MONTANA LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY

When I ordered “The Power of Art” -- which is a series of lectures on famous artists as presented by the BBC -- I had no idea who Simon Schama was.  He turns out to be a professor of art, history and politics who works both sides of the Atlantic and is almost the definition of “irrepressible.”  His language is so eloquently elegant, sensuous and inventive that it’s almost lascivious.  Tim has seen him in person and says his hands fly everywhere like wings.  Clearly his tongue also has wings.  A parody on YouTube goes for his bobble head.  He’s a high-concept, wry, mischievous fellow, six years younger than me, and what Montana folks would call a “character.”

The middle of the three disc series came first -- what did I think, that it wouldn’t have to come from out-of-state?  I’m just grateful to get these DVD’s.  But I had thought they would be about, you know, color and composition with maybe a little sociological context about the times.  But in the mouth of Schama, each artist (here, it was David and the French Revolution, Turner and the English awakening of conscience, and Van Gogh searching for God in creation) was practically a re-enactment of the Passion of Christ.  (In fact, that exact image snuck in here and there.)  Schama believes in the artist as daemon, inspired monster, outside any social restraints, and illustrates in some cases by providing previously forbidden images.

I suppose now it seems safe to show us Marat dead in his bath, sainted at last;  or Turner’s slave ship drowning its human cargo so they will be insured, forever damning the ship captain; much less Van Gogh stuffing a whole tube of Chrome Yellow oil paint into his mouth.  (I hope it was mustard.)  I can see why few in Montana watch this series, quite apart from not being able to get public television except on cable.  Modern cowboy artists are pleasant businessmen with very nice houses.  Charlie Russell is a grandfatherly gent who only hung around whore houses because he was . . .  well, nevermind.  No one expects artists to, um, “impact” politics.  For one thing, most of the buyers are Republicans, though Democrats like pretty scenery and animals.  There is no political niche for demented artists.  Even Governor Schweitzer’s mild excursions outside sober propriety get called down.  (Repubs are known to drink but never to be too drunk to drive.)

David (Da-VEED) was not above pandering to rich patrons and painted them very well.  According to Schama, the awakening came when he visited Rome and realized that the French sovereign order with all its wretched excess was heading for the same ruined fate.  Huge national debt, personal wealth sequestered from general poverty and privation, frivolous preoccupation with glamour and sex -- am I scaring you yet?  Or were you already pretty worried?  Maybe looking for someone to blame.  Thousands were guillotined -- the best, the brightest, and in some cases the bravest.  Hopefully we won’t do that this time, though unfunding education is probably as effective.

Van Gogh, Dutch son of a clergyman that he was, suffered from actual physiological damage expressed in epileptic fits.  Sensitive to the suffering of the poor, he had thought at first he would convert them and God would come to their aid.  By the end he was simply opening his undefended heart to the land itself, the sunflowers and the wheat fields where the crows flew up.  It proved unendurable, though his ecstatic work endures.

Turner never had a lot of use for humans anyway.  His woman and children were sequestered away from his home/studio.  People were puppets in the grip of a mighty sea of fantastic forces, gorgeously tinted and smeared with vapors.  He recognized the horror but it was always in a context of mighty waves and typhoons of a grandeur that miniaturized humans.

Possibly there are contemporary Montana artists who are painting in this highly charged way, but I can’t think of them at the moment.  Or maybe the media just ignores them as too disturbing, too ugly, raising too many questions about what a human being is on a land so vast, so deadly, so cold and so hot, so little sheltered from winds so powerful, so ranged with mountains with spiritual impact far beyond anything offered in a cathedral and badlands that suggest portraits of hell.

If you talk this way to a Montana person younger than fifty, they’ll think solemnly for a few minutes, then say,  “I have a painting by so-and-so.  How much do you think it might be worth?”   If you talk this way to a Montana person older than eighty, they won’t say anything but their eyes will fill with tears.  If you talk this way to a full-blood Indian (if you can find one), they will simply and quietly rise and leave.

Tim says that most people who listen to Schama have no idea what he’s talking about.  Wikipedia (we don’t approve of Wikipedia) says, prissily, “Schama has a literary way of writing that is attractive to both historians and a wider readership. It is ‘packed with evocative detail: rich fruit cakes crammed with raisins, currants, nuts and glacé cherries all mulled in brandy sauce’.  He has also received criticism from one critic for dumbing down history, presenting a ‘grossly oversimplified and mythologising view of the history of nations’ and not fostering critical thinking.”  This is a predictable sentiment from the snarky little overeducated white male twits who control Wikipedia.  They just cannot tolerate excess and passion.  They have neither the nimble vocabulary nor the sympathy with the masses that Schama demonstrates.

You know, when Ace Powell was still alive, we had conversations about such things.  That’s before he was captured, dried out and commodified.  He would have understood Simon Schama and his long sweeps of idea and theory, even from Ace’s John Birch point of view, which in Ace’s interpretation was a people’s movement.

Now I’m on the hunt for a copy of “Landscape and Memory,” either the book or the DVD.  On the face of it, these two words ought to be highly relevant to an understanding of Montana -- oh, why accept state boundaries?  Have a little scale!  Let’s say an understanding of the high continental eastslope prairie, at least as much as a human can manage.  

ENTROPY INCREASES EVERYWHERE, BUT LOVE BRINGS ALL BACK

In the mid-Seventies in Portland, Oregon, there was a column in the Portland Scribe, a “people’s newspaper” written and edited by people who walked in off the street (it was SE Hawthorne actually) who were seriously funky as well as gifted.  A regular column was “Entropy Increases Everywhere,” which is a fancy way of saying “things fall apart.”  This column was just like a blog, except on paper, and called attention in a vehement and uncensored way to all the ways things were disintegrating.  Eventually entropy ended the column.

But other things were forming.  When people challenge me to name them, I say, “Well, I can’t and I wouldn’t if I could, because some people look for new things in order to destroy them.”  They consider it weeding.  But there are always hidden things that grow into something new, for instance,  Willamette Weekly.

