6 February 05
5 February 05
Library Cats
For those folks losing sleep over where to visit working cats in their milieu, here is a map and directory of library cats past and present.
4 February 05
Portage
Picture a highway bridge over a small river in central Wisconsin. The land is flat, mostly open, marshy in bits; on one side up a slope is an old farmhouse. The only clue to anything unusual about the vicinity is that it has perhaps more than its fair share of historical markers. Two of these commemorate Fort Winnebago, formerly on the site of the farmhouse. The second one is a small monument in red granite, erected around 1925 by the Daughters of the American Revolution. The wording on the copper plaques is terse; on one side there is a list of officers who served at the fort. To the modern viewer, all the names on the plaque are likely to be unfamiliar except for one, a Lieutenant Jefferson Davis.
So began the environmental historian William Cronon last night in a talk he gave in the Alumni Center on campus. He was reading from the first chapter of a book he has been working on for ten years, and is likely to be published in three, a local history of a town named Portage. “This is a place with ghosts”, he said. Three of these ghosts are important figures in American environmental history who spent formative years near the spot: Frederick Jackson Turner, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold.
And once upon a time the spot was a major transportation nexus. Due to an accident of physical geography, the Fox River, over which the bridge passes, here lies only 1.28 miles from the Wisconsin River. The Fox drains into the Great Lakes and hence is connected to the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Wisconsin drains into the Mississippi and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico. In the era when canoes reigned, when waterways were the chief means of transportation into the interior, this portage spot, at the border of two great watersheds, was key.
There are many stories to be told about this place. But that is so about all places. The process of placemaking, Cronon contends, is the process of storytelling.
3 February 05
Canson Replies!
On December 14 I sent a letter of complaint to Canson paper in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
Today I got a reply along with six different gorgeous pads of Canson Mi-Teints. Apparently the pad of layout bond I was using was an aberration (I suspected as much—their paper is usually fabulous). In addition, I was suspected of being a former Crane Paper sales representative (I’m not, though my step-sister-in-law’s partner is related to the Crane Paper people, I’m not sure in what way). In any event I was asked to consider that if I were interested in submitting “some of your projects for consideration for display at Canson trade shows we would certainly welcome this.”
Not bad for a morning’s fulmination which was far more fun than anything else… make art, not war, should be my new motto.
2 February 05
Signs of Spring
In honor of the holiday of Brigid, celebrating awakening from winter’s deep, yesterday after work I went to the cooperatively-run Experimental Garden on campus to find and sketch a newly-blooming flower. I ended up drawing this lavender. While sitting in the garden, I heard a familiar metallic ping—ping—ping. Baseball practice! The UCD baseball field is nearby, and the baseball team was practicing in their batting cages. Their season begins next Tuesday. Signs of spring indeed—the weather is beautiful as well.
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.