Manchild With Guitar

The human body is an amazing thing. As I become one with my new guitar, under the skin of the fingertips on my left hand small pads of calluses have formed. They are a sign not only of a new adaptation to an instrument I haven’t picked up in over forty years, but they link me back in time to a young teenager struggling without instruction or even much talent in a log cabin in northern British Columbia.

Back then, I talked my mother into buying a cheap acoustic guitar out of Sears or Eaton’s one winter. I laboured over that guitar long hours, with the strings set so high above the frets that the calluses must have grown twice as high as they are now in the bruising effort to get a clear sound.

I managed to get some sheet music and an instruction book or two. I got bored quickly with Michael Row Your Boat Ashore and The Streets of Laredo in the doong-ching-doong-ching,  or doong-ching-ching style of the bass root note first and then the rest of the chord in 4/4 or in waltz time.

Most of the music for guitar was chords with the notes reserved for piano or voice. I wanted to play the melodies, so I coded all the notes to the guitar fretboard, like 6-1 or 5-3 (guitar string – fret) in my own version of tab notation. By doing that, even though I could never sight-read notes all that quickly, I  slowly managed to read music through shear repetition.

I bought a variety of Beatles sheet music at the all purpose music/electronics store in Smithers, BC. I think one was Ob-la-di, Ob-la-dah. Then Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. And Mason Williams’ Classical Gas. Even given my lack of technical skills (although I learned how to play arpeggios a little) I transcribed the complex chords and notes of Classical Gas into my system, and managed to eke out a version that at least I could recognize. (By the way, there’s a series of video lessons on how to play Classical Gas the right way by Mike Herbert on YouTube…)

But then I came across a couple of Ventures instructional records which had diagrams on how to play Walk Don’t Run, Pipeline, Apache and Tequila with the tracks on the record demonstrating simplified versions. This was incredible! I was a rocker, sort of, all of a sudden… (I’ve chronicled some of this before.) Although even then, the Ventures were becoming passé, as we moved more into the era of the Beatles, Neil Young and the Rolling Stones.

(But take a listen to the band in this video from 1989 playing Sleepwalker with the amazing Jeff Baxter on slide guitar.  Baxter played with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers in the 1970s and still works as a musician although he has a second career going as an expert on missile defense, of all things. )

That brings us to today. For my birthday recently, my wife bought me an electric guitar and I splurged on a Fender amplifier called a G-Dec. The G-Dec is like many amplifiers in one, with controls to simulate an incredible array of effects. There’s a built-in drum and bass machine. You can set the key it plays in. There’s a tuner which assists my tin ear immensely.

The guitar itself is a lovely instrument. I just like to look at it. It’s a Speyer, which was the house brand of guitars custom built for a local store called Prussin Music. I’m told they were built in the same factory in China that builds Washburn guitars.

The Speyers have been discontinued. The store decided to go with the more typical lines of, for instance, Squier guitars from Fender that simulate Telecasters and Stratocasters. Their own line was put on sale, and I think I got a great guitar out of it. The body is smallish and hollow with a thick top and a couple of cutouts. The action on the neck is great and the sound seems really good.

I’ve rounded up some wonderful instruction books and my wife donated a couple months or so of guitar lessons. I’m starting off in a much more advantageous learning position than that lad blowing on his fingers on a cold evening by a kerosene lamp.

Of course, I’ve picked up a book of music from the Ventures: The Ventures: Pipeline, 25 Surf/Rock Hits Arranged for Solo Guitar. I’m working on Walk Don’t Run right now, in a somewhat more complex version than I learned as a kid. Still sounds cool though.

There’s a great version they did of Runaway, the Del Shannon hit, in there too that I’m going to learn next, and maybe a few more after that. Then it’ll be time to move on from the Ventures to other music.

It was sad, though, to learn this week of the passing of Bob Bogle, one of the original pair of bricklayers who started the Ventures 50 years ago. All these years the group has been going strong, especially in Japan where they are revered. There have been occasional personnel changes. The long-time drummer Mel Taylor died in 1996, for instance, and his duties were taken over by his son Leon.

