Seeing an Old Friend

We attended a conversation this evening between Teju Cole and John Gossage on photography. Here are my notes.

Francis At The Feeder

As Pica has noted, we enjoy watching hummingbirds. We have set up two hummingbird feeders in our yard, one on the east and the other on the south side of the house which we refill the feeders with syrup twice a week. Anna’s hummingbirds are the most common species and are present year-round; we’ve named the individual males of this species Francis. These hummingbirds are highly territorial and will chase each other off from the feeder frequently. Here is a photo I took today with my long telephoto lens of a male Anna’s on the feeder outside the kitchen window.

Zhuzhing Up Your Handwriting

It’s World Sketchnote Week (it used to be a single day) and I attended a couple of sessions yesterday. One was by a Graphic Recording colleague, Heather Martinez, whose fame as a lettering artist is well known in our field and who has taught me in particular a great deal about different lettering styles, effective for writing at speed and at scale.

Her session yesterday was more about spicing up your sketchnoting lettering, which is a much smaller canvas. But what struck me was that she seemed to think that joining all the letters — American cursive — is faster than other methods.

I remember reading Tom Gourdie’s Improve Your Handwriting long ago — I think I was still in college — and it is long out of print, though digitized versions are available through the Internet Archive among other places. One thing I’ve always remembered is his assertion that any handwriting that loses legibility at speed is useless. (Gourdie was a master of Italic handwriting as evidenced in the image. It has gone the way of the dodo in the UK as well as most other places; this book was published in 1978, when there was still some hope of improving national handwriting among British schoolchildren.) But to do this some ligatures must be lost — it’s not faster to join up the letters when to do so makes an awkward and lengthy detour.

I found the image at right where he is excoriating the Palmer method as illegible — though few people under 80 use it anymore, and indeed few American (or British!) adults under the age of 50 do anything at all that could be called “cursive.” Sigh. Handwriting is a useful skill in order to retain information, much more effective than typing. Get off my lawn.

One Tree And A House

In the morning before heading to the memorial protest on Saturday, I sketched this house on A Street. As is my practice in winter, I colored it in with the watercolor crayons when I got home. Pica suggested I get an aubergine crayon; here I try it out in the shadows of the tree and the vegetation. I like the richness the color adds.

Busy Day Tomorrow

Our patterns of sleep seem to be shifting a bit now that Numenius is retired and we are sleeping much later into the morning than we used to. I can’t tomorrow, though, because I have a number of timed engagements, all of which are pleasurable but which mean I need to be up, dressed, and with my wits about me by 8 am. (I used to rise often before 5, so yes, this is a big change.)

The final of these engagements at 4 pm is a discussion about this recently published tome through the Sequential Artists Workshop. We are going to discuss a list of Rookie Mistakes contained in the book’s introduction, which include not thinking through the visual story, writing way too much, underestimating how long it takes to draw a comic, taking sloppy notes, and refusing to edit or cut anything. I’m afraid this last one is a big constraint for me — why draw it if it’s going to go? — but I hope to have enough of a thumbnail draft of one project to be able to share it next Saturday.

Memorial In Central Park

We went to the memorial held in the afternoon in Central Park here in Davis for Renee Good who was murdered earlier this week by ICE in Minneapolis. There was a good turnout of several hundred people, some of them wandering over from the tail end of the Farmers Market, and the memorial was marred only by a disruption by our town’s Moms for Liberty loon (Lady, I’d like to hear what the pastor is saying, thank you, I thought).

On YouTube later I watched a bit of a conversation between historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman about this moment. A fragment from this:

(HCR) “And you know, I quite frankly never wanted to live through historic times. I just got to lay that out there.” (JF) “And I wanted to sit in archives and read dead people’s mail. Like that was our job.”

Escoda Ultimo

An Escoda travel brush arrived today. It’s the synthetic fiber Ultimo #12, a large round brush that can hold a crazy amount of water but also holds a very sharp point.

I am not averse to using waterbrushes like the Pentel Aquash, but I’m looking for a little more control. This brush seems to be able to handle all kinds of things I might throw at it. More anon.

Perils of Public Natural History

I have begun my historical research explorations with some research into a topic in California historical ecology: how did California grasslands come to be dominated by non-native annual grasses? The story I learned as a student was that prior to European settlement California grasslands were mainly dominated by perennial bunchgrasses, but the introduction of grazing livestock led to their replacement by the non-native grasses. This is what Davis botanist Glen Holstein called the “Bunchgrass Dominance Paradigm” in a paper in the journal Madroño in the year 2001. The first sentence of the sign in the photo (“Purple needlegrass (Stipa pulchra) once covered the Central Valley floor and surrounding foothills”) from the UC Davis Arboretum sums up this paradigm pretty well.

The sign clearly dates from no earlier than 2004, and the trouble is is that the paradigm was already falling out of favor in historical ecology by that date, due to the research of Holstein and others. (A more minor point is that Stipa pulchra had been renamed Nassella pulchra with the publication of The Jepson Manual (a comprehensive flora of California) in 1993.) I have used the phrase “public natural history” in the title to this post in an analogy to the field of public history, the professional discipline of interpretation of history for the general public, for example in writing the text for museum displays. Public history is a challenging discipline — how does one know which stories to tell to what publics? From this example from our Arboretum, it seems like there are similar challenges in presenting natural history — the science is always changing.

Drawing Trees

I have, among other things, set as an intention this year to get better at drawing trees. My plan is to draw a tree a day. I feel like I’ve chosen a bad medium — pen is less versatile than pencil, for trees — but I’m going to keep going.

This tree was drawn a couple of days ago in the early morning fog. Here, the pen wasn’t a hindrance. I’ll be posting more as I go.

And I’m writing about drawing because the events in the world are almost too much to bear.

A Neo-Royalist Future?

As we struggle to make sense of Trump’s maneuvers in Venezuela and elsewhere, a couple of international relations scholars have a new term to describe this possible shift in the world system order. This term is “neo-royalism”, and is described in a paper written by Stacie E. Goddard and Abraham Newman which was published a couple months ago in the journal International Organization. This paper has seen a lot of interest in the past several days including many mentions on Bluesky and a MetaFilter post about it.

International relations scholars view the liberal international order as a system that is in decline, but they have tended to think that this shift may be a fallback to what preceded it, that is the Westphalian great power system, where systems of global governance are weak and states are sovereign and acting to pursue their own best interests. What Goddard and Newman are suggesting is that we might be have to look back before the Westphalian system for an analogue (the Treaty of Westphalia was 1648). As they put it:

A plausible emerging order, which we label neo-royalism, would be a major break from both [the liberal international order and the Westphalian system]. It centers on ruling cliques, networks of political, capital, and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns, seeking to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes.

They give as examples of royalist cliques the Khanate “great houses”, monarchical families such as the Tudors or Hapsburgs, or conglomerations such as the Medicis in Florence. Today’s analogues would be Trump and his circle of course but also Putin, Modi, Orbán, Modi, bin Salman, and others.

They see neo-royalists maintaining their power through rent-seeking rather than a rules-based order. As they say:

The goal of rent extraction is not simply self-enrichment; it amasses wealth from both the domestic and international peripheries so as to perpetuate and extend clique political dominance.

Or as Newman just expressed it on Bluesky: “Why target Venezuela/Greenland? Because they offer rents that can be extracted and distributed to the insider clique. The broligarchs have a long term interest in these places.”

I’m afraid to say it but I think Goddard and Newman are onto something here. This has a lot of parallels to discussions around neofeudalism but perhaps neo-royalism as a concept has more descriptive power. Maybe it’s time for medieval and early modern political historians to educate us all about the world before states.