23 May 06
Artichoke Dreaming
Pica has planted a couple of artichokes in the garden by now, and we’re hoping that they give fruit that is as delicious as what Karen gave us from her community plot the other day.
22 May 06
A Frenzy of Seeds
I put the kettle on this morning and took the remainder of yesterday’s artichokes (thanks, dear Karen!) out to the compost. We had rain yesterday, a late soaking rain that has perked the California poppies up along with everything else.
I’ve pretty much finished the fence around the garden to keep out jackrabbits and bunnies. (It will not work for squirrels and I’ll have to figure that one out; they apparently love tomatoes.)
I looked in, admiring the artichoke plants I’ve almost certainly planted too late in the season.
My heart sank.
There, in a puddle, were a bunch of seed packets. Wet. Well on their way to germination.
I tore open the packets and started spreading them, pell mell, on the moist good soil. Parsley. (Parsley is not a garnish for me, it’s its own food group.) Mesclun. Spring onions. Arugula. Yard-long beans. Sunflowers. Turned around to get a new packet; it was parsley. The parsley I had planted was, in fact, jalapeño chiles.
I am willing to be entertained by what happens in all this…
21 May 06
Enough Already
Now that Barry Bonds has tied Babe Ruth’s home run record, must every story about the San Francisco Giants be about Bonds? The headlines in today’s Yahoo! Sports baseball section about the Giants’ game reads “Bonds stays at 714 homers, Giants win”. It’s not until four paragraphs into the story do we learn that Matt Cain pitched the game of his lifetime, allowing only one hit and throwing a complete-game shutout. The Giants won 6-0.
This evening we watched half of the episode that deals with the Babe Ruth era, the 1920s, in the Ken Burns baseball series.
20 May 06
Truth and Beauty
We returned this morning to Cold Canyon for a journal entry workshop. The person leading it, Ed Dawkins, wanted us to focus on Truth and Beauty. My immediate reaction on seeing the workshop advertised was Keats: a romantic’s view of the universe, but there are worse ones… but Dawkins’ counterpart was Whitehead, talking about half-truths and how truth is impossible without beauty.
The first part we were to focus on the beauty within ourselves, and how that shapes our truths. The second section was dwelling in the moment. I was hearing wrentits and hutton’s vireos and, toward the top of the trail, black-headed grosbeaks but we were encouraged to eschew specificity for general input. It was hard, but it was useful.
My mind kept turning to Abu Ghraib. It was inevitable. What role has beauty there? Or truth, for that matter? How will the people who survive that experience—captors or captive—ever experience either truth or beauty again? When Truth, a half-truth informed by ill-informed religious belief, starts to run the world, we are all in for a nasty shock. And worse, if we are at the butt end of a rifle or cigarette. Evil will reign.
Yet there is something here, something that calls. The gray pine—digger pine, foothill pine, ghost pine, pine of more names than we can utter, most of them unuttered by any human—sits in that canyon and is. Is beauty. Is truth. Our job is to attend to it. Otherwise it’s all smoke and mirrors, or dogs in torture chambers.
19 May 06
Conservation Commons
I heard a seminar today by Tom Moritz, who is a librarian who has been at the American Museum of Natural History and prior to that the California Academy of Science and has just taken up a position at the Getty Research Institute. Tom is a great proponent of the Conservation Commons, the purpose of which “is to ensure open access and fair use of data, information, knowledge, and expertise on the conservation of biodiversity for the benefit of the global conservation community and beyond.” The idea of the Conservation Commons has grown out of the Creative Commons movement, the idea of the latter being to give creators a spectrum of possibilities to license their work between full copyright and the public domain, “a some rights reserved” notion of copyright. There have been many endorsers of the Conservation Commons to date, but the idea of open access to data is still a difficult one for a lot of folks to work with.
17 May 06
Slow Road Home
A copy of Fred First’s book arrived today. A Blue Ridge Book of Days. This book has been a long time coming and it’s a thrill to see it finally bound and delivered—a book we’ve been watching happen through Fragments From Floyd.
When you write a blog, daily, you do write in fragments. Yet how well this transition—from screen to page—seems to have gone, especially since there are almost no photographs, a surprise for me. Fred’s writing is always at his best, I think, when he allows humor to punctuate his deep and often quite moving observations about place, his place, his nook in Floyd County where the county seat has only one traffic light (we’ve seen it).
And then there’s this:
“This was a pasture where cattle grazed. Before that, virgin hemlock and oak and white pines tall as ships’ masts grew in dark forests seldom visited. I wish I could have seen it then. I wish I could see it fifty years from now when it will have begun to seem like healthy forest once again. But I only have today—a fixed point in the succession from past to future; and I’ll try to do a better job of living in the land and in the time I have here.”
John Elder couldn’t put it better…
16 May 06
Fishing For Zambia
Pica’s garden has turned into a amenable place to do radio. I’ve strung my 15-foot speaker wire antenna through the almond tree and hooked it up to my little Sony shortwave radio. A favorite shortwave pastime is to try to pull in signals from the far corners of the world. A good time to do this is at dawn or dusk, as the terminator, the border on the face of the earth between day and night, is a good path for radio propagation. Yesterday, at 0320 UTC on 4910 KHz, I was pretty sure I heard Radio Zambia, at least according to my database. The signal was there again this evening—very cool.
14 May 06
Skiving
“Skiving” is a word I learned, like so many others, my first term at boarding school in Derbyshire. It means to goof off but there’s more of an element of deception implicit in the term. Like you’re really getting away with a LOT.
This afternoon I skived off from my class in the most impromptu way to go to a baseball game at the newly renamed and surely to be renamed in the future ATT Park. Class itself was skiving off from chores at home which would otherwise have been skived off from by going to Whole Earth or gardening or going for a bike ride or a swim.
Skiving’s good thing to do. In general. And in specificity.
Tomorrow I’ll post a couple of boards I made at my class. What fun that was… [done, Monday May 15]
13 May 06
Losing The Heart Of Berkeley
We heard the bad news from Ron. Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley is closing as of July 10. This store has been in its present location for as long as I have been alive and has always been the flagship bookstore in Berkeley and the East Bay.
The press release blames a 15-year decline in sales in the Telegraph Avenue location, together with a loss of sales from the Internet. The store has two other locations—one on the highly yuppified 4th Street in Berkeley, and another that just opened in the past year or so on Stockton in San Francisco. I have always found the 4th Street Cody’s to have a fairly paltry selection, and have never been to the San Francisco store.
Probably this decision has been in the works for some time. In my last several visits to the Telegraph store I’ve noticed that the selection of books has been getting poorer. And the recent opening of the San Francisco store worried me.
I grew up near Berkeley, and I have a routine I often follow when I return for a visit. I’ll start off at the Berkeley BART station, walk through campus visiting a few shops along the way, and then head south several blocks for a good browse in Cody’s. It’s very sad that this is no longer to be.
11 May 06
Here Comes Whole Earth
The Whole Earth Festival is back in town tomorrow. Unfortunately I’ll miss most of it since I’ll be spending the weekend at a class in San Francisco, but I’ll get a quick tie-dye fix tomorrow at lunchtime…