A Good Drying Day

We’ve gotten a fair amount of rain the past several days (1.30”), but today was a good drying day for laundry. Here’s my pajama top and a t-shirt, sketched with Inktense pan colors.

The Artist's Way

Since my mother died I’ve been journalling a lot, early morning, three pages, morning pages style. There is a lot to process and writing the same old stuff over and over is a) helpful, b) kind to my friends, c) a palette cleanse for the day.

I tried doing the Artist’s Way back when I was living in Cambridge, Mass, and again in Santa Barbara, and got stuck (like so many people) in the middle. I liked the morning pages and I even liked the artist date, though I rarely did it, but it seemed like a Reaganite version of self-actualization with some new age gobbledegook thrown in for good measure. But I can journal, so I’ve been doing that since I got home, first thing in the morning like a good little artist. Rewriting what happened with my mother and the time I spent in Maine has at least spared my friends the endless repetition of it all…

But then a couple of videos about the Artist’s Way popped up on my YouTube feed and I decided to watch one of them. Like me, they balked at the God references; like me, they were half-assed about the artist dates. But they said they got a lot of value out of it anyway, and this has made me wonder whether stopping wasn’t a form of self-sabotage.

So I’m not sure I’m recommitting but I’ve read through chapter 1 and this time had a whole load of critics and many, many more champions to name. (I even wrote some cringy affirmations.)

My issue isn’t that I don’t think I’m an artist, though I genuinely don’t have aspirations to have my art hang in galleries. I like to make things and give them to others. My issue is that I value all of this so little that I don’t make time for it. This is what I’m going to be focusing on over the next however many weeks it takes. Stay tuned…

Meditations On Probability

After almost six years since the start of the pandemic, I finally caught COVID. Since Pica and I are two of those rare people who still continue to take infection risks seriously (e.g.. we avoid indoor gatherings, and are scrupulous about masking in public indoor spaces), I have been pondering the nature of rare events. Or given enough repetitions of a low probability event, it is not surprising to see it occur eventually.

Here is the timeline. Pica spends three weeks back east with her family, During this period I am not venturing out much, except for walks and a weekly trip to the grocery store. Pica returns on Saturday 4 October. Because she passes through the infectious soup that is modern air travel, we follow an isolation protocol for five days: she sleeps in the spare room of our next-door neighbor, and doesn’t come inside our house without being masked. (The weather is nice, and we can eat outside happily).

On Tuesday 7 October one of our two cats Esme starts sneezing a good bit. I wonder if she picked up a leurgy from Pica’s luggage still sitting in the living room.

On Thursday 9 October I feel a touch like I’m catching a cold, and by the morning of Friday 10 October I am clearly crook with what feels like a mild cold. Pica meanwhile Thursday tests negative for COVID, and we exit our isolation protocol. I’m wondering if I picked up a cold from Esme, who was still sneezing a lot. Though on Saturday I read that cat-to-human cold transmission doesn’t in fact occur.

On Sunday it still feels like a mild cold but since I had a dental appointment on Monday I decide I had better test for COVID. Oops. The antigen test comes up positive, as does repeating with another test kit from a different manufacturer.

Based on the timing of things, it was likely I was infected sometime between Saturday October 4 and Monday October 6. The possibilities I come up with are all low probability events:
a) On Saturday I went to the co-op to pick up some groceries. But the co-op is well-ventilated, and I am masked with an N95.
b) On Sunday I pick up takeout burritos from Chipotle. But this is a two minute task, and I am wearing an N95.
c) I pass through somebody’s infectious plume on one of my walks. Perhaps this was when I was sketching the jazz band on Sunday.
d) Somehow Pica’s return introduced COVID to the house, although she’s been asymptomatic throughout. Fomites on the luggage?

As for Esme, cats do in fact get COVID, and there has been at least one documented transmission event of COVID from cats to humans. I don’t think that’s what happened here though. She is not sneezing now, and is leaping up the walls with high energy.

I am isolating now in the spare room, and feel quite fortunate that I got my annual COVID booster almost three weeks ago on 18 September.

Puzzles

My mother collected postcards from wherever she went throughout her life, and used them in her latter years to send notes to people where she lived — notes about who has the bridge scorepad, or enclosing some of her recent writing, or just happy birthday. She offered me a huge stack of postcards when I was there last year, which I took happily (Postcrossing is a passionate hobby of mine).

There were lots more, though, which I picked up and deposited in the box I was sending back to Davis last week. One was partially written to “Pete.” I think I know who Pete is: her date at a dance, the only person tall enough to dance with her, or maybe he wasn’t, but he later went on to work for NASA or somewhere fancy. She was traveling around Europe with her friend Marianne, and this postcard is of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, black and white, serrated edge. In her cryptic style (which got ever more cryptic as the decades passed), she writes: “Dear Pete – Am ver’ sorry I haven’t written in such months but what I have to say would burn up the page – so I’ll tell you all about the rivers valleys and sunsets again & let you guessabout the rest. We have been to Nice which is ideal for peoples like you – there are islands all over & you can sail between them till you get out into the Mediterranean” [text ends abruptly here, though more than half the available space is left, no address is written in]. I’m guessing the year is 1954.

