Personal
Personal reflections, comments about things I've been doing, etc.
Spring Email Inbox Cleaning
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/16/2010 - 08:58Everyday, I struggle to get through the constant stream of incoming emails. Last year, I received over 13,500 emails that I never got a chance to read. So far, this year, I’ve managed to keep my inbox close to zero. To do this, I scan some emails quite quickly. Generally, I try to delete those that don’t need saving, and filing the rest to appropriate files. Some emails get left in the inbox as something I need to respond to or write about, and some even get flagged for special attention.
Yet even with that, there are a lot of emails that should get special attention, that I am just unlikely to get to. This month, there are currently 111 read emails in my inbox that deserve some sort of attention. 43 have been specially flagged. There are 188 emails in my inbox from last month, with 86 of them specially flagged. Many are things that I want to highlight on my blog or perhaps work up a story on, yet many will not get their full stories.
So, it is time for spring cleaning. This blog post will note some of the things that I’m watching, but may never get a chance to explore as closely as I would like.
A Light Blogging Weekend
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/14/2010 - 16:52Perhaps it is the weather, we’ve had lots of wind and rain over the past couple days. Perhaps it is from grieving the death of Dave Roberson. Perhaps, some of it is fighting some sort of cold; I’ve been tired, achy and congested. Whatever it is, I’ve been very low energy and haven’t managed to do as much blogging over this weekend as I otherwise would have. On top of that, my internet connection has been particularly slow this weekend, so I haven’t been able to visit as many other blogs as I would like.
We will see what the coming week is like. I’m supposed to speak to two different groups about using Drupal. I’m supposed to go to a planning meeting. I should try to make it to the Board of Education meeting and of course, Wednesday is St. Patrick’s Day. Next weekend, is the rescheduled Hebron Maple Festival, a memorial service and a speaking engagement.
So, the list of blog stories waiting to be written continues to grow. More later.
RIP: Greenwich DTC Chair and friend, Dave Roberson
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 03/12/2010 - 13:05“In the end, we all die alone”. Last November, Greenwich Democratic Town Committee Chair Dave Roberson started off his tribute to his recently deceased father challenging this view. He spoke about those who cared for his father in his final hour and he spoke of his belief in that “great cloud of witnesses” that Saint Paul talks about.
Monday, Dave challenged that view again. The newspaper reports talked about a witness who saw Dave’s car veer off the road as he suffered an apparent heart attack. They talked about the EMTs that pulled Dave from the wreckage and tried in vain to save his life. They did not talk about the angels or the great cloud of witnesses that I am sure God sent to be with Dave as he moved from this world to the next. Perhaps some of my sleeplessness Monday night was not due to the stresses in my own life, but my spirit longing to be near an old friend as he moved on as well.
Dave had a lot of friends in politics. He was a cheerful, dedicated, hard worker. As I think about his life and the crowds that will gather to memorialize it, I remember a scene from the movie Norma Rae. In it, Reuben Warshowsky, a union organizer, talks about his own father’s death and those that came to the funeral
On October 4, 1970, my grandfather, Isaac Abraham Warshowsky, aged eighty-seven, died in his sleep in New York City. On the following Friday morning, his funeral was held. My mother and father attended, my two uncles from Brooklyn attended, my Aunt Minnie came up from Florida. Also present were eight hundred and sixty-two members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and Cloth, Hat and Cap Makers' Union. Also members of his family. In death as in life, they stood at his side. They had fought battles with him, bound the wounds of battle with him, had earned bread together and had broken it together. When they spoke, they spoke in one voice, and they were heard. They were black, they were white, they were Irish, they were Polish, they were Catholic, they were Jews, they were one. That's what a union is: one.
That is also what we, the friends of Dave Roberson are: one. We became his friend through politics, through church, or many other activities. We might not all share the same religious beliefs or political beliefs, but we share an important kinship, or friendship with Dave Roberson and hopefully that will spur all of us on, to work for a better country and a better world.
I will miss Dave.
Note: For those of you who have not seen Dave’s tribute to his father, I am including it below the fold.
Juxtaposing Blog Posts and Museum Exhibitions: A Deconstruction of a Family Trip to the Whitney Biennial
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/04/2010 - 10:13”Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow.” Said Mrs. Ramsay. “But you’ll have to be up with the lark,” she added.
