Eva Salutis Reads a Beautiful Piece

It was the second night of the Reading Series at UAA. There are writing workshops/classes going on this week, which is why all these writers are here. In the evenings the students share their teachers with the rest of us.




The evening began with Derick Burleson who teaches at UAF. (I posted all the bios in the previous post.) I'm afraid I didn't connect with him tonight - we were in different places.





But Eva Saulitis' piece worked for me in various ways. (And they even brought in a lamp tonight which really improved the lighting.)





First and foremost was how she wrote this. She took 13 stabs at starting her story about her trip to her ancestral home in Latvia. While she used a professional conference as the impetus for the trip, it was really to visit long lost family. Each time she started over, she covered a bit of the ground she'd hit in the previous takes, but from a slightly different angle. Blogging has highlighted the futility of telling any story and I appreciated her multi-story approach. There's so much to tell sometimes, so many layers of the same topic, each requiring its own telling. There isn't just one story. And through Saulutis' 13 little stories, she painted 13 layers, each revealing nuances that the others hadn't. And the stories, particularly the disparity between when her father signed up to fight for the Germans in WW II (1941) and when his brother was drafted (1944) was rich and poignant. And like much of her visit, many things were left unsaid.

The video has parts 12 and 13. (I was a little unsure of posting any of the video, but since they announced tonight that they are recording the whole series for podcasting later I figured it would be ok.)

John Keeble Starts UAA Summer Reading Series

UAA has over a week of readings by the authors every night (except Friday) starting last night and going through Tuesday, July 21. They're at 8pm which gives you time to eat and settled.

Last night we heard John Keeble - no we'd never heard of him before, but that is part of the fun, discovering new (for us) writers - reading from his new book Nocturnal America. We got excerpts from a longish (80 pages) short story, I think it was called Freeing the Fish. There's no one way to convey the story, you should have been there, as they say, but there were negotiations with Pakistani rebels, an uncomfortable scene where his wife is packing up the marriage, crosses on the lawn, and a budding relationship with the new neighbor.



When Keeble was done, there was a long pause as the audience waited to see if there was more. Then applause. Then it looked like Keeble and the audience waited in vain for someone to come up and say the normal thank you's and allow for questions from the audience. (To be fair, we were late because I didn't look carefully and we first went to the Art building where this event was last year, so I'm not sure what was all said in the introduction. We got there as Keeble came to the podium.)

I really don't understand why so many stages in Anchorage - Rasmuson Hall 101 and 110, the Arts Building rooms at UAA, Loussac's Marston Auditorium, the Museum's auditorium - all have such bad lighting for speakers/performers. The picture at the top is what it was like. I messed with the brightness on this second picture.

Then Keeble walked down from the stage and sat down. Only then did the faculty member stand up and wave the red program for the Series and invite people to come to the other sessions. And to buy books in the lobby.


People who complain about the cost of entertainment or the lack of entertainment in Anchorage,(neither of which is a valid complaint in most cases) well, here's over a week of live authors reading from their works, FREE!! It's at Rasmuson Hall at UAA (the 3 story green building connected to the sports center on the west end of campus) and after 7pm parking should be free. Better yet bike over in these great summer days we're having.

The website has a link to a pdf file with info on each night and all the speakers. That's way too much work for people, so I've just posted it all below. Most are people I don't know, but Willie Hensley will be presenting on Saturday night. Also, the website says through July 22, but the pdf file says July 21 is the last night.

Anyway, take advantage of having a university in town that does stuff like this.


From the UAA website on this:

Northern Renaissance Arts & Science Series
Summer 2009 MFA Evening Author Readings

All readings are FREE and open to the public and are organized and sponsored by UAA’s Creative Writing & Literary Arts Department, Low-Residency MFA Program.

NEW Location: UAA, Rasmuson Hall 101.

Time: 8:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

The UAA Campus Bookstore will showcase and sell books authored by MFA faculty, special guest writers, and suggested coursebooks during each of the (9) evening writer programs.

For more information, contact Kathleen Tarr, MFA Program Coordinator at 907-786-4394, or at afkt1@uaa.alaska.edu.

Monday, July 13 Derick Burleson
Derick Burleson is the author of two books of poems: Never Night (Marick Press, 2007) and Ejo: Poems, Rwanda 1991-94 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). His poems
have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among other journals. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, Burleson teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska—Fairbanks and lives in Two Rivers. He’s also an associate faculty member in the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA.


Eva Saulitis
Eva Saulitis has taught English and creative writing at the Kachemak Bay branch of Kenai Peninsula College, in Homer, Alaska, since 1999 and is also on the faculty of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. Trained initially as a marine biologist, she received her M.S. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1993. Since 1986, she has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Kenai Fjords and the Aleutian Islands and is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications. Dissatisfied with the objective language and rigid methodology of science, she turned to creative writing – poetry and the essay – to develop another language with which to address the natural world, receiving her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1996.

Her essay collection, Leaving Resurrection, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize, and was published by Boreal Books/Red Hen Press in 2008. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Carnet de Route, Seattle Review, Ice-Floe, Connotations and Kalliope. They have also appeared in several anthologies, including Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez; she has read essays she contributed to that volume on the PBS radio series Living on Earth. She’s been a recipient of fellowships from the Island Institute, the Alaska State Council on the Arts (Connie Boochever Fellowship) and the Rasumuson Foundation. In 2007, with the help of grants from Rasmuson Foundation and Ventspils House, an international center for writers and translators, she spent a month in Latvia, her parents’ birthplace, where she began a new book of lyric essays and completed a poetry collection entitled Many Ways to Say It.