Among scary entropies, like the fall of tyrants, we are seeing the fall of the traditional labor union, the book store chains (how we hated them when they appeared), and the DVD.  I’m watching all of the latter as fast as I can before the tech world goes to streaming, which will mean I have to either go back to books or buy more electronic equipment.  At least I can stall until the cost of the equipment comes down.  What we now oppose to entropy is chaos theory, which relates to the time of onset of the pattern and predicts that even a small variation will reveal underlying patterns, maybe bringing them to the surface.  At least I think that’s what they’re saying.  Because I’m not very good at the math and data explanations.  What I like is a good story.

So I call it the “84 Charing Street Effect.”  Maybe you remember this luv of a movie -- and a book -- about a writer in Manhattan and a bookseller in London, who became close friends over decades, entirely without Facebook.  They were nothing alike: a rather abrasive and formidably educated Jewish woman and an equally educated but quite mild and orderly Englishman, who nevertheless enjoyed fiery females.  (His wife -- I’d forgotten she was played by Judi Dench, so achingly young -- was Irish.)  Nothing happens except a lot of mailing of books and a World War, but we become absorbed in the small changes that in time erase both of them plus that sort of bookstore.

I feel no grief over Borders going into bankruptcy, since it drove so many small indie bookstores to the wall.  To me the big chains have only been useful for buying magazines.  I might feel badly about Powells collapsing but in a sense Powells is already gone.  Or maybe not.

I make this paradoxical statement because to me the definitive Powells is in Chicago near the University of Chicago -- in fact, just down the street from where Meadville/Lombard Theological School used to be.  (It’s now sold to the University.)  That Powells is small but choice.  The mustached fellow on the ladder in the bookstore logo is Michael Powell, the founder of the whole empire, and the store was stocked according to his taste, which was quite like that of the 84 Charing Cross crowd, including many continental and English books on esoteric subjects.  The Portland branch, the one that is block-sized, was started by Michael’s father.  Here are two interviews: 

http://www.powells.com/info/presskit/inc_interview.html

http://www.powells.com/info/japan_mp_interview.html

Michael’s father just simply loved books.  In the beginning he sat at the counter and at least once when I took my stack up to the cash register, he looked me over and said,  “I think you are a reader.  I’m going to knock $5 off the total.”  Loving books was part of the secret, the synergy, ecology.  Michael’s U of Chicago degree was in politics, he loved people.  He really wanted to know what they were reading and why and he defended their right to read ANYTHING.  (Torture, porn -- shelved out of the way.)  He’s been a strong member of the ACLU in Portland, very active in all the liberal and arts activities as well as standard politics.  Michael moved there in 1979, my sophomore year at Meadville and U of Chicago.

But another strong factor in this was wildcat street intellectuals like the ones at the Portland Scribe.  Michael hired a “curator” for each knowledge category.  You could walk in, ask for who was managing the section on Native American literature and they would KNOW what the trends were, would have read each book, could tell you which were important and which were probably not worth your time.  These people worked for pennies because they loved the work.  In fact, there were lurkers among the shelves who would give you good advice for free.  Gradually, those people disappeared -- maybe starved to death.  Now the clerks want a union and a decent wage and health care.  That’s fine and I’m sure it’s right and deserved.  But it obscures the factors that are at the heart of the bookstore.  

Michael speaks of how J.K. Gill’s was the only new bookstore in town and how he decided to stock new books, although many were remainders.  Somehow now the new books seem to have mugged the used books by shifting attention in a way Helen Hanff would have mocked and scorned.  She was not interested in “newest,” she was interested in the most definitive and it takes time to find out which that is.  Not that we should all imitate Helen Hanff, particularly her addiction to cigarettes.  I mean, cigarettes have fallen by the wayside, too, haven’t they?  And they had ritual and charisma that many people miss, even those of us who never smoked but liked to watch people smoke in movies.  

I got distracted by mention of J.K. Gill’s.  The basement stocked craft supplies, glitter in little bins, carefully guarded by a dragon clerk so you wouldn’t spill or mix colors.  For ten cents, she’d make up a little envelope of red glitter so you could create a Valentine.  The basement was old and creaky.  Upstairs was new and trendy.  I liked the basement.  It’s been replaced by (ironically) “Michaels” where you can buy the same glitter, prepackaged for three dollars.

But the point of this wandering discussion was entropy and how it increases everywhere.  And the reciprocating point is that love, whether it is love of a subject, of ideas, of books, of bookstores, or of each other, underlies the deeper patterns that according to chaos theory gather it all up again whether or not those patterns are recognized.   So now, NOW, you know what?  I think a lot of those former Powell’s book clerks are blogging.  Skip the books -- straight to print.  Same love of subject and dialogue as in the letters of Helen Hanff. 

HOT POTATOES

When I heard the first breaking news about Scott Brown, I thought, “This will be a fascinating story for Tim and the boys of The Studio, survivors of sexual abuse.  It certainly shows that a man can have a miserable sexually-confused childhood and still succeed.  Good for him.  Then I began listening to the reaction of the media.

So far I note these reactions:

1. Surface sympathy.
2. Hints that Brown is telling this to sell his book, which is meant to get him re-elected.  (doesn’t matter what is said if you get name familiarity)
3.   Denial and skepticism  (how bad was it really?)
4.   Instructions for parents  (no matter that it was parents -- esp. fathers and step-fathers -- who inflicted the abuse)
5. Speculations on how this will affect the election
6. Hints about why he didn’t tell his wife and mother everything
7. Fantasies about intimacy with him
8. The feeling that they’d really rather be in a riot in an Arab country right about now.  It might be safer.  
9. The search is on for evidence that indicts Brown -- though he was a child at the time of the abuse

What they’ve found so far is that he posed nude for Cosmopolitan and that in his joking acceptance speech when he took office he said his daughters were “available,” probably meaning for dating but then picking up a second meaning as being pimped.  They are quite glamorous girls.  The real assumption is that “romance” is a path to money and prestige.  Very Jane Austen.

We’re having another Alfred Kinsey moment:  you’ll remember that Kinsey’s studies revealed that almost everyone masturbates (male or female) and many more men than anyone thought were having male-on-male experiences for a host of reasons.  What this information does -- and no one could deny his case histories and data -- is re-set all our “norming” mechanisms.  The norm appears to be Sarah Palin.  Welcome to “frat boy” world.  Looks are everything.  Sex is just a suck-up strategy.  Nothing is too gross or licentious.

