24 October 04
Landscape In Brown Paper Stock
We packed up Nellie and set off early in the morning for our workshop today at the San Francisco Center for the Book. SFCB is in a convenient part of San Francisco: close enough to the freeway to reach it quickly provided you have a map, but far enough from downtown so that there’s no problem parking. Our teacher, Karen Holden, is a poet as well as a book artist, and we did several writing exercises in addition to making a couple of quick books. She believes in letting the outside world flow into one’s writing as easily as possible. In our first exercise she primed this by randomly mentioning phrases to incorporate into the middle of a free writing exercise. Here’s a bit from mine:
The river sits under the fog, cleaning the air with thoughts floated up by fish. The field is a brown book, the furrows lines of type upon which is written the leavings of the plow.
We then made a landscape book, bound together with a simple stitch. Pica of course makes books like this all the time, but I’m much newer at such things, and found it to be a lot of fun. Above is my little California landscape book: our instructor gave us wonderful paper to work with.
23 October 04
Multiples of Monoprints
In preparing for our Sense of Place workshop in San Francisco tomorrow, I’ve been going through all my potential “items for collage.” I came across some monoprints I did in 2001 or 2002; lots of dark renditions of Grendel sneaking up on feasting vikings, I now see. (I was reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf at the time.) Lots of abstract monoprints also—I scanned some today and printed them to use as possible book covers.
Since I don’t know what exactly we’ll be doing, it’s hard to plan what to bring. I’m bringing far too much.
In baseball news, the first game of the World Series was won by the Red Sox tonight, but they are clearly not going to make it easy on themselves (or us). They blew an early 7-2 lead and the game was tied at 9 going into the ninth inning. Mark Bellhorn’s two-run homer took care of business, but this is cutting it way too fine (and running through an entire pitching staff every game).
22 October 04
Rats to Cats!
All of a sudden our house is being plagued with these centimeter-long beetles that stink when they’re handled. But the cats are enjoying having live creepy-crawlies to pounce on: not too many moths around these days.
Here is some light verse presented “with Satirical Intent for the Amusement and Edification of Both Fanciers and Detractors of the Feline Specie”. It’s illustrated with lovely pen-and-ink drawings.
21 October 04
In the Zone
I’ve written earlier about a project my Wildlife Health Center colleagues have been undertaking to try and catch corvids, take samples, and radio collar them to track the spread of West Nile Virus in the Central Valley. This is easier said than done: crows, magpies and jays have resisted repeated attempts at capture by a net gun, by large traps, by small traps, and anything in between.
Yesterday, though, was different. They caught three crows.
I watched as these women worked almost silently, dancing around each other with a calm and clear purpose. Their confidence quieted the crows they were handling. It was like watching a rite, a ritual: the tone was reverential.
This was, in essence, women doing science. I’ve never seen anything like it.
20 October 04
Milagro
Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox for their historic come-from-behind victory over the Yankees in the league championship series, culminating in tonight’s Game 7 thrashing 10-3.
We went to El Mariachi, our favorite taqueria in Davis, to watch most of the game. I arrived just before Johnny Damon hit his grand slam home run in top of the second inning to put the Red Sox up 6-nothing. Our friends Kevin and Denise showed up for the final three innings, and we were getting pretty rowdy by the end.
David Ortiz hit a two-run home run to start things off in the first inning, and deservedly won the series MVP award. But there were many other fine performances by other Red Sox players: Curt Schilling, Johnny Damon, Mark Bellhorn, Derek Lowe, to name a few.
When we got home the coyotes started howling in celebration, quite near to the house.
Now on to the World Series!
19 October 04
Sense of Place Revisited
The Ecotone Wiki was set up to provide a forum for people to explore their sense of place; the first two discussion topics here and here did this in the most general terms. (Many of the discussion topics that followed focused on a more specific element that dealt with place; please feel free to add a post to any of them and please alert me if you do!). The wiki has sadly been the target of much spam and is less active than it used to be, but it remains a wonderful resource for those with an interest in place.
Numenius and I will be heading back to the San Francisco Center for the Book this Sunday to take two workshops: Sense of Place and Letters to Anywhere. Ive just received the materials list for both workshops:
writing paper and pens
drawing paper
colored pencils
marking pens
pastels or crayons
assorted materials for collage
glue
scissors
thread and needles
awls
bone folders
cardboard and heavyweight colored stock for making books
exacto knife with blades
When they say pens, Ill bring about 50; about five different kinds of glue, different kinds of colored pencils, watercolors, gouache, etc. Ill be bringing along the walnut ink I made last year (by the way, there’s still plenty, so if you’d like some let me know and I’ll send it to you), some flowers I pressed from the foothills, various sketchbooks so I can refer back to images in my head. Often for these kinds of workshops I feel regret for things I left behind as ideas get triggered; Im going to stop just short of bringing the kitchen sink this time, since well drive and have no space restrictions.
Thanks to a tip from Chris Clarke, I read an amