24 November 05
Not For Guys
My mother arrived at lunchtime today. We went to the local Nepalese restaurant for a very good thanksgiving lunch and then dropped Numenius back at home before returning to see Pride and Prejudice.
There were three men in the audience, one of whom walked out.
23 November 05
Little Apples
Every now and then I get to make pretty maps at work. My new computer worked hard today—in a 3 1/2 hour run it produced over 7800 maps of plant species in California. After that I summed together a few of these to make species richness maps for a few favorite genera in the state. This is a map of the number of manzanita species in different parts of the state. Blue is zero species, red is high (about 10 species), and yellow is in between.
Have a happy Thanksgiving, and don’t eat like these folks.
22 November 05
Language Learning
I’m back in Hebrew. I almost didn’t, because my three classmates were not going to come back, and the opportunity arose to take the same class over again.
Part of me was very weary of the idea but also welcomed the chance to consolidate what I’d learned. It was a huge learning curve at the beginning, there.
I finally feel as though I’m making some real progress: I was able to follow along with a lot of the prayers and readings at a Bar Mitzvah on Saturday. It’s the very best kind of motivation. I know you need to push hard to get anywhere but sometimes it’s nice to get this sense of accomplishment…
21 November 05
Singing For The Brain
Therapists have been finding that group singing sessions can unlock communication blocks in individuals with dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.
20 November 05
Thirty Years Ago Today...
... Franco died. Amnesty International has calculated that about 30,000 people disappeared and were buried in mass graves either during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) or under Franco’s long rule.
I was in boarding school in England in 1975. I remember worrying about my family in Madrid, about whether there would be some kind of violence. I remember wondering how many people would emerge from the woodwork, people who had been in hiding pretty much since the War. About who’d return from exile.
The running joke of course was that nobody was ever really sure if Franco was dead, or when he had died, or whether he’d be coming back in some grotesque parody of the resurrection (a book did in fact appear a couple of years later entitled Y el Tercer Año Resucitó.) The war memorial he built (well, his prisoners of war built) into a mountainside northwest of Madrid was his own mausoleum. His tomb lies just below the mosaic image of Christ Triumphant in the cupola, which is a few centimeters smaller in diameter than St. Peter’s (lest the Caudillo be accused of being bigger than his boots).
There was a huge mass yesterday in the Valle de los Caídos for Franco. Hundreds of arms raised in fascist salutes. They are upset, it seems, with the Socialist government’s systematic dismantling of the temporal power of the church in Spain.
19 November 05
Long Before GIS
People were still making maps. News of the discovery of the oldest map in the Western world was just announced. This map is on a bit of a terracotta vase found in an archeological dig about two years ago in southern Italy. The fragment depicts the region of Apulia, and dates from about 500 BC. The script on it is ancient Greek, and it is the first ancient Greek map predating the Romans that has ever been found.
18 November 05
So Frail a Thing
I heard a scream from my office this morning. A bird had flown into our building. It’s been unseasonably warm and we work with the doors open despite the flies…
I don’t know why some people scream when there is a bird indoors: I think more people have bird phobias than you’d imagine. The screamer was hiding under the desk.
I moved over to the window and easily caught the yellow-rumped warbler (Audubon’s) in my hands; took it out; released it. It flew up in to the pine, scolding loudly.
My hands throbbed, remembering that frenzied frail heartbeat.
17 November 05
Feline Drinking Songs
This sounds intriguing—a CD of Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers. It just came out and is available now through CD Baby.
16 November 05
A Different Boston
I spent Sunday in Boston with my sister. She is making a career switch from pediatric occupational therapist, a wonderful one who is quite positive she’s never ever going to write one more report about a child, to an interior designer. She’s taking an online course from KLC in London. I saw the course materials and was quite impressed: it looks like fun, too. It seems in the US the options were either 4-year degree or “interior decorator,” neither of which quite matched her means or aptitude, so she’s a British student. Again. Brava, say I.
Since one of her ongoing assignments is to visit houses from earlier eras, sketch them, and compare period decoration, we visited the Paul Revere House in the North End (late Tudor, sparse but not spartan furnishings); the Pierce house next door (early Georgian, fascinating black line running from the fireplace to border sections of the room), and the Otis house just across Cambridge Street from Beacon Hill, plush Federal.
I lived in Boston for eight years and never went in any of these places. It was interesting to return and see them through this new lens, sketching fireplaces and chairs and wondering how they managed to keep warm through all those freezing winters.
Mostly it was such a treat to spend a WHOLE DAY with my sister, just the two of us. This happens so rarely nowadays. I always return to Davis after having seen her thinking about ways to reinvent ourselves so we could move to some hilltop ramshackle farmstead in the frozen north…
15 November 05
Kater Murr
I’ve been listening to the one CD of Schumann I have, Artur Rubenstein performing the Kreisleriana and the Fantasia Op. 17. Maybe this means it’s time to reread E.T.A. Hoffmann’s wild circa 1820 novel The Life and Opinions of Kater Murr, which was the inspiration for the Kreisleriana.
From the opening bits:
Well the editor promised to do his best for his literary colleague. It did rather surprise him when his friend confessed that the manuscript was the work of a tomcat called Murr, and contained an account of the cat’s life and opinions; however, he had given his word, and since the style of the opening struck him as quite good he went straight off, with the manuscript in his pocket to Herr Dümmler in Unter den Linden and offered him the right to publish the tomcat’s book.
Herr Dümmler said that although he had never numbered a cat among his authors before, nor did he know that any of his esteemed colleagues had taken on a man of that stamp, he was willing to make the attempt.
So printing began, and the editor saw the first clean proofs. Imagine his alarm, however, when he discovered that now and then Murr’s story breaks off, and there are interpolations of a different nature, which belong to another book, containing the biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler!
E.T.A. Hoffmann did actually have a cat named Murr.