5 October 06
Frisbees for Turkeys
As I get ready to start putting plants into this herb garden, my thoughts turn to the visitors we have twice a day.
The extended turkey family (3 hens and multiple adolescents) passes through here morning and evening like a panzer division on patrol, eating everything in its path. They used to be shy. Now they stare me down as if they own the place. I fear for my salvias.
I don’t want to fence this garden in, so I’m hoping a) they don’t like oregano, b) they will be deterred by the five frisbees I found at work today, new and unused in a file cabinet. I’ll leave them outside as ready ammunition….
(Note: wild turkeys are NOT native to California and were introduced at great expense and effort by the California Department of Fish and Game for hunting. Now they are proliferating wildly, eating acorns and people’s gardens and terrifying rottweilers.)
4 October 06
Off Season
I am now at a conference in Keystone, Colorado, up at 9300 feet elevation, surrounded by mountains that are 11,000, 12,000, and even up to 14,000 feet high. Keystone is a resort town, and we are betwixt and between the summer mountain vacation period and ski season. This means that the town is quiet, very quiet. Foraging for dinner is a challenge—the cafe I went to for dinner the day I arrived is closed Tuesday through Thursday.
The area got some snow about two weeks ago, and there’s still some remaining on the higher peaks. The aspen is in full fall color—an intense warm yellow. The cadmium yellow hue in my paint box is getting plenty of use.
3 October 06
Embarking on Copperplate
I’ve enrolled in a copperplate calligraphy correspondence course. The first lesson arrived today.
This had had always fascinated me, but I’ll also admit to being a bit put off by its fussiness. No matter. Now I’m going to be spending my evenings working at a 70° 55° slant, perfecting the art of allowing spreading tines to make a perfect square top.
I’ll let you know how I get on.
2 October 06
Closing Day
The baseball season ended yesterday. Most noteworthy was the collapse of the Detroit Tigers, who after leading their division the entire season, relinquished first place in the last game of the season to the resurgent Minnesota Twins. I’ve been rooting for the Tigers all along this year, since three or so years ago they barely avoided setting the record for worst season ever in all of baseball history.
The Tigers will still be in the playoffs as the American League wild card. The good news is they will not be playing the Oakland A’s in the first matchup of the playoffs, thus leading to a personal rooting conflict. The bad news is they have to play the Yankees straight away, which for a slumping team will be a challenge. Go you Tigers!
I’m off to Colorado for a business trip this week, but this means I’ll get to watch some of the playoffs on the telly.
1 October 06
Digging in October
Apologies to all my friends in northern climes, but I’m working at getting the winter vegetable garden in as well as planting a new herb garden. I had no idea gardening involved so much time with a fork and spade, or what good they did, but I’m getting the hang of this.
We took a break today to go on a little sketching outing to the Arboretum. Here’s some California fuchsia, which I’m hoping to plant with the herbs…
1 October 06
Mapping All Them California Plants
A couple of years ago, two colleagues of mine at work started to pull together two data sources on the California flora into a combined database that they call CalJep. For many months now, I have been working to make the CalJep database into an online mapping application and am happy to say that it is now live on the web. This application allows you to look at a distribution map of any of almost 7900 plant species in California. Do have a poke if you’re interested—feedback on the interface is always helpful.
29 September 06
Tango Evening
There were no tickets. There were no tickets WEEKS ago. But I showed up at 7:55, and, lo and behold, there was a woman whose friend had been unable to make it.
Estampas Porteñas was riveting, sexy, rigid, flowing, stop-start-stop like all good tango should be. But what was so much more fabulous than I’d thought was the four-piece band (piano, double-bass, accordion, fiddle). They were given music-only slots where they each shone. What a treat.
What a treat. I tried to sketch in the dark. It was pretty pitiful but I’ll try and post a sketch tomorrow.
28 September 06
Paging the Ghost of George Washington
The United States is now officially a tyranny. You might not have heard—at least our local rag had no mention of the final debate—but the Senate today passed the torture and detention bill (or whatever it was officially called) 65-34. The torture bit is horrible enough, but the suspension of habeas corpus rights is the real kicker. Congress has just given the President the right to detain anyone anywhere indefinitely without any right to judicial oversight or trial by jury if they are an ‘unlawful enemy combatant’. And who gets to decide who is an unlawful enemy combatant? That’s right—the executive branch. It doesn’t matter if you’re a U.S. citizen or not. And if Bush were to declare that some group—let’s say left-wing bloggers—were in fact ‘enemy combatants’ , oops, into the gulags they go.
