Today I did not stir from the house. I am entering a period of very serious economic retrenchment. Moreover, I am using the spring to get my body moving again. After reading a manuscript all day, and doing a pleasurable interview on KFGO, I ran three miles and then walked another 5.6. The air was spectacular. The countryside is still brown and gray, dead and lifeless, but the hint of spring is definitely in the air. My middle aged body is creaky and stiff, but after that mild workout I felt marvelous--alive again. The chemical high from breathing seriously and calmly and drinking in the wonders of North Dakota, was magnificently satisfying. Now I am reading in that way that comes so seldom--when we can read steadily and without fatigue forever.

Clay

Is it possible to remake one's life? My former mother-in-law, a wonderful woman, used to say, nobody every changes, we just get more and more what we are. I want to believe that is not true. I want to believe we can step back from the ways we see, the habits we cling to, the ruts we are in, the ways we ingest and digest, the ways we hold our bodies, the ways we respond to others, the ways we think about ourselves and our lives, the way we write English sentences, and rewrite the software.

What I'm trying to do, at 55, is to ask myself--what man did you expect to be? What did you hope to do with your big life and your daily life? How well are you living up to your dream of yourself?

55 is a kind of magical number. I'm make 66 baring a catastrophe. Whether I make 77 or 88 is a very different question. So I am going to use a numerical coincidence to ask the tough questions before it is too late. It may already be too late.

I've made some big resolutions in the last two days. I won't retail them here until they erase the habits I wish to erase, but I know that it is now or never.

Meanwhile, I am not ready to leave my child and return to North Dakota--but that is inevitable this afternoon.

csj

Kansas

I'm with my child in Kansas. A day of tremendous wind, gray most of the day, sunny later, but windy the way Kansas can be windy. I have a friend who was in Fargo today at the Democratic Convention. No surprises: Tracy Potter for Senate, Earl Pomeroy for the House. I would have loved to have been there to hear Earl Pomeroy's speech, which was said to be fiery. I would have liked to have seen Darrell Dorgan's tribute film to his brother. It is a time of hope for the party, but a time of great sadness for North Dakota, i believe, because we are losing our extraordinary senator Byron Dorgan.

Tomorrow I fly home. The time I spend with my daughter is the happiest of my life, without any exception or qualification. She is now a young woman. That pleases me mostly.

My daughter is doing facebook catch-up and texting, while we sit in our room at the Holiday Inn Express decompressing from a long interesting day.

I would have liked to have seen the parade-demonstration for Earl Pomeroy.

Lunar Lucubrations

Tonight, Wednesday, March 16, My wedding anniversary.

The new moon tonight is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. I like the new moon best of all moons, much more than the full moon. I love to see it at minimal crescent, when it is all but swallowed up by the shadow of the earth. Tonight the crescent in like a saucer, a little more than the quarter of the circumference of the moon, perfectly poised with its horns up as if to cup the rest of the moon, which makes a perfect ghostly appearance. It makes me ache. For some reason the new moon has always had a powerful gravitational pull on my spirit.

I like this unusual up-pointed crescent, poised on the bottom of its concavity, holding the rest of the moon in embrace. I'm sure I have seen it this way before, but I actually don't remember when.

I like the more common new moon wherein it is open, slightly upturned, like a tilted parenthesis, and I particularly like it when the new moon virtually embraces Venus.

It is a perfect night in North Dakota. I came home from a long day of work, recordings, and meetings, and stood out on my deck looking at the perfection of the moon, and saw my front yard for the first time in four months.

Today we recorded two Jefferson Hours at Makoche Recording Studios, one on the Texas school book fiasco, and the other on what the world needs now to be Jeffersonian. They were two of the most passionate and hard-hitting programs in the history of the Jefferson Hour.

csj

I feel as if I am coming back to life after a sustained hibernation. Got home from Minneapolis and immediately suited up and ran and walked five miles in my neighborhood, first listening to the white album (Beatles) and then reading a book about the Anschluss in 1938--hitler's absorption of Austria. Now I am sitting at my kitchen table in the best lit room in my house. The light is exquisite. It was virtually windless out on the road. The snow is hanging on but it is dense with ice crystals. My back and shoulders hurt in the way they should hurt after sloughing off ennui and car-restlessness. The streets are bare except for the lines of icy water running down along the gutters. I was able to read 20-30 pages as I walked. Now I will clean up and put on crisp clean clothes, and make rice and shrimp for dinner. And read. And work on my Roosevelt signage project.

csj

Now back from Minneapolis and St. Paul, where I saw Macbeth, saw the Dead Sea Scrolls, saw the St. John's College bible manuscript, visited Louise Erdrich's bookstore, met with a fellow North Dakotan who wants to help us realize our dream of a Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, visited the Eric Sevareid Library at the University of Minnesota, walked a good deal, bought books, and gifts for my dear friend Sheila Schafer.

