A Driving Force Behind Keeping the Classics Relevant

This is an article about Amy Thomas Elder, who runs the Odyssey Project for the Illinois Humanities Council. This program provides college level classes that focus on the humanities for free to low-income people.
When I heard about the Odyssey Project, I wanted to write a freelance article about it. I called and left a message, and I got a call back from Amy. She said “We need volunteers, are you in or out?” Not a lot of fooling around. So, I said “I’m in” and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
I learned a lot and hope that I helped others do the same.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/life/ct-tribu-remarkable-elder-20130127,0,4397907.story

Modern Works — “Life” by Keith Richards

Life by Keith Richards
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll are what you would expect from a Keith Richards autobiography, but there are also lessons on music, knife fighting, and even a recipe for bangers and mash.

Richards writes about how the Rolling Stones got started and how they wrote their songs. In the ge of the Internet and auto-tuning, I am not sure that their path could be followed exactly, but the principles and methods he describe could probably be applied to all sorts of music.

Making music is Richards’s first love. (Incidentally, that ”s’ is correct according to Strunk and White.) He describes the joy he feels in making music with a band, and it just sounds like the kind of thing that you want to try — even if you are not musical.

As a non-musician, the other thing that this book gave me was a new appreciation for Rolling Stones songs. When Richards describes how Charlie Watts does not always play all four beats on a high hat or how Richards plugged a cassette recorder into an extension speaker and then put a microphone in front of the speaker to get more depth, you just can’t listen to the songs in the same way.

In addition to all of this Keith Richards’s life story holds its own interest. For instance, he loved being a Boy Scout. Compulsory military service ended just at the right time, so he never went in the army, though he speculates on what would have happened if he had. His first job application was to be an ad man. And he had a scary run-in after falling out of a palm tree (though the story was blown up to mythic proportions, it is the kind of thing that could happen to any of us).

The other interesting thing is how Keith Richards and Bruce Lee had a similar philosophy. Both of them approached their arts as a means of expressing themselves, and that ability, that development of skill to express themselves is in large part what drove them. I am not sure what this means entirely, but it is something that is worth thinking about in more depth.

I woudl recommend this book to Rolling Stones fans, musicians and people who want to start a band, and people interested in music history.

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How I Got a Gun License – Freedom Isn’t Free

As I follow the on-going gun debate in this country, one unspoken assumption seems to be that anyone can buy a gun anywhere at any time. Although the recent mass shootings show that bad people can get guns legally, as part of finding the middle ground, I want to explain what I had to do to get my license.

We all have rights, but those rights need to be earned. “Freedom isn’t free” is a popular catch phrase, and I think that is true when it comes to responsible gun ownership. State law says that the chief of police in each town grants the license. While this certainly has the potential for abuse, I think that the rules here are a good starting point.

First, I had to have no criminal record, be over 21, and not have been treated for mental illness, drug addiction, or alcoholism. I also must not have any protection orders or outstanding arrest warrants. This is common sense stuff, and I agree with it.

Second, I needed to submit a letter detailing the reasons I wanted a gun license. That’s pretty reasonable. I was advised to use that language that I wanted a license ‘for all lawful purposes’ so as not to exclude anything, but I also detailed the reasons in my earlier post. That was reasonable both to me and the police department. I highly doubt that the shooters from Tucson and Aurora ever submitted a letter like this. It is also a way to open a line of communication to demonstrate that you know your rights, and understand your responsibilities.

Third, I had to prove my citizenship and residency. Again, these are both reasonable requirements as I am exercising the rights of a citizen in a particular place.

Four, I needed to prove that I completed an approved firearms safety course taught by a certified instructor, approved by the Colonel of the State Police. An approved safety course should be mandatory for everyone wanting to own a gun. If anyone thinks this is unreasonable, then I doubt we will ever find common ground. If you want to drive a car, then you take a driving course. It should be the same with guns. My course covered safety rules, loading and unloading guns, cleaning them, gun laws, and we even talked about teaching children what to do if they see a gun. Having it approved by the Colonel of the State Police means that standards are in place. The Nation Rifle Association’s course meets those standards.

If I wanted a ‘target shooting only’ license, then I needed to belong to a gun club. I joined a gun club anyway because I wanted a place to practice. To join the gun club, I had to attend another safety class and then demonstrate safe gun handling on a firing range.

Five, I had to submit two letters of reference from people saying I would be a safe and responsible gun owner. I think that if this requirement had been in place where the mass shooters bought their guns, then the United States might have had three or four fewer massacres. Really, if you cannot find two people to say you aren’t crazy, then you probably should not have access to guns.

Six, we had to go through background checks and interviews with detectives at the police department. Again, this was another way to check people out to ensure they are okay to own guns. The detectives that interviewed me were professional, friendly, and most importantly struck me as fair people. You need to pass a driver’s test with a qualified instructor, so an interview is not a hassle.

