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!
23 December 03
Immersion Learning
At left is a bit of typography from a sign outside a bank in vila. Pica noticed this sign on account of the unusual DE ligature; meanwhile I did what I was doing throughout the trip to Spain – notice the language. Try to figure out patterns in words, phrases and make sense of a language that I’ve never studied. My favorite book in one of the places where we stayed turned out to be a copy of the Oxford Spanish Dictionary.
I’ve returned from Spain determined to learn Spanish. I don’t know what it will be like to learn a language at age forty. I’m monolingual, but along the way I’ve studied Hebrew, some German, some Latin, and most of all French (six years in secondary school). I’ve signed up for a class in the new year, and right now I’m starting by trying to read, with aid of dictionaries and grammars, whatever Spanish I come across.
23 November 03
Sangreal
I just galloped through Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, a nonstop-paced thriller that starts with a contemporary murder in the Louvre that quickly leads into the mysteries of the Holy Grail. Brown has taken an actual set of conspiracy theories and has repackaged these in terms of a best-selling thriller. Whatever be the truthfulness of these tales of long-standing secret societies, the heterodoxies they attest to are enthralling, and make for a compelling read.
21 October 03
The Book Project Turns Pink
The Campus Community Book Project was launched a week ago and so far the response has been great. The wide variety of programs ranging from talks, lectures, and workshops to martial arts demonstrations, a peace picnic, and a performance of Lysistrata means that there’s something for everyone. The visit by the author of Gandhi’s Way, Mark Juergensmeyer, last week was a great success.
Tonight we heard Medea Benjamin, Green Party candidate for Senate in 2000 and one of the founders of Code Pink, explain how U.S. policies have been a disaster in Afghanistan and Iraq and how social movements are, in her view, the way to change the world (as opposed merely to the electoral process). Her three visits to Iraq this year and her conversations with people who are having to live through the results of the occupation give her an authority that radiates through her vibrant energy.
The peace movement is demoralized, almost defeated. Today, I felt I got some batteries recharged. It is important to keep going, not to let fatigue and hopelessness stop us. Benjamin sees a lot more than I do to demoralize her, but I have rarely seen so much energy in one person.
We wore pink. Arnold’s going to get a pink delegation on the eve of his inauguration in November. Being silly is a good way for me to stay engaged; it’s certainly more fun than the alternatives.
7 September 03
Bees: A Secret Life
I finished reading Sue Monk Kidd’s Secret Life of Bees yesterday. Several people have recommended it to me but it is also under consideration for next year’s Campus Community Book Project.
The story of a white girl coming of age in the Deep South during the era of Civil Rights unrest, it weaves the orderly, matriarchal society of bees through the sometimes turbulent lives of a group of women, most of whom are black, and the black Madonna, an interesting and incongruous figure in this setting. The writing is good. The story is powerful; the threads are drawn together at the end in a satisfying but not quite predictable way. Why, then, am I so ambivalent about this novel?
For a book that features so many strong female African American characters, I fear it will only be seen by black readers (if this book ever has any) as yet another Aunt Jemima story. A friend pointed out recently that black movie audiences and white movie audiences are, today, almost completely segregated. Eddie Murphy, for instance, has made the crossover into the white mainstream, but he no longer has a strong black following. At least in certain films. Did I go and see Antoine Fisher? No. I didn’t. I wanted to; it didn’t come to Davis. But surely that only strengthens her point.
If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last year when racial tension has been rife in my office and in the university, it’s this: African Americans are sick and tired of liberal white angst about race. They don’t want to hear any more “I get it now” stories. They want action, they want change; they don’t want to see or hear about any more handwringing. Liberal white guilt is the least effective agent of change.
The Secret Life of Bees is a story about a white girl, for white people, about a successful, healing, powerful interaction with black people. From where I sit today, it reads as fantasy. I wish it weren’t so.
4 June 03
Gandhi’s Way
The UC Davis campus embarked on an ambitious but very successful project last year, namely, to have students, staff, faculty, and the community read the same book and then talk about it. The chosen book was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Dozens of events were organized around this book in Fall 2002, culminating in the visit to Davis by the author and some of the protagonists of her book.
This was always going to be a hard act to follow, but in the end Gandhi’s Way, by Mark Juergensmeyer, a UC Santa Barbara professor of sociology, was selected as the project for Fall 2003. Published over 15 years ago, it calls itself a “handbook of non-violent conflict resolution”—a book whose time has surely come. We are hoping it will help campus and community members learn to welcome, instead of avoid, conflict, and think creatively about ways to bring about change that works for both parties. The Davis Enterprise ran a nice write-up about this project on Sunday.
8 May 03
The Pleasures of a Good Bookstore
Lance Knobel of the excellent Davos Newbies (which I just discovered because I followed the little red light on Geoblog) tells of an exciting new bookstore opening near the British Museum in London by none other than the London Review of Books. I’m envious.
Here in Davis, though, we are lucky enough to have three independent bookstores alongside the UC Davis Bookstore: Avid Reader, Bogey’s Books, and Sweetbriar, the latter two dealing mostly in used books. Just up the road in Woodland there’s the Next Chapter. All this despite the inevitable appearance of Borders, for which I politely decline to provide a link. While Borders, which started out as a nice little independent in Ann Arbor, does understand the importance of making browsers feel comfortable and provides them with chairs and a coffee shop, it is now just too big for its boots.
I overcame my usual knee-jerk Borcott and went in last weekend, looking for a book on Photoshop and a DVD. On my previous three or four visits, I had gone in because no other bookstore in Davis had what I was looking for. On each occasion, I looked on the shelf, failed to find the book, waited at the information desk, and was told by a pleasant young salesperson (different each time) that according to the computer the book was in stock, but wasn’t it on the shelf where it was supposed to be. Each time there followed a sort of tortuous and progressively more frantic attempt by the saleseperson to locate the book—always to no avail.
This time, it was even worse. The DVD in question (Bull Durham, Extended Edition,) was indeed in stock, but it was in the back, and nobody currently in the store was authorized to open the box it was in. The pleasant young salesperson was unable to predict when such a box might be opened: it might be tomorrow, it might be in three weeks.
That’s it. No more Borders for me. Not for anything. I like to support Powells in Portland and browse in the Avid Reader, despite the suspect politics of its owner. I can probably wait till next Tuesday for the book I want. And on trips to Berkeley we immerse ourselves in Cody’s, Black Oak, and occasionally Diesel and Pegasus.