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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Archive for January, 2010

Mister Montaigne

Been re-reading Montaigne.  Devouring him, in fact.  Among other things, it is bracing to read 430-year-old essays and be reminded that human inconsistency is ever consistent.

COOP on the Radio

Weekdays at 12:30 p.m. CST from now until February 12, Jim Fleming will be reading Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Chapter A Day.”  Jim has a wonderful reading voice (I have learned he is a favorite of rural mail carriers) and you can listen to a live stream of the reading right here.

Missed a segment?  The five most recent chapters are available here: http://wpr.org/webcasting/audioarchives_display.cfm?Code=cad&repeats=no

IHalloween

Came across a photo from last Halloween.  A certain number of you will recognize my costume.  The block on my head was actually the same red as the rest of the costume but the flash made it look pale.

Fire and EMS for Real(ity)

Quite a bit of first responder training lately*, and even a call or two.  With every year (20 of’em now, if my math is right), I grow more grateful that I wandered into the firefighting/EMS world.  I cherish the camaraderie, I cherish the shared language, I cherish the action, I cherish the privilege of being able to get in there and do our best to help, and above all I love how carrying a pager keeps me centered on the idea that each and every one of us is a mortal vulnerable being, so breathe deep…

*Yes, I hear you, you blue-shirted wisenheimers chuckling about me showing up at the wrong class in the wrong place…(inside joke).

Both Backwards

As you know I publicly track my authorial errors with an Oops! tag.  Therefore I enjoyed this entry on Terry Teachout’s blog, especially since a few sharp-eyed readers have noticed that the image on the hardcover of Truck: A Love Story is similarly reversed.  The Pops biography is terrific, by the way.  It was one of those books I parsed out so as not to devour it all at once.  Teachout is especially thought-provoking when addressing Armstrong’s lifelong navigation between artistic endeavor and the primary duty of entertaining the folks in the seats.  Armstrong took the second half of that equation very seriously, and I think Teachout has done him a fine posthumous service in suggesting that the two need not be mutually exclusive, and – perhaps even more to the point – those who would make it so are engaging in a bit of the ol’ hoity-toit.

Singing on Sunday

For reasons I’ve written about at length in other places, I call myself a bumbling agnostic.  But I love to sing hymns.  So I resonated with this quote from a longer article on Brian Eno:

“I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.”

I think he is right on about the loss of ego.  And he uses one of my most cherished words: transcendance.

Miscellaneous Law Enforcement Tips

Talked to a retired sheriff’s deputy last night.  He says the key to successfully breaking up a bar brawl is to turn the siren on about a mile out and slow down so everyone has plenty of time to clear out…