Trying to learn Walk Don’t Run and playing around with some of their other songs, I’m understanding how the jet-propelled drumming was a huge part of their sound.

My wife tells me the guitar looks right on me, and it makes me feel good to play again and to struggle with the learning of it. I rub the tips of my fingers and think of a long time ago.

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Notes on images, from the top:

1) My new guitar and amp. I don’t even have to play it… I just like how it sits around.

2) Close-up of the Speyer. I’ve tried to find some kind of guitar it resembles, but no luck so far. The body is really rather small, although the neck is full size.

3) Walk Don’t Run sheet music…

4) Picasso’s Blue Guitar. I’m not really feeling this blue.

A Masculine Upbringing

That winter after my father died of a stroke, I sharpened, rather poorly, our Homelite chain saw, filled it with mixed oil and gas, and went out to cut and haul firewood with the help of my younger brothers. I was 12; my brothers three and four years younger. My mother urged us on and fed us well from the wood-burning cook stove we supplied.

Eventually that winter in 1963 our uncle, my mother’s twin brother and a railroad engineer, arrived from California, and he took over the lead on fuel production.

Gathering enough wood to keep our stoves going was a big deal. We might use four or five cords of wood per winter. A cord is four feet wide, four feet high and eight feet long. The wood had to be cut far enough in advance to dry properly, so that meant at first we were cutting for the next winter too. We tended to burn a mix of dried and green poplar. Poplar is plentiful in the Bulkley Valley in northern British Columbia, but when green it doesn’t burn well and it takes a long time to dry. When it’s dry it burns too fast.

The winters were more severe then, and the snow piled high and lasted long, from the end of October until well into March. There might be several weeks of -40 to -50 below zero (Fahrenheit).

Back to back they faced each other

My uncle taught us amusing doggerel verses while he stayed and worked with us that winter. Like this:

One day
In the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight
Back to back
They faced each other
Drew their swords
And shot each other
A deaf policeman
Heard the noise
And came and shot
Those poor dead boys.

My brothers and I thought this was the height of literary sophistication and laughed at all my uncle’s tried and true comedic versifying.

But after that winter, my uncle left, having lost 20 pounds or more to hard work, and returned to Southern Pacific in California.

The rest of us returned to our reality, a near penniless young widow and her three boys living in a 50-year-old log cabin on a section of land without electricity.

I remember finding my mother several times with her head down on her arms crying at the big kitchen table. But she would dry her tears quickly and try not to show any weakness in front of her sons. We had almost no money, but with the kindness of friends and neighbours who brought by quarters of deer and moose and bear, and with largesse from their gardens and our own, we did well enough.

In a year or two some GI benefits from the States trickled in since my father had been a US Marine in WWII, and then Ma eventually found some employment 25 miles away in the town of Smithers (pop. 3500 or so at that time). The industries in that part of BC were logging and ranching, with some civil service jobs like working for the Ministry of Highways thrown in.

A near miss

But before our affairs started to right themselves, I remember a local well-to-do rancher coming to court Ma. It was a funny kind of courting. From what I recall, one day he was introducing himself, and shortly thereafter he was at our cabin with a serious proposition.

He told Ma he needed a wife to help run his ranch, and that us three boys needed a man’s influence. Ma needed help, without a doubt, and she had no obvious prospects and little future.

Ma sent the three of us outside while she talked with him. It was one of those times when one’s entire life might change while having very little say in the matter.

She refused. The rancher went away feeling slighted and misunderstood. I think Ma understood this turning point well. She had come to appreciate her growing independence and couldn’t see herself in the subservient position, even if it proved to be benign, that marriage to that fellow meant.

The ghost in the machine

Ma eventually worked for several doctors in Smithers as a receptionist. I can still see the face of one of the doctors who loaned to me Arthur Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine. I remember his interest in what I thought of it, and his kindness towards a fatherless bookworm boy who built his own boxing ring.

There are many threads of masculinity in all this. They weave towards the main knot of one winter and summer. There was considerable timber on our section of land. Ma wheeled and dealed her way to selling the logs for a considerable sum to a contractor from the Peace River region in northeast BC.

