1 February 05
Ten Things I Did Today
1. Paid the rent.
2. Edited a map of California showing incidence of Toxoplasma gondii in sea otters. This is transmitted to sea otters from cat feces.
3. Updated the media file for the Ventura oil spill.
4. Updated the web site for the Ventura oil spill.
5. Got an oil change (first one) for the car. The connection between this and items 3 and 4 did not go unnoticed.
6. Waited at home for delivery of a new washing machine, the pump on our old one having finally given up.
7. Went out to see if the almond blossoms were ready to paint yet (not quite).
8. Helped the landlord put the washing machine together at 4:45 pm. Had I known this is when the washing machine would get here, I’d have gone to work all afternoon. We chuckled about ineffective box cutters.
9. Wrote three letters in support of a Tibetan prisoner in Szechuan at an Amnesty International Meeting.
10. Wondered how it can possibly be that the United States can still countenance the death penalty. It’s assumed to be normal, like having university students parade around in military gear on Wednesday afternoons. (It’s not normal.)
31 January 05
Soup Precursors
We had vegetable and garbanzo bean soup this evening, into which went these kohlrabis.
30 January 05
Catching the Moment
Last night we watched Le Mystre Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot. Picasso created 20 images—paintings and drawings in ink on a transparent surface—that were captured on film on the reverse side. It was an extraordinary performance. Picasso’s gestural faces, for instance, are breathtaking, as are the calves of middle-aged men and pointy toes of bullfighters. He worked very quickly but would just as quickly rework something that he called “trs mauvais”—a complex beach scene complete with water-skier and couple in moonlight which still had the original strong compositional lines he started with. Most of the works were destroyed after the making of the film.
I first saw Guernica in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late seventies. It is a huge, impressive painting, and it was given appropriate attention and weight and pomp. Franco had already died by then and you knew this painting was heading back to Madrid; through who knows what legal wrangles, it finally did get its own entire gallery (the Thyssen-Bornemisa, now housed in much larger digs across the Paseo del Prado), shown along with sketches displayed in a darkened antechamber, people whispering about it, the forbidden suddenly in their midst.
Numenius and I saw it in December 2003 at the new Reina Sofa museum in Madrid, across the boulevard from the Prado. It seems to need more elbow room than it has. There was a huge crowd around it. For all this, the painting has lost none of its searing power. These gestures: he must have painted them thousands if not millions of times, the eye with tears, the fat four fingers, the pointed howling tongue. They return again and again in his work.
Guernica speaks against the horrors of war. Against Franco’s, against Hitler’s, against all war. Against the senseless brutality that is the result, always, of war.
Who will paint the horrors of this one? Who will write the book? Who will compose the music? Or do the din of it all and the fatigue make such a painting, now, an impossibility?
29 January 05
Sun Emerging
The fog burned off late in the morning, and it turned into a fine, sunny day, a good pottering Saturday. We cycled into campus in the morning, going to the open house for the new facility housing the UC Davis Herbarium. The herbarium in its old location had run out of space, and the collections were not temperature-controlled, leading to insect damage. The new location is in a brand-new science building on campus, with the collections stored in movable cabinets like they use for compactable shelving in libraries.
After lunch at Ali Baba’s, we went home and enjoyed the sunshine. The bees were out in force, visiting white violets and snapdragons. Pica worked on her calligraphy, and I did a couple of paintings: above is our car Nellie, with the levee to the north.
28 January 05
Hazard
The Western gray squirrel was hit by a car today.
It might not seem like much. This is often the fate of squirrels.
Yet—
riding home at lunchtime I saw him newly dead and almost wept.
Over 1500 birds were brought in as a result of an oil spill whose source they can still not pinpoint in Southern California. Over 70% of those birds—mostly Western grebes—have died. (For every one bird brought in to the rehab center, 10-100 die at sea.) My colleagues are near exhaustion, working 16 and even 20-hour days for the last two weeks. They are discouraged. I saw two of them today, up for a couple of days then back to the bird work.