Miranda is home from college for winter break. Not completely home, she’s staying at her mother’s house, and she has her own life now. She’s studying art and would rather spend time having lunch with gallery owners in New York than dinner with her dad and his family in Connecticut. Of course the best of all worlds might be if she could go museum hopping with Fiona, Kim and I in New York.
Kim had to work, but we decided to take Fiona out of school for the day. She has been longing to see her half-sister and a trip to the Whitney Biennial could be a great educational experience. Unlike Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’, I did not expect Miranda to be up with the lark, and we planned a late morning train.
What a lark! What a plunge! My thoughts shifted to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. I discovered Virginia Woolf in my college days and fell in love with her writing. She captures a world from a viewpoint so different than I had developed growing up on a small farm in Western Massachusetts and that diversity of viewpoints I found so intriguing. Slowly, I grew out of my fascination for the outsiders that Hermann Hesse portrayed to the crazy older men of other great literature. What did Mr. Ramsay struggle with as he tried to get beyond ‘R’? What opium induced visions did Augustus Carmichael see as he shuffled past Mrs. Ramsay, reminding her of the inadequacy of human relationships.
Some one had blundered.
As I thought of these characters, various idealists from Anton Chekhov’s plays came to mind. Marcel Proust joined the fray and the opening line, For a long time I used to go to bed early comes to mind. Fiona went to bed early before the great trip to the museum, and my thoughts mingled together into strange dreamlike sequences as I drifted off that night.
The train ride in was uneventful. Fiona was full of excitement about seeing her big sister. Miranda was full of excitement about seeing the Biennial. I settled into my role of the crazy old uncle. I had thought about titling my blog post something like, “Having a Crazy Uncle for a Dad”. As we talked, I asked Fiona what she thought ‘art’ was. I explained that it sounds like a very simple question, but really, it is very complicated. She admitted it was complicated and started talking about things that are painted. I asked if a painted house, car, or mailbox is art. As we talked, Fiona decided that everything was art and moved on to other topics.
Is this blog post art? How does it compare to the video of people talking about America projected on to the cracked windshield of a 1960s era ambulance? What is the purpose of art? Miranda was less interested in those installations that were making some sort of political statement. If she were older and more cynical, I could hear her deriding anything except art for art’s sake. Yet what is the ‘sake’ of ‘art’? Towards the end of the exhibit, we looked at a painting by Mark Rothko and Miranda talked about how he resisted his work being called abstract and berated using words like ‘juxtaposed’ to describe it. We joked about so many of those little write-ups on the walls using words like juxtaposed and deconstructed. I remember the old joke about people who can’t do, teach, and wandered if something similar applied to these art write-ups. Those who can’t do art, write little descriptions for the walls of museums.
At one point during the visit, I glanced out of one of the rare windows in the Whitney to the scene outside. I remembered the old homeless man that Miranda and I had seen dumpster diving at Grand Central. What is art? What is its purpose? What do we learn by juxtaposing the homeless man against the Whitney?
More immediately, what am I doing here, writing my blog post about going to the Whitney with two of my daughters? How do blogs fit into the greater picture? Where does other technology fit in?
For me, perhaps some of it comes back to the crazy old men who look at life a little bit different. Perhaps I’m becoming one of them. Perhaps, I might even cause someone else to stop, if even just for a moment, and look at life a little bit differently. I know that my experience at the Whitney has caused me to look around a little more closely, and I hope it has had a similar effect for my daughters, as well as for others that visit it.
Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit, Lion and Lamb
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/01/2010 - 11:45The wind was strong last night and I did not sleep well. It was March, coming in like a lion. The weather forecast for the next couple of days calls for rain and snow, but the sun is shining right now.
March seems like a turbulent month, as winter passes to spring and new growth comes. It seems like a particularly good month to start off with the childhood invocation for good luck, “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit”. Perhaps this turbulence and luck will come through for people starting new jobs, looking for new jobs, or simply for exciting new projects. Perhaps the turbulence and luck will come to people as they rebuild their lives after earthquakes or personal traumas.
There are so many things I need to write about, but many of them take a bit of time and so I’ll go through my normal start of day, start of week and start of month activities, and hopefully have more to show a little later.