Tuesday, July 14 Linda McCarriston
Linda McCarriston is the senior core faculty member and Professor of Poetry in UAA's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. Linda McCarriston has received two literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two from the Vermont State Council on the arts. A winner of the Grolier Prize and the Consuelo Ford Prize from Poetry, she was awarded the poetry fellowship at the Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute) at Harvard for 1992-1993, after which she was named Jenny McKean Moore Visiting Writer in Washington at the George Washington University.

Her poetry books include: Little River New & Selected Poems; Eva-Mary; and Talking Soft Dutch.

Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Ohio Review, the Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner ( where she has work forthcoming), New England Review (which also solicited her oft-reprinted essay "The Grace of Form: Class Un consciousness and an American Writer" for a special issue on Class and American Writers), ICE-FLOE: An International Journal of Poetry of the Far North, Calyx, Kalliope, Sojourner, Sojouners, TriQuarterly, Poetry Ireland, and many others. She has read at Berkeley, Poets' House in NYC, The Library of Congress, and countless other sites around the country, is a featured poet in Bill Moyers' latest PBS Poetry Series, The Language of Life (her tape, with Sandra McPherson: "The Field of Time"), and has been twice interviewed by Terry Gross for Public Radio's Fresh Air.

In addition to poetry readings "on the circuit," she's read and spoken in prisons, public schools, family shelters, women's centers, and such gatherings as the Alaska Governor's Summit on the Neglect and Abuse of Children, as well as been invited to represent the United States and the English Language at the 2004 Festival de las Lenguas, in Mexico City. One of fourteen poets from the Americas, she was honored for her expression of solidarity and compassion for Native American women in the poem "Indian Girls," which caused great controversy in Alaska. Other poems, including "Le Coursier de Jeanne D'Arc" and "God the Synecdoche in His Holy Land," have also generated political controversy. McCarriston has been invited to contribute to panels and speaking series on subjects including women's history, American education, censorship and self-censorship, and her poems and prose are anthologized across a wide range of subject areas.

She lives in Rockport, Massachusetts.


Josip Novokovich
Josip Novakovich moved from Croatia to the U.S. at the age of twenty. He wrote the Fiction Writers Workshop, and has published a novel, April Fool's Day (translated into ten languages), three story collections (Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust, Yolk, and Salvation and Other Disasters) and two collections of narrative essays. His work was anthologized in Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prize collection, and O. Henry Prize Stories. He has received the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Ingram Merrill Award, and an American Book Award, and he has been a writing fellow of the New York Public Library. He has taught at the University of Cincinnati, Bard, Penn State, and now Concordia University in Montreal. He lives in Warriors Mark, Pennsylvania.


Wednesday, July 15 Anne Caston
Anne Caston's first book, Flying Out With The Wounded, won the 1996 New York University Press Prize in Poetry. Her second collection, Judah's Lion, is now available in a second edition from Toad Hall Press (2009). Anne is currently at work on a third collection of poems, The Empress Of Longing, and a memoir, Deep Dixie: A Southern Woman's Take on Life, Love, Friendship, Romance, Faith, and Coming-of-Age Among Southern Baptists. Anne is core faculty in poetry in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Anchorage and divides her time between Alaska And Central Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband and two miscreant cats in Central Pennsylvania.


Rich Chiappone
Richard Chiappone received a BA in English at the university of Alaska Anchorage in 1991, and an MFA in creative writing there in 1994. He has published dozens of stories and essays in both commercial and literary magazines including Playboy, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Alaska Magazine, Missouri Review, Crescent Review, Sou’wester, New Virginia Review, ZYZZYVA and others. His collection of short stories “Water of an Undetermined Depth” was published in 2003. One of the stories in the collection, “Raccoon” was made into an award winning short film featured at international film festivals including Aspen, Montreal, Palm Springs and others. Chiappone lives in Anchor Point, Alaska, where he writes a newspaper column, teaches creative writing, and serves on the faculty of the annual Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference. He has won writing awards including an Alaska Press Club award, and the John W. Voelker Award for short fiction. Chiappone is also an associate faculty member in the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA.


Zack Rogow
Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of eighteen books or plays. His sixth book of poems, The Number before Infinity, was published by Scarlet Tanager Books in 2008. His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, from American Poetry Review to Zyzzyva. He is the editor of an anthology of U.S. poetry, The Face of Poetry, published by University of California Press in 2005. Currently he teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the California College of the Arts and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.


Thursday, July 16 (FREE PUBLIC CONCERT!) David Lynn Grimes An evening with Alaskan singer/songwriter, David Grimes
David Lynn Grimes is a bardic trickster, songteller and wandering fool who has howled with wolves, run from bears and cavorted with killer whales. In the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, David has been one of the primary citizen artists and activists working to protect and praise wild habitat for critters and human communities in Alaska's Prince William Sound and Copper River ecosystems. David's adoptive Eyak name—given by Chief Marie Smith Jones, last speaker of the Eyak language—is YaxadiliSayaxinh, which means "The Thinker" or more literally, "He who causes his mind to involuntarily roam in an indeterminate direction."


Friday, July 17
NO READINGS.


Saturday, July 18 Nancy Lord
Nancy Lord, Alaska’s current Writer Laureate, holds a liberal arts degree from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College. In addition to being an independent writer based in Homer, she fished commercially for many years and has, more recently, worked as a naturalist and historian on adventure cruise ships.

She is the author of three short fiction collections (most recently The Man Who Swam with Beavers, Coffee House Press, 2001) and three books of literary nonfiction (most recently Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths, Counterpoint Press, 2004.) A collection of essays/memoir, Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life, will be released by the University of Nebraska Press in September. She teaches part-time at the Kachemak Bay Branch of Kenai Peninsula College and in the low-residency graduate writing program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Her awards include fellowships from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and residencies at a number of artist communities. See www.nancylord.alaskawriters.com.

Willie Hensley
Willie Hensley’s memoir, Fifty Years from Tomorrow: A Memoir of Alaska and the Real People, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in December, 2008. In March of 2010, a Korean language version will be published in Korea.

In 1966, he spearheaded the formation of the Northwest Alaska Native Association which filed a claim to 40 million acres in that part of Alaska. He was instrumental in fighting for passage of the historic Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act of 1971, signed by President Richard Nixon. The act provided for payment of close to $1 billion to Alaska Natives and 44 million acres conveyed to corporations owned and controlled by Alaska Natives. He also spent eight years in the Alaska State Legislature, and has been in many top leadership positions in AFN. Though now retired, for 10 years, he represented the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company in Washington, D.C.

Willie Hensley received an honorary doctorate of law from University of Alaska in 1980. Hensley presently serves as Chairman of the First Alaskans Institute, providing leadership development, research and analysis to improve the Native community. He also serves as Chairman of the Alaska Manufacturing Extension Partnership; and sits on the Board of Trustees of Charter College. He and his wife Abbe have raised four children.

Sunday, July 19 Jo-Ann Mapson
Jo-Ann Mapson grew up in Southern California, attended Johnston College at the University of Redlands, and received her B.A. in English/Creative Writing at California State University Long Beach. In 1992, she received her MFA in Writing at Vermont College in Montpelier where she completed thesis projects in both poetry and fiction.

Her students include writers Joyce Weatherford (Heart of the Beast), Judith Ryan Hendricks (Bread Alone) and bestselling mystery and mainstream author Earlene Fowler (The Saddlemaker's Wife). Her awards include The California Short Story Award sponsored by Squaw Valley Community of Writers and she was a semi-finalist for the Barnes & Noble inaugural Discover Great New Writers Award. Two of her novels have been national bestsellers (The Wilder Sisters and Bad Girl Creek), and one was made into a movie for television (Blue Rodeo). Her stories, personal essays and poetry have been widely published and anthologized, most recently in Wild Moments: Adventures with Animals of the North. Several of her novels have been BookSense 76 picks. Her literary papers are being collected in Boston University's Twentieth Century Writers "The Jo-Ann Mapson Collection."

She is Assistant Professor on the core faculty of UAA’s Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she is completing a new novel.



Sunday, July 19 Ernestine Hayes
Ernestine Hayes is a member of the Wolf House of the Kaagwaantaan Clan of the Lingit [sic]. Her book, Blonde Indian, an Alaska Native Memoir, won a 2007 American book Award, was a HAIL (Honoring Alaska Indigenous Literature) recipient, and was a finalist for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize and the 2007 PEN Creative Non-Fiction Award. She is the author of other published work in fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction.

Ernestine's recent presentations include "Tlingit Literature" at the 2009 Tlingit Clan Conference, "The Negotiation of Identity in Alaska Native Transitional Generations" at the San Francisco American Anthropological Association Annual Conference, and "What Shall We Do with Our Histories?" at the International Polar Year in Nome. She was the 2009 featured writer for University of Alaska Southeast's journal, Tidal Echoes, where her poetry, nonfiction, and fiction appeared. She has recently had a short short published in BellaOnline Literary Review, and her creative essay "Winter in Lingit Aani Brings Magpies and Ravens" is scheduled for publication in Studies in American Literature in Fall 2009.

Grandmother of four, she is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alaska Southeast Juneau campus, and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA as an associate faculty member.


Monday, July 20 Judith Barrington
Judith Barrington is a memoirist and a poet. Her Lifesaving:A Memoir won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Her best-selling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art is enormously popular with writing groups, university programs, and individual memoirists. Her most recent poetry collection, Horses and the Human Soul was recently selected by the Oregon State Library for "150 Books for the Sesquicentennial" (from among books by Oregon writers, 1836 – 2009).

Her awards include the Andrés Berger Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dulwich Festival International Poetry Contest, and the Stewart H. Holbrook Award for outstanding contributions to Oregon's literary life. Judith grew up in England and moved to the United States in 1976. She has lived in Portland, Oregon since then, returning to Europe to give readings and workshops in England and Spain every year.

David Stevenson
David Stevenson is the director of the Creative Writing and Literary Arts Department and the Low-Residency MFA Program at UAA. He has been teaching creative writing for over twenty years at the University of Utah, University of California Davis, and at Western Illinois University where he was full professor and director of the Graduate Program in English. He first came to Alaska in 1977 on a ski mountaineering expedition to Mt. Kennedy, a remote peak near the Alaska-Yukon border in the St. Elias Range.

He was educated in the west at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington (BA ’78) and the University of Utah (Ph.D. ’94). He writes often about the mountaineering experience both in fiction and nonfiction prose and has published widely in journals such as Ascent, Alpinist, Isotope, and Weber Studies, as well as in The American Alpine Journal where he has been book review editor since 1996. In the late 1990s he spent several summers working for the US Forest Service in the Inyo National Forest (California). There, he was editor and lead writer for the “Eastern Sierra Scenic Byway,” a project that placed 23 interpretive kiosks along Highway 395; he also designed and wrote much of the “Restoration Ecology in the Mono Basin” exhibit for the Mono Lake Scenic Area Visitor Center. His short story, “Native,” won the Boulevard Award for Emerging Writers in 1999.

Recently he contributed to Contact: Mountain Climbing and Environmental Thinking, edited by Jeff McCarthy (University of Nevada Press 2008), edited a book length collection of student writing Practice: Twelve Stories and a Novella, and privately published a short folio of photographs of climbing in the Dolomites (Italy). His novel-in-progress, Forty Crows, is set in Mexico City in the early 1970s.

Sherry Simpson
Sherry Simpson is the author of two collections of essays, The Way Winter Comes, and The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Creative Nonfiction journal, Orion, Great Writers on the Great Outdoors, and In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction. She is the winner of the inaugural Chinook Prize and the Andres Berger award for nonfiction, and she was a Bakeless Scholar at Breadloaf Writers' Conference.

She is working on a book about people and bears for the University Press of Kansas. Simpson is the core faculty member in literary nonfiction in UAA's Low-Residency MFA Program. She also teaches for the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University


Tuesday, July 21 (final summer 2009 reading and art presentation) Margot Klass Frank Soos

Among Margo Klass’s influences are medieval altarpieces, and the work of constructionist Kurt Schwitters and architect Tadeo Ando. Her work has been exhibited by various galleries and museums in Maine and Alaska. In addition to work in private collections, she has work in the collections of the University of Alaska Museum of the North, the Anchorage Museum of Art and History, and Davistown Museum in Liberty, Maine. She is a 2008 recipient of a Rasmuson Foundation Artist Award.

Frank Soos has published two works of fiction: Early Yet, and Unified Field Theory, the 1997 winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and one book of essays, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite. His short essay responses to Margo Klass’s work represent a new and unexpected direction in his work.

Margo Klass and Frank Soos began their collaboration in 2002 and make their home in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Anchorage Bug Gunk Infestation

Aphid honeydew. Gunk. Particularly
under cottonwoods, there are large sticky wet spots.

If you stand under the true for a minute it feels like a very light drizzle. (One reason the close up picture below isn't better. I just couldn't stand under there for long. It wasn't just me, but my camera was getting dripped on.)

Here's a closer look of the sidewalk, gunking up. There are even bubbles.

And here are the culprits. (Double click any picture to enlarge it.) The best option I know (if you don't want to use poisons) is to wash the trees with a heavy spray of water everyday. The ones that are getting are deck sticky get sprayed. The others I leave alone.

Don Mitchell Revises the 'Palin-as-Public-Ethics-Champ' Story

With years as a politically active Alaskan and a week's worth of perspective on Palin's decision to resign, Don Mitchell offers a very plausible explanation the Governor's decision over at Alaska Dispatch.

There's a lot of interesting new story and interpretation here. Did you know that Palin was "reportedly livid" when Gov. Murkowski didn't appoint her to fill his vacant US Semate seat?

In December 2002 when Frank was sworn into office, Alaska's election law allowed Governor Murkowski to appoint Senator Murkowski's replacement. Sarah had enough juice to get on the long list of Republicans Frank interviewed. During her interview she came off as vapid and uninformed. But that's not how Sarah saw it. Several weeks later Frank astounded Alaskans by giving his Senate seat to his daughter, Lisa, who had never been publicly mentioned as a candidate for the seat and who had not been interviewed. Sarah, a 38-year-old former small town mayor who had never won a statewide election, reportedly was livid and reportedly never fully forgave Frank, because in her self-absorption she was certain that she should have been the obvious choice.

But most interesting to me was his rewriting of the story of Sarah Palin, ethicist for the people.

Mitchell talks about how she was appointed as the public member of the Oil and Gas Commission, even though she had no experience at all in oil and gas. He also points out how the position didn't require such expertise at the time, though that has since been changed.

Within weeks of her arrival at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah knew she was drowning. That she had no understanding of, and no interest in, the Commission's highly technical work. And not only that, but, like every state employee, she was expected to be at work five mornings a week. To get to the Commission's office in Anchorage required an hour commute from Wasilla that during the winter she had to make by driving in the pitch dark down an icy, moose-strewn highway. [Moose-strewn? A little color for the Outside readers?]

So according to people who knew her at the time, soon after she arrived at the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Sarah began searching for a face-saving excuse to quit a job she never should have been given.

She picked up on an issue raised by Ethan Burkowitz during the confirmation hearing of another Oil and Gas Commission member - Republican Party Chair Rudy Ruedrich. Berkowitz had asked how a party chair could ethically regulate people he would, as party chair, be asking money from?

For several months thereafter Oil and Gas Conservation Commissioner Palin, who also served as the Commission's ethics officer, had no ethical problem with Randy Ruedrich serving as a Commissioner. But then she suddenly had a huge, and very public, problem when the news leaked that during his workday Ruedrich had been using his office computer to conduct Alaska Republican Party business.

The year previous when she had been a candidate in the Republican primary election for the party's nomination for Lieutenant Governor, Sarah not only had used her computer in the Wasilla mayor's office for campaign purposes, she had used it to communicate about the progress of her campaign with Randy Ruedrich. But now she not only expressed outrage about Ruedrich's ethical lapse, she had the brazen temerity to file an ethics complaint against him. And then in a public fit of professed pique, in January 2004 she quit the Commission because, since the Attorney General's investigation of Ruedrich's violation of the Alaska Ethics Act was ongoing, she was precluded from publicly discussing what she knew about it. As Sarah went out of her way to tell the Anchorage Daily News, the state's largest newspaper: "I'm forced to withhold information from Alaskans, and that goes against what I believe in as a public servant."

There's a lot more in Mitchell's post. I can neither confirm nor dispute Mitchell's factual characterizations. But I think they add a lot more information to the public discussion of who Sarah Palin is. Eventually, with enough accounts, we will be able to sort through them, find which facts seem to stick and which seem to lack substance. Eventually we'll get a clearer picture of the phenomenon of Sarah Palin.

Mitchell's track record as, among other things, the most comprehensive chronicler of the history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (and volume 2) gives him more credibility than most.