Recently the labs who work with genetic analysis for medical and forensic purposes -- looking for mutant genes and possibly inheritable causes of disease -- began to realize they were seeing something they had never considered.   Their investigations of family shared genes showed that some of these perfectly respectable people were the products of incest.   Laws require that cases of incest be reported to the police.   What was the moral and legal obligation of the lab?  The incidents were in the past, but they were indubitable.  Some had consequences, genetic vulnerabilities, maybe the ones the scientists had been asked to find.  Who’s going to confront the family?

It was a little like those studies of animal genomes that reveal supposedly “paired for life” big birds were in fact, slipping around on the side.  And the disconcerting news that the fathers of many new chimps were not the big alpha male who dominated his group, but in fact some quiet but sly “beta” competitor who managed a quickie while the big boy was asleep.  Scientific studies reveal that in many species about ten per cent of males are sexually interested only in other males.  (I don’t know of any evidence about animals -- other than humans -- who sexually use juveniles.)  We used to think that animals were more virtuous than humans.

The prevalence of stories about transgressive sexual violence against juvenile or otherwise weakly defended individuals (females, handicapped, aged, mentally handicapped, the very poor) now amounts to a sea change.  Not just in war zones and the ghetto, but everywhere.  The newspaper is full of the stories.  But we are no longer very shocked.

I have left Rousseau.  I now think that human beings are naturally opportunistic, dominating, secretive, and predatory.  If this is our biological “norm,” then I think it is not the destructive who are deviant exceptions but rather the peaceful, the trustworthy, the honest, and productive.  

In our modern “enlightened,” commodity-based and sex-intensive society the nuclear family that was once thought to be protective -- well, it IS when it works! -- is now shattered by consecutive marriages (step-parents), drugs and alcohol, unwanted conception and pregnancies, constant modeling of violence, and economic chaos.  We accept what hadn’t seemed normal to us.  

On the other hand, beating children used to seem normal -- still does to some people -- but I can’t remember any adults in my childhood who were as  philosophically opposed as now to any physical contact, any harsh punishment, or intense scoldings.  In some circles we’re almost phobic.  And yet, the beatings continue.

Tim has been running a video project he calls “Show Me Your Life,” asking street kids to video-document how they survive, and some children faraway have done that, using handheld devices (possibly stolen) and cafe wireless hotspots.  He expected harsh images, but today he says he got a vid that made him look away.  This dimension of our times may be what the constant stream of dystopian movies and books are getting at, simply extending today's indicators.

So Massachusetts' Scott Brown is showing us his life, and can we handle it?  Hard to be more transparent than posing nude.  Admirable as his body is, this will not help to defend him against stigma.  Many people consider nudity a clear sign of sexual “availability” and still think that’s immoral.  Other cases are coming forward.  The Utah Brown 5, siblings who are classical musicians, have accused their father of abusing the three girls of the group.  There’s a story of a Mexican nanny who oppressed one of the girls she was hired to take care of.  These last are more typical since girls are the victims.  But the illusion that boys can resist and escape abuse makes them MORE vulnerable rather than less.  

In the Seventies I lived in a neighborhood overseen by an old Irish woman who sat on her front porch watching.  She stopped me one day to ask what I had seen and heard next door to me.  She said she had reason to believe that the boy over there was raping his sister.  I HAD heard scuffling and protests.  I had seen nothing that would be useful evidence.  Later it turned out that our neighborhood watcher was right.  I was ashamed, but should I have spied on purpose?

Later I had a job in a nursing home where I discovered one of the male nursing assistants was scaring a patient by throwing things around in her room and threatening to hit her.  I turned him in and he was fired.  Then so was I.  When teaching I suspected a boy in one of my classes was being molested.  I turned the case in and was fired.  We’d rather not know.  We’d rather pretend these things never happen.  Because if people like Scott Brown come along and TELL us, then we’ll have to do something about it.  Won’t we?  Or will we shrug?

GUNS

The American West was won by the industrial revolution: steamships bringing European refugees, steamboats inserting people and removing commodities from the heart of the continent, railroads uniting the continent, and guns.  Guns were handheld-small, but they wiped out the buffalo so that the starving original population could be subdued, confined and mostly eliminated.  Of course, one can shoot people as well as bison, and that’s been the crux of the argument ever since.

The remedy for shooting people has been the removal of all guns.  But the argument for keeping them, in Montana at least, has been hunting and protection.  We draw a distinction between handguns and long guns, but our long guns are not normally war guns.  Rather we tend to have big game rifles and waterfowl shotguns.  

The industrial revolution extended the powers of ordinary humans in both war and peace.  The hand-carried device that can eject a high-speed pellet, a gun, has become loaded with juju, the way a small piece of paper imprinted to be money becomes a symbol of power and control.  Those who wish to have the extra impact of being gun-carriers have a motto:  “guns don’t kill people -- people kill people.”   Quite so.  But they don’t follow through with that idea.

I don’t own a gun.  I had a little single-shot .22 once that I used to kill gophers (actually ground squirrels) to feed our pets (eagle and fox), but I left it behind somewhere because I was going to the city.  Nevertheless, when I was an animal control officer (specialized sheriff’s deputy), I was expected to qualify on a rifle range and did pretty well.  

When I was little, there was an automatic pistol in the house meant for protection.  It was WWII and guns were everywhere, on everyone’s minds, and that’s part of the reason that Westerns (gunslingers) were big when television arrived.  I handled that gun, didn’t shoot it, and was taught that all guns were loaded.  But as an adult my Marine veteran brother shot himself in the forearm with an “unloaded” gun.  

I recognize the beauty and history of guns.  Bob Scriver had an extensive collection of historic weapons, so I can recognize a Hawken, a big heavy buffalo shooting instrument so well balanced and designed that even I can hold it steady, or “Yellow Boy,” the Winchester .66.  I rubbed down the Colt Navy pistol kept on the bookshelf and the hand-made tiger-maple and brass Kentucky rifle a couple of locals created, inventing a small forge from a barbecue grill and a hair-dryer in order to cast the butt-plate and trigger guard.  In fact, I got impatient with the miniature “lodgepoles” of long guns precariously leaning in every corner, gathering dust unless there were aficionadoes who wanted to handle them.   