What I hope to show by this is that even though the process was a little long, it was not impossible or unreasonable. It makes sense to have a safety class, a background check, and letters of reference. I think these things could have helped prevent tragedies. Note that in Colorado, there was one gun club that did not grant a shooter membership. Unfortunately, he already had his guns.

At the same time, I had two safety classes, a range test, a background check, and multiple interviews. I have earned my right to own firearms. I should keep that right unless I abuse it or do something wrong. The idea that it is all or nothing is unacceptable to me and should be to any reasonable person.

Why I Own Guns

This blog is about reading great books, but there is another conversation going on right now, and I feel like there is something missing from it. I will continue talking about the books, but will add a few other thoughs into the mix.

Since the mass shootings at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, there has been a lot of talk about gun control. The discussion has devolved into two irrational camps shouting at each other.

On the pro-gun control side, the argument is that guns are only for killing people and have no place in private hands. On the anti-gun control side, the argument is that people need to own guns for self-defense, fighting foreign invaders, or defending against a tyranny imposed by our own government.

These arguments do not represent me, and I don’t think they take into account most gun owners in the United States. So, I want to talk about why I own guns to maybe add something to the discussion that has been unheard.
In my house, right now, we own two .22 caliber, bolt-action rifles. One was left to me by my grandfather, and the other I bought for my wife. We own these guns because we wanted to take part in summer biathlons and be able to practice outside of races.

For those who don’t know, the summer biathlon combines running and shooting. The winter biathlon combines cross country skiing and shooting. It is an exciting sport to watch and participate in because it is a race determined both by speed and skill.

In the summer biathlon, I run an 800-meter course, and come into the shooting range. There I have 5 shots to hit five targets at 50 meters. If lying prone, the targets are the size of a silver dollar. If standing, they are the size of a compact disk. The targets are steel knock-down targets, so when they are hit, they flip from black to white. The competitor knows instantly if they have hit or missed. For every miss, before you start the next 800 meter run, you have to run a 100-meter penalty loop. It pays to run fast, but it also pays to shoot well. There are five loops plus penalty laps from four shooting stages.

This sport is a wonderful challenge because you run as fast as you can, and then you need to calm your breathing and heartbeat and take your best shots. It is a test of physical fitness and your ability to center yourself.
While doing this sport, I have met a lot of wonderful people who are concerned about two primary things: safety and fun. Before every event, there is a safety lecture. The two rules are nobody gets shot and everyone has fun. The people are interested in helping one another learn a new sport and get better at it. They are not gun nuts, they are athletes.

I have also had the good fortune to be on the summer biathlon course with an Olympic athlete from the winter biathlon. This is not because I am so good. It is because the sport is democratic enough that Olympians will come by local competitions.

My wife and I tried biathlon because she had seen it at Salt Lake City Olympics. We had borrowed guns from the host club for our first event. In the car on the way home she said to me, “We have to get rifles. We need to practice.”

So we got licenses and bought her a rifle.

Since then we have joined a gun club to target shoot to prepare for the summer events. We’d like to do the winter biathlon at some point as well. We have also talked about doing just target shooting events. The sport of target shooting develops discipline and self-control, traits that can carry over into other parts of your life, and the practice of maintaining your equipment, your guns, further improves that discipline.

I am not alone. There are a lot of gun owners like me out there: people concerned with sporting and personal excellence. But we are left out of the gun debate. I will write more on the issues surrounding the topics of guns in America to explain how someone in my position sees these issues. But next time, I will explain exactly how I got a license to own a gun.

Modern Works: Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Back To Blood Tom Wolfe again makes and in-depth study of a city and a culture while all the time exploring the idea of what it means to be a man. In Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full he looked at this idea from the perspective of Wall Street and Harlem and from real estate development and prisons, respectively.

Here Wolfe tackles Miami and its confluence of cultures. This time it is mostly from the perspective of a nurse and a cop. His main characters are working class people who brush up against and alter the upper echelons of the city. While the characters were engaging, Wolfe’s depictions of them as uneducated, or perhaps under-educated, sometimes seems a little over-emphasized, and a bit incongruous. At one point his nurse does not know the words ‘monograph’ or ‘treatise’, but knows ‘hypomanic’ and thinks about ‘decephalized larvae.’ She also doesn’t know what a logotherapist is despite being a psychiatric nurse. It is forgiveable, but a bit of an oversight in the writing. There are similar issues with the cop.

Wolfe’s writing, however, remians as strong as ever. I find that his prose carries me along and is easy to read. Wolfe plays with punctuation to show where characters are thinking and having an internal dialogue versus speaking out loud. I liked the offset. He does some odd repetitions of words to emphasize points. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is jarring. There may also have been one sub-plot too many. But overall, the writing is great.

