7 September 05
Ouroboros, Tetramorph, Polycephalos
Back when I was at the Getty in LA a couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Symbols and Allegories in Art by Matilde Battistini.
I grew up being taken to the Prado in Madrid which houses a fine collection of Renaissance Flemish and Italian art and managed to pick up along the way a lot of the Christian iconography, but this book is a gem.
What today must be studied, memorized, and recognized with a definite “aha!” when spotted in a painting was taken for granted. Just as lot of the allusions in Shakespeare would have been caught by even the hoi polloi at the time. Now, they’re the sign of an elite education and culture.
It’s a bridge, though, between this world and that, and I’m looking forward to reading more. And looking.
7 September 05
Evening Fascinations
Screen-door dragonfly
Wings beating like shuffling cards
The cats paw and leap.
5 September 05
What I Can Do
There has been no shortage of pieces in blogland over the past week about Hurrricane Katrina, who screwed up, What This Says About America, who screwed up, white guilt, what it means to be poor (in general, but mostly in the United States), liberal guilt, rich guilt, and who screwed up.
Enough with the handwringing already.
I can
a) give money to Habitat for Humanity and Heifer International, programs which will help people long after the Red Cross has moved out
b) make it known in my dealings with folks I work with, or talk with, or stand next to at the grocery store, that I do not consider the word “looter” an acceptable synonym for “African American.”
c) put pressure on my elected officials to ask hard questions, and not relent until they’ve been answered. They need to ask some easy questions too, like when is Mr. Brown going to get fired from FEMA.
d) seriously examine my lifestyle and curtail the ways in which it is wasteful, unmindful, unthinking. The ways in which it might, with or without my knowledge, exploit others. Focus on low impact environmentally, high impact socially. This will take some time.
e) offer to make it easy for someone whose skills might be put to good use in hurricane relief efforts to get there, like looking after their pets. UC Davis is giving employees who wish to volunteer paid leave. I think this is laudable and I’d like to support it however I can.
f) support community efforts on the ground to rebuild New Orleans and surrounding areas according to the needs of the people who live there, rather than according to the wishes of the government, developers or speculators, corrupt officials, and the rest of the corporate looting mob.
I’m still thinking, but this is a start.
4 September 05
This Must Be A Sign
Though I’m not sure of what.
Yesterday I took a walk west out the Putah Creek levee. After passing under the freeway, I found some scattered pages torn out of a book. I picked these up and read—it was Candide.
3 September 05
Velveteen
During Passover this year we went to a seder at a friend’s house. She used a haggadah—a prayer rite, said throughout the course of long meal—put together by a blogger who has long been on our blogroll, Rachel (Velveteen Rabbi). Only she’s not really a rabbi—yet.
Rachel has just been accepted for rabbinic study, a feat in itself and a huge challenge for the future. It is a delight to read about this journey by someone so intelligent, so committed to the paths of understanding of different faiths, so willing to share her own experience.
Mazel tov, Rachel.
3 September 05
Horses For Courses
This morning’s revelation was that the director of FEMA, Michael Brown (who yesterday didn’t even know that there were now tens of thousands of people at the Convention Center), was drummed out of his previous job as a lawyer for the International Arabian Horse Association for financially and legally running the organization into the ground. The correspondent reporting this doesn’t mince words:
I think I’ve told you that I’m into Arab horses. Well, for 3 years Michael Brown was hired and then fired by our IAHA, the International Arabian Horse Assoc. He was an unmitigated, total fucking disaster. I was shocked as hell when captain clueless put him in charge of FEMA a couple of years ago. He or the WH lied on the WH presser announcing him to FEMA. IAHA was never connected to the Olympic Comm, only the half Arab registry then and the governing body to the state and local Arabian horse clubs. He ruined IAHA financially so badly that we had to change the name and combine it with the Purebred registry.
Hmm, I can hear it now: “Sounds like he’d be great for the FEMA job, doesn’t he, Dick.”
1 September 05
Fifty Years of Pigments
My cousin Gainor is having a 50-year retrospective show of her work at the Horizon Line Gallery in Tampa starting on September 23. Well done, Gainor. Thanks for being a luminous presence in my life. (Click here to see a painting by Gainor that hangs in our living room…)
1 September 05
Your Tax Cuts at Work
That would make a good sign for a particularly potholed stretch of road.
Or a levee in poor nick.
It has been well reported that part of the reason for the levee catastrophe in New Orleans was the diversion of funds from engineering efforts on the levees to the Iraq war. And it has been four years since 9/11—if anything this disaster proves is the uselessness of that stepchild the Department of Homeland Security, which has only obfuscated disaster preparedness in this country.
But the roots of this disaster certainly predate Bush, if not Bushism. I’m livid at the culture of the Tax Cut.
I graduated from a public high school in California in 1981, and always have felt I received a good education there. But that was a matter of timing. In 1978, the voters of the state passed Proposition 13, an initiative limiting property tax increases, all in the name of tax relief. Ever since then, funding for education, and many other things, plummeted, and the California public school system devolved into a sorry mess. My own school district would be bankrupt less than a decade after I graduated.
Infrastructure. You guys—that’s what government is meant to provide. And guess what, that takes tax money.
Pica tells me that the head of infectious disease at the UCD Medical Center has just headed off to New Orleans. I don’t even want to contemplate what our failure to invest in infrastructure has done to the public health system of the Gulf Coast. I imagine it has been barely getting by in normal times, and is now completely overwhelmed by this crisis.
30 August 05
Science Writing
Partly for professional reasons—the need to inform myself about West Nile Virus and the possibility that Avian Flu will emerge in lethal and pandemic form any minute now, and will possibly enter the United States via California, possibly in wild birds—I’ve been reading about epidemics.
John Barry’s The Great Influenza is an excellent read not just about the horrifying events of 1918 but about the emerging field of medicine in the U.S. My grandfather got this flu when he was a quartermaster in the Canadian Air Force, but his letters mention it only obliquely (“I had a mild case, unlike some of the others”—for “some of the others,” read “poor bastards writhing in cyanotic agony, blood streaming from their eyes and ears,” but you don’t write this in letters home to mother, especially when said letters are censored. It’s extraordinary how little has actually been written, fictionally or otherwise, about this pandemic given how many millions of people it affected.). Then, while I was in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Mike Davis’ new Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu.
Both these writers are journalists and have written a lot about non-scientific subjects. Yet the way they both approach science is inspiring to me: it’s hard to make a virus with codenames such as HPAI H5N1 interesting, but Davis has written a searingly compelling book. So has Barry.
I want to write like this. I want to take a subject about which I know ostensibly little, research it, and write like this. I wish I knew how to start. (Of course the way to start is to start, and there are lots of reasons for not starting such as I’m working 50-60 hours this week and so on, but still.) Anyone have any suggestions?
29 August 05
Cats in Sinks
Our kitties view the bathroom countertop solely as the springboard for leaping up onto the windowsill, but these cats have other ideas.