Glenn Greenwald sums up today’s cravenness perhaps best of all:
During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus rights and allows the President to detain people indefinitely. He also said the bill violates core Constitutional protections. Then he voted for it.
The bill is probably quite unconstitutional, even to the eyes of today’s Supreme Court, but why will it ever see review? If you’ve been disappeared, how are you ever going to bring the case forward in the courts?
Didn’t we once fight a revolution against such tyranny? To quote Thomas Jefferson (thanks again, Glenn Greenwald): “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
There’s not a whole lot of checks and balances left in the system. Unless of course the ghost of George Washington himself were to summon the spectres of the soldiers at Valley Forge to a march on the Capitol to rout this adminstration and their despicable enabling crony congresscritters from the nation, in a scene straight out of Lord of the Rings.
27 September 06
Birthday Party
He was having his friends over—six of them—to participate in a contest on his birthday: make the best presented/sweetest/spiciest etc. dish with the ingredients available. He arranged to have a panel of independent judges present. He greeted his guests with enthusiasm and excitement.
They set about the basil and grape leaves and chiles and ice cream with abandon. His effort was a log-cabin masterpiece of dolmas and chiles…
He has, ladies and gentlemen, just turned six. And he’s my nephew. (Photos of Simon making pizza dough with me two years ago can be found here.)
26 September 06
Landscapes Of Moral Rot
Two institutions of higher learning and several lifetimes ago, a progressive colleague of mine recommended the book The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, by Andrew Bard Schmookler, saying that it was brilliant. I read it and concurred, gleaning from it the idea that the vast majority of evils result from layers upon layers of acts of power across successive civilizations, not from anything innate in our nature. Moving on to the present, I just discovered that Mr. Schmookler has a website and blog. The site is his response to the amorality and fascistic impulses of the present administration.
But his premise is that this moral crisis is the result of the failings of both liberals and conservatives. In the introduction to the site, he writes:
Many Americans feel a sense of alarm about the moral condition of American society today.
Many in the liberal half of America worry that the political right has been taken over by amoral forces that only pretend to be righteous while they indulge their lust for power and wealth. Many in the conservative half of America fear that America’s moral integrity has been eroded by an “anything goes” culture abetted by the moral permissiveness of contemporary liberalism.
Both these worries are well-founded.
His critique of liberalism is of particular interest:
First, unable to recognize the truth in the old idea that the battle between good and evil is a central part of the human drama, liberalism has been unable to recognize the nature of the forces it’s up against. It is this inability to see these forces for what they are that has rendered liberalism impotent to make an effective stand against them.
And, second, unwilling to take seriously the distinction between right desire and wrong desire, liberalism has been complicit in the emergence of a trash culture that undermines standards and ideals and that cultivates what is base and degrading. This moral decadence, in turn, has created among many Americans a kind of moral anxiety that has historically provided fascistic forces an opening to exploit in their quest for power.
In one post on his blog, he asks his readers for “vignettes of ‘moral rot’ in America”. He cites as an example the routine nastiness in the media, even in in his favorite television show that is at times prophetic and brilliant.
Violence and nastiness in the media are clear examples of moral rot, but what I am curious about is finding instances of cultural degradation in our landscapes. Does the way we create landscape have a moral component to it? And concomitantly, doesn’t inhabiting a degraded landscape lead to moral decline in other aspects of culture?
I believe this is the case. Trying to define a “landscape of moral rot” I come up with the following—a landscape where the forces of greed or lack of respect for personal or collective space predominates.
What are examples? At the small-scale level of individual action, graffiti is clearly one. At the opposite end of the scale would be the the result from the act of drilling for oil in ANWAR. (One perspective on the Republican fixation on ANWAR is that once the taboo on tearing into that last pristine landscape is broken, all other acts of environmental destruction would be simple.)
Closer to home, don’t we see an expression of moral rot in our current housing slump, one that I predict will be long-lasting and deep? It’s sheer greed upon the landscape. People buy huge houses they can’t afford which leads to developers building vast tracts of huge, ugly, and shoddily-constructed things until the system collapses of its economic contradictions.
The antidote to such landscapes is cultivating a sense of aesthetics in our built environment. Of course this means doing something that is completely academically uncool and counter-postmodern—making moral judgments about aesthetics in cultural production, claiming a role for high culture, asserting the primacy of social order, and so on.
Some landscapes just are ugly—let’s cultivate!