How fortunate for us North Dakotans that just 8 hours away by car and 90 minutes by flight is one of the nation's great cities. It is such a pleasure to walk the campus of the University of Minnesota, to walk across the Washington Avenue bridge, which I walked across at 7:45 a.m. five days a week for two full years when I studied Latin on the East Bank and lived on the West Bank--always outside, never within the bridge shelter. And then when you are standing precisely where John Berryman threw himself off that bridge, thinking about the hypnotic power of poetry and rivers, and the lives of the great thinkers, writers, poets, artists, and students who have spent part of their lives at the University of Minnesota, to look to the west and see the skyscrapers of Minneapolis looming over the prairie.

I was thrilled to spend time with my favorite professor of all time, the man, in Jefferson's words, "who set the destiny of my life." And to realize that though he has mellowed a little, he is still as brilliant in my soul thirty years later as he was when I was a callow youth.

I'm tired but full--the best way to return from a journey.

csj

Yesterday, March 13, 2010, was the anniversary of the birth of correspondent-based broadcast news. After Hitler absorbed Austria on March 12, 1938, the Murrow Boys, led by the legendary Edward R. Murrow, cobbled together a news roundup from European capitals to provide Americans a window on the dramatic events in Europe--events that led inexorably to World War II. Hosted by William L. Shirer, the author of The Berlin Diaries and later The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the Murrow team performed flawlessly in what would become the pattern of all subsequent news radio broadcasts and then television.

Before March 13, 1938 Murrow and his colleagues had been confined to organizing live broadcasts of choirs and orchestras, and arranging radio lectures by such figures as Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw. The world crisis enabled Murrow and his colleagues to get their first live news airtime.

It was a revolution in the history of broadcasting.

Soon North Dakota's Eric Sevareid joined the Murrow Boys.

The Dakota Institute is making a documentary film about Sevareid, to be released in 2012, on the centennial of his birth in Velva, North Dakota. With the North Dakota Humanities Council the Dakota Institute is hosting a national public humanities symposium on Sevareid and the Murrow Boys September 30-October 3, 2010 in Bismarck.

Sunday morning in Minneapolis. Today brunch with my mother's friend Russ and then Macbeth at the Guthrie. Macbeth is not my favorite Shakespeare, by far, but it was one of the first plays I ever read, in my introduction to Shakespeare course at the University of Minnesota. Macbeth's last soliloquy is one of the sublime things in the English language. I don't know much about this production, except that it is apparently set in the 1930s. The joy for me is that I get to take my greatest professor Thomas Clayton to the production. There was a time when Shakespeare was my life. Now it occupies a slender place in my life and consciousness. The biggest mistake we make in life is thinking what is is forever, particularly what is when we are 20 years old. The great thing is that within an easy day's drive of Bismarck is one of the country's finest theaters. I frankly liked the old Guthrie better than the new, but still....

Minnesota v. North Dakota

Today I drove to Minneapolis from Bismarck, with my friend Beverly Everett. She has a unique perspective. She is from Texas, educated in Texas and Iowa, and she conducts two symphonies, one in Minnesota and one in Bismarck, North Dakota.

My question to her and to anyone who reads this is: if you used a random generator to select 1000 Minnesotans and 1000 North Dakotans, what would be the cultural differences, political differences, and outlook differences, between the two groups?

Is Minnesota different from its neighbor North Dakota? If so, how and why? Why is Minnesota considered a blue state and North Dakota a red state? What are the factors that led to this distinction, which would seem to have little to do with the swollen river border we passed, almost imperceptibly, at mid-day.

I have thoughts about this, but I want to hold them for a few days to see what sorts of responses, if any, others might have.

It is my sense that North Dakota is drifting right fast, measurably, and with a level of conviction that I have not seen in my lifetime. I do not have any thoughts about Minnesota, since it is not my state and I do not follow the world of Minnesota very carefully.

I did come to one resolution somewhere near Sauk Center, the home of Sinclair Lewis. I intend to spend much more time in Minnesota in the years and decades ahead, and not just in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

As I passed my grandparents' farm in Fergus Falls, still visible from the interstate highway, though abandoned now, I felt a strong rush of nostalgia, sadness, and joy.

Now we are at the Nicollet Island Inn, preparing to join colleagues for dinner at Murray's, home of the butterknife steak. We'll see about that.