The only thing was, we would supply the loggers with food and shelter. The latter amounted to a well-built plywood shack fifty feet from our log cabin that would last for decades. Three loggers moved in: a Swede and a Greek and some down and out local guy. The Swede was huge and had a beard like Santa Claus. Their bunk house smelled of sawdust, chainsaw oil, old wool and sweat.

Ma and the contractor Zig formed a romantic liaison. He stayed in town usually. I remember listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine while we drove in a warm pickup somewhere on a cold winter’s night, Ziggy’s free hand going to my mother’s knee.

The logging seemed to go well. That summer we had a real party, thanks to those loggers.

We ate breakfast and dinner with them almost every day in our small kitchen, and there was a true air of camaraderie in this odd extended family. Zig was often there too.

We had a few pigs and chickens then. The Greek fellow declared that if we were willing, he would kill and butcher the big sow, build a spit over an open fire and cook it for all of us, just like the old country. The logging was finishing up, and it would be a just celebration. Ma agreed. She loved a good party and often had friends and neighbours sitting around a campfire in our yard on summer nights until all hours.

Feast of the pig

The process of killing the big pig was elaborate. The Greek slit her throat and she was hung to bleed out. The carcass was then lowered into a 45 gallon drum of boiling water from a home-made tripod. Lifted out of that, the skin was scraped to remove all the hair.

Meanwhile the loggers had built a large spit with a handle over a long fire of burning coals. Somehow they threaded the heavy carcass onto the spit and our Greek friend stood there beaming for hours as he slowly turned the handle and drank beer.

These men roamed almost anonymously from logging show to logging show, thick accents, uneducated, perhaps even illiterate; they were hard working, hard drinking, with little to show for all their years in the woods. Yet they showed us quite unselfconsciously that day their true masculine spirit.

That was a party. People came from near and far, even that doctor who loaned the book to me. The sparks flew up around the diminishing spitted pig until the stars were bright, and where we sat around another fire as it crackled and glowed, talk and laughter endured until the small hours.

But then there’s always another side of the masculine. Zig started to drag his feet paying out the rest of his obligations on the logging contract. One day he just disappeared, presumably back to the Peace River country. It wasn’t just a financial betrayal for my mother, but also a personal and amatory one by a man who had strung her along and finally conned her.

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Writing Like A Baboon

I came across an article this week that shows baboons to be more intelligent than dogs, with a story about a female baboon herding goats.

Now dogs herd animals too. But this mother baboon understood the relationships between the goats… so much so that the baboon would take a bleating kid from one barn to its mother in another barn.

As one of the baboon researchers put it: “The question is, where does this mind come from?” I think this is a rich question.

But to digress momentarily… a writing project or so ago, I was going to write a science fiction novel. As is my wont, I ponder the thing endlessly, and as often happens, I didn’t get much beyond doing some background research.

The working title was at first Six Million Baboons, and by the time I was almost ready to start writing, the title was Eight Million Baboons. Today if I was going to start it, it would probably be 10 Million Baboons.

The premise was that somehow in the dim dark past a bunch of laboratory and experimental baboons began to exhibit such rogue intelligence that they escaped their lab cages and overwhelmed their keepers. Their birth rate was so phenomenal and their access to wild baboons was such that they interbred and produced young like… well, Roman Catholics. At the same time, the humans suffered the effects of wars and one pandemic disease after another, and their population took a major nosedive.

In the brave new world, the baboons have supplanted humans and are beginning to suffer their own population explosion, hence the title. The few humans who still remain are almost like pets or prestigious servants.

It was going to be interesting to explore an intelligent baboon kind of culture, with all the aggressive and heirarchical differences from humans that such might entail (and the intriguing similarities).  And a chance to satirize human overpopulation and explore its stresses in the guise of baboon society. (All the trendy talk about sustainability and green revolution never brings up the single overriding factor of our impact on the planet and each other: too many people.)

I’m still fascinated by baboons (and who knows, I might pick up that novel idea again someday).

