3 December 04
The Druids Across The Way
Jim of the acorn grubs held a potting party for his valley oak seedlings at his house this evening, conveniently located on the other side of the street from us. It’s quite a production. The acorns get laid out in flats over vermiculite, as seen at right. Once the acorns germinate, they get placed in pots made of two milk cartons, preferably quart-sized, opened up and duct-taped end-to-end. Meanwhile, folks are scouring Davis cafs for empty dairy cartons, and our office is serving as a waystation for garbage bags full of half-and-half containers coming from the campus Memorial Union coffeehouse.
So far over three hundred acorns have been potted, and a number of flats of these have gone out to various people. A lot of teachers have become interested in the project, and several were at our gathering this evening. The seedlings will be ready to plant once the tap root reaches the bottom of the twinned carton. Jim this will happen some time in mid-January to the beginning of February.
At left we’re happily inspecting seedlings to the music of La Bottine Souriante.
2 December 04
Different Paths
I’ve been taking an online calligraphy class, my first. Roman Majuscules. The ones on the Trajan Column, beautifully proportioned and fiendishly difficult to do well—the basics are easy but everything, EVERYTHING is in the nuance, the subtleties. It requires a lot of practice.
The time I have to practice is early in the morning. This is also the time when I might be writing or meditating, and in practice it ends up being the time when I everyone else’s blog over several cups of tea. And get ready for work, having eaten breakfast. And taken a shower. And am late for work. And so on.
Meditation’s not easy for me; I am easily distracted and the thought of a week of Zen practice, let alone longer, is inconceivable (Lorianne has my admiration no just because she wrote a 50,000-word novel in the month of November…). All the uncomfortable sitting, thoughts whizzing through my brain…. Yet this morning as I patiently dipped the pen in the ink, strove for the 30 degree pen angle (but 60 degree on the verticals of the “N,” 20 degrees on the “Q’s” tail and the upper diagonal of the “K,” 0 degrees on the diagonal of the “Z,” I pondered on what a meditative exercise it was. Family groups, organized widest to narrowest; then the alphabet; then abecedarian sentences (I gravitate mostly to those in Latin, like “Trans zephyrique globum scandunt tua facta per axem,” which nonetheless leaves out “K” and “W” as well as “V” which should replace the “U”). Finally, I decided to try Michael Nagler’s suggestion of the prayer of St. Francis.
There is no way to write these letters quickly. They build stroke upon stroke, over time, and the space between the strokes is as important as the shape of the letterform. They get absorbed, penetrate the psyche. It’s pure concentration: pure present.
Lorianne says a Trappist monk once told her Catholicism had lost sight of its contemplative roots. I’d like to think the invention of the printing press had a tiny part in that….
Since this photo gives a rough sense of what the rest of the house looks like, and the reasons I find to avoiding doing housework, this will serve as an Ecotone Wiki entry—this time it’s Housekeeping and Place.
1 December 04
Luring The Wild Entomologist
Simply offer a jar of grubs.
The listserv of the ecology graduate students at UC Davis evidently is a happening place. Recent emails have concerned offers of Swedish massage by a graduate of the ecology group who has since gone on to get massage training, and a note by a visiting Portuguese scholar/rockstar seeking temporary housing for winter quarter—a person with a keen ability to find a party every weekend, but someone who gets grumpy if he runs out of salted codfish.
My officemate, who is in the middle of a project growing valley oak seedlings for restoration plantings, posted the following in response:
Seeing as the list serve themes are eclectic today, I’m offering up
a jar full of grubs. They emerged from the valley oak acorns currently
sprouting all over my house.While these grubs are not the life of the party, nor do they know Swedish
massage, they still might be of interest to budding entomologists who are
curious about oaks. Get ‘em while they’re hot!You will have to figure out what they eat, or if they can be salted and
used instead of codfish.
There were no claimants via email, but this morning we got a call from a woman who was quite excited about the grubs. She’s an entomologist, and came over on her bike in a half-hour. She immediately concluded they were lepidopteran larvae, probably some gray moth, and wondered why they hadn’t pupated yet. She took the jar, and would be heading over to the entomology museum tomorrow. This will be fun, she said.