One of the intinerant traders who came through Browning all the time in those days showed us a special handgun he had acquired.  I’ve forgotten what it was exactly.  We were fond of this good-hearted man who was not at all violent and rejoiced to have produced a son late in life.  (Suppress jokes about being a “shooter.”)  When he got home with that handgun, he put it down briefly on his coffee table while he turned to his wife.  The toddler son saw the gun, picked it up, shot our friend in the chest.  He died.  Even a small child can be deadly with a loaded gun.

A gun is only an extension of human abilities and only effective as a mechanism if it is properly maintained.  Modern war movies show the soldiers “breaking down” their guns, cleaning and inspecting them, then reassembling them -- over and over until they know them intimately and have integrated them into their brains and reflexes.  We have seen sharp-shooters with their high-tech electronically augmented shooting machines that are kept in carefully foam-cushioned cases.  Therefore, we have to know that it takes a LOT of practice, the physiology of “Brad Pitt,” and a specific kind of temperament.  Those who are not just sharp-shooters but also assassins must be willing to accept orders and able to assimilate the morality of killing.  Probably family is not a good idea.  Maybe not any intimate relationships.

“If you fight with violence,”  Gene Sharp says, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”  Or crook.  Mr. Sharp is the thinker about non-violence who is said to be the guru of the Egyptian regime change.  There are those in our society who have discovered that “death by cop” is an exciting way to commit suicide, though the price for failure is pretty high.

But the reason I don’t own a gun is pure laziness.  I have no reason to get up early to shoot gophers, so I don’t need a long gun.  Beyond that, even a handgun means taking the time and making the effort to sight it in, clean it,  and practice enough to stay accurate.  

There are no children in this household and I don’t let visiting children out of my sight, though I can’t always control them.  It’s best to put a gun in a lockbox of some sort, better to separate it from ammunition.  If I were keeping a gun for self-defense, it would have to be quickly accessible, meaning where I could get at it fast, though to keep it from being stolen I probably ought to put it in a hidden spot.  Problematic when I can’t even remember where I put the book I was just reading.  That applies to the key of the lockbox as well.

In the end the bumper sticker is true but incomplete.  Even allowing for accidents, which inevitably happen, a gun is a mechanism that extends the power of human beings without either making them worse or better.  The worse the person the more evil (I locate evil in persons, not the devil.) is empowered.  We would want to prevent bad people from having guns, but bad people -- who are often evil because of their craving for control and power -- are exactly the ones who want to own guns.  Good people have better things to do, unless they are hunters.  I don’t object to responsible hunting though I've been accidentally shot at twice.

So in the end gun control is a matter of people-control, and we aren’t even close to understanding how to do that responsibly.  Clearly institutional religion is not the answer.  Training and other education is not the answer, though they help.  I think the answer is in a true understanding of what a human being is and can be.  How we achieve that is what’s up for discussion world-wide.  We’re in the midst of a tech revolution that moves power away from violence, though the management of money can kill far more people than guns or even bombs.  (By ignoring famine, disease.)  Tech revolutions don’t improve humans, but they are a means towards that end.  Then maybe we can tell what our devices are extending.

ONE GOOSE AT A TIME

FROM PAUL:

Won’t be long now, the geese will arrive, thought I heard some yesterday, but it was only exuberant chickens. Even before there’s any open water on the creek, they’ll be entertaining and serenading me as they crash land, slide and tumble on the ice, to scout out and lay claim to the choicest nesting area. I have to think these are the same geese or offspring that have been raised here over the years. What other reason would geese in their right mind wend their way through the mountains, looking for a beaver dammed creek in a country with huge lakes and two big, designated waterfowl refuges? I’ve always meant to compile statistics...when they first arrive every year and how many pairs start out nesting and how many are successful at raising a brood. I suspect they’re swallow-like and show up every year on or about the same day. 

Even when I’m expecting them, the first wild honks come as a surprise, like they snuck in overnight. Trying to count them is problematic too. If I go out there, it seems they all rise up at once to circle and eye me warily, but that’s deceptive because if they’re sitting eggs, there are still a bunch of geese in the grass and reeds, waiting until you almost step on them before bursting into flight, or come chasing after you with wings outspread and neck crooked forward, offering to take a piece of your hide.

Coyotes and other predators must take a lot of them but it never seems to much reduce the population, nor dampen their enthusiasm. My camera records sound, I ought to see if it’ll pick them up well and figure out how to send you a sound file. I’d like to get another one of the spring peepers and overlay them for a sound track I could use for a spring tonic in mid winter.

Paul is on the plush west side of the Rockies, surrounded by trees, where spring comes early and actually involves things we don’t see until early summer, but here’s something he could listen to if he doesn’t get to that recording project.

http://www.myspace.com/frankielainemusic/music   NO, not “Mule Train!”  “The Cry of the Wild Goose.”  That was my father’s theme song.  In fact, Paul is getting ready for a spring wanderjahr.

Not me.  After the wind blew everything into a tumble, it has snowed again.  Not a lot, so the cats don’t mind trotting out the cat path to inspect the back garage.  

But my winter wool socks are looking very hairy.  I decided early that knots in socks were not a good thing, so I just let the ends of the wool trail.  They don’t show when I have my shoes on in public.  For the same reason, I use up any bits of wool I have around.  I like sock darning.  It’s a pleasant way to keep my hands busy while I listen to the news.

Yesterday on the way back from the post office I picked up some good firewood and there’s lots in my own yard.  The wind is quiet enough to sit by my wood stove and burn sticks this afternoon.  Another pleasant thing to do, though there’s no radio out there.  No matter.  I like hearing the fire.

The other event on the way back from the post office was a Canada goose flying over, yelping, not much higher than the housetops!  Here I was scoffing at Paul.  But the calves and lambs are coming fast now.  And then there was a whole V of geese -- not a long, high one.  I think they were local geese, hatched here, who wintered over in Great Falls where the river is fast enough to stay open.  The real migrators fly way up high, only their voices falling down like rain.

One theory is that these big birds, remnants of dinosaurs, learned to migrate partly in response to seasons and partly because of the continents, borne on deep tectonic plates and driven apart by volcanic upwelling at the bottoms of oceans, kept trying to do what they had always done, even though the terrain changed and so now they are birds.

