23 August 04
Precept
Forty-five years ago today, I was born not too far from here.
My mother and I have grown closer over the years; the connection has been writing. I send her a poem, she sends me one, kind of thing.
This is the one she sent me for today:
Precept
Even then,
our little girl
saw beauty
in a snail on the move
whose disguise
lies in doing things
slowly.
She painted one,
not in camouflage
but strident walnut taupe,
for its journey up
a sturdy turquoise blade
that dared to stab awake
the lasting
blue.
Her work hangs,
now in a wood frame,
part of this empty house,
and I’m seventy.
18 August 04
Back To Class
My second semester of Spanish started yesterday. Again, this is through the local city college. Thankfully we’re using the same exact text so I don’t have to spend lots of money on new books. It’s a long class period—I think fifteen weeks, running the middle of August through the middle of December. We meet twice a week, in a slightly more inconvenient location (south Davis rather than on the UC Davis campus) than last time. I didn’t make good on my intention to study lots of Spanish over the summer, but at least we’re starting out with a review of last semester’s work.
3 August 04
A Different Kind of Thought
I just finished reading a book so remarkable I’m not sure what to say. The book is Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. I had heard a lot about this book—my sister works with autistic children, for one thing—and when the chance came to evaluate it for next year’s Campus Community Book Project, I leapt at it.
I have always thought I had a visual mind… When people talk, I immediately render what they’re saying into pictures. When the topic is very abstract, this is hard, which is why it’s hard for me to get my head around REALLY abstract concepts. I couldn’t have been a philosophy major, for instance.
But I have NOTHING on Temple, a woman so courageous it leaves me humbled. She thinks only in pictures. Every thought she’s ever had is an image, and they get stored in her head, sequentially, so she retrieves them as though from a hard drive. This method of thinking has allowed her to be an amazing designer of facilities for livestock, with whom she identifies and is able to “see as”: thinking like a cow, she calls it. So she’s been able to design chutes, insecticide vats, vaccination restraints, and even restraints for slaughter that are humane and dignified, cutting down on the amount of unnecessary stress on the animals. When the book was written, a third of all livestock facilities in the United States were designed according to her principles. All of which are done in her head, visually, from every conceivable angle, like pieces of neurological Meccano.
Yet it is Grandin’s account of growing up autistic, of the tantrums, the isolation, the terror of being an adolescent and not fitting in, unable to communicate, yet miraculously tumbling on two or three mentors who didn’t mind that she was different (understatement of the year) and finding her calling as a designer-the journey is quite spiritual. And that she is able to articulate all this, an experience that is usually perplexing and completely opaque to non-autistics-no wonder this woman’s such a heroine in those circles.
My hope is that she’ll be a heroine in other, much bigger, ones. She has so much to teach us all about difference, tolerance, other ways of seeing.
13 May 04
The Footnote’s Triumph
Tony Grafton is one of those great ferreting historians who should be declared international treasures. Like astronomers who look a little to the side when viewing something like the Pleiades in order to see them better, in peripheral vision, he rumages through discarded and often ignored bits from the past and removes, from the detritus, a mirror. His Footnote: A Curious History is one such.
I picked up a book in the library the other day: Ibid: A Life, a novel in footnotes by Mark Dunn. The premise is that a manuscript gets destroyed by a careless editor and all that remains are the footnotes. I haven’t gotten very far, but this promises to be a great read. I’ll let you know.
Terry Pratchett, whom I’ve also been reading voraciously as I predicted, is a master of the device: a simple phrase such as “everything happened at once*” is turned into a chuckle or more by a simple asterisk. Gentle mockery of pedantic erudition doesn’t debase erudition itself. Where, for heaven’s sake, would we be without the philosophers?
Here’s my plea for the continuation of the footnote, which I will lay at the feet of the sages of the marketing departments of university and other presses, who maintain doggedly that footnotes frighten people off with their terrifying “ibids,” their ghoulish “see alsos,” their scary “this practice is not unknown in the culture of X”s. If a note’s worth putting in at all, put it at the foot of the page. Don’t bury it in the back where we have no way of knowing whether it’s just an ibid or something really juicy. We can decide for ourselves whether to ignore it or not, rather than get paper cuts scratching through the “notes to chapter 6,” spilling our tea and fumbling with crumpets and losing our original places in the process.**
Look at us, people. We write our blogs every day, splashing links to this and links to that throughout like insects to toil and moil on our behalf to say look! and see this! and that too!—the link in the blog has not only brought the footnote into its own, but is practically its raison d’etre. We’re now grown up enough, I think, to be able to deal with footnotes. What say you?***
——*“This is not precisely true. It is generally agreed by philosophers that the shortest time in which everything can happen is one thousand billion years” (from Mort).
**Though having just divulged the fact that I’ve borrowed a book from the LIBRARY, not paid $22 for it, will no doubt render my opinion worthless to said sages.
- A bit of gratuitous pseudo-Elizabethan English designed to raise the level of diction in an otherwise prosaic paragraph, repeated TWICE by the Lord Aragorn (Pippa and Fran, you must have been really tired that night) to the King of the Dead and his mates in the film version of Return of the King, but too Falstaffian for anyone including the King of the Dead to respond any way at all other than by guffawing. Speshly when you say it THREE TIMES. (This is of course why Peter Jackson cut away from the scene without letting you see it.)
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.