HICKORY PASS RANCH #9

AHEAD OF THE CURVE -- DAYS 15 &16
By (c) Russ Barnes. All rights reserved: text. Photo credit: the Mouton family

July 21, 2008, Monday. Joe leaves about 6:30 for work at the school.  I don’t even wake up.  Jacquelyn transfers the dog, Murphy, AKA Queso, over to me at 10 a.m.  He disappears instantly trying to find the track of his mistress who leaves.  Finally, he comes back to me, the only thing he has left.  I give him some barbecue pork, and we are forever bonded.  He roams a bit.  Then he sleeps while I revise the second act.  We have lunch.  I give him my plate to clean.  I don’t think his mistress allows that. I like having an animal around.  It’s better than a dish washing machine.  Sharon is in Chicago .  She hears about Murphy.  Her 30s something reply, -- “Awesome.”

I take Murph for a walk, actually a six mile run by bicycle.  He keeps right up -- unlike what Jacquelyn says.  She says, he won’t follow on bicycle.  He definitely does follow.  There are cows and a bull on the way.  They all scat when they see the dog.  Murph crashes when we get back.  We stay on the porch and he slobbers.  Good for him.  He will sleep well tonight.  I am talking about, he is knocked out.

Yesterday, Joe asked me about the business model of plays.  I said I’m making didley squat on them now.  But explained how, if things work out over time, the plays may bring in some very good passive income -- which is what I’m looking for.

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July 22, 2008, Tuesday.  Slept in till about 10 a.m.  Dog slept here too.  Was good dog.  Probably all the exercise.  Joe has given me a book by John Graves which I am now reading.  He is a regional writer.  About this region of Texas.  Famous book is Goodbye to a River.  It is so Southern in its love of place.  The southern writers are among the greatest American writers.  They know how to articulate meaning in slight details.  Graves is wonderful with description and metaphor of birds.  

I am kind of an oddity as a Pennsylvanian; i.e.: “yankee” writer.  Who would try to understand Uniontown, PA but me?  I have no competition.  But the people in Uniontown or Pittsburgh do not see the elegance and drama of their place, their habitation.  (George Washington, the Southerner, did when he was in the region.)  

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

When I published Modern Saga of Monongahela River (which see here) in the Pittsburgh Press, the most enthusiastic piece of fan mail I received was from a Texan.  He said he and his wife travel to Pittsburgh on business, and they love the land, and the personality of the people.  I suppose I do have qualifications as a southerner.  Granny was from Virginia.  And the Cluss side was from Missouri which I think counts as southern.  

Been reading here about George Marshall.  He was raised in Uniontown.  But much of his family was from Kentucky.  And one of his relatives -- John Marshall, the early supreme court justice, was a Virginian.  Marshall loved Uniontown and Virginia.  I wonder whether “Red Dog Dirt” will ever be a hit in Pennsylvania.  I wonder if it may first take off first in the South.  Rewriting this play.  Plays are much more difficult than non-fiction books or novels.  Novels can be very particular.  Plays MUST be particular and universal at the same time.  A play evokes, does not describe, feelings.  A play is all action, not reflection.  The audience gets to reflect on the action.  The audience is not spoon-fed.  They must come to their own conclusions.

GRAZING ON DATA PASTURES

Drama deals with action and data.  Been thinking about something I heard on KUT, NPR, on Sunday.  A guy, a scientist, talked about “the Google model.”  He said, Google does not look at a web page and figure its MEANING.  It simply looks for DATA and then it makes correlations with other data.  The correlations of data are what make meaning.  Not speculations, or theories, about meaning.  

This knocks dogma and political ideology off the chart..  Kind of goes back to the nominalist/realist controversy during the middle ages (REF: Abelard) whereas the realist started with ideas and worked backward to things (Plato), and the nominalists started with things and worked upward toward ideas (Aristotle.)  

This commentator said theoretical science is dead.  With all the processing power we now have, we can put in data, cross-reference it with algorithms as Google does, and we will arrive at reality -- without theory.  Without policy.  Darwin, he said, had a theory.  Those were the days.  But Darwin was ahead of the curve.  Because his journey on the Beagle provided data first and foremost.  It was then Darwin was able to extrapolate something like reality.  And what he came up with explained a lot about all us animals.  And how we came to be and, in fact, are.  Not in contradiction to religion, or the Bible.  Data is God’s speech.  The word.  We experience the Word through particulars.

I told Joe a story day before yesterday.  The story is about a Puritan preacher from New England who rides south on a horse to convert the Virginians who, as some say, are “Episco-pagan.”  Thrilled, the preacher meets his first Virginian.  He asks from atop his horse to this old Virginia farmer who tills: “Do you know Jesus Christ?”  The reply from the Virginian: “I don’t believe the gentleman lives anyplace around these parts.”

To be continued tomorrow.

Go to sequel #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12