If you want to get all scared (and put off doing your homework) here’s something to worry about:

“The world can see total havoc if the solar flares continue to bombard the earth. According to some scientists and geologists, the Sun may be experiencing a 100,000 years cycle and bombarding the earth with massive solar wind. While the magnetosphere and earths internal dynamo is holding strong, a serious problem is being observed in the thermal and seismological readings of the earth’s tectonic plates.

“For the first time the tectonic plates of the earth are becoming vulnerable to these abnormal electromagnetic radiation from the Sun.

“There is some risk of the tectonic plates disintegrating by 2012. That will be catastrophic and the human civilization can disappear in a day or two.

“According to some tectonic plate observers, Indo-Australian plate is about to break apart near Sumatra. That will automatically produce ripple effects and many other plates will start cracking.

“The electromagnetic radiation from the Sun and the cosmic radiation jointly are causing major stresses in all fault areas of the tectonic plates. It is similar to making the plates in those weak spots brittle – a little shock of any kind will break them.”

(FROM A BLOG CALLED YEAR-2012)

Paul won’t be surprised:  he’s a “doomer,” raised in the shadow of nuclear holocaust.  Actually, total and instant destruction is not a problem because there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.  But disruption of what one expects and depends upon as daily infrastructure can be a heavy weight, a strong wind, an earthquake.  The realistic problem might be interference with our internet/satellite system or even our electrical grid.

So I keep my socks mended and trek to the post office every day to get my bills and second-hand books.  The windfall of sticks is welcome and if I can’t blog, well, I have a big stack of yellow legal pads.  Not to worry about publishing what I write -- publishing has already cratered.  Apocalypse comes in small increments.  It teaches us to fly.

CATABATIC NIGHTS

The cats and I generally get up for a while about three or three-thirty, an old habit that’s partly anatomical, partly defensive (checking the premises), partly accidental. a habit that means I watch the sun come up in midsummer but not in winter when I'm up, but not the sun.   Last night I rose quietly, and Squibbie, who sleeps in the front room in my extra reading chair, didn’t wake up.  After Crackers and I’d been back in bed for a while, the Squib suddenly woke up, missed her snack and used her favorite tactic to wake me up, which is slamming the bathroom door.   I’d left the computer lamp and a kitchen lamp on.  WHAM.  And the lights went out.  Huh?  ALL the lights everywhere were out -- the whole TOWN was dark, street-lights and all.  Squibbie looked proud.   The carbon mono detector was screaming because it’s dependent on electricity.   I pulled it out of the wall.

The stars were not extinguished.  The sky was clear, the moon was down, and there were a zillion jillion very bright stars.  After a bit of  breakfast, we went back to bed.  Finally we overslept and woke up in a snow squall.

Nassim Taleb fascinates my library friend, which means he forwards clips to me that I wouldn’t see otherwise.  Taleb is wrestling with the problem of how to survive black swan events, unforeseen developments that up-end everything.  Of course, that’s impossible because human consciousness is always based on a selection from reality rather than the reality itself, which is why we can never know “God.”  There is no safety because there is no escape from change.

But it seems worthy to keep pursuing what he calls the issue of “robustness” versus “fragility.”  He’s beginning with a financial context, of course, which is what he knows, and he has gone back to his Mediterranean roots for wisdom, which tells him to avoid Procrustes, those particular kinds of template for reality that exclude and distort reality to the point of destruction.  He’s trying to escape the mistaken interpretation of Darwin that defines “robustness” (survival) as being the most dominant, powerful, wealthy, etc. Clearly that is not only corrupting, but also unstable because it is uncontrollable.  The idea of "red tooth and claw” as a good thing only works in terms of violence.  When the terms move to nonviolent resistance, Egypt falls.

As a model of the robust, Taleb describes the sublime phenomenon of dining on fine foods with dear friends full of ideas.  The wine and food come from traditions as old as Mediterranean civilization and as human relationships.  We’re talking about the model of the Last Supper here.  I love it.  But if I sat down to eat with Taleb, I would be sent into diabetic shock.  The most fragile thing at the table is humans.  Fine dining is Procrustean, a product of “civilization” that defines it, thus limiting it.

Now back to my beginning.  The infrastructure in the prairie village of Valier is vulnerable.  We cannot afford to become dependent on electricity, our water system needs constant tending and upgrading, gas prices are volatile, roads and railways are easily interdicted, storage was toppled in the wind storm Saturday night.  Our very shelter was threatened as roofs were ripped off and trees were broken to drop on our cars.  The anemometers showed windspeeds up to 114 mph, 140, 160, and maybe above that but we don’t know because the instruments blew away.

We are robust, because we respond.  Sunday morning the chainsaws were snarling to clear streets so we could get to church.  The ladders were up so we could repair shingles.  The people were standing in knots to exchange news.  I’m sure the electricity was off this morning for the sake of repairs.  And the temp went high enough to strip away most of the snow.

When I first heard about catabatic winds, I talked about them so much that one of my students said he might throw up if I mentioned it one more time.  They are winds caused by warm Pacific air piling up against the west side of the Rockies and dropping moisture until they are light enough to cross the barrier.  Then on the east side the drier air is released in a torrent.  This means the trees, needing rain, grow on the west side while on the east side there is grass made accessible even in winter.  In years the pattern fails, the grazers starve.

Taleb forgets two things.  One is that we cannot escape Procrustes because there is always winnowing.  Extremes are what shape species by eliminating everything that no longer fits the niche, even if it’s not their fault because the niche has changed.  What was formerly an outlier at the edge of the most successful, can become the new center.  Since we have changed this “niche” we call a planet, we are bound to lose a lot of entities that used to fit.  We call them “species” and mourn their inevitable loss.  

The other overlooked fact is scale.  We tend to look at events in terms of life-times.   The last ten thousand years are what count to us.  Until we consider the dinosaurs, killed by Procrustean climate forces, while the scampering little mammals ran between the tines of death.  The Montana legislature had to pass a law that the history of Native Americans must be taught in the Montana schools, because otherwise the curriculum only went back two centuries, only the “anthropocene” in which we began to change the planet.  Then it jumped suddenly to dinosaurs, which have a reassuringly sci-fi aura.