Jehova[h]'s Witnesses and a Bumper Sticker Get Me Thinking

I was just wearing my running shorts when the doorbell rang. It's warm in Anchorage now. An attractive blond Jehovah Witness with another woman and a young girl were at the door. She read me a passage from her bible and asked if I'd ever worried all the terrible problems on earth? I said no. She said something about the truth of God's word and I should read the bible. I asked if she'd ever read the Koran. She said she has the Truth in the bible. I said that Muslims said the same thing about the Koran. She said she understood that people could get to God through different paths and she was tolerant of that. But, I responded, you claim your bible to be the the only true bible, so you are actually saying the Koran is wrong. She continued smiling nicely - she had really good teeth - and asked if she could leave something with me. So now I have this booklet. She may come back to see if I have further questions.

So here's the cover of the booklet I got.

(I found the Black version of the picture when I went online for the booklet.)


Then, when I went for my run, I passed this bumper sticker. Apparently God gives directions, but doesn't wash cars.



The booklet has a simple progression through an explanation of the future perfect world that is coming and why, if God can give us this perfect world, he didn't do that from the beginning.

In answer to question 1, yes God does care. (You can get all the details yourself online, but it doesn't have all the same pictures. I'll get to that.) After mentioning war and ethnic strife including the Holocaust, it tells us:

Thus, many people cannot understand why a good God would allow bad things to happen. They question whether he really cares about us or whether he exists at all. And many of them feel that suffering will always be a part of human existence. [source] [Note: after putting links to each of the separate webpages for each quote, I realized they were all going back to page 1 of the booklet. You have to click the arrows yourself to move along.]

HOWEVER,

millions of people worldwide have a totally different view. They foresee a marvelous future for mankind. They say that right here on earth there will soon be a world completely free from wickedness and suffering. They are confident that what is bad will soon be cleared away and an entirely new world established. They even say that the foundation of this new world is being laid right now!

These people believe that the new world will be free from war, cruelty, crime, injustice, and poverty. It will be a world without sickness, sorrow, tears, and even death. At that time people will grow to perfection and live forever in happiness in an earthly paradise. Why, those who have died will even be resurrected and have the opportunity to live forever! [source]

Cool, right? But why should I believe it?

Is this view of the future just a dream, just wishful thinking? No, not at all. It is founded on a solidly based faith that this incoming Paradise is inevitable. (Hebrews 11:1) Why are they so sure? Because the almighty Creator of the universe has promised it.

They anticipated my next question:

However, if God's purpose was to establish an earthly paradise free from suffering, why did he permit bad things to happen in the first place? Why did he wait six thousand years until now to correct what is wrong? [source]

But is that six thousand years from the beginning of the earth? Oh dear. I guess that's when they think Adam and Eve were created. And since everything was created in a week, I guess that's what that means.

How can we know there's a God? is the longest section. It asks us to:

apply this well-established principle: What is made requires a maker. The more complicated the thing made, the more capable the maker must be.

For example, look around your home. Tables, chairs, desks, beds, pots, pans, plates, and other eating utensils all require a maker, as do walls, floors, and ceilings. Yet, those things are comparatively simple to make. Since simple things require a maker, is it not logical that complex things require an even more intelligent maker? [source]

It then goes on to point out the complexity of a cell and the even greater complexity of the solar system and the earth and, of course, they couldn't simply happen.

It has an atmosphere with just the right mixture of gases so we can breathe and be protected from damaging radiation from space. It also has the vital water and soil needed to grow food.

Without all those factors, and others, working together, life would be impossible. Was all of that an accident? Science News says: "It seems as if such particular and precise conditions could hardly have arisen at random." No, they could not. They involved purposeful design by a superb Designer. [source]

Fortunately, today we have Google to look up quotes out of context. Since the booklet didn't cite the exact source, I took the quote and googled. One of the hits said it was August 1974, p. 124. Their online editions don't go back that far, but I have access to the UAA library system. So you probably have to give a password for this last link. Actually all Anchorage residents with a library card - and maybe everyone else - through the interlibrary link has such access through Loussac.

Here's what that article says in context:

It rejects handing the question over to theodicy which "justifies the ways of God in the minds of humans." Great phrase there. "But most cosmologists are not willing to take the cop-out route." Ouch! The best quote they could get was one that says their method is a cop-out. But, hey, how many people are going to look this up?

I'll just give you the synopsis from here on. You can read it yourself if you want the details.

So after all this maker stuff - I did have a really good class as an undergraduate student where we covered in excruciating detail what you need to have life, and just before the final it all fell into place for me and I understood how life could have happened without a maker, so I'm not impressed. Some things do happen randomly - like a cloud shaped like a dragon, or a rock that is perfectly round. And evolution, over many, many years, can work to select those qualities that gain an edge on survival. Makers aren't needed for everything.

Anyway, they then ask "So why did God let people suffer all this time?" This answer gets good. See, God gave humans free will because God made humans in his own image and God has free will. But not completely. There are rules. And Adam and Eve (it didn't take long), exercising their free will, violated the rules and lost the perfect life than God had created for them. And God, in his wisdom, realized that with free will, people had to see for themselves. So he waited all this time to make sure they got the message that humans trying to rule themselves really screw it up.

In this 20th century alone, we have seen the systematic murder of millions during the Holocaust and the slaughter of over 100 million in wars. In our time countless numbers of people have been tortured, murdered, and imprisoned because of intolerance and political differences. [source]

And he waited this long to be sure that there would be no doubt. Of course all this was prophesied. 1914 - the beginning of WW I was when the new era began. All predicted. The flu pandemic of the 1920's, AIDS, etc.

