Izaak Walton League

Named after the 17th century author of The Compleat Angler, the Izaak Walton League is an organization of fishermen and hunters involved with conservation activities, and I recently became a member of a local chapter.

Located about a half hour's drive from my house, the wooded grounds and pond are a wild oasis in the suburbs. On a couple of mild days during the past week, I've caught a few bluegills. Any fish caught in February is a treasure.




There are the usual cast of suspects of wildlife to observe:

Tiefest 2012

This annual get-together of fly fishermen from Maryland and adjacent states was held on Kent Island yesterday. Attendees wander through tables where expert fly tiers, like the one pictured below, are passing on tips and answering questions as they work.

Even in mild winters like this one there's not much fishing, and the event is a nice time to renew friendships, eat, drink, and socialize.

Barry Hannah: A Musical Writer

Hannah died two years ago at 67. I recently read his semi-autobiographical first novel, Geronimo Rex, and enjoyed it very much. He was Mississippi born, and although it's a lightly populated state there must be something in that soil that produces so many writers, blues singers, and pro football quarterbacks.

Looking around the internet, I found an interview that Hannah gave to The Paris Review a few years ago, and this passage caught my attention:

"Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don’t get it. I don’t get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I’m doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn’t think you ever had."

Those thoughts brought to mind what I liked best about his writing: it's the lyricism and rhythm of his prose. His love for music shows in his writing. Once I heard a lecture from poet and novelist Erica Jong who said that before she sends a book to the publisher she reads it aloud from beginning to end because her writing has to sound right to her ear.

I think that much of the writing I most admire has a pleasing, musical sound to it. I was generally a mediocre musician, but nobody appreciates listening to music more than I do. Similarly, I may never be any better than an adequate writer, but I sure enjoy and appreciate reading good writing, especially writing that reflects a love of music the way Barry Hannah's does.

Mallows Bay

Friday I drove down into Charles County to scout a fishing location along the tidal Potomac. Mallows Bay is best known for the large number of shipwrecks, some that rise above the surface and are visible from shore and others that lie underwater but are clearly visible from boats.



The area at Wilson Landing is now a park which provides recreational opportunities, nature views, and historical information. Most of the boats were hastily built on contract by the government for shipping in support of the WWI war effort, and they were later scrapped.








I thought this was an interesting looking tree near the boat ramp. There is also a floating dock for kayaks.







Some of the wrecks are out in the main area section of the river.










Others are back in the tidal creek.















This is the one most visible from shore.













The link below contains the full story of "The Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay":


http://www.dnr.state.md.us/naturalresource/winter2001/ghostship.html

Watching movies on TV

As a baby-boomer, the first TV generation, I've been watching movies on the tube since the 50's. Of course, it's a different experience than going to the theater, not necessarily better or worse, but certainly different. It might be better to fully appreciate a great film in the isolation of a darkened theater, but a mediocre movie is easier tolerated at home.

Television introduced me to some classic movies that I eventually saw on the big screen; Citizen Kane, the original King Kong, and Blade Runner come to mind. The accessibility of TV has also enabled me to repeatedly enjoy what I consider great scenes in less than great movies. A recent example is Meryl Streep's "hire the smart, fat girl" speech in The Devil Wears Prada, but there are many others. There are also movies that I think of as having seen many times but eventually realize that I've never seen the actual beginning until I happen to catch the whole thing.

Then there is the topic of buying favorite movies on DVD, VHS, or whatever is the popular format of the time. The Big Lebowski, and National Lampoon Christmas Vacation were thoughtful gifts from our children, but they've been watched many fewer times than when they've shown up on the channel rotation. It's possible that we've never watched The Godfather Trilogy in a box DVD set which was a Christmas gift six or seven years ago, but Pam and I will watch at least the first two anytime we spot on the TV listing and we're available.

We are not alone in this behavior, apparently. Not long ago, I heard Steve Van Zandt discussing his sometime occupation of disc jockey (along with musician and actor) on his satellite radio channel. He rhetorically posed the question of why middle-age people who owned a huge amount of rock music on record, tapes, and CD's still listened to disc jockeys on the radio. "The same reason you seldom watch movies you own, " he said, answering his own question. "It's the element of surprise of hearing the song or seeing the movie at a random time when a disc jockey or TV station chooses them."

That's the best explanation I've heard.

University Art Show

The "Wood, Paper, Fiber" exhibit is currently being shown in the gallery in the Art and Sociology Building. I really like the interior of the building which is pictured above.



Drew Goerlitz: "Propositum III" He's a Maryland graduate, and all his works shown in this exhibit are made from steel and paper.