We can’t stop time.  This planet is a constantly changing niche, writhing under the barrage of change coming from the star called Sol which is a fusion bomb that will exhaust itself.  We know this in a sci-fi way, but the actual fact doesn’t often make it into our template.   This little prairie village survives partly by adapting, partly by sacrifice, partly by knowing and partly by not-knowing.  The idea of God gives us some way of getting a connection to the overwhelming Shiva of creating/destroying reality, so the Valier churches are full.  But the people are often diabetic.  Sitting at that table may sicken them.

We have learned now that the really robust are the small, the particulate, the viral, the sidereal.  These are the thoughts one has when wakened at 3AM under whirling stars.  While the alarm screams.  And so one emails a close friend and co-writer.  This is what Tim Barrus says in answer:

My struggle now is how do you take a cogent awareness (rare) like this writing you do and then exemplify it in such a way as to put it into your work that says; yes, there is pain in the world and pain to life, and, yes, it can be far too short, life, your life, but if you are willing to pay the price, you can transcend the scripts culture hands you, and you can have the life you don't know you want; how (not why) does one put that into one's work where you transcend yourself simply in the reaching out to them. Not that you always connect. But you do the work and you do the reaching out, and an awful lot of it, certainly the sweat, is up to them, most of them are as sacred [a typo, but I love it] as the people whose lives they turn their backs on. I do not know this to be true but I think it might be true: perhaps years after you are gone from their lives, they will have moments when they remember and in that remembering, they will find small pieces of it that move them forward. It is the idea of moving forward that is actually quite complex because of its relationship to looking backward.

THE GREAT LOVER

The Great Lover

Rupert Brooke

I have been so great a lover: filled my days
So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise,
The pain, the calm, and the astonishment,
Desire illimitable, and silent content,
And all dear names men use, to cheat despair,
For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear
Our hearts at random down the dark of life.
Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife
Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far,
My night shall be remembered for a star
That outshone all the suns of all men's days.
Shall I not crown them with immortal praise
Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me
High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see
The inenarrable godhead of delight?
Love is a flame; we have beaconed the world's night.
A city: and we have built it, these and I.
An emperor: we have taught the world to die.
So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence,
And the high cause of Love's magnificence,
And to keep loyalties young, I'll write those names
Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames,
And set them as a banner, that men may know,
To dare the generations, burn, and blow
Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming...
These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year's ferns...
Dear names,
And thousand other throng to me! Royal flames;
Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the groud; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;
All these have been my loves. And these shall pass,
Whatever passes not, in the great hour,
Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power
To hold them with me through the gate of Death.
They'll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath,
Break the high bond we made, and sell Love's trust
And sacramented covenant to the dust.
- Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what's left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers...
But the best I've known
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains.

O dear my loves, O faithless, once again
This one last gift I give: that after men
Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed,
Praise you, "All these were lovely"; say "He loved".

BOOK AS DANCE

Book as dance -- NOT an object but a time-art.  This is a concept I’ve been pursuing for a while.  Bless Dave Lull, “the cross-pollinating librarian,” for sending me this quote this morning, just as I was about to embark on the rough seas of explanation.  The quote is from  http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/31_books_in_31_days_mark_athitakis_on_ander_monsons_vanishing_point/  (I don’t have anything against book critics per se -- just the idea that I have to agree with them.  In this case, we have a happy coincidence.)

“Truth is so unstable for Monson, in fact, that Vanishing Point is not only not a memoir but not a book as well––or, rather, not just a printed, permanent one. Monson’s website, www.otherelectricities.com, is an essential part of the experience of reading the book: Footnoted words are expanded upon online, to move the book beyond its status as an artifact and to reflect “flux, motion, synapses connecting and reconnecting and thinking exploding everywhere.” Even so, the old-fashioned text explodes in its own way. In “Exteriority” he pushes the text to the very edge of the page, removing the margins to show just how much they frame stories on paper. “Solipsism”––the essay that opens with those two pages of “Me”s––sprays out into sidebars, footnotes, and marginal digressions, the better to expose the performative act of writing.”

A book is not necessarily an artifact.  A PRINTED book is exactly that, whether a medieval Bible chained to a pulpit or a yellowed and flaking pulp paperback lost in a garaged box of debris.  AS ARTIFACT, a book has a lot to say.  I’ve often noted that Blackfeet will save a book, not on a shelf, but deep in a trunk, to protect it.  Bob Scriver used to keep his Masonic book wrapped in a silk scarf in his underwear drawer.  He never read it.  When I moved it aside to make room for clean underwear, he was very upset.  A codex as juju -- the magic of the form and not the content.

It has become fashionable to say, following the lead that may have started with the atom and the cell and now characterized by the algorithm and the genome, that a book is information.  It certainly is, if you are looking at the marks we translate into meaning.  It might be in another way, if you value facts above all else and are reading to find out “truth” -- which would explain why some people are so intent on knowing the “real facts.”  And it’s true that one of the shared characteristics of print on paper and electronically produced print is information -- the same words in the same order.  Audible books, read aloud from a printed page, are just another kind of information about the same immutable composition.

NOT “flux, motion, synapses connecting and reconnecting and thinking exploding everywhere.”  Though that happens if the composition evokes what it ought.

At the moment I’m creating a book that has no name yet.  It happens that my co-writer, Tim Barrus, writes poetry constantly.  If he could, he would rather dance but since his disintegrating bones prevent that, he dances his fingers through the music of thought, producing strong images.  Last summer he and one of his boys were diagnosed with AIDS dementia.  The HIV virus was in both their brains.  The boy, Tristan, who had been battered and compromised so much in his short but vivid life, died rather quickly after Tim took him apart from the others (to shield them as much as Tristan) to a sequestered and elemental shore where the two of them, plus their dogs, sat in blankets sipping cups of scotch while the sun went down.  In a while, Tristan didn’t know Tim’s name, but he recognized and craved the smell and feel of him right to the end.

As the days went by, Tim posted what he wrote and I downloaded each post.  When I read through them, I saw that it was an extraordinary record.  Not a memoir, not a novel, not even a poetry anthology, but shifting consciousness against -- this time -- the music of the sea which has always meant the mystery of life and death.  He added photos and videos, not possible in a codex, but this material could easily become that kind of “book,” so that’s what I’m doing.