It also mentions that humans were not the only rebels. Satan led a band of angels in rebellion too.

So we're already at Part 8 about God's Purpose Moving to Fulfillment.

With all rulership independent of God taken out of the way, God's Kingdom rule over the earth will be complete. And because the Kingdom rules from heaven, it can never be corrupted by humans. Governing power will be where it was in the first place, in heaven, with God. And since God's rule will control all the earth, no longer will anybody be misled by false religions or unsatisfactory human philosophies and political theories. None of those things will be allowed to exist. [source] [I just realized that all these links go to the first page of this booklet and you have to click arrows to move through it on your own.]

Part 10 describes the wondrous new world coming up.

Thus, there will be no more murder, violence, rape, robbery, or any other crime. No one will have to suffer because of the wicked deeds of others.

Will it not be thrilling to wake up each morning and realize that you now enjoy vibrant health? Will it not be gratifying for elderly persons to know that they have been restored to the full vigor of youth and will achieve the perfection that Adam and Eve originally enjoyed? The Bible's promise is: "Let his flesh become fresher than in youth; let him return to the days of his youthful vigor." (Job 33:25) What a delight it will be to throw away those eyeglasses, hearing aids, crutches, wheelchairs, and medicines! Hospitals, doctors, and dentists will never again be needed.

Persons who enjoy such vibrant health will not want to die. And they will not have to, for mankind will no longer be in the grip of inherited imperfection and death.

Whoa. In the reform Jewish High Holy Day services there comes a point when we are asked: "If you were offered the chance of living forever, on the condition that no new babies would be born, who would take it?" I always understood that to mean that there is a cycle to life, and that earth would run out of room if everyone was immortal. So new life would have to end. Maybe I misinterpreted that.

Not only will people not die,

Great will be the joy earth wide when group after group of dead persons come back to life to join their loved ones! No longer will there be obituary columns to bring sadness to the survivors.

You think there's a housing shortage now, wait until that happens. But I'm lacking proper faith in God's ability to provide for us all. Maybe I missed something in Physics when they talked about the expanding universe.

But forget hamburgers and steaks. Everyone will be a vegetarian:

"The wolf will actually reside for a while with the male lamb, and with the kid the leopard itself will lie down, and the calf and the maned young lion and the well-fed animal all together; and a mere little boy will be leader over them." Never again will the animals be a threat to man or to themselves. Even "the lion will eat straw just like the bull."

And gourmet straw for people too?

But free will won't be part of this paradise.

Then the destructive ideas of human rule will be replaced by the upbuilding teaching that comes from God. "All your sons will be persons taught by Jehovah." (Isaiah 54:13) With this wholesome instruction year after year, "the earth will certainly be filled with the knowledge of Jehovah as the waters are covering the very sea." (Isaiah 11:9) People will no more learn what is bad, but "righteousness is what the inhabitants of the productive land will certainly learn." (Isaiah 26:9) Upbuilding thoughts and actions will be the order of the day.—Acts 17:31; Philippians 4:8.

Thus, there will be no more murder, violence, rape, robbery, or any other crime. No one will have to suffer because of the wicked deeds of others. Proverbs 10:30 says: "As for the righteous one, to time indefinite he will not be caused to stagger; but as for the wicked ones, they will not keep residing on the earth."

I'm sorry, I'm missing something in the logic. If God is going to rule from Heaven and people will no longer be able to freely choose the wrong path, why didn't he do this in the first place? I know we covered that question above. It was to prove to people that they can't rule as well as God. But why did that have to be proven? If everyone had been living in a blissful paradise from the beginning, everyone would have been happy. OK, there was Satan and the evil angels, but God didn't need to create them and let them loose on earth. They are working hard to answer these questions in this booklet, but it doesn't quite follow right for me. But, if you buy into it the next section tells you how to join up. Go visit your nearest Jehovah's Witness Hall.


So with all this in my head while I was running, I began to think about the kind of religion that starts off by punishing people who choose knowledge. (It was the fruit of the tree of knowledge that got Adam and Eve kicked out of paradise.) Throughout history, those in power have restricted access to information and power. The Chinese created a writing system that required that you have a teacher. Not just to learn phonetics, but to learn every individual character, each of which represent words. While phonetic alphabets were easier, for a long time, only the anointed had access to books. And even today, governments conceal information from the people. We aren't worthy, we can't understand.

But I'm beginning to see at least one source of resentment toward those with knowledge. It's biblical. It was the reason we were cast out of the Garden of Eden in the first place. And questioning, rebelling, are all evil for we should be obedient to the word of God. The Jehovah's Witness booklet tells us that again when it talks about who will be allowed into this paradise:

By choosing God's rule, they qualify to be put on the "right hand" of Christ as he separates "the sheep" from "the goats." In his prophecy about the last days, Jesus foretold: "All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another, just as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will put the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left." The sheep are humble people who associate with and support Christ's brothers, submitting to God's rule. The goats are stubborn people who reject Christ's brothers and do nothing to support God's rule.

My head is spinning. People believe this? Why not? It simply tells those who are unhappy that all they have to do is believe in God's will and they will experience heaven on earth forever. It's like buying a lottery ticket. It's hope. And in this lottery, if the story is true, everyone with a ticket wins. You don't have to think. You just have to follow. And man's thinking, as has been pointed out in the booklet, has led to all our suffering. Man's bad choices have done it all. So just let someone else tell you what to do.

And if you grow up with everyone around you believing this, this is your given. I hope my Witness comes back to check up on me. I've got lots of questions for her now.

The Four R's - Rendition, Rosencrantz and Guilderstern..., Rent, The Reader

We found our way back to Blockbusters. We'd been away so long that I found three movies just in the R section and then J got another one when she took those back.