30 November 04
Loss
A friend has just lost her guide dog, Bruno. He had cancer for a while and it finally caught up with him.
Losing a dog is awful. Losing a dog who helps you get around, is your eyes, your legs, who picks things up you can’t find, who gets you past those awkwardnesses when people don’t know how to respond because you’re in a wheelchair, so that even strangers come up to you and start conversations, who kisses you when you cry because let’s face it the world’s a pretty bleak place right now, who allows your partner to go to work without worrying—losing this, I can’t really imagine.
Bruno attended Code Pink rallies in a pink bandana, wagging his tail and smiling at everyone. He sat at the ACLU table at the Farmers’ Market, encouraging people to take literature, warning them about Ashcroft, grinning through his graying Labrador jowls. He was a true activist, a true friend. He was a Good Dog with a fondness for cookies.
He’ll be missed…
29 November 04
A Wiki For Davis
I learned today that my town now has its own community wiki. The Davis Wiki was started by a number of students and first went live at the end of October. It has grown rapidly, now having well over a hundred contributors and 600 pages. The wiki is particularly strong in describing the town’s eateries, and also has a growing number of pages on quirky features of Davis, such as the building known as the Death Star, Cows, and the Locomotive Hedge. An excellent feature of it is the interactive Davis map that allows you to click on and insert landmarks that link to wiki pages.
Pica and I have both signed up as editors, Pica quickly leaping in to add a page on our favorite Thai restaurant in town, Thai Nakorn.
28 November 04
Whither American Fiction?
One of the things my mother does when we meet up, here or in Bodega Bay, is that she (messily) unloads a pile of things she wants me to see that she’s been saving up since last time. One of these latest unpackings was some excerpts from the current issue of the Antioch Review, a piece called “The Writing Life: Envy and Editing” by Daniel Harris. In this he wrings his hands about the state of American letters, where creative writing programs mass-produce out-of-work MFAs, all of whom are first in line to nab spots at prestigious art colonies and write stuff that is read only by others like them. Whom they envy and take delight when some small failure or other befalls them. It’s a shrinking pool, he says, one that despises the mass-market authors but secretly envies them more than anyone else.
I’m not sure I follow the entire drift, not having the article to hand, but this section (as quoted by my mother) caught my eye: “The five best books I’ve read in the last couple of years have been Harry Mulisch’s Siegried, Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time... Not a single American author alive today … is capable of writing a novel like one of these. Because they dare to take on the big issues of life and death (because they’re presented without chilling effects), knowledge and meaning, learning and forgetting, without shame, without fear, without self-doubt…”
Is this because American writers are too geared toward publication, or getting on Oprah, or receiving kind notice by the New York Review of Books? (Or that they are too weighed down by Hemingway or even Faulkner?) What would happen if someone quietly writing away in the backwaters, away from writing groups and even bookstores, produced something like G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer LePage, the most quirky novel I’ve read in over a decade? Is it just not now culturally possible for this to happen in the United States? Or to write a highbrow novel that doesn’t, somewhere deep within, have an unpunctuated stream of consciousness that mimics the Hot Thing passage in Toni Morisson’s Beloved?
To all of you who’ve been working hard on your fifty thousand words for the month of November (and even those who haven’t), I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Me, I’d settle for an American version of Terry Pratchett. We’re ripe for some serious satire.
27 November 04
La Casita del Cielo
We went on a downtown bookstore outing today, and wandered for the first time into La Casita del Cielo, which is a new Spanish children’s bookstore hidden between D and E streets. Pica was looking for a grammar to send her sister, who is helping teach Spanish in her primary school back in Maine. She found a perfect book, and talked a lot to the owner about bilingual education here. One of the reasons the owner, who is from Peru, started the store is because of concern over Spanish literacy here. Most bilingual teachers in the schools have very little command of Spanish, and Spanish-speaking students do not end up learning much in the way of Spanish grammar or writing skills. On top of all that, American culture as a whole is not one where most people read much. Anyway, he was happy to hear about Pica’s sister’s efforts, and gladly gave Pica several free books to send along to her school. As for myself, Spanish children’s books make for good reading practice at my level, and I settled in this evening to a copy of Helico y el pjaro, by Andr Dahan. Fun little story about a bird being taught to fly.