His exploration of the Cuban, Russian, and Haitian communities is interesting, and knowing Wolfe’s reputation for research, probably based largely in fact. Of course, he also explores the cop subculture, which reliably appears in his novels.

One of the interesting themes that emerges from Wolfe’s works is that despite cultural differences and location changes, there are constant threads in human, and especialy masculine, behavior. It is hard to read his works without thinking about the interactions and power plays that we see every day.

I would recommend this book to people who like Tom Wolfe’s other works, people who are interested in Miami, Cubans in America, and in questions about what it means to be a man in modern society.

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Modern Works: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My karate dojo is reading this book as a group to learn about compassion and to expand out training beyond punching and kicking. We plan to tackle a chapter a month, though I have read the whole book in keeping with the author’s suggestion and will go through each step along with the rest of the dojo.

It is a thought-provoking book that has led me to try to look at people and events in my world in a different way. I try to think about approaching situations from a position of compassion rather than aggression or dispassion.

The author of the book, Karen Armstrong, perhaps by design raises more questions than she answers. Compassion is never strictly defined. So, there are points in the book where compassion seems to be identical to politeness or doing a good deed. I don’t think this is exactly compassion. I think that there needs to be an element of commitment of one’s personal power, or resource to be in compassion.

There are aspects to the book that I think are interesting from a philosophical point of view, though I don’t know that they matter to the overall message.

First, she talks about Socratic dialogue being a compassionate tool and says that Socrates was compassionate with those he spoke with. Yet, Socrates was put to death as a result of how he treated others when speaking with them and dismantling their arguments. Anytus in “Meno” unlikely found Socrates compassionate.

Second, I don’t think that Armstrong gives Western civilization enough credit for Compassion. Compassionate organizations such as the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and hundreds of others grew from the Western notion of the importance of the individual. I understand Armstrong’s desire to promote cross-cultural understanding, but I think she misses some important examples of compassion in that emphasis.

I have a few other quibbles (for instance, I think she takes an unjustified swipe at E.O. Wilson), but overall I think this is a worthwhile read for anyone who is interested in living a life that includes concern for other people across the planet and for those trying to develop a broader sense of the interconnectedness of people.

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Pursuing Excellence in Sports

Athletics in the Ancient World by E. Norman Gardiner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Athletics in the Ancient World gives a great overview of ancient Greek athletics and draws some comparisons with ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, and modern day (being the 1920s and 1930s). The book has wonderful descriptions of ancient sports and talks about what we know, how we know it, and what some of the remaining mysteries are.

Wtih the Olympics about to start, it seems a good time to review this book, since so much of it is concerned with the ancient Olympics. Chapters cover running, jumping, diskos, javelin, pentathlon, wrestling, boxing, and pankration. There are also discussion of athletic festivals, athletics of the East, and athletics in Homer, art, and education. E. Noramn Gardiner also talks abotu professionalism and the meaning of athletics.

“But why does the athlete delight in the grevious contest? Why do we enjoy a hard game? The athlete is one who competes for something, but it is certainly not the material value of the prize that attracts him. The prize may be an ox, or a woman skilled in fair handicraft, a tripod, or a cup, but the most coveted prize int he Greek world was the wreath of wild olive branch which was the only prize at the Olympic Games. The real prized is the honour of vitory. Them ovtice that turns his effort into joy is the desire to put to the test his physical powers, the desire to excel.”

The coverage of the different sports is an excellent primer, and the book is well-illustrated, so be prepared to flip from text to picture. These pictures, some of which are drawings of vases and other art held in museums, are no longer the state of the art, but they are good enough to be educational and illustrative of the concepts descfribed in the text. One can get a sense of what each contest looked like, and there are pictures of modern athletes (again, circa 1930), that show the conenction we moderns have with the past.

The age of the book gives it a certain charm, especially since Gardiner is not afraid to call out other scholars and authors and say that they are wrong abotu their conclusions or have misled earlier students. Gardiner puts his arguments together rather well, so I tend to think he has a sound basis for what he says. Though, it would be interesting to do more reading and see if there are any updates from new archeaological finds and the like.

The connection between ancient and modern is always present in this book. One sentence that struck me was the description of the Pankration, that ‘terrible science of all holds’ as one of the philosophers described it. “But as a general rule, the contest was decied ont he ground, and, when both competitors were down, hitting was usually ineffective.” It sounds a lot like some descriptions of modern mixed martial arts contests.

I also rather enjoyed that the author talked with Percy Longhurst, a champion wrestler from Britain about wrestling and the concepts tha tmight apply to ancient Greek bouts.

I woudl recommend this book to anyone interested in individual sports, the Olympics, or combat sports. I will warn you, though, this book will make you want to go out and run, throw something, and maybe wrestle someone. Though if you do those things well enough, you could be an ancient pentathlete.

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