We liked Rendition and The Reader a lot. Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead we probably need to get again when we aren't so sleepy. I think Tom Stoppard is one of, if not, the best playwright alive. I first became aware of him when I saw a fantastic university production of Arcadia, then began to see he'd been involved in other things I liked, such as Shakespeare in Love. But his work requires a clear head. There's lots of very cerebral humor and we just weren't up for it. Need to go back and reread Hamlet before watching it again.

Rendition was both a tight dramatic adventure movie with good actors - Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, and a great cast of Arabic actors as well - that also talked to an important issue of our day - secret prison camps and torture and kidnapping. While the Cheney types keep talking about the lives that are saved through torture, they never discuss the innocents who are needlessly tortured based on some minor suspicion, who eventually offer confirmation of the whatever the interrogators want to hear, leading to more innocent suspects. I also liked that the Arabs in the movie spoke Arabic with subtitles instead of dumbing it all down to English. In the world, not everyone speaks English, and certainly not when they are talking among themselves. The US is far away from non-English speaking countries (except Mexico). So most Americans see non-Americans on television and in movies, where they usually speak English. It's important to have movies portray them speaking their own languages. Movies have a powerful effect on how we understand the world. Even if we know intellectualy that they don't really speak English, we know, viscerally, from the movies, that they do.

The ending was disappointingly Hollywood. Unless they can show me where a CIA officer felt sorry for a captive and helped him escape, I think sweetening the end for American audiences almost ruins the movie. Making all the loose ends in the length of a movie isn't an easy task. The best movies manage to do it. I wasn't completely satisfied, but it kept my attention all the way through. I'm sure there is an ideological divide among viewers. This is clearly an anti-Bush policy movie and those who think fighting terrorism is the most important thing in the world will not be happy with this movie. There was also an interesting documentary on rendition and prison camps also on the DVD.

The Reader raises all sorts of questions. Here, the characters are almost all German, but the cast isn't. They do have German accents though and I'm sure it was much more accessible being in English. (I've already discussed the issue recently of acting cross-culturally in a post on the play Man in the Attic - which also took place in Germany.) The Reader based on a 1995 German novel Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink. While the focus of attention on this movie has been on the Holocaust, it also raises issues about sexuality that I think are even more interesting. I say this only because the Holocaust seems to be covered so much. While sexuality is everywhere in our culture, it isn't usually dealt with frankly and realistically. In this case, a 15 year old boy is seduced by a woman 21 years his senior. By the end of the movie it is clear that this relationship has seriously damaged him emotionally and he's been unable communicate seriously with anyone.

Lots of men probably have the same symptoms from various causes. I've always wondered whether early sex with an older partner is ALWAYS the negative that we assume. Can an older person introduce sex in a positive way to a younger one? I suspect the difference in ages is relevant, that 15 is probably on the young end of the scale, but that each person is different. Clearly its lasting effects in this story are permanent debilitating scars. But, and this is a big but, how much of the scarring was due simply to the short affair and how much to the fact that the boy, later, as a law student in a small course on the Holocaust, attends the trial of - and he didn't know this in advance - his former lover who is convicted of murdering Jews as a Nazi concentration camp guard. Would he have gotten over the affair if it weren't for the second half? I know there are people who say that any sort of relationship like this is bad, and it clearly is for many if not most. But I don't know what research exists that looks at those who had such relationships and went on to have happy and healthy lives.

Anyway, a good, serious movie with no sweetened endings.


Rent. We made it through the whole movie, but we kept looking at each other and with a look that said, "Why was this a big hit?" Maybe those folks in the 20 - 40 range could relate better to all the issues brought up about relationships and compromises, but that's told a million different ways. This one just didn't connect.

Warm and Smokey

Warm days - into the high 70s/low 80s - and smoke from wildfires all around the State. Worked in the yard and cleaning out the garage the last couple of days. Trying to make room for summer visitors in the house. More room in the garage means I can move things out there on their way to finding new homes.





Here's a picture of the same view, on a normal, clear day, but without any telephoto. This is much more common. It feels a bit like Chiang Mai with warm air and haze.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

This post is better if you have the music from the video on in the background.



We just lost our girlfriend governor. You know, the "hottest Governor in the country" that we've had this rocky relationship with. It started out pretty good. She stood up against Frank and said ethics was the most important thing in life. And we'd never had ethics before and we loved it.

But then John caught her eye, dangling before her much more than we had to give. She was flirting with states all over the country, humiliating us. But when they dumped her, we took her back. It was hard to see her with all those others, but damn it she was "hot!" and she was our governor, no one else's, even if she was so high maintenance.

But now she's made it official. She broke up with us on Friday. She doesn't like ethics with us any more. It seems it didn't just get boring, she's started to hate it. When she was in charge, she loved it. But now that we decided that we wanted to call the ethics shots, she's no longer into it.

And while she told us it was over and she was going to her secret hiding place, she must have her cell phone, because all these other guys are suddenly over at her place and they're as love struck as we once were. She's teasing them. Yesterday they each got to make out with her for ten minutes on the beach, and then she went on to the next guy.


Sorry, different metaphors keep trying out for the role of explaining Sarah Palin. Today, I've been taken over by the high school metaphor. Let's try a variation on this theme.

OK, I graduated high school before Palin was born and I'm sure things are different now. But when I was in high school, there were different cliques.

The soshes (from social) were the 'in' crowd. The beautiful people of high school, they defined what was cool and not. (Has 'cool' been in all this time, or did it go away for a while and come back?) Even among the soshes there were rival cliques. They had minor differences, but they all wore the right clothes, drove the right cars, hung out at the right places, and dated the right people. The cheerleaders (Title IX wasn't even an idea then) and the football players were the inner circle.