The researchers, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, who relate the above goat story found that in baboon society, it’s like a Jane Austen novel: “Be nice to your relatives and get in with the high-ranking ones.”

In that context, the baboons instantly recognize identity, kinship and rank. They understand it among themselves, and wonderfully, some talented baboons are able to work with that same understanding about other species. There is something so human-like about that… there is a continuum here, rather than the sharp division between humans and animals that we prejudicially assume.

Seyfarth and Cheney wrote a book with the fascinating title: Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind (a title which partially references Charles Darwin’s observation: “He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”)

(The book by the way is available in an extensive preview in Google Books.)

In the book they meet the typical objection of the behaviorist that animals cannot be shown to have mental states (just as humans do not have mental states under the strictest of behaviorist interpretations). The authors note that a baboon behaving as if she anticipates friendliness from another animal is functionally not that different than the animal “knowing” that the other is friendly.

In the book Almost Human: A Journey Into the World of Baboons by Shirley Strum, that author takes an anthropologist’s perspective into her work with the baboons Tessa, Theodora, Pebbles and many others in Kenya.

Her research was the first to suggest that male baboons did not dominate the troop, but that baboon society is a matrilineal one, centred around the females and their young.

The complexity of baboon social relationships suggests that although chimpanzees are the primate species closest to us genetically, baboons may be closer socially.

In yet another baboon chronicle, Robert Sapolsky wrote A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons. To him, the baboons he became acquainted with on the Serengeti seemed most like a bunch of quarrelsome human adolescents.

Among the series of misadventures and amusing anecdotes Sapolsky has to tell in his life with the baboons, he also is forced to come to grips with the dichotomy of himself as a man of science, darting animals with tranquilizers to record data, and as a fellow being with growing fondness for these unusual creatures.

Hans Kummer studied the hamadryas baboons of Ethiopia in In Quest of the Sacred Baboon which has become a text in some primatology classes due to its readability and its usefulness for understanding social evolution.

He comments: “We read into the animals something of what we are ourselves….”

Returning for a moment to Seyfarth and Cheney’s book above on Baboon Metaphysics, the authors at one point discuss how baboons, the great apes, orangutans and other primates make their appearance in literary satire.

For instance in 1817, a fellow named Thomas Love Peacock wrote Melincourt, a tale of an erudite young orangutan named Sir Oran Haut-ton. Although he cannot speak, he is elected to Parliament because his silence gives him the reputation of a reserved yet powerful thinker.

But Kummer in his book says the last authentic experts on the baboon were the ancient Egyptians. Greek sources report that Egyptian priests placed writing implements in front of newly captured hamadryas baboon males, with their white fur ruffs and shiny red posteriors. When the baboons picked up the writing implements and began scribbling away, the priests consecrated them to Thoth, weigher of souls and god of the noble art of writing.

That must explain my fascination…

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Notes on images:

From the top, the first one is from a BBC news article .

The second is actually of a mandrill, a close relative of the baboon from this site .

And the third is of a hamadryas baboon from biologist Tim Knight’s wildlife gallery .

Unusual WordPress Blogs I Have Found

When I first started blogging on WordPress I was intrigued by the whole scene. With my first halting posts (as opposed to recent halting posts), I ventured into this brave new world with trepidation and anticipation.

What if I gave a party (or wrote a post) and nobody came? Then I realized it didn’t really matter, as long as somebody somewhere reads this stuff I write once in awhile. That’s enough to give me a sense of audience, and that sense is enough to motivate me to occasionally tease out the thread of my thoughts, for better or for worse, just for my own record. And the people who come by and share their own thoughts and ideas are an unexpected pleasure, a bonus…

I also hunted around, much more than I do now, for other blogs to admire and to be inspired by, and to comment on. I’m not sure why I don’t do that so much any more… jaded, or insular, or self-involved, take your pick.

Trying to correct my jaded ways

So I’ve determined to hunt around WordPress and find, among the one million plus blogs, a few to make one take a second glance. These will be beyond those worthies in my blogroll to the right (not all WordPress, by the way), whom I obviously already think fall into that second look category.