And the almond tree outside our front door is getting ready to burst into blossom—if we get some good sunshine this weekend it will happen—but since it’s always so much earlier than all the others, it almost never gets pollinated. It’s like a bride, stood up at the altar.
I try not to get into a place of despair, so well described by Butuki, but it’s hard sometimes.
27 January 05
Cousin Hippopotamus
A post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, Jean-Renaud Boisserie, and two French colleagues have just published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences clarifying the evolutionary relationships of the hippopotamus. This morphological study derives the hippopotamus from an extinct group of artiodactyls (the even-toed ungulates, such as cows, pigs and sheep) called the anthracotheres.
Their study indicates that the closest living relatives of the hippos are not pigs as has been commonly thought, but rather whales, as molecular evidence has also suggested. According to the study, cetaceans and hippos appear to have had a common ancestor 50 or 60 million years ago, and phylogenetically whales can be considered members of the artiodactyls.
26 January 05
Walking to Work on a Wednesday
It’s raining and I’m
walking to work
because it’s raining
and my helmet won’t fit over
the rose barrette Nicole made me
which goes with this turtleneck
(but not so much else)
and it’s not raining after all
and I see
my shadow—the merest hint—for the first time in days
and I notice the creek’s flow
is somehow reversed
but I can’t stop to see why
because as usual
I’m late for work
late, but not so late
as not to notice the red-wing’s concoree
or the kew of the flicker
or that the fat western gray squirrel
(not the kind the Brits accuse us
of having introduced there to wipe out
their red squirrels, I observe as I
see a starling overhead,
bane of bluebirds and purple martins
and just one of hundreds
of eurocontaminants here)
is getting ready to mate
but will probably
statistically get run over first
and I kick a lone
black walnut
to the left
and it leaves a trail
of walnut ink
which I’ve been writing in
all morning
and as I cross the road
my heart is singing
because how many people
get to walk to work
in the rain?
25 January 05
Forty-fifth Out of 146
This is the ranking of the United States in the newly released 2005 Environmental Sustainability Index, a joint product of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, the Center for Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, and the World Economic Forum. The top five countries in this index are Finland, Norway, Uruguay, Sweden, and Iceland respectively.
In the main report there is a figure (Figure 3) that illuminates the position of the United States well. This is a scatterplot and regression of the environmental sustainability index agains the per capita gross domestic product. Despite having the highest per capita GDP, the United States falls well below the regression line. In other words, the United States is performing poorly when you take into account its wealth level.
24 January 05
Apocalyptic Assignment
My calligraphy course in Roman Majuscules continues to throw challenges my way. The latest one is a rendition of Revelation 6:8, the one where the four horsemen of the apocalypse are named along with wild beasts of the earth (which apparently didn’t merit their own horses). Roman majuscules lend themselves to ponderous, serious things, and would be quite unsuitable for, say, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” unless you were trying to pull a Monty Python. (Which Terry Pratchett does, in fact: he has the horsemen scratching their heads over how to play bridge in a bar while Cohen the Barbarian comes along and makes off with their horses. I forget which novel.)
We were to write out this verse in a mixture of 7mm and 15 mm-high letters with the attribution at 3mm; we could choose a left, centered, right, or asymmetric alignment. In these days of desktop publishing programs this is very easy to do in type but when you do it with a pen, it involves a lot of scissors, lettering, re-lettering, and so on; I can’t swear I didn’t futz with the right alignment a little in Photoshop before turning it in.
I chose a right-aligned text, much harder than I suspected, and spent hours working out the inter-line spacing, where the words should be larger, and so on. In the end the lonely word “earth” at the bottom is a reminder that things look pretty bleak out there. But this class is a lot of fun and it’s certainly a lot of work…
23 January 05
Dogblog
A photo essay on San Francisco’s patient canines.