I don’t think she liked Pete much, and I’m wondering if this was a draft of a dear John postcard, which I can’t imagine her sending, because that’s like breaking up with someone by text (which everyone including the mail carrier can read). I wish I could ask her about this, but this is my life now: wondering about things (mostly trivial) I could have asked but never did. Whoever you are, Pete, I hope you found a good life partner, someone who respected and valued you. And I hope you respected and valued them.

Fruit Bowl

We have a complete set of 24 of the Derwent Inktense paint pans, and I have been testing them out a bit. Here is a sketch of some apples in a fruit bowl using the Inktense pan colors.

Unpacking

When I was at my mother’s with my siblings, we went through literally thousands of photographs. Some of this was while she was still alive, a fun trip down memory lane, camping in Spain or visits to our boarding schools in England and then many photos of California once she and Dad had moved back. She usually got two sets of prints of every roll of film she took, and she took lots of rolls (she must have culled a lot of my father’s photos a long time ago).

I’m not sure what to do with what I brought back, a tiny sample of photos mostly of her and of me, but it was another exercise in memory, nostalgia, and yes, loss. I am waiting to go through the writing of hers that I brought back, since I did a lot of that while I was still in Maine, recycling or shredding a lot of duplicates or writing by others.

Curation and archiving is an interesting activity, especially when you’re not sure what the purpose is. I will let these things sit a while until I’m more clear (she did ask specifically that I read, and then shred, some of her journal writing).

Tis The Season

In October I inevitably take lots of photos of Halloween decorations. Here is a photo of a couple of skeletons that I met on a recent walk.

Zettelkastening Comics

I was interested to read Numenius’ blog post from yesterday. I am drawn to movable pieces, whether written or drawn, and wonder how this might help in construction of a comic.

An important feature of a comic is that there be sequential panels, whether or not anything is written on them. But the number of panels, their size relative to each other, and even where they appear (cliffhangers work better if positioned at the bottom right hand of a recto page, at least in Western traditions, for instance), can all be worked through if ideas and panels are assembled as movable pieces.

I have a lot of index cards and at least three projects currently in the works on cards, held together with rubber bands. None of them is very large which helps. But this is giving me a lot of ideas about how to work, specifically with how to structure thought.

A Zettelkasten Adventure

A major part of my eighth grade English class was being taught how to write a research paper. In my recollection, there were two big elements to what we were taught: the first element was developing a formal outline for the content, with topic sentences for each major and minor point, and the second element was a system of notetaking using notecards, where we would write out individual ideas and quotes from our sources on separate notecards and later be able to sort them into an order that made sense for writing out the paper. In retrospect, I don’t think this notetaking system differs much from what nowadays goes by the name of the Zettelkasten method.

(I was quite happy with how my research paper turned out, by the way. I was very interested in World War One aviation then, having spent a lot of time playing the boardgame Richthofen’s War, so my paper was on fighter tactics in World War One. I was pleased because I knew enough to be looking at original sources, especially pilots’ memoirs.)

There are lots of variations on the Zettelkasten method, but a couple points seem key. First, each notecard contains a single atomic concept. Second, there is an indexing system in place to allow individual notecards to link to other notecards; that is, it’s a hypertext system.

Some of the practitioners of the Zettelkasten method in the analog era would accumulate massive collections of notecards, for instance the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann created a Zettelkasten of about 90,000 notecards which he used in writing 50 books and over 600 articles. The digital era makes the process much easier, with a number of different software systems available for creating Zettelkasten, and if nothing else one doesn’t end up needing to get cabinetry to store all the notecards.

I have just started a new Zettelkasten since I have many research ideas but am a long way from turning these into essays and the like and need to be taking a lot of notes. (A current research project is learning about empires and the rise and fall of the nation-state.) For now I am using a software package called Zettlr, though there others I might explore as well. I’ve used Zettlr previously to help me write my last paper when I was working at the university. One thing that is nice about Zettlr is that it integrates well with citation management systems such as Zotero, which I have been using for many years.

With this Zettelkasten I am beginning a new practice: make sure to write a couple notes into it every day. This could be taking notes on an essay or paper, interesting quotes, or just general thoughts. We’ll see where this all goes in a little while.

Lessons From My Mother On How To Die

a) understand exactly what you want
b) communicate this, over months or years if necessary, to your loved ones. Repeat.
c) continue to learn your options because they change over time and over your health condition(s)
d) keep a sense of humor about it all
e) filing? damn the torpedoes… (actually, no. Don’t damn the torpedoes. Mum’s filing system must have made sense to her, but we are continuing to find surprises)
f) try and keep your marbles; it expands your options (see item c) above)
g) write your own obituary. Ask for help if this seems overwhelming.
h) be clear about who you want to be present, and almost more importantly, who you DON’T want to be there. Appoint a gatekeeper if necessary.
i) let there be ice cream.

What I wish:

Is that she hadn’t told us all not to cry. As Gandalf says, “not all tears are an evil.”