"Vessel" by Millicent Young who lives in rural Virginia. That's horse hair hanging down.
"Globe" by Englishman Chris Gilmour using cardboard:Drew Goerlitz: "Vascellum"




"Monstrare II" by Drew Goerlitz






"Julius Ceasar" by Chris Gilmour









Close-up of the cardboard materials:






Curator Prof. Foon Sham says the artists "Skillfully transform these materials into art of great beauty and deep resonance."

I feel that way about this untitled work by Aeneas Wilder of Scotland:

Wading the Magothy

The Magothy and the Severn are tidal rivers that empty into the Chesapeake between Annapolis and Baltimore, and their upper tidal sections are only about five miles apart in Anne Arundel County.

Winter fishing for pickerel can be good in these areas, so yesterday I decided to take advantage of a 70 degree day to drive to a place on the Magothy where there is public access. Before leaving on a fishing trip, I write my destination on a white board in our hallway, and there I wrote "Severn River near Severna Park." It had been six or seven years since I fished the area, and it wasn't until I reached Severna Park that I realized my targeted fishing site was on the Magothy rather than the Severn. Fortunately, it didn't take long to make the correction and soon I was wading and casting.

Everything was perfect: I had the appropriate fly tackle, my casting was fine, and the weather was beautiful with the warm sun light only occasionally blocked by passing clouds and the breezes not over-powering. The fish, unfortunately, did not co-operate. Brought out by the mild weather, there were some bait fishermen there as well, and they didn't seem to do well either but those that I talked to on walks back to the car agreed with me that being able to be out fishing on the first day of February was prize enough.

As we anglers say: the fishing's always good even when the catching is not.

Snow and freezing rain

Yesterday. It's in the mid 50's today.

Birds currently around us

The Ring-necked ducks at the pond have grown to five. They're fun to watch dive under-water.


We frequently see hawks but not usually this close to the house. We believe they are Red- shouldered hawks.

More thoughts on cars and rock and roll...

I'd been consciously aware of the pleasures of cruising while listening to rock long before writing the previous post, but putting those musings into words brought about some new thoughts about the subject.

For example, I realized that my association with rock music and cars was so strong that for much of my life I seldom listened to that type of music in any other context. As a teenager, I bought jazz and folk records and sometimes heard those artists live but didn't buy rock records or go to rock concerts until my 20's. Now in my 60's, I still sometimes buy the music and go to concerts.

Having heard much of the great 1960's rock initially through tinny- sounding car radios, it was a revelation when I started listening to quality sound systems. High fidelity brought a different dimension to rock and, in some ways, I am still discovering the beauty of some of the old music. In recent years, I have bought Beach Boys CD's although it wouldn't have occurred to me to buy the records when they were new. Nah, the Beach Boys were to for driving with your friends to the hamburger stand or for on the way to pick up a date. Those melodies and harmonies, however, contained nuances and subtleties that are missed unless played through quality speakers or headphones.

But although the sound quality may have been lacking, the power of the music was there. "Sugar-pie, honey-bunch..." sang the Four Tops in the spring and summer of 1965, the year I graduated from high school, and that song seemed to be in the air every time I was in a car. It made me feel good then and it still does.

"Cruising and playing the radio..."

... no particular place to go."

In a lot of ways I really haven't changed much in behavior since my late teens, nearly a half century ago. For instance, I still like driving around listening to the car radio, and my choice of music is still usually rock and roll. Like one radio station described their rock playlist and target demographic: "It's the soundtrack of your lives."

Performers such as Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen have reflected in their lyrics this association of rock and roll with cars. I guess a driver's license often represents freedom to the teenager, freedom from parents, schools, and other adult authority. There's a freedom about rock and roll too. In the 50's communist Russia tried unsuccessfully to suppress the music, probably because they recognized this, but the USSR is no more and rock and roll remains.

So is it that I've never grown up, or am I still seeking freedom? I prefer to think that as an American I like to revel in my freedom, and the music makes me feel good about it.

Anyway, I first listened on the AM dial, but in the late 60's it was mostly on FM. AM radio still had decent classical and country music, but as I said previously I mostly listen to rock and roll when driving. Eventually I felt a similar deterioration of rock music on FM that I had experienced on AM. There was a drought in suitable cruising music until satellite radio, XM and then Sirius XM, came along for me in the 2000's. When a great song comes on just as I've arrived at my driving destination, I'll either drive around the block or sit in my car until it's finished, just as I did as a teenager.

First fishing of the year

Temperatures over 60 degrees gave me hope of catching something at the pond, so I put in about an hour this afternoon. Crappie will sometimes bite in cold water, and I hoped there may even be a few holdover trout from last spring's stocking. Didn't catch anything though.

Just a few nights ago it went down to 16 degrees and didn't rise above freezing all day which accounts for the ice off the deep end up to twenty feet in some places. Also, there were about 150 geese which limited the areas suitable for fly casting.

