28 June 09
Wet and Humid
I’m in Maine, where my mother is recovering from surgery. Posts will be sporadic from here so I’m going to leave you in the hands of Numenius for a while.
Singing, now, outside this window, are birds I used to know well and which I now need to really pay attention to identify. They include the Maine dialect of song sparrow, a winter wren, thrasher — I’ll try and sketch some for Bird by Bird as I get more time. A pair of ospreys was flying over the trees outside the hospital window yesterday…
24 June 09
Consequences 13
“This was only one solution for the present,” Ellers sniped.
McMason fidgeted. He knew all the funding for the Institute for Computational
History was at stake here.
“But, look at the correlations,” he replied. “The model correctly predicted that the Russians would move into South Ossetia during the time of the Beijing Olympics, and that Chris Hoy would be the first Brit to win three golds at the Games in a hundred years.”
“Did it predict he would be knighted for his efforts?”
“Uh, no…”
“Lookit, how many free parameters does your model have?”
“Five hundred and sixty-seven.”
“And I probably can tweak any ten of them and come up with different solutions giving Hoy and Ossetia. Mr. McMason, your model is underdetermined. To say the least.”
“Ms. Ellers, I just want to remind you of the opportunity you have here. Here is
what the model predicts. The Azerbaijanis will up the rate of water injection in the Baku fields. Overly so, it turns out. In three years, this will induce a massive earthquake just off the coast of Baku. That, the resulting tsunami, and the fires will devastate the oil and gas infrastructure, but more importantly cause a cultural phase transition.”
“Howzzat?”
McMason grew animated. “Fire! In a land with a small but vibrant Zoroastrian community. It won’t be so small after that. People convert in droves. The religious movement spreads south, into Iran…”
Ellers sighed. She now knew the butterfly effect could produce a loon in her office.
(This was the thirteenth post in an online game of Consequences. The series started at Hydragenic. The previous post was at Ivy is here, and the next post shall appear soon at Velveteen Rabbi.)
17 June 09
Dream Cake
A theory of mind in a raspberry torte
Top layer sensing — luscious crimson seed eyes
Underneath cream cheese filling deep cogitations
Crumbly base rich buttery motor actions
Food for thought.
13 June 09
Be-longing
Only the music belongs completely to itself…
Tosh, she thought.
The string-section shimmer of sapphires and turquoises on a mid-afternoon mountain lake, edging into the dark purple bassoon murk: they own the music. The gray pines that sang her their song that day in the rain. The clarion “play ball” and thwack of the bat on ball, the sub-human bellowed glottal stop of the umpire. Ours. The sweet saxophone solo: maybe it doesn’t belong to Charlie Parker, but it belongs to the night, to the smoke and the sweaty sex and the swilled liquor and the bebby Jesus.
We are along for the ride. We gulp what is here and ours and nobody’s and nothing’s.
(This is the fifth post in an ongoing online game of Consequences. Each successive entry begins with the closing lines of its predecessor. Entries are 250 words long, and are linked thematically. The series started with Hydragenic and was followed by Patteran Pages, Porous Borders, The Middlewesterner, and Feathers of Hope. The series will continue in a day or two at Blaugustine. )
17 May 09
Burning
Like this, he said.
A stone circle first
then paper (FT’s best)
then twigs then kindling
then, when that’s caught,
a log.
And another:
a teepee or crossways.
A path for the air.
Camping chairs shifting forward then back
a dance with the cold and
the size of the fire
the kind of wood
(oak’s best, well seasoned)
and how many clothes
we’d lugged into
which Castilian landscape.
Bottles surrounded us
(Chinchon’s good, but best
with coñac).
The bonfire beacon
summoned
shepherds and in pairs, guardias,
and frozen, parched hikers:
all offered a copa
and given a smoke.
Those fires: the cracking and
smoke and bane of
scorpions, spiders, the beasts
that emerged from their midst:
swallowing, omnomming
the night. My youth smells like this.
But the first time —
when I had just learned
to read —
that time, when we walked half a block,
he and I, with our tent and two bags
and the matchbox that held
“cosy” and “warm”
The dry thistles caught and
he beat them: slap! thwack!
the bag snuffing the life
yet there was the mock, the crackling
flames, rebirthing themselves:
That time, I saw something bigger
than Dad
and learned fear.
Ten years
since the flames took the flesh
off his bones
and consumed it all:
fire bigger than Dad —
the land cracks,
the breeze lifts,
and it’s
re-licking its
lips.
24 April 09
Velvet Women
For Ivy and in memory of Bobette
They clung together through
the soft rocking:
the boat and the gin
while the men on deck
smoked and laughed and
coursed.