I’m searching for blogs that show some unusual acumen, or viewpoint, or writerly skill, or humour, or… who knows what! Let’s take a look…

First up in my crystal internet ball, through my Secret Method of Locating WordPress Blogs That Don’t Mention Britney Spears, is Writing Companion. It has some genuinely useful ideas for writing prompts, whether blogging, fiction or non-fiction by a female writer from Australia.

For instance, her post about mining old journals or notebooks for writing ideas I found quite stimulating.

Become your own light saber

Next is one of those compendium sites with a well-chosen potpourri of tidbits from everywhere called A Repository of Cyber Treasure.

I quite enjoyed this short post there on a Light Saber Farm. Holding a surveying rod once under high power electric towers and experiencing the trembling verge of electricity that I was dangerously close to makes me appreciate this item even more. I was almost lit up like one of those fluorescent tubes…

Unfortunately, because I do appreciate knowing a little about the writers of interesting blogs, the blogger here chooses not to say anything about him or herself.

The Web easily caters to the information scroungers who range far and wide for items that amuse, bother, or titillate them, but it also provides a home for the obsessive such as Penguin Geek. Every post is about penguins in all their glory…

My favorite thing on the site are the listed penguin webcams on one page. Among them is a site in Antarctica where you can see what’s going on.

Friends after 60 years

At Margaret and Helen: Best Friends For 60 Years And Counting, we learn about two old friends with decided opinions on current events. Helen, who is often writing to Margaret in her posts, has a frank, cut the shit attitude about politics that only being alive for many decades gives you. The site is managed by Helen’s grandson.

In her eighties, Helen has resumed posting after being “a bit under the weather.” In one note, grandson Matthew gives tribute to his “cool” grandmother and her lifelong friend.

I like very much the photo at the masthead of the blog which shows the two of them spirited and mobile on their electric carts, roaming about what looks like a battleship or aircraft carrier.

At the site Popular Symbolism, there is quite a serious and intriguing look at the cultural phenomenon of interest in zombies. This is one of those popular trends that both masks and makes apparent certain kinds of social anxieties. I don’t know if I always agree with the author’s dissection, but it is thought provoking.

The author does not reveal him or herself in any detail, although the About page contains preemptive responses to criticism.

Art what?

I think I’ll end with Art Blart, an art and photography site by a fellow named Marcus Bunyan who is an Australian artist and painter.

This site contains quite detailed reviews and descriptions of many exhibitions and showings mostly about photography. Two in particular caught my eye and interest.

The first is his recent post on Exhibition: ‘Charting the Canyon: Photographs by Klett and Wolfe’ at Phoenix Art Museum, which is one of those conceptual art conceits with landscape scenery photographs of the same scenes included in large landscape photographs. I like the combination of history and modernity.

The other is Exhibition: ‘Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West’ at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York which includes evocative photos from the beginning of photography in the West at such iconic spots as Yosemite and moves on to more modern photography such as a shot of a pocket natural disaster at a 1979 flash flood in California.

I find myself taking in something of an education in photography on this site, which makes it a valuable one for me.

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Notes and the Internet

From time to time I obsess over some part of the writing process. Unfortunately it’s often other than writing itself.

Lately, I’m trying to figure out the best way to take notes and keep track of my web searches for a fiction project I’ve been working on for a long time now.

I have organized quite a few notes for this prospective novel with Papel, a free note-organizing software written by Michael O’Donnell, which I mentioned previously in this post.

The part I like best about Papel is the freeform graphical symbology of it, linked as you choose. But I think it would work best for organizing a smaller project than a novel. The linking is limited, as is the symbology, for the complexities and interrelations of the research and plotting required. I could go the predominantly text route with a personal wiki like Wikidpad, but I want to tie in all the research notes and clips from the web…

I should make plain what I need, and what I don’t. What I don’t need is a collaborative platform. Writing a novel is a lonely business, and that’s the way I like it. I need a program that lets me organize my text notes and plotting and characterization the way I want, and that integrates somehow all the web stuff, and stores it all on my computer. Since I’m trying to write a science fiction novel, there’s a lot of research involved.

