In Remembrance Rolf Dumke

(July 16, 1941 - February 29, 2020)

A prolific writer

By Moristotle

In view of the passing of columnist Rolf Dumke, a former IBM colleague of mine sent a link to the list of Rolf’s prolific writings on WorldCat, “the world’s largest network of library content and services.” Here’s a link to Rolf’s list at Dumke, Rolf H. - WorldCat Identities.

Ask Wednesday: What of great interest didn't you report from Bavaria?

The millstone quarry above Neubeuern

By Morris Dean

After reading last week's column ("What did you do on your summer vacation?"), my friend Rolf Dumke, whom we visited our first full day in Bavaria (he's pictured here pointing), emailed me that he was "a bit disappointed that [I] ignored the millstone quarry above Altenbeuern [Old Beuern], an unusual and symbolic world event." Altenbeuern seems forgotten; now it's Neubeuern (which we visited – but more about that another time perhaps).

In Remembrance of Rolf Dumke

(July 16, 1941 - February 29, 2020)

In gratitude for
“Growing Up in America”

By Moristotle

I learned yesterday from Rolf Dumke’s son Tristan that his father had passed away the day before, on February 29. Rolf suffered cardiac arrest at home the preceding Tuesday and was immediately taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital, where doctors fought for his life for four days, to no avail.

Ask Wednesday: What else did you see or do at Neubeuern besides visit the millstone quarry?

Hardly enough

By Morris Dean

[Sequel to "What of great interest didn't you report from Bavaria?," October 1]

When we went to Rosenheim, a few miles southeast of Munich, to visit Rolf & Susan Dumke, we had never heard of the little town of Neubeuern. And I don't think we ever would have except that the millstone quarry was near there. Rolf & Susan took us into the town's historic district, which we entered through one of the district's old city gates before parking in the town square, very near the parish Church of the Immaculate Conception:

A Yorkshire Dales obituary

By Anonymous

The couple had been happily married for just over 50 years when the wife died. They had spent their entire married life in the Yorkshire Dales. The husband contacted the local newspaper to enquire about having an obituary published. But when informed of the cost by the lady in the newspaper office, the man uttered, in true Yorkshire fashion, “How much?! You’ve got to be joking!!”

Planting & pruning for your place & purpose: Ask my wife

My friend Rolf inquires from Germany:

I planted three fruit trees about four years ago and all of them have become misshapen: the apple tree has become enormously tall, the plum tree totally misshapen by a huge number of branches, the cherry tree also goes up but not wide.
    Help!
    If you have any good websites on gardening advice, please let me know.

Good questions! My wife being the botanist in our family, I appealed to her for some advice for you:

Well, there's the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. But what I do when I need to find some info is a Google search on my problem and I usually find something helpful. For example, when I wanted to know what trees would survive in clay soil, I did a search on "trees for clay soil" or something like that. I found a University of Minnesota site that had done a very thorough report on the subject. It had recommendations for trees that would grow in clay soil and also for planting the tree. (That's how we ended up with some of the trees we have.) But you need to be able to recognize the kind of soil you have or take it to someone who can tell you.
    I guess it's a matter of figuring out your question. Rolf's problems with his fruit trees might go back to selection. He might not have chosen an appropriate tree for the amount of sun and other conditions. Or he may have selected varieties that just grow the way his trees are growing. I recommend that he learn all he can about the varieties he has, then search for info on pruning. Pruning is not that simple. You have to figure out what you want to achieve. Do you want to maximize fruit production? Or are you after appearance?
    Gardening is all about figuring out what you want to achieve and what kind of soil and how much sun you have. Also how much water, time, and money. If you've got enough money, you can just hire someone to help you do the figuring out and everything else. But where's the fun in that?

Later, my wife overheard me listening to Frank Harris's My Life and Loves and suggested—almost as quickly as it occurred to me—that I also share the following passage with Rolf:

Europe has learned what natural beauty is from English tourists. Was not Ruskin [John Ruskin, 1819-1900] the first to assert that French trees were far more beautiful than English trees? He did not give the reason, but I may. England is afflicted with a wind from the southwest that blows three hundred odd days each year. Against this attack all trees when young have to stem themselves or they would be uprooted; as it is, they are dwarfed and crooked. And the woodlands of France suffer from the same plague, though much less severely. There are no forests in the world to be compared with the American: in half an hour's drive out of New York up the Hudson one sees more varieties of exquisite and well grown trees than one can find in all France, or even Germany. [p. 371]

Farewell ​to Moristotle & Co.

On Behalf of
Rolf Dumke

By His Daughter,
Sibylla Dumke,
from Olargues, France

Dear Morris, you have stimulated and showcased the works, ideas, expressions, writings, and pictures of all kinds of different and interesting people. One of them was my dear Dad, whose 82nd birthday would have been this July 16^th.

