3 November 04
Routed
I spent the day alternating between despair and deep anger, vanquishing the elation of last week’s Red Sox victory. But here’s one thought I ran across today that however trivial, seems apropos. The Red Sox fans kept the faith. For 86 years each spring their hopes would be up, only to be dashed by season’s end. But they never gave up on their team. And one year, they finally won. We lost, and we will lose again. But one day victory will be ours, if we keep up the hope.
Jarrett has started a blog on place and politics, and has some initial ponderings about the geography of this election. This topic may be a starting point for me to regroup: to begin diving into the county-level patterns in the election data and see how it compares to demographic information. And maybe I’ll end up with interesting maps and charts for all to see.
2 November 04
1 November 04
The Feline Neighborhood
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on cats and place.
Berkeley owes much to its cats, I once read. Or at least I owe much to them: when I was growing up near there, going on walks and meeting the neighborhood cats was my main contact with the feline deities, since we didn’t have cats at home. I wonder now if there’s a relationship between neighborhoods that are good from a cat’s point of view, and neighborhoods that have been built for walkers. After all, one of life’s great pleasures to go for walk and meet up with a friendly cat. Village Homes, the archetype in this town of a humanely-planned development, certainly has many cats contentedly roaming the interior walkways and sunning themselves on vine-bestrewn wooden fences. The photographer Hans Silvester is justly celebrated for his photographs of Greek village cats. And who wouldn’t want to walk around a Greek island village?
We need to ask the cats their opinion on urban design. Will a feline Christopher Alexander come forward, please?
31 October 04
Cats and Place
This entry is for the Ecotone wiki’s joint blogging topic, Cats and Place.
Never really having been a cat person before it’s been interesting to watch what were two feral kittens grow into something resembling adult cats—with no adult training. They know how to find warm spots in the house; they react to chaos in a chaotic way, attempting to reverse it; they play with all kinds of things they shouldn’t and shun cat-specific toys.
What to learn from a cat: find a place you like and take over; eat; nap a lot. (Don’t go into scholarly publishing, in other words.)
30 October 04
Dashing Into A Swing State
Today we went on our day trip to Carson City, Nevada for a little bit of get-out-the-vote work. We met Susan and Barbara at nine in town in Davis and rode in Susan’s Subie Forester. Our first stop was just outside Auburn for fuel. The attendant at the gas station, a middle-aged guy with a long white beard, said we were the third group to pass through wearing Kerry-Edwards buttons, and wondered if there was a rally somewhere. We explained we were headed to Nevada. He said he was probably the only person in his precinct to be supporting Kerry, and they knew who he was! On the way over the mountain, we passed another car clearly filled with volunteers; we waved and they waved back.
We were told to arrive by 1 PM; there was no point in doing work in the morning since it was Nevada Day (celebrating the founding of the state) and there was a big parade downtown. Our coordinator was Kris, a youngish guy wearing a Yes on Kerry, No on Yucca Mountain t-shirt, who’s been at this since mid-August. Our brief was to visit voters not so much to persuade them to support Kerry but to get them to go to the polls, and offer them help if they needed any. Volunteers had already contacted most of the registered Democratic voters, so we started in on the non-partisan voters.
Nevada has early elections: one of the things we discovered is that a large fraction of the people have already voted. The people we talked to seemed pretty evenly split between Bushites and Kerry supporters—it is a swing state after all—and we had only one overtly hostile encounter. We figure our afternoon’s efforts probably netted the cause a couple more voters, and certainly helped the Carson City locals cover more ground. Kerry’s sister Peggy was in town campaigning today as part of the Nevada Day activities, and Anne Richards, the former governor of Texas who was defeated in 1994 by Bush, will be speaking there tomorrow, so Carson City is definitely getting some upper-level attention.
We stopped at a restaurant for dinner on the way back. On one of the televisions by the bar they had figures from I think the last day of early voting. This showed about 37,000 votes cast, apparently evenly between those registered Democrat and Republican. I think this is a good sign for Kerry, since far more Republicans are going to cross over and vote Kerry than vice-versa.
29 October 04
Paths Not Taken
Long ago and far, far away, I was an assistant editor at a major university press. (Hint: it’s in the same town as the team that just won the World Series.) Not a line or copy editor, the kind of editor that makes decisions about what gets published or not.
Times are hard in scholarly publishing right now; print runs have shrunk, nobody’s buying criticism, and the machine—the deeply flawed machine that goes by the name of publish or perish—is grinding to a halt. There are plenty of very smart people out there, some of whom can even write very well; but whether their books will sell or not is a very hard question to answer. Actually, it isn’t: they mostly won’t.
I used to move in these exalted circles, have intricate discussions about subjects I knew a lot less about than I appeared to (but so, always, did my interlocutors); travel to conferences, try and find the diamond in the rough—the hot new commodity everyone else was also on the lookout for. It was cut-throat and it made your heart beat fast. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and ultimately, too much for me.
