5 May 04
Cinco de Mayo
I just finished one of my many concurrent Clairefontaine grid-journals, which I started in April 2002, when we were taking our Mexican poetry class here at the UC Davis Arboretum. Looking through it, there’s a lot of poetry in there; Maria Melendez made us write a SONNET A DAY for a week. Sonnets are tough. It was a tough week.
She also introduced us in this class to the chant, believed to have been the earliest form of poetry. Francisco Alarcn, a poet who teaches here at Davis and who was shortlisted for California poet laureate that year, came and read some of his chants to us. I loved them. I wrote lots, including, I now see, the chant of the ground-squirrel sentry. (No mention there of genitalia, I assure you.)
Here are a couple of poems. One’s a chant, in Spanglish, a tribute to the people we see in the fields near us, working all the time, all the time, all the time. The second is in Spanish, written as I was reading lots of sonnets in Spanish (notably Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz). The poem talks about the blind lottery ticket sellers I walked past as a child in Madrid; they sang out in a resounding tenor that they had tickets to sell. (The Spanish lottery has, since its inception, devoted a large percentage of its profits to the blind; the “gordo” is the mind-boggling sum won only at the Christmas lottery.)
Growing What Sells
The wheat. The cows. The almonds. The plums.
The earth. La tierra. Trabajo. Our hands.
Los aos. The sweat. Sudando, we plough.
We water. We grow. Cultivamos. We pick.
The food. The earth. La tierra. The bounty.
The silos. The cows. La leche. The rain.
The sun. El sol. Sudando, we work.
The mortgage. The debt. Sudando, we worry.
The houses, the creeping. The vanishing farms.
Regulations. The debts. The cows, the poor wheat.
Las casas, the lawns. These have few regulations.
The turf that we grow, that we spray, it pays well.
If there’s no more food, don’t blame us: it’s demand.
We grow grass for your lawns, it’s no sweat: it’s our land.
Lotera
“El premio para hoy,” canta el ciego:
Un chillo que se extiende por la plaza
Por encima del ron del autobs
Circulndose. “El premio para hoy.”
Tono casi rabe llamando a la
Oracin, o an canto hebreo
Que se oan por aqu hace mil aos:
La splica del ciego nos promete
Ms que la maana soleada. Un
Boleto del azar, la vida,
Premio gordo: basta comprrnoslo.
O suerte desgraciada y ciega, que vas
premiando y castigando igualmente!
Por m, elijo la maana y el sol.
4 May 04
La Presentacin
This evening I gave my presentation to my Spanish class on our trip to Spain. For my visual aid I printed out several photos from our collection and passed these around the class. I was going to make overhead transparencies of these, but it turns out one can’t readily buy inkjet transparencies in small quantities. We weren’t supposed to read our presentation; I didn’t, and did fine nonetheless. Instead, we were allowed to use a 17-word cheatsheet. Here’s mine.
- Un viaje
- El bautismo
- Un foto
- vila
- Nuestro almuerzo
- Toledo
- Andaluca
- Pajaros y caballos
- El tren
- Vacaciones
29 April 04
Adventures In Spanish
Tuesdays and Thursdays are long days on campus for me. My Spanish class starts at 6:30 in the evening and runs till 8:20. I grab dinner at the campus eatery before heading on over to class. Next Tuesday I have both a test and an oral presentation, and will accordingly be busy studying this weekend. My presentation will be on our trip to Spain: fortunately we’ve gotten as far as the preterite of ser and ir so I will be able to use the correct tense when describing the trip. I don’t know that they’ll be able to figure out the word bautismo though, so that one is going up on the chalkboard for them.
28 April 04
Wyrded Out
I have just had a rollicking introduction to Terry Pratchett. Numenius got the Wryd Systers, a hilarious rewrite of Macbeth, out of the library on Sunday and I started-and finished it-this evening.
There’s many more where this one came from. I feel a May and June full of silliness coming on.
11 February 04
Words Of The Year
Perhaps it’s getting a little late for lists for 2003, but the American Dialect Society has an annual list of the words that most colored the nation’s lexicon in that year. The overall winner in 2003 was metrosexual, with notable others being SARS, gropenfhrer, and weapons of mass deception.
And Pica and I certainly qualify as flexitarians.
10 February 04
The Muck Off the Pond
Maria at Alembic and Lorianne at Hoarded Ordinaries have both within the last week prompted some thinking about the nature of writing. Lorianne’s under a fearsome deadline to get a dissertation finished on time; Maria wondered whether there were enough words to go around what with being paid to write and scrambling to find pieces of paper with words written on them; she suggests writing for oneself first.
Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way is relegated in my mind to the 1990s and a slew of get-rich-quick schemes, none of which really worked in the end. Her point was that if you wrote three pages-the dreaded “morning pages”-every day, you’d be clearing the scum off the pond of your mind, and you’d be able to compose an opera, write a dissertation, paint a masterpiece, or knit a tea cosy before dinner. (Or all of the above, really, honest.)