Growing Up in the Two Americas

Another source of estrangement

By Rolf Dumke

Land vs. cities, as Tim Wallace’s November 16 NY Times article “The Two Americas of 2016^*” affirms, is an important division of American culture and politics, which have many sources for division.

Growing Up in America: American Movies in the 1950s (Part 4)

Publication delayed

By Rolf Dumke

[Editor’s Note: We simply could not finish Part 4 on time for publication today.]

And so...still to come:

Is vast inequality necessary?

Paul Krugman says no

By Rolf Dumke

Economist Paul Krugman’s January 15 piece in the NY Times, “Is Vast Inequality Necessary?” is a very readable argument explaining the rise of inequality in the US since the 1960s as a combination of forces:

Movie Review: Apocalypse Now (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola’s failed translation of Joseph Conrad

By Rolf Dumke

I found Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) wonderful. But I think that his celebrated Apocalypse Now (1979) contains too much slaughter. And, according to a recent article in The Guardian, Coppola agrees so far as to say, “Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That’s not anti-war.”

Tuesday Voice: Growing up in America

Climbing rocks

By Rolf Dumke

Reading the NY Times article of the spectacular recent climb of Yosemite's El Capitan – “Pursuing the Impossible, and Coming Out on Top,” by John Branch, January 14, 2015 – I felt certain college memories resurfacing.

Sunday Review: British and American productions of Shakespeare

A problem

By Rolf Dumke

In “Shakespeare in Modern English?” [New York Times, October 7], James Shapiro rightly discusses a main problem in both British and American Shakespeare productions, “that even the best directors and actors...too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having firm enough grasp of what his words mean.”

Brexit: What happened?

A journalist explains it

By Rolf Dumke

I have enjoyed British novelist Ian McEwan’s excellent novels Amsterdam and Saturday and others because of their ironic, satirical portraits of British society. And now, in a February 1 article in The Guardian (“Brexit, the most pointless, masochistic ambition in our country’s history, is done”), McEwan tries to disperse the fog of nationalistic populism, or “populist stardust” that has confused debate on Brexit in the UK. In the attempt, he enumerates more than enough reasons to convince me that Brexit was a huge mistake, but how Brexit nevertheless happened remains open to discussion.

Third Monday Musing: On an irony of the creation of something from nothing

Its paradoxical aesthetic asymmetry

By Rolf Dumke

What fun to read your philosophical-historical query on why is there something rather than nothing!
    Modern physicists have indeed analyzed why there is something. According to the latest theories, the initial Big Bang should have created exactly the same amount of matter and anti-matter – i.e., in symmetry – at the first moment of explosion. And these should have immediately combined to eliminate each other, eliminating everything that had been created in the first tenzillionth squared of a second.

Growing Up in America

St. Paul’s and girls

By Rolf Dumke

[Links to previously published installments appear at the bottom.]

Notwithstanding environmental, social, and moral problems of life in and around our house in Linwood Avenue and E. 55th Street, I grew up attending a well-structured Lutheran school for the four years from 5th through 8th grades. St. Paul’s Lutheran Elementary School was located up on E. 55th, above Superior Avenue. I graduated with top grades and was awarded at our graduation ceremony the cherished blue letter P for top sportsman of the graduating class, making my parents proud.

Ask Wednesday: What did you do on your summer vacation?

We went to Europe

By Morris Dean

Early this year we purchased tickets to fly from Charlotte to Sofia (by way of Munich) to visit our son and take in the Rila Music Exchange 2014. As it transpired, our son wasn't going to be in Bulgaria for the event. What to do? Our air tickets were nonrefundable. I was okay with simply not using them. The money's spent, so cut your losses.

Third Monday Musing

Que sera, sera

By Rolf Dumke

“That mysterious flow,” wrote Paul Davies about time in the February 2006 Scientific American. We all experience it as an unstoppable flow from a given past to a flighty present, onwards to an unknown future. But, he argues, for physicists this is a mere illusion: time does not fly or flow. It merely exists. See Davies’s book, About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution (1995, Simon & Schuster).

Growing Up in America: American movies in the 1950s

Prolog

By Rolf Dumke

Movies in the 1950s were an intoxicating and disturbing experience for an immigrant boy. They exposed the psychic underbelly of an America disturbed by Freud, sex, women, and crime; troubled by the Cold War struggle between patriotic Americans and communist traitors; haunted by Ray Bradbury’s and Orson Welles’s impending attacks by aliens from outer space; and unbalanced by the drama in American high schools that created or cemented social barriers, allocating dramatically different life chances among its students.

Moristotle & Co. abandons regular scheduling

Baldassare Peruzzi, “Muses Dancing with Apollo”

Our muses insisted

By Morris Dean

This week I notified the staff that it was no longer working for me to try to live up to the blog’s commitment to have regularly scheduled columns. I told them that I wanted to give up specifying the days of the week (or month) on which particular columns would appear, so that there would be no stated or implied commitment to publish anything on any given day.