Yesterday I got a call from someone who was visiting Davis—an editor I knew well from my conference circuit days. He was giving a talk to graduate students about how to get their work published. His hosts invited me along to dinner—the inevitable expense account dinner—and for an evening, before I went off to the shabby offices of the Yolo Beat Bush/Democratic Party HQ, waiting to get our Nevada assignment for tomorrow, I was transported back to the world of publishing. It was fun. I got to talk to people about their interesting work (and it IS interesting, it turns out, if unpublishable), enthuse, trade jokes, remember Edward Said making one of his grand entrances at MLA with a long black cape (fifteen thousand people would part like the Red Sea).
I’m not sorry I chose a different path. There’s too much posturing in that world, too much bullshitting. But the dinner was a reminder that my life could have been very different—and a great deal more stressful.
28 October 04
Proposition Soup
Since we live out in the boonies—a precinct with less than 250 voters—we need to vote absentee. That means I’d better send in that ballot pronto. Alas, we Californians always get intimidated by a daunting list of propositions on the ballot: this time we have sixteen. It’s an ordeal to wade through, as most of time the measures are fairly technical things pushed forth by one special interest group after another. I look forward to seeing someday a proposition to make getting propositions on the ballot much, much harder.
On Saturday we’re heading over the mountains to go canvassing in Carson City, Nevada. We’ll be riding up with our friends and fellow baseball fans Susan and Barbara. Nevada is at the moment leaning Bush but we’ll see if we can do something about that.
27 October 04
Dust to Silver
As I write this, the fourth World Series game has not yet started. As I write this, I look out onto a patch of ground that has been brown and dusty all summer but which is now becoming green, and the green under the brown stalks turns the landscape silver.
Every year I forget about the California early-winter silver. Every year I rediscover it.
The rains have come early: October is early for rain in these parts. The cold’s here too. So is the silver.
I’ve been thinking a lot about two people who took me to Fenway Park back in the late 80s. They were fathers of friends of mine; both were passionate about the Red Sox. One of them introduced me to baseball altogether; the other one taught me a lot more about it.
They are both gone now: two Red Sox fans (how many, many more must there have been?) who were born after 1918 and who died before they could see their team win the World Series.
Their silver hair and blue eyes swirl with the smell of hot dogs and the Boston accents and the lousy beer and the sound of bat on ball, CRACK not POCK like a cricket bat, that impossibly lush green diamond. I wish I could send them both a letter thanking them for this. I wish they could see it. Eddie’s scorecard would be trembling in his hands, the seventy or so years he’d heard “wait till next year” rolling by like innings, his yellow golf pencil clinking down onto the seat in front but lost in the roar that is not the collective victorious howl of when we beat the Yankees last week but something soft and sweet, grateful, not quite believing, like the October rain that paints this landscape silver. I think I’m hearing it now.
I think next year’s here, guys.
Postscript, Thursday morning: Red Sox flags have been turning up all over Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, according to a piece in the Boston Globe:
“Workers at Mount Auburn Cemetery said yesterday they began to see tiny Red Sox flags blossom near some headstones at the historic graveyard in Cambridge.
‘This is a place where the living and the dead meet,’ said Janet Heywood, a Mount Auburn vice president. ‘It seems appropriate that people would want to invoke the spirit of their ancestors and let them know what’s happening with the Red Sox.’”
And one of the best baseball blogs, Bambino’s Curse, is, as of today, discontinued:
“My work here is done.
This will be the final, regular post to the Bambino’s Curse weblog. The site, however, and all the archives will remain online forever, as a small testament and recollection of what it was like to be a fan before the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918. (Like anyone wants to relive that!)”
26 October 04
Moonstruck
Tomorrow night there will be a total lunar eclipse during the World Series game. Clearly this is portentious. Since the Red Sox won tonight’s game to go up 3-0 in the series, either they will break their 86 year-long curse, or they will collapse just as spectacularly as did the Yankees last week and add another sorrowful chapter to their long tale of woe. The moon will have her say in the matter tomorrow.
25 October 04
Letters to Anywhere
The second workshop we took yesterday was entitled “Letters to Anywhere,” an intriguing title we never seemed quite to cover in the class…
We DID all have to write to someone whose face appeared on a postcard, of which there were many, or imagine the person on the postcard writing to someone else on a different postcard (and on and on; you get the gist). We constructed different envelope models for correspondence, things you can actually put in the mail. I liked Karen’s insistence on the ephemeral, on eschewing the sacred archival that we may have learned elsewhere. Have fun, she says. And SHARE it. It doesn’t have to last; it has to get mailed.
Ideas that came up on the drive home: Write a letter to a place. Write a LOVE letter to a place. Write a letter to yourself at a younger (or older) age. Write to a fictional character in your place, or a place you know well.
It strikes me that this blog is an ongoing letter to anywhere, actually: it’s certainly a letter to many places at once. So, anywhere: how are you? I am fine. Wish you were here…