Cole Brecheen
2004-12-14
Garrison Keillor's reading this morning from Howard Nemerov's Trees reminded me of what it was that made me realize, years ago, that I liked some kinds of poetry. Some poems sound like the things people say in your dreams: not usually some rhyming set of words that sounds like it could be set to music, sometimes inarticulate but sometimes articulate about things you couldn't really talk about in any other way. This particular reading is so articulate that you might mistake it for a lecture until a minute or two after hearing it.
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about.
That's very nice.
2004-12-09
The poems Garrison Keillor read this morning -- two poems about carpentry -- were especially good. I'm not sure what it is about some combinations of plain words, but sometimes they remind me of things that seem important for reasons I can't quite put my finger on.
2004-07-10
From an e-mail I sent to a long lost friend a little while ago:
I'm just recovering from a brutally busy work week myself -- this is the first real chance I've had all week to read email to our home account -- so I'll just give you a quick update. You were probably able to determine from that out-of-date web page that Marsha and I are still married and have two kids: Amanda is 13 and Kyle is 11. I gave up practicing law just a few years after moving to Portland and became a software developer, and I've been pretty happy at that. I've spent most of the last 15 or 20 years working for the Portland offices of fairly big companies (Apple for a long time, Microsoft more recently for a year or so), but now I'm with a little 125-person software company in downtown Portland. I've been mostly a manager for the last half of my career, but that part of the work gets a little less satisfying every year. I think I'm drifting toward spending most of my time between now and retirement just writing code. I'm not completely sure I still have the intellectual horsepower to maintain an employable technical skill set in this field, but when I look around me at the very few people who are ten or fifteen years older, I just don't think I want to follow in the footsteps of the managers. I think I'd rather be doing the work than writing schedules and performance reviews for the people who are doing it. That's pretty much all I do now.
I still often think about those long hot summers we spent out on the bookfield. To this day I can't knock on a door without assuming the Bookman Position -- three steps back, facing to the side -- and every time I feel a firm handshake or see someone who gets to work at 8:00 a.m. and stays cheerful on days we would have called Character Builders, I think "Hmm. I wonder if he used to work for Southwestern?"
2004-06-26
I'm still thinking about the poem Garrison Keillor read yesterday morning (Howard Nemerov's The Vacuum) so I guess I'd better make a note about it here. Has there ever been a more complete portrait of a widower in as few words?
2004-04-26
2004-04-25
I have to put in a good word for AccuRadio.com's "Twang: Y'alternative" channel. It plays the best and smartest of the artists who appeal to long-gone-but-nostalgic Texans like me: Iris Dement, Steve Earle, Robert Earl Keen, Son Volt, etc. I just heard it play Iris Dement's "I'm Walking Home Tonight," which always brings back old memories and long-buried emotions for me.
2004-03-10
2004-02-27
My grandfather (Howard Draper, 1900-1981) owned a few hundred acres, a house, and a building he once intended to turn into a restaurant in Clairemont, Texas. I think he bought it a little before he retired from full-time farming, when I was very small -- I don't clearly remember a time when he didn't spend most weekdays at Clairemont. He used to drive back to Tahoka on weekends, but Clairemont was where he really liked to spend his time. His property was right on a good sized river, but I can't remember it's name. I was thinking about it a little while ago, listening to Lyle Lovett's beautiful Texas River Song. I wish my grandfather had lived long enough to hear it.
2003-10-14
Someone just referred me to this story about the way we are treating Iraqi civilians right now. It makes me ashamed to be an American.
2003-09-28
I was very sorry to hear that Edward Said died today. The first time I heard him speak must have been twenty-five or thirty years ago -- I think I was in either high school or college -- and it made a permanent impression, confirmed many times in the years since then. I didn't always agree with him, but he was one of the most intelligent and gently persuasive people I have ever heard or read.
2003-09-22
Are you old enough to remember the week back in the mid-1970s when Bruce Springsteen appeared simultaneously on the cover of both Time and Newsweek? I don't remember what prompted that coincidence -- he must have been a complete nobody at the time -- but two unusually prescient news reporters and/or news organizations somehow realized within days of each other that Springsteen had the mark of destiny on him. We now have the unusual luxury, given that he is still alive and productive, of knowing that they were right.
This comes to mind because I got a message a few minutes ago indicating that Garrison Keillor has chosen to memorialize tomorrow as (among other things) Bruce Springsteen's birthday. Between this and the Time/Newsweek thing thirty years ago, I'd say Garrison Keillor's mention is the higher honor, but maybe that's just idiosyncrasy.
2003-09-15
My bike ride into work each morning runs through one of the comparatively few parts of Portland where you see an unusual amount of trash on the streets. I think I understand the general mind set of most of the people living there, and don't particularly fault them for it as a group, but it's still hard not to be irritated by it. I try instead to notice the spots where things are clean and tidy. The pattern isn't exactly what you would expect. The low-income apartment complexes, for example -- the ones where the units face each other around a courtyard -- always seem to be pretty clean. My guess is that the reason isn't just that these places tend to have a manager who goes outside and picks up trash. I have a feeling that these settings tend to generate a little healthy social pressure that's missing in areas where rows of detached houses face bare streets.
2003-09-10
I once heard Terry Gross interview a quiet but surprisingly articulate woman who had suffered from autism all her life, and who had written a book about it. At one point Terry asked her how well she related to other autistic people, and the woman said something like this. "Not very well, I'm sorry to say. I've found that I can't communicate with them. It's like trying to have a relationship with someone who has a terrible spiritual disease of some kind."
That phrase -- "terrible spiritual disease" -- stuck with me, and I've wondered a lot since then about the nature of spiritual disease: what it really is, what forms it takes, whether it can be treated, whether the people who have it know that they have it, whether it tends to spread in groups of people or to worsen in particular people over time. Someone better versed in popular psychology would probably use other names to describe most of what I now tend to see as spiritual disease, but I'm afraid those terms may create the impression that all problems like this need to be handled by professionals. The world might work better if some of us assumed a little day to day responsibility for diagnosing and treating spiritual disease with a little common sense and intuition.
2003-09-01
I wonder whether things like rentacoder.com will make it hard for software developers in the United States to survive. Maybe not. Big software projects are surprisingly amorphous. It's hard to imagine a bid system that works very well when you think about the problems most software companies have with their internal specification-implementation-delivery processes. But it certainly seems like a powerful force for turning what used to be highly specialized skills into low-cost commodities. People who perform manual services -- plumbers, construction workers, waiters, house cleaners -- may eventually find themselves making more money than people with expensive educations and lots of high-tech experience because of this phenomenon.
2003-08-16
Garrison Keillor read a poem five or six years ago that I liked very much: "Cathedral Builders," by John Ormand. This was before The Writer's Almanac started keeping copies of the poems he reads each day, so I wrote down the name and looked for it every now and then, but never found it. A little while ago, looking through old notes for a phone number, I found the note I made that day, and decided to search again. This time it showed up on an interesting web site named B A R R Y L A N D. I like pretty much anyone who has good taste in poetry.
Seven or eight years ago I sat in the back row of a large, very crowded auditorium listening to Houston Smith talk about world religions. During the question and answer period following the main part of his talk someone asked whether he had an opinion about why particular historical periods seem to be more religiously significant than others. He said he did have some ideas about why the hundred or so years before and after 500 B.C. were particularly significant, but he declined to elaborate; it was getting late, and for an 80-something-year-old man he was unusually concise and alert to the immediate social situation. I've often wondered what he would have said if that question had been asked earlier in the evening.
Cole Brecheen
