Testing oneself

This weekend we had aikido tests. There are five levels before black belt, and each test has a list of attack and defense techniques that must be demonstrated in order to pass. When there was just one school and one teacher, the teacher could see when you were ready and give you a black belt. Now, in order to minimize the differences between black belts from one school and another, we have standardized tests. (Same reason schools give standardized tests.)

We follow rules, take tests. In Zen monasteries, there are also rules to follow. Everyone is on the same schedule, following the same rules, keeping things moving in harmony. There are koans to pass, standards to keep.

Where are the rules in writing? Where are the tests, once we're out of school? Well, the obvious answer is, there aren't any, but if you look deeper, you'll see that there are, but we have to make them up ourselves, and everything we do, school, Zen training, martial arts training, is training for this moment, when we must follow the rules we set up for our own lives, writing and otherwise, and meet our own standards. Is it easier to follow someone else's rules? Easier to go to work every day, do the household chores, respond to the needs of others, than to practice every day, write every day?

Challenging, isn't it?

"You do not wait for fulfillment, but brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice but to call forth something yourself that ought to happen independently of you, and so long as you call it forth your hand will not open the right way.... Your hand does not burst open like the skin of a ripe fruit." From Zen in the Art of Archery.

Bitch Bitch Bitch

Bitch Book:
"When a man gives his opinion, he's a man; when a woman gives her opinion, she's a bitch." --Bette Davis
Bitch: What a woman gets called if she disappoints someone's expectations of perfect, enabling mommydom. Big Fat Bitch Book review.

Bitchin Doughnuts: That first cup of coffee is a big motivation for getting out of bed in the morning. But I try not to eat normal doughnuts for breakfast, much less the souped-up version: Caffeinated Doughnuts. Besides, I'd rather have that second cup.

Napkins, threats, butt prints, court-defined deviance and lame reading

-- Esquire Napkin Project: Esquire sends napkins to writers. Writers write stories on them and send them back.
-- Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk threatened.
-- Butt-print artist loses teaching job, hires ACLU.
-- Georgia teen imprisoned for oral sex with another teen.
-- Librarian or Media Specialist? Why is reading considered lame? (Who would choose the DVD of Bleak House, and who the book?)

We are all Armenian

"We have killed a man whose ideas we could not accept," Orhan Pamuk said, when he visited Hrant Dink's home and office on Sunday.

Hrant Dink was murdered for maintaining the truth of the Armenian genocide of 1915.

Meditation, Trance, Cooking & Writing to Music

What a friend calls "trancing out" -- when you listen to music while doing some repetitive task. It's not meditation. Meditation is focused. Focusing on the task at hand is not trancing out. Trancing out is escapist. The premise is that the task at hand is too boring for your entire attention. It's not really a trance; it's just doing more than one thing at a time. In meditation, the beginner focuses mainly on the breath, which can be considered boring, if you must think that way. Do you work on detailed tasks without trancing out? Does your mind wander when the task hits a repetitive point? That's the whole point of focusing on the breath, the simplest, most repetitive thing we do, while keeping the mind focused. Once you have the focus, you can have music playing and not trance out while you work, or write. The test is this: do you feel the same way with or without the music?

For me, cooking is a better example than writing. Cooking is a repetitive task which I find neutral-to-pleasant, although time-consuming. When I am cooking, I either remember to play music or I don't, but either way, I feel the same focus while washing and chopping veggies, and timing the addition of ingredients.

Some writers like to have music playing while they write. Many do not. I'm of the silence is best opinion, but I do occasionally play music while I write or revise. When it gets distracting it has to go. I don't usually listen to music while reading, either.

Best Friends; or, Kids are a Dog Substitute

It's pretty much the accepted wisdom among one's friends that if one is childless and has animals, the animals are child-substitutes. Actually, although there were parallels when he was a pup, since he was more dependent and needed training, my adult dog is more like a friend -- albeit one I have to feed daily and let outside to poop. We've been hiking, mountain biking, to the beach, the city, the pizzeria, etc. He's up for anything, even if it means sitting in the car waiting while I'm in the bookstore.

He does like to sniff books. I imagine he thinks I am into flat, rectangular sticks, while he prefers the conventional, long, round ones. Now that he's well past lap-size, he no longer inserts himself between my eyes and the page.

Click here for fun dog book. According to NPR, more U.S. households include dogs than kids.

Zen is about reality...like it or not

The fine art of letter writing seems to be lost on the Bush Administration. Bothering elderly citizens who exercise their freedom of speech is not exactly what we were hoping for but I guess we should expect it. Yahoo news.
Should we expect this too? PETA workers helping animals by killing them? What's ethical about that? Granted, these workers were acting on their own, killing animals randomly regardless of age or health, but I'd argue this kind of thing arises from a "kill with discretion" policy such as PETA advocates. Too subject to abuse to be justifiable. Read the article.