Then there were various others castes. The nerdy people were smart, but hopelessly dressed, socially inept, and a bunch of loners. Some soshes used the smarts from time to time for help with homework and exams (and helping them gave the nerds the illusion of temporary coolness), but the in crowd laughed at them behind their backs and sometimes, if necessary, would humiliate them in public.

And then there were others who simply didn't count at all. They weren't well dressed, they weren't cool, and they weren't even smart.

I can't help seeing Palin as one of the soshes. Popularity is the most important thing. The image has to be maintained - cool clothes, being with the right people, doing the cool things. Basically looking good. Going to class is a social event and homework is so boring. She'd been a sosh in Wasilla, but when she moved to Juneau, it was like changing schools and she had to work her way in.

She used some of the nerds to come up with AGIA. They realized she wasn't too smart, but she was beautiful. They loved it when she walked around with them, holding their hands, leaning up against them, as they walked past their usually untouchable rivals the oil team. The team had been busted for gambling with the legislature and were temporarily on probation.

But when John, that college guy, caught Palin's eye, all bets were off. She quickly tried to act college. But she was out of her league. But when they wanted her to be a pit bull - hell that was easy, it was her natural behavior and hiding behind a facade of nice was so tiring. Well, that relationship didn't work out, but a lot of other college guys started panting after this hot high school chick.

But for a while, she came back to finish high school. But it wasn't any fun any more. She even stopped going to class at the end of this last semester to hang out with some college guys. And those nerdy chicks with the blogs started getting brazen and telling people that she wasn't pretty without all that make up, and who was buying her clothes, and they put up posters all over school every time she dallied with another guy. Who are these bitches?! But no matter what she said, they wouldn't leave her alone.

And so now she's announced that in her sophomore year, she's dropping out. I don't need you guys, I'm bored with you. I don't need to do my homework, the college guys like me just the way I am.

Deciding Which Public Information to Release

If you want to see the maturity of Alaskan bloggers, go look at Henkimaa's post "The 2 Million Dollar Meme." Mel writes a term paper on the Palin claim that $2 million has been spent on dealing with 'frivolous' ethics complaints. Mel pulls together ADN stories as well as posts from various blogs (yes, full disclosure, even this blog) which have covered the Personnel Review Board's report that only $300,000 has been spent on these, 2/3 of which was for Troopergate which Palin filed against herself. Mel posts a variety of charts.

Palin's counterclaim is that she's counting the cost of all the time others besides the Personnel Review Board spent. One line from a new ADN article from Sean Cockerham Mel quoted caught my eye:

It is a per-hour calculation that the Palin administration put together, involving time spent by state lawyers deciding which public information to release as a result of all public records requests, time spent by governor's office staffers responding to media inquiries about ethics complaints, and time technicians spend on retrieving requested e-mail, among other things.

This isn't in quotes in the article, so I'm not sure Palin actually said this or Sean has worded it this way, but as I understand it, no one should be deciding which public information to release. ALL public information should be released.

Palin is also quoted as saying she didn't take the filings personally, she's just concerned with all the money it's costing. Yeah right! This just doesn't square with how often and how emotionally she's mentioned it. Why was this mentioned, say, in her resignation speech? On the other hand, I have said that some of the complaints are pushing the line of what we consider acceptable. For instance, all politicians use their offices as stepping stones to higher office and campaign while in office. And for an Alaskan, physically so far away from DC, more time is required. But, ethics review offices, such as the Municipal Board of Ethics, have a pre-screening process with which they screen out 'frivolous' filings. It doesn't take that much time. I think she's taking her cue from the hate-radio guys - never back down from anything you say. She said two million and she's going to go with that no matter the contrary evidence.

Anyway, check out Henkimaa for one of the most indepth Alaskan blogger reports. As I say, this is a professionally prepared report on the topic. (OK, I said term paper above, but my grad students' term papers were often as good or better than reports the government pays for.)

McNamara and Palin - Wrong Stories

Robert McNamara died today at age 93. Lots of others are covering this story. I want to pull out a quote played today on NPR from the movie Fog of War.

"We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War, not what they saw it as - a civil war. We were wrong."

McNamara was usually characterized as a 'technocrat.' Over 30 years ago, management scholars Blake and Mouton developed their managerial grid where they identified two characteristics of managers - people orientation and task (production) orientation. McNamara came to the Department of Defense in the Kennedy administration from the Ford Motor Company, clearly a task oriented person. He had a Harvard education and had through his task orientation and mastery of details, done great things for Ford.

I would argue that Palin tends to be more of a people oriented person and mastery of the technical details of getting the job done are not her strength.

I think though that there is another issue that caused failure for both - they both used their skills to push the wrong story.

McNamara told us that his story going into the Vietnam war was "The Cold War" but it should have been "Civil War."

In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war. [also from NPR]

I think that Palin's problems too, are based on a story that is at odds with most people in the US. It's a story, apparently, based on a strong belief in a fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity. It's based on relatively sheltered life with a small set of family and friends and experiences which never seriously challenged her story. Combine this then with her people orientation - which values loyalty (taking care of your own and expecting them to stand with you) - and a weakness with details and analysis of complex issues.

So, it is understandable when Palin is startled by the animosity towards her and it might explain her vitriol in attacking those who challenge her. But I think that while many of the issues that have been raised against Palin are petty, the real issue is the antipathy to Palin's story. Perhaps one day, an enlightened Palin, like a more enlightened McNamara, will say something like:

"I saw good and evil as established by Fundamentalist Christianity, not as they saw it as defined by the Constitution of the United States. I was wrong."