The tears and slobber
[o those violet eyes]
my baby, gone. my baby.
it was a night
to remember
[her name is was Liz]
and forget
[my unborn had no name]
The pain of it, the
misery
the shame
sloshing in the bilge
slapping the side
the hangover next day
and through it all
two women, adrift, bereft.
5 April 09
Spring
This weekend, I
a) listened to the last exhibition game of spring training. The Giants beat the Dodgers.
b) finished my first sweater in over 30 years. (Also my first top-down sweater ever, my first seamless sweater ever, my first i-cord bindoff ever. Photo soon added.)
c) led a bird walk in Cold Canyon whose focus was birdsong. We heard mostly orange-crowned warblers and wrentits, but on the way down the path heard then saw two gorgeous black-throated gray warblers.
d) met a bunch of Jacobs sheep and their lambs up close and personal.
e) bought a bit of Jacobs roving and a spindle.
f) planted six Japanese cucumber plants, a gift from the landlady. It’s too early to plant cukes, but six is too many, so if some don’t make it, oh well.
g) failed to clean the house.
h) failed to make a start on taxes. Numenius says he is.
i) am currently listening to the first real baseball game of the season. Atlanta is beating the Phillies, 4-0.
j) have somehow managed to get a bit of sunburned cheeks. It was a gorgeous weekend, much of it spent outside despite all the knitting.
22 January 09
It's Raining, Oh It's Raining...
The soil laughs, muddy.
But it must have irked the skunk
Under the bathroom.
30 December 08
A Festering
The endowed chairs come bearing expensive overcoats, a studied ennui, and a secret hope that at least ten people will point at them in a whisper, the way people do in supermarkets in Van Nuys or Palm Springs when the famous actor du jour stands eyeing the tortilla chips.
The tenured faculty come bearing overcrowded schedules, the nagging feeling that after eight years interviewing the brightest young things in the country they are never going to land the hottest one (or even the hemidemisemi hottest one), and the gnawing suspicion that they are no longer young enough to show up at the Marxist cash bar without making a spectacle of themselves.
The untenured faculty come bearing hastily finished manuscripts, a bad hangover, and the guilty knowledge that they’d be far happier curled up in a good armchair with a novel that has nothing — NOTHING — to do with their field of research.
The university publishers come bearing crates of their new offerings and many more crates of backlist, hoping like the tenured faculty for the hot new thing over whom so many are salivating, bracing themselves for the onslaught of hastily finished manuscripts that will all end up in one of the crates that may or may not make it back to their press (but that will certainly never make it back to their desks).
The graduate students come bearing slightly dishonest resumes, enough clothes to ponder interview garb over four hours, and a permanent rictus that results from the awareness of their being on display to potentially any of the above categories in any venue: in the cafeteria, in the bathroom, in the dismal hotel corridors, in the seminar rooms, in any one of a number of good or cheap or trendy restaurants within fifteen miles, and above all in the exhibition hall where the publishers await them with a mixture of terror and vague hope.
What they all bring—without exception, from the four corners of the globe and the many cities and via the many airlines and taxis and buses and subway trains, given what time of year it is and where they’ve just been—is viruses.
This post is dedicated to all those who had, for one reason or another, to go to San Francisco this past weekend for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, and even more so to those who were supposed to go but decided, wisely, against it. (Here’s looking at you, Liz.)
17 December 08
Drifting Toward Invisibility
Julie Zickefoose, a bird artist and writer whose blog I’ve been following closely for a while, just had a piece published on the NPR website on becoming invisible after 50.
I will turn 50 this next year. It is only over the past few months that I’ve been aware, as Julie puts so very coherently, that a) I’m no longer being noticed in casual in-the-street-type contexts, b) that I therefore must have been aware of having been noticed before, though this didn’t really ever register, c) this is not altogether an unpleasant experience once you get over the shock of a) and b).
It’s starting to become more clear to me why some women take such pains to appear younger than they are. I have dismissed this as vanity for a long time, but I don’t think it’s just that. I think they want to still be someone, a person, a noticed person—someone who walks into a cafe and more than one head is raised in their direction, which culturally has given them meaning. Julie raises the obvious example of the Red Hat brigade as a damn-the-torpedoes approach to the unnoticeability problem, one that neither she nor I is likely to adopt. But I am starting to understand it a little more.
One of the commenters on Julie’s NPR piece suggests that blogging is a powerful way for women to keep their voice and have it be noticed. I think we shouldn’t underestimate this.
I am just finding it so very odd to even remark upon it. And wonder whether wearing my hair long and defiantly gray is my own means of bucking the trend…. Others have written about this and I’d love to hear from my male and female readers of all ages about their experience of this phenomenon.
These blind contour self-portrait sketches were done this evening at Mishka’s in the reflection in the window onto the night of Second Street, in the company of Blue Bicicletta who had some wonderful “Ride a Bike” pins for me (let me know if you’d like one).