Brookside Gardens again

Fewer people around after Christmas.

The House and Yard

Blogs are useful to document things. I've used this one to document fishing trips, vacations, and the look of the surrounding outdoors areas at various times of the year and have enjoyed looking back at the pictures later. While I don't expect the pictures to be particularly meaningful to anyone else, they are to me. I decided that pictures of the house and yard would be of similar future interest, so these are my baseline.

New Year's Day 2012

It's been mild so far this winter, but that will change.

Diving ducks in the park

As far as waterfowl, the pond has Canada Geese pretty much year round and Mallards often. It always gets our interest when we have a lone visitor of another species. Over the past month, one such visitor we have tentatively identified as a Lesser Scaup. We have watched her many times but have been disappointed with our photo attempts. This is the best of the group:

Today, I spotted another diving duck, and this appears to be a Ring-necked Duck, a type which has visited the pond before in late winter and spring.

Outdoors Art in Middleburg, Virginia

The image above is from a painting that is part of an exhibit titled "Afield in America: 400 Years of Animal and Sporting Art" at the National Sporting Library and Museum which we visited yesterday. Hunters, fishermen, horses, and dogs are the dominant subjects.


Pam views one of the paintings:













Being old, I needed reading glasses for much of the text:















Of course, I spent most of the time with the fishing paintings.








This Winslow Homer, "A Boy Fishing", is one of my favorites.






A close-up of a fly fisherman from one of the other paintings:





This is the angling section of the library. I have many of these books.











Pam settles down with a British magazine on fox hunting.

This year's Christmas Tree

It may be my favorite thing about the holiday.












I like the whole process- picking it out, setting it up, putting the lights on first, then the ribbons, then everything else.

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

Continuing to ponder about the course I recently finished, I realized that of the three components of the title I had been concentrating most on power and ritual and decided to review my lecture notes with a concentration on the third element, society.

The baseline for the course had been established by Aristotle who said that man is a political animal and that only a beast or a god would live outside the polis or political society. Hundreds of years later the Roman thinker Seneca disagreed, but most important writers on this subject such as St. Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle for the next millennium. In the late middle ages and early modern period, the political society was seen as an organism likened to the human body with the king as head, the military the arms, and the peasants the feet. Finally, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century wrote that humans were born both solitary and free, and the theory of individualism appeared for the first time in Western political thought.

Shortly after Rousseau's theories were written, the United States was created, and I wondered if Americans embraced the concept of individualism more than other peoples. The phrase "rugged American individualism" may have been first uttered by Herbert Hoover, but the concept had been around for a long time. This wondering brought to mind the quote that serves as the title for this entry, a quote which I have read many times but have forgot its origins. When I looked it up I felt I had come full circle back to the college course because the sentence comes from D.H. Lawrence although not from the novel that was one of the course requirements.

I'll now have to think whether we Americans are as individuals unusually isolated and if so what effect this alienation from each other has on our politics.

Power, Ritual, and Society

That was the name of the course I just finished at the University of Maryland. The course followed the topic of political power and ritual through both theory and historical events in a generally chronological sequence beginning with Aristotle. Although classified both as a history and a religious studies course, none of the six required books were written by historians or theologians, and two were fiction, a play by Spanish author Lope de Vega, and a novel by D.H. Lawrence. In addition, there were about a dozen articles and book excerpts, some from historians and one from a theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas.

Lectures and discussion groups examined such topics as whether human nature was essentially good and rational (Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought yes while St. Augustine and Machiavelli thought no), whether humans are social and political by nature (Aristotle said yes, and Rousseau said no), whether economics was the driving force of history (as Karl Marx believed), and whether public ritual and ceremony, which had been so crucial to political power in the middle ages and early modern period in Europe, were still important in a modern industrial society with its emphasis on science and rationality.

The final readings were from the 20th century's Michel Foucault, and the lectures elaborated on his studies of the history of punishment, the change from public physical brutality as "a spectacular and discontinuous intervention of power" to the modern state's invisible, discrete surveillance as "an automatic functioning of power." An original and controversial thinker, Foucault presented Jeremy Bentham's 19th century design for a modern prison, the panopticon, which Foucault came to regard as a metaphor for modern society.

I'll have to think some more about these subjects.

Late season bream

The days following Thanksgiving have been mild, so I thought I'd walk over to the pond to see what I could catch. Got about a half dozen bream on both wets and drys.

Brookside Gardens

Nice place for a walk on a nice day.

Most of the leaves have fallen...

But I'm a sucker for autumn foliage, and the path down to Paint Branch Creek still has some maples showing their stuff.



Odd patriotic display well off the beaten path in the woods.