There are internet based programs and services that let you collate and relate your material on somebody else’s server somewhere, often with the capability of sharing with others. I just don’t have confidence in this kind of solution, with server crashes always a possibility. And the sharing part… hey, I’ll share when I’m ready, alright?

One such online notes/research collation program is the free Zoho Notebook. One review calls it better than the expensive Microsoft product OneNote.

OneNote , by the way, seems to be just what I’m looking for, and through a special deal from work I can get it inexpensively. Although it can be used collaboratively and is designed to integrate with the Microsoft Office suite, it seems to also offer that combination of notation and collection residing on my computer that I figure I need. But to satisfy my curiosity and as a public service I wanted to see what alternatives I might find.

Another free online notes and web service is the wiki-like Springnote. And yet another web-based notes organizer is Ubernote, although it does apparently allow you to back up all your work on your home computer.

I occasionally used Evernote in its previous free standalone incarnations when it was a way to store screenshots, web pages and notes in a long ribbon of data. But I didn’t really find that method of organization so useful, and now it has gone web-based, although still free. For those working as a team at work or play, it’s probably good, but I just don’t trust other people’s servers. Call me old-fashioned.

My most dependable and most used program for collecting web research has to date been Local Website Archive. It’s a way to store selected web pages offline so you can refer to them at your leisure, and it’s not a website ripper that downloads every page on a site. You can organize what you’ve captured like a note tree, and open it later as you wish.

There’s still a free “lite” version available and as this useful review notes, the so-called “lite” version is quite adequate. But the problem is that a good way of organizing your written notes to go with all this collected information is not there.

Enter Surfulator, a program that costs actual money. I’ve kindly been given an evaluation copy by the publisher.

I’ve begun using it in a limited way, and it has the characteristics I want: it sits on my machine, it captures web pages and I can organize and relate my written notes to the research as I find it and later.

It is actively supported and undergoes continuous improvement by its developer, Neville Franks (or Chief Rocket Scientist as he sometimes calls himself). His forums are informative and useful.

In Surfulator, you can embed your notes in the downloaded pages and everything can be linked together in a kind of knowledge database. Some people use it as a PIM (that’s Personal Information Manager, another whole subject area that I will leave alone.) You can read Mr. Franks’ claims here: he is not afraid to compare it to other similar programs.

So I like this program, although the cost seems a bit high at $79. For example, a similar although admittedly not as polished or as supported a program, AnyNotes , is available for $25. But if you do serious research on the web, Surfulator may well be worth it to you.

And yet my quest continues… If you surf with Firefox there’s a couple of plug-ins along these lines that may be useful.

Scrapbook is primarily another web page archiver, similar to Local Website Archive, but with expanded features compared to LWA. You can attach short notes or comments, but it is not really set up to act as a knowledge database in the flexible way Surfulator is. (Although as I look closer at Scrapbook which I haven’t used that much, it does have a feature to add text notes resembling the browser Opera’s notes function.)

Similar to Scrapbook is the freeware Internet Research Scout, which I haven’t tried at all.

Another research tool is Zotero, which again is a plugin for Firefox (which is the browser I use). It’s more of an academic style web data retriever and organizer with concern about such things as citations and bibliographies which it can capture automatically. It has more note-taking functionality than Scrapbook but it is geared towards annotating individual items rather than organzing an overall project like a novel with all the links and interconnections that would be useful.

If you want to work with just text, then CintaNotes seems like it might be a useful program. It provides you with several ways to take notes. You can enter notes manually, clip text from other applications, or paste text from the clipboard. It seems like a great application, except you can’t work with anything graphical.

Wired-Marker is an interesting concept: highlight items of interest as you find them on a web page and that material is automatically saved for you.

The developers say: “You can highlight not only text but also pictures, tables, and selected portions of the screen. You can even add notes to the highlighted items.” Another one to investigate more thoroughly.

For an overview and comparison of many of these notetaking programs, take a look at the DonationCoder.com site. It mentions some of the software mentioned here, including Surfulator and Evernote.

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