As for himself, the virus in his brain is an inconvenience and means he’s a little different every day, but he makes his own “book” -- an art book in which he writes directly, draws, paints, leaves prints, folds in objects -- all things one can do to books between covers.  Tim is a very hands-on person.  Lucky for Tristan that much of his life has been using that characteristic in the physical care of children: feeding, washing, diapering, cradling.  He faced the facts of the situation by fly-fishing in streams that fed the ocean.  

With my temperament and education, I’m more interested in what one might call mental fly-fishing:  teasing the idea up out of the depths in something like devotion, reflection, attention.  My model is from preaching: that the sermon is something created by the interaction between preacher and listener, the thought-construct of one person reaching out to evoke thought-constructs in the listeners.  When I was circuit-riding, I used to preach each sermon four times in four towns and since the groups were small, I was in steady and individual eye-contact with each person.  Though each was clearly reacting in a unique way, in the best of times we were all caught up in the electricity of ideas, very much like the best of love-making, if you can accept the latter not being physical.  Can’t it be “virtual?”  (I accept the double meaning.)

I’m merely arranging Tim’s words, adding a few of my own, editing for clarity, in a way that is only possible after years of working together.  Last night Tim edited a post of mine about Djordji on our vlog called “Orpheus in the Catacombs” orpheus in the catacombs  http://orpheus-catacombs.tumblr.com which is meant to pique your interest in a manuscript about the just-past trajectory of the art school for boys at risk formerly called “Cinematheque Films” and now sequestered as “The Studio” to protect the boys.  

Tim has NEVER edited anything by me until now: he added information about Djordji that I didn’t have.  I welcome it.  Djordji wears a helmet because he pounds his head on walls when he’s frustrated.  There is no helmet to protect from AIDS dementia.  It does help to have the brain cells of sixty years of interaction with the world.  Tim is volcanic, artesian --  both fire and water coming from somewhere underground.

My belief is that a body is a codex, a way of accessing experience and even offering it to another as if holding out a hand in an invitation to dance, something that changes constantly, always meaningful even if not intentionally.  This kind of writing is not a “book” but it is possible in a “blog.”

WHAT IF THERE WERE BOOK CONCIERGES?

One of my most useful life “tools” is the simple reversal.  If someone seems unreasonable, I ask myself if I might be the one who is unreasonable.  If something won’t fit into the hole, I wonder whether I have the right end of the thing and turn it around.  If my story won’t work, I start with the ending.  Like that.

So I was thinking about writer’s agents.  An agent is supposed to be a scout and guide, who knows which publishing houses would like one’s work and how to present it to them in order to get the maximum money, with the reward of a percentage of that amount.  I don’t know much about the history of literary agents -- it would make a fascinating book.  I do know a bit about the sort of entrepreneurs who used to come by Scriver Studio with art in the trunks of their cars.  Somehow they had come to have a great deal of knowledge about the territory and had developed a pretty good eye, so they went around buying low and selling high, working their network.

Nowadays, they would simply summon one of the art auction websites to see what things are going for.  Since the art is only pictured, they would be dependent on name more than the actual quality of the canvas, state of the paint surface, deftness of the brush strokes and so on.  Something parallel seems to be happening in the context of books.  One goes by the the “platform” (which is sort of a cross between the genre and the reputation of the author) and the sales category:  young adults, mommies, political wonks, and so on.  (Vampires are still pretty big, but it’s unclear whether that’s the platform or the publishers.)  Memoirs are big, too, but if they’re not some new ethnic category, they tend to be indistinguishable.  What hard lives we all have!  Especially writers!!

It used to be that publishers had in-house editors, some of them designated to “acquire.”  The one who “acquired” my book about Bob Scriver,  “Bronze Inside and Out,” had a contract with the press to scout out a certain number of prospective manuscripts in a specific category:  important people in Alberta.  “Legacy” people.   It was an uneasy fit, but Bob did have quite a bit to do with Alberta, especially Calgary.

But these days publishers have books thrust upon them from all sides.  Since they have dismissed most of their editors, no one has time to “develop” manuscripts, so it has fallen upon the agents to continue to do their same editing jobs, except this time for a percentage of the author’s money instead of for a steady salary and a provided office.

A second chain of events has afflicted the book buyer.  The bookstores, esp. the Indies, are collapsing.  No more the pleasant experience of dropping by the bookstore while waiting for the kids’ ballet lesson or soccer practice to be over.  No more the clerk who has grown to know what you like to read, who will occasionally put a book aside so you’re the first one to see it, who will prompt you to consider something that only you would really appreciate.  Yet there are still people out there who like an array of books on their nightstands, even collections on shelves, maybe the works of a favorite author or an assortment on a particular subject.  The days of the Book-of-the-Month are over.  And dependable reviewers seem to be thin on the ground.

So here’s my reversal idea:  what about an agent for readers?  In fact, there ARE people who make a living by looking for paintings on behalf of clients.  They might take a finder’s fee, but that would be more appropriate if their client were the gallery, like the handling fee at an auction.  (It was only fifty years ago that the auction price was actually the price -- flat.)  What if one subscribed to what we might call a “readers’ concierge,” someone who would locate books you would like and then notify you, not necessarily buy the book for you unless you asked them to find and order something specific.  It’s pretty easy to find a book and buy it online.  One might be phobic about the process of using a computer.  It takes a little time, not to buy but to find.

A good book concierge might be one who nimbly moved among conventional publishing, ePublishing, self-publishing, print on demand (which could include books out of print), used books, local books (the ones that don’t even have an ISBN), unpublished manuscripts, audible books, and so on.  A person who did free lance writing might really appreciate some scouting for research in the more arcane and inaccessible places.  Research librarians used to do this but some technical fields are now pretty tough to negotiate.  Like everything else they are migrating from print journals to online discussions.

If a person were in a high density population, like a big city or a university town, it might be possible to drop by clients for tea and discussion.  Otherwise, contact would have to be a function of the “virtual city” online with the advantage of fitting the clients’ schedule, maybe at 3AM.