26 November 04
A Day of Birds and Salmon
Rock wren barn owl burrowing owl bus driver who got out of the bus (to the airport) to see the burrowing owls glaucous-winged gull thousands of chinook salmon breaking themselves apart to get upstream merlin nailing a white-throated swift over the rapids and hauling it off for lunch, when most people were there to see the salmon ferruginous hawk ALBINO red-tailed hawk (this was the magic bird today) Lewis’s woodpecker western bluebird phainopepla FERRUGINOUS HAWK sandhill crane greater yellowlegs lesser yellowlegs snow goose eastern phoebe sunset behind Mt. Diablo sandhill cranes white-fronted geese, v’s in opposite directions veggie lasagne and some central heating, washed down with a pinot gris far above our means donated by someone who’s moving back east…
25 November 04
Mughlia Saag Thali
Pica’s Mum came up to see us today from Bodega Bay. After a walk in the Arboretum, we set out to find a lunch place, thinking at the very least the restaurant Great Wall of China would be open despite the holiday.
We did better than that, ending up at Kathmandu Kitchen, a Nepali place on G Street here in town. I had the thali plate mentioned in the title, Pica had beighan bharta, and Mum had palak tikka paneer. We all drank mango lassis too.
That meal was so much more tasty and wonderful than the traditional Thanksgiving turkey I can hardly believe it. No sticking one’s head in the oven staring at the fat-spitting giant fowl either. I think we’ve started a new tradition here.
24 November 04
Thanksgiving
We do not do Thanksgiving Dinner. People around me ask, jokingly yet accusingly, whether I’m not thankful. Yes, I say, every day, but I’m a vegetarian, and it’s all about turkey, and I just don’t understand what connection there is between being thankful and stuffing my face over the course of hours at the expense of my mother’s back and tranquility and overall mental health, which is how I recall this from the time when we DID do Thanksgiving Dinner, in Spain, when nobody else was, a little island of American tradition where most of the people at the table were more English than American, a tradition we then repeated a month later, only this time with presents.
Once we were invited by some friends—he was in the US Air Force—to Thanksgiving Dinner at the Base southeast of Madrid. (This was the Torrejn Air Force Base, but it was just called “The Base” by all non-base English speakers, a place which, during the height of the Cold War which this was, would be the launching point for an airborne nuclear attack in the European theatre, which we never thought about at all being only nine or ten. To us the Base was a place where you could get American candy and American comics and where there were lots and lots of people who never emerged at all, never saw Spain, never learned even a word of Spanish, carried on their own little version of military life that would have been identical in Germany, or Japan, or the Philippines but which always included lots of liquor. There were exceptions, such as the friends who had invited us. They seemed very, very rare.
What struck me about this dinner at the Base was how formulaic it was. Our Thanksgiving dinners at home were similar—similar ingredients—but were special, probably because we were the only family within three miles to have the oven on at 5:00 am; I enjoyed making the crosses on the stems of the brussels sprouts like some minor benediction, waiting for the inevitable o’clock when my mother would cut herself badly with one knife or another. (Blood everywhere. Every time.) At the Base, by contrast, there were literally hundreds of people getting the same mashed potatoes, the same turkey, the same gravy—the uniformity, the sheer number of slices of turkey, made it so much less and at the same time so much more. It was excess, my first real inkling of it on this scale. The food was good. It was just that there was so MUCH of it.
The past few days I’ve been pondering on the emptiness of this culture. The paradoxes abound: there’s way too much of everything, of food, of STUFF. Obesity is an epidemic linked to poverty, of all things; antidepressants are now the number one class of drug prescribed in the U.S. When will we say, as a culture, enough? Enough stuff? Enough of this emptiness? We have so much now, can’t we just be thankful for THIS? Can’t we share? Can’t we just be?
So I will get up tomorrow morning and be grateful for the white-crowned and golden-crowned sparrows that sing and scratch at our back door, for the rock wren hiding in the bee boxes, for the color of the dawn, for the mist that glides over the levee, for my health, for my friends, for my family, for my love. Then I will go and BE in this instead of eating for hours followed by slouching comatose in a chair watching a game of American football.
And on Friday, I will not shop till I drop. It’s Buy Nothing Day. You’re invited.