I'm indebted to Nan Shin ("Diary of A Zen Nun") for pointing out that when we do not like to look at things like this, and choose instead to look the other way, we wind up living somewhere next to our real life, rather than in it. (I apologize for the paraphrase.)

And finally: Tell us something we don't know. Daydreaming is brain's default setting.

Himself, Herself, Themself

I hate using him. I hate using him/her. I hate using her. I hate using them, but I'm going to try to get used to it because I think it makes the most sense.

"They/them" is not even a modern usage. It dates from the sixteenth century.

Vegetarians Who Don't Eat Rice May Save the Planet

After the "Meat and the Planet" article in the New York Times (Google it if it asks for registration), which explained that keeping cows contributes more to global warming than driving cars, we now have Plows, Plagues and Petroleum, by William Ruddiman, Princeton University Press, reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. Here is a quote from the review by Richard Hamblyn:

The really startling part of Ruddiman’s analysis comes when he looks at what happens to the climate whenever human activity is curtailed. Mysterious oscillations in the carbon signal over the past 2,000 years sent him “into the history books”, where he discovered that the steepest declines in the CO² record all occurred immediately after major plague pandemics, when population crashes saw significant areas of abandoned farmland revert back to new forest cover. The near-global Justinian Plague of 540–42 ad, for example, which killed an estimated 40 per cent of the populations of Europe and the Middle East, was followed by the first extended CO² minimum that appears in the recent ice-core record, while the subsequent plague-free interval from the 740s to the mid-1300s “correlates reasonably well with the rebound of the CO² trend”. Similarly, the Black Death of the late 1340s, which swept away at least a third of the European population, was followed by another sudden CO² decline that almost certainly played a part in the Little Ice Age, a 600-year cooling phase that began in the thirteenth century, and which ended with the introduction of modern coal-fired technology. If the Ruddiman Hypothesis is correct, it will add an entirely new dimension to our understanding of climate change, since it shows that rampant human activity has been capable not only of warming our world, but of cooling it down when it stops.

That's the book the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works should be reading. Not "State of Fear." Remember when SOF author Crichton testified that global warming was a hoax? That's Michael Crichton, science fiction author. The Republican congressman who called him, James Inhofe, from Oklahoma, must have been confused: In the phrase "science fiction," science is an adjective. It's FICTION about science, people. Or maybe they just think Americans will believe anybody whose name they hear often enough, no matter how stupid and short-sighted the testimony is.

God's Dietary Will?

Fascinating how eating and being vegetarian (or not) has been so heavily influenced by religion, and the belief that you are what you eat (eat meat to be like a lion? Really? What does cappuccino signify? That I'll be illustrating the Book of Hours soon?*). See Steven Shapin's review of The Bloodless Revolution by Tristram Stuart. I suppose it's mainly a reflection of the power the Catholic church used to have, that religion influenced every thought, from food to sex to work, etc. Now at our secular remove such religion-infused society seems a bit strange, but we use other authorities to condemn the same old sins, e.g., Obesity used to be condemned as Gluttony, and there were quite the number of required fasts.

*This is a joke. Capuchin monks are largely missionaries, who historically followed a very ascetic lifestyle. Don't know if they were also manuscript copyists. They were an offshoot of the Franciscans, whose second most famous member was William of Ockham (or, Occam), of Ockham's Razor fame. This principle of favoring the simplest solution also described the Franciscan lifestyle.

Cinema of the Spirit

Today I noticed the steeple of the Tinker Street Cinema. It used to be a church, which is apparent also from the windows on the sides (now boarded up). Probably not meant as a comment on the tendency of people nowadays to worship celebrities. They do show some very good films.

Diapering the Octopus

That is, trying to wrap up the waving loose ends of my novel without completely eviscerating the conflict, and without entertaining thoughts such as, "Is this an accurate reflection of what I want to say, my soul, my presence in the world, whatever?" and letting them derail the wrapping up process. First, does it work? Do I have something that makes sense, is interesting and does justice to my premise? Second, is this really what I wanted to say when I started this, and if not, is that a good thing?

I suppose this blog could be construed in two ways. Either I'm still buzzing with the energy of Nanowrimo month, or, I'm procrastinating about finishing the novel. I do sometimes procrastinate about finishing reading books I've really loved and don't want to end. I also wait before reading all of the author's other books, so as to save some for a rainy reading day. (Which is not likely to ever happen. I'd post my list of unread books that I already own, except that I could probably read one in the time that would take.)

One of Those Stories You Don't Quite Believe At First

Woman dies after water-drinking contest to win Wii. Because it seems like it might almost be a joke (it isn't), the first thing I thought of was W.C. Fields' famous quote about why he doesn't drink water. I'll let you go to Wikiquote to look it up yourself. Here's a different one: "Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people."