I used to believe in this model of writing, and I have books of drivel to show for it. I’m grateful to the blog, I suppose, for providing an audience (even theoretical) to keep the drivel somewhat under control. Being on an every-other-day schedule as we are provides a structure for the writing that suits me, at least, quite well. But unlike Julia Cameron, I think there are probably as many models of writing as there are writers.
4 February 04
American Prophet
All my education was in the British, rather than American, system, so we read Milton, Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Hardy rather than Emerson, Melville, or Thoreau. For my Religion and Non-Violence class we recently read Civil Disobedience by Thoreau, which I had never read before. His name is pronounced by many Americans almost in a whisper; he is prophet to several generations.
A lot of what is said in this essay is about resisting government, taxes, and slavery; since there’s something in here for everyone, everyone uses Thoreau’s classic text to bolster their ideas, whether violent or non-violent resistance during the Vietnam war, to hatred of taxes, to blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Much like the accounts of far earlier prophets, this one can be used to argue just about anything. Even by presidents.
While Thoreau may have been arguing for an informed resistance against the bits of government one finds unpalatable, he didn’t bargain, perhaps, with the wholesale abandonment of “informed” anything. A uniform press that is a lackey to the status quo (the current bleating about Janet Jackson’s nipplegate fracas should silence doubters that this culture is still truly puritanical) is not likely to lead to an informed public. Yet those of us who wish to become informed and act on this information would do well to read Thoreau: his challenge to follow the lead of our conscience resounds loudly today, as we contemplate tax season and the announcement of the increase in the U.S. “defense” budget…
2 February 04
The Name “Pica”
During a very interesting conversation this morning that revolved around blogging and mountain lions, a third meaning for the name “Pica” was drawn to my attention. I chose this as a screen name because Pica is short for Pica nutelli, the yellow-billed magpie that lives around this part of California (and nowhere else). A pica is also a measurement in type: twelve points to a pica, twelve picas to an inch, and as a typophile it seemed to fit well.
What I learned this morning is that it is also the name for a particular eating disorder... eating dirt (and other non-food items). I assure all you faithful readers that I don’t indulge in this particular culinary extravaganza. Really, honest. I know some pregnant women sometimes have odd tastes but I’m not pregnant and hope to get through life without ever having this particular craving.
Apparently the term does derive from the Latin for magpie, whose eating habits are said to be indiscriminate. Our magpies choose only the tastiest morsels out here on the field, I should add, so they must have been thinking about black-billed magpies…
30 December 03
Avoiding the Latinate
Maria from Alembic has got me thinking that perhaps I equate the Latinate in English with the bovine. At any rate, I’ve been musing on Tolkien’s rabid avoidance of it and have attempted to write a sonnet (below) containing no Latin. The problem with this is that a) you immediately get taken for a demented Scotsman, and b) you sound like you’re auditioning for Radio Shakespeare. It’s all in fun, of course, so please have a go if you feel so inclined. Anyone who spots a latin word gets a bottle of ink (poem title excluded, but as you can see, there will be plenty of ink to go around; send me your snailmail address and I’ll send one along). Oh, and one other problem with making walnut ink: your house smells like Grendel’s mother’s lair for about a week. Think wet dog plus badger carcass. Pleasant, yes? (If I had done this in October like I was supposed to, the windows could all have happily been open.)
Alchemy in Brown
The walnuts sat forlorn along the road
And, scattered by the howling wind, they thought
(Since walnuts think, crass doubter: brains they hold)
Their fate lay in a headlong drop to nought
Bestowed by crows: on railway sidings hurled,
To tear asunder husk from hull and meat;
The black birds cawing at their underworld.
No murder was more gleeful, feast more meet.
She wandered slowly through the side-strewn rain
To stoop and gather (carefully, though sore).
Into the basket, then the pot again
And sat to simmer for three days or more.
The walnuts sighed and gave their souls to ink
For words and drawings: life beyond the brink.
27 December 03
Ablatives On The Rebound
Thanks to the excellent blog Mirabilis.ca, there is an article in The Economist about contemporary advocates of Latin, including that center of Latin as a living language, the Vatican. Some tidbits from the article:
– In his upcoming movie The Passion about the last hours of Christ, Mel Gibson initially didn’t want the film, which is spoken entirely in Latin and Aramaic, to be subtitled. – The Finnish national radio broadcasting station YLE each week has a 5-minute world news broadcast in Latin, entitled Nuntii Latini. It may be heard worldwide via satellite or shortwave radio. – Every Thursday, a five-man team in the Vatican argues about how to translate modern words into Latin. Try globuli solaniani for potato chips.Though not mentioned in the article, there’s even a programming language, specifically a dialect of Perl, in Latin!