20 January 26
Pondering Greenland
I am not able to read the article, but the Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece today headlined “Greenland is Trump’s White Whale”. This seems like a succinct way to describe Trump’s derangement. Beyond that, the neo-royalist lens that I’ve discussed earlier is the best framework I that have found to make sense of what Trump is up to. There is no strategic or economic advantage for the United States in seizing Greenland; rather it is all about status-seeking and being able to provide lucre to billionaires in his clique. A takeover of Greenland will quite plausibly cause the economic ruination of the United States, as Europe starts to disentangle itself from trade with us. The prime minister of Canada Mark Carney gave an excellent speech at the Davos conference about how middle powers such as Canada are going to start routing around the United States as hegemon.
Everything I know about American history says that the Greenlanders will suffer tremendously under American rule.
There is far more going on than we are aware of. As the aphorism from the Tao Te Ching says — “those who know don’t tell, those who tell don’t know.” And military adventurists should always heed the quote from the title character in the movie “Elizabeth” — “I do not like wars. They have uncertain outcomes.”
The photo at left was taken somewhere over the eastern coast of Greenland in September 2017 on our return flight from Iceland.
19 January 26
Resistance Through Knitting
Numenius drew my attention this morning to a thread on Blue Sky about the Melt the Ice Hat, a knitting pattern released a few days ago to emulate a hat worn (and subsequently banned) in Norway to protest the Nazi occupation. The pattern notes contain this narrative:
In the 1940’s, Norwegians made and wore red pointed hats with a tassel as a form of visual protest against Nazi occupation of their country. Within two years, the Nazis made these protest hats illegal and punishable by law to wear, make, or distribute. As purveyors of traditional craft, we felt it appropriate to revisit this design.
Norwegians are ingenious people and this story gives an account of how the resistance moved to creating Christmas cards that echoed the sentiment as a way of getting around the ban.
I have no red yarn in my stash, at least yarn that isn’t particularly scratchy, so I ordered some online today. I already have requests for four hats, and I’m going to knit them two at a time — not like the double-knit socks in War and Peace, which is really a party trick, but using the magic loop method.
The outrages of ICE in Minneapolis are being well documented. We have GOT to stand up to this thuggery.
18 January 26
West Campus Outing
We went on a little outing this afternoon to the Putah Creek Riparian Reserve in UC Davis’s West Campus. Pica settled in and sketched a very difficult tree, and I focused on drawing the row of olive trees running north alongside Hopkins Road. I sketched these with my Derwent Graphitint pencils, except for the little bit of blue in the sky.
17 January 26
Fear of Getting it Wrong
I had the second workshop of my year-long Comix Coven today. We had half an hour to work with watercolor and ink on a two-page spread about where we are in our process with our projects.
I am working on a piece about my mother and her choices about end-of-life. I’m terrified I don’t have the chops to draw her, either as she appeared or as she was to me. I’m trying to jump in and have a go nonetheless.
Something that is so personal is challenging, but I think I have this fear with all projects. The way out of them is through, instead of putting them on the shelf and finding ways to justify abandoning them. But this one, even if only five people ever read it, is really worth doing, so I’m going to go ahead and keep working on it.
16 January 26
Attention And The Everyday Carry Camera
Attention was a significant theme of yesterday’s conversation between Teju Cole and John Gossage. It is evident that photography for Teju is a refuge from the despair of the world, and photography becomes a practice of attending to the beauty he finds. To paraphrase him, attention taken to the highest level is indistinguishable from prayer.
The conversation did make me ponder what am I trying to achieve when I take pictures. I wouldn’t think of posting my photos on Instagram, nor am I trying to sell prints of them. But I do carry a small camera wherever I go. (In today’s parlance, this is called an “everyday carry camera”). When I see something that strikes my eye on my habitual walks, I’ll take a photo or two. Sometimes these photos work, often they don’t. It’s still a practice of attention.
(The photo at left was taken up the street returning from my morning walk a couple days ago).
15 January 26
Seeing an Old Friend
We attended a conversation this evening between Teju Cole and John Gossage on photography. Here are my notes.
14 January 26
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.
13 January 26
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.
12 January 26
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.
11 January 26
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.