions, but because I fear that I will sound legalistic to other Christians.  I do think that pulling back from pop culture is a good thing, or I wouldn't do it. And I agree with Myers' statement above. But there are all kinds of reasons people have for living the way they do, and I'm not interested in telling you exactly where you should veer off the mainstream. The Bible doesn't say whether or not you can watch a given movie, eat junk food, or listen to a given band. It gives us the big picture of who God is, and the glorious story of how Christ came to redeem us. The details are what God gave us lives, brains and an intellectual tradition for.

Cozy weekend in the not-yet-spring

What ingredients do you need for a cozy weekend in the not-yet-spring?

C.Z.'s newest experiment from The Breads of France

A couple of games of chess

And a pot of vegetables to roast

After a couple of weeks of sickness, we're all starting to mend, I think. Bob is back to running and studying Italian, which is to say, he's back to normal. During our ski outing, C.Z. went down a slope that should probably have been marked black diamond (because a ten-year-old told her it would be okay!), and even I am off the bunny slope now.  

We've enjoyed having C.Z. home this Presidents' Day weekend. As a matter of fact, though she has continued with music school on Saturdays, she's on a month's break from violin because of a practice injury from last fall, called either thoracoscapular bursitis or snapping scapula, depending on which doctor you consult.  And we've been consulting a lot of them lately. Despite the fact that no one wants their child to be in pain, I admit we've enjoyed having her more available for conversation and other activities.  The question no one really wants to pose, of course, is what happens if a month's rest doesn't suffice. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  

Meanwhile, I spend much of yesterday reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, which I was most surprised to find on the shelf at the local library (usually there's quite a wait for a popular book like that).  It makes a lot of sense, and after reading it I made a pot of roasted vegetables, which seemed like just the thing for a family just getting over colds and flu. C.Z. is going through Little House again, which seems like just the thing to read when you want to snuggle up in midwinter while recovering from a cold. And we all enjoyed a Teaching Company lecture on medieval history that was almost Monty-Python-esque, even if it barely seemed to touch the surface of a fascinating subject.  

While I'm sure it's going to remain cold for quite some time yet, the temperatures are occasionally creeping back up into the lighter jacket range again, and the snow in the park has temporarily melted, giving rise to the hope of spring. In fact, I have a consistent experience about this time of year which I term "ghost spring." It may be the result of having spent my first 35 years in the South (where the crocuses bloom about now), but in mid-February, I start to spontaneously and vividly remember the smell of rich soil and new plants when I'm least expecting it.  I gave at least a moment's thought to the planter box this week, and right before lunch thought about putting in a bird call CD to brush up for spring migration.  

Not-yet-spring has a poignant texture of all its own, doesn't it? It's the essence of hope. But I know it's not really time for consistent warmth yet, so like the groundhog, back into winter mode I go, to plan, to read, to care for the sick, to cook root vegetables, and yes, even to zigzag (slowly) down a mountain one more time. I'm really looking forward to spring.  But one should never wish time away, and winter develops something intrepid in a person if you embrace it.  (Don't quote me on that, because I just made it up, but I think it's true.)

How are you faring with winter in your corner of the country?

What to do with the rutabaga? Or, eating down the winter pantry

Boy, isn't that an exciting post topic?  Well, like I said, my mind got a bit overloaded this week, so I'm cooking instead.  Unfortunately, this isn't going to be a pretty post, because it's just too dark in here and what I make either gets eaten right away or looks like mush.  But still, it's fun to experiment, and that's what I've been doing.

This food experimenting started because everyone was sick but me, and no one wanted to eat big meals, so I kept making dinner out of what I had in the refrigerator.  And what seasonal fare does one have lingering in the refrigerator and on the counter in February?  In our house, it's inevitably rutabagas and beets, because I don't know what to do with the former, and because two members of my family got tired of beet salad made from the latter (I didn't).  There was also a large pumpkin squash.  

My seasonal food guru is Deborah Madison, but I'd been so disheartened by the lack of new seasonal produce that I hadn't been consulting her.  I'd just been coasting, cooking-wise, and buying more from the grocery.  So when I pulled out Local Flavors again, I was pleased to see that you can mash rutabaga together with potatoes and season it with nutmeg and parsley. Just make sure you slice the rutabaga half the size of the potatoes, because they take longer to cook.  And Madison has you reserving cooking water and pouring it back in (her specialty), so you don't even have to put milk or cream in it.  I even got to use my new bottle of whole nutmeg, grinding one in my second coffee grinder that I use for spices.  

Rutabaga and potato puree

This evening, I tackled the beets.  Madison has you steam and chop them, toss them with vinegar-soaked onions and parsley, and then toss with Chevre and endive.  It's all sitting on the counter now ready for the final toss when Bob gets home.  

Beet and endive salad 

Maple-roasted butternut (or in this case, pumpkin) squash

Also, I happened to pick up Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics at the library.  That's where the squash comes in.  Garten has you chop up the squash and separate unpeeled garlic, drizzle with maple syrup, and bake.  Later you add pancetta and sage to the mix (I used bacon and thyme, but I've since bought some pancetta and sage for the other half of the squash) and let it carmelize.  I've been eating bits out of the refrigerator during the day. It's almost like candy.

Meanwhile, a friend who used to live in NYC brought an Amish Friendship Bread starter up with her for a visit, and it's "gone viral" (if you'll pardon the expression, since we're all sick anyway) within our homeschooling community.  You're supposed to give away three out of the four bags, but we're saturated with it among our group, so this chain bread stops with us.  

Anyway, C.Z. enjoyed the recipe as her first experiment with a starter. She mushed the bag and watched it ferment and then made the two loaves on the tenth day.  It was easy and delicious! The rest of the starter is in the freezer for now.

And I made my first pizza dough this week.  I'm a little behind the curve with yeast breads, since I used to kill them regularly and got scared.  But C.Z. figured out the proper temperature on her own last summer and showed me how to activate the yeast on Monday.  I really sort of liked not knowing how to bake, since that made C.Z. the baker in the family, but hopefully she'll still cook for me sometimes.

Maybe we should all get colds more often!  It's amazing what I'll do to avoid running to the grocery every day, and it's not a bad idea to become more resourceful with what one has on hand.

In lieu of Chapter 6

A personal commentary on Chapter 6 of Ken Myers's All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes is not forthcoming anytime soon. And since both Wednesday and Friday promise all-day outings, I'm not sure Chapter 7 is in the works for this week, either.  In fact, I seem to have overloaded my brain to the extent that I need to take a deep breath and straighten out some of the tangle that's in there already. That happens from time to time.  So I'm cooking instead.

Regarding Chapter 6, I attempted in two different drafts to write something more than a mere synopsis of the chapter, whose subject is how pop culture and the liberal arts are not just different tastes, but different experiences altogether. And both times, even though I clearly stated the difference between quality of thought issues and salvation issues, I ended up feeling as though I were personally critiquing my fellow Christians.  Moral of story:  I suppose it doesn't work for the neighborhood Luddite to preach on the mental advantages of turning off pop culture, no matter how wonderful, or even important, those advantages may be to said Luddite.  

In my state of mental knottedness, however, I did discover a young writer, Matthew B. Crawford, who seems to have a gift for making many of the same points I would like to make if I were half so talented as he at writing insightfully (a big if!).  It probably helps that he isn't trying to make an appeal to Christians, but to young people generally, particularly college students.  That way, there's no question of any implications in his appeals for acceptance by God.  With Myers, it's much harder to separate the two.

Here's a sample of Crawford talking about the importance of liberal education, echoing what Myers (via C.S. Lewis) calls receiving a work, which an requires effort to see beyond one's limited perspective, as opposed to using it:

The humanities might be understood simply as s record of the best that has been thought about the human situation. Acquaintance with this record has the effect of freeing us from the present, with its necessarily partial view, and opening us up to the full range of human possibilities. Further, to enter truly into the great works of the past, or of other cultures, requires an effort to free oneself from the present and its certainties. A cultivated willingness to make that effort is perhaps the cardinal intellectual virtue.

That is an excellent summary of Chapter 6, with the exception that Myers postulates that for Christians, our imprisonment in the psychological familiarity and present-orientation of pop culture may make it harder for us to grow not only intellectually, but spiritually as well.

I found Mr. Crawford via Rick Saenz of Dry Creek Chronicles, who in turn found him on Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons blog.  After reading the linked article, Shop Class as Soulcraft (which will be published as a full-length book in May), I was so enthused that I Googled several other articles by Mr. Matthews, all equally enjoyable. Though he writes on everything from physics textbooks to mood medication on campus, the common thread is always the destructive effect of modern society on the liberal arts.  And that's a subject I could read about all day.  

So, for Chapter 6, I suppose my comments will be limited to:  1) Instead of reading Myers, go ahead and read An Experiment in Criticism, the excellent C.S. Lewis book on which most of the chapter is based, and 2) print out a few articles by Matthew B. Crawford and read them when you have time.  Among the current mass of internet articles, they stand out as well worth our attention.