One might call this “guided distribution.”  It has been my experience that a great many readers are passive: they are sessile, waiting for good things to come in on the tide.  Others, of course, are nimble and seeking, and a few are like octopi, into everything, always prying at possibilities, maybe something forbidden.

My next question is how a book concierge would guide my books, esp. those written with Tim, into the hands of readers.  What readers are looking for the sorts of books we write?  We don’t confine ourselves to one sort of reader -- the very fact that we are so different from each other makes that clear.  But then, wouldn’t the sort of reader who would respond to our writing be people like us?  Doesn’t it take an octopus to enjoy reading about other octopi and maybe the occasional squid?  Maybe our dilemma is that we are rare and therefore it takes someone special to appreciate us.  I think I won’t reverse that idea right now.

In the meantime, this person is ALREADY a “book concierge!”  http://www.shelfari.com/o1516844670

JOHAN (JOHN) F. DORMAAR (1930 - 2011)

Lethbridge, Alberta, is a major city a little over a hundred miles north of Valier, where I am.  Between there and here is a row of small volcanic mountains, aligned along the border and called the Sweetgrass Hills.  That’s a misnomer: sweetgrass likes low swampy burned over places -- it is sweet pine that is meant.  The smell is very similar and so are the names in Blackfeet.  Some know it as balsam pine.  

Aside from being a good place to look for incense, the Sweetgrass Hills (if you don’t call them that you won’t be able to google them) were a favorite place among the Blackfeet for “getting a vision.”  One can still find the “vision beds” dream seekers made to mark the spots where they lay down to sing and fast until their consciousness touched something sacred.  Some want to de-sacralize the land, so they say,  “Oh, well, then show us the structures that prove anyone ever worshipped here!”  They are shocked to see photos of vision beds taken by Dr. Dormaar or possibly his friend Arlo Skari, who lives on this side of the Sweetgrass Hills.  It takes a lot of walking to find them, but they exist.

Hills on plains are always holy, special locations where the spirit is intensified, but  these particular hills are also “refugia,” meaning that they provided refuge for many species of plants and animals -- they say even earthworms -- that were otherwise scoured away by the repeated walls of ice called glaciers that came down from the north.  Even now they are refuges in summer when the prairie simmers in heat.  They are water-sheds that re-charge the ground so that the wells of the ranchers fill up.

Yet Johan Dormaar’s work was quite practical, the study of the impact of range grazing in a highly specific, technical and internationally useful way: not tirades against this or that practice, but developing techniques to study soil organic matter and the restoration of carbon -- matters of life and death on this planet.  He traced soil phosphorus, both organic and inorganic, as it cycled through the seasons.  

Since I belong to a number of academic listservs that study both environmental science and the philosophy about it, I’m aware of a huge body of literature of “place,” wherein people look at how land and people shape each other over time.  Nomadism may be part of this if the wandering is a pattern-cycle of return.  The ideas themselves can become a bit unmoored if they are not anchored by real experience on the land.  This Dr. Dormaar knew.  He walked the land, he got down on his knees in curiosity and gratitude.  After fifty years of scouting, the Boy Scout organization gave him their Silver Acorn Award.

The world was his vision, but he regarded it from Lethbridge, specifically the University of Lethbridge, a stunning “campus” built across the mouth of a coulee with a space at the bottom to keep it from becoming a dam.  Some say it was inspired by a striking long trestle bridge across another coulee,  marvel of early engineering.  The school has a concentration in the study of the people called in Canada Blackfoot rather than Blackfeet. 

I was so sad to hear of this death.  I corresponded with Dr. Dormaar a bit and sent him my story about a dream bed in the Sweetgrass Hills being put to use by a modern Blackfeet boy.  I was looking forward to meeting him some day.  He’s one of the extraordinary people who often live close to us and make major contributions to human thought, but so quietly that we don’t know about it.  This link is to what his fellow scientists noted about him:

http://www.science.ca/scientists/scientistprofile.php?pID=286&pg=3

I can’t go to the memorial service because of the border, since my passport has expired.  The world has become a more suspicious and narrow place recently.  I hope the cycle moves on through all this and back to an open border again.  In the meantime, I can offer these thoughts in a borderless way.  I smudge a bit of sweetgrass as I write.

Dr. Johan F. Dormaar Death Announcement

It is with sadness that we announce the death of  Johan Frederik Dormaar Ph.D., D.Sc.h.c., FCSSS of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada.  His body reached its highest level of entropy on Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at the age of 80 years.

Left to cherish his memory are his beloved children; Steve (Karen), Paul (Louise), Judi (Richard), grandchildren; Amanda, Andy, Jamie, Janelle, Nicholas, Peter, Sean, great grandchildren; Adrian, Logan, and brother Dr. Nicholas Dormaar.

Johan was born in a military hospital in Indonesia on February 16, 1930 under German occupation in the Netherlands.  He came to Canada in 1953 and to Lethbridge in 1962 where he lived the rest of his life.  His career was spent at the Agriculture Canada Research Centre.  As well, he was involved with the Archaeological societies of Lethbridge and Alberta, the Historical Society of Lethbridge, the Chinook Outdoor Club, Alpine Club of Canada, Glacier Mountaineering Society, Scouts Canada, the Lethbridge Science Fair and the Alberta Wildflower Survey.  He had deep pedological, geological and historical interest in the landscape of Southern Alberta with all its varieties from prairie to rivers, canyons, ridges and mountains.  With this background he was able to assist the Geoarchaeology and Geomorphology field courses at the University of Lethbridge.  Johan volunteered and spoke to many organizations and groups throughout the years.  When asked why he worked and volunteered so tirelessly in his retirement, Johan would state that when you retire, you get to spend your time doing all the things you love to do.  

Johan’s family would like to invite each and every one of you to his “Celebration of Life”.   This is taking place from 6-9pm on Saturday, February 19, 2011 at the Galt Museum, 502-1^st St. S., Lethbridge.  Open mic will begin at 6:30pm.  Please come and share your memories and enjoy all the people whose lives Johan touched.

For those of you who would like to contact the family here are our email addresses:

Steven Dormaar – sdormaar@gmail.com

Paul Dormaar – dormaar@shaw.ca

Judi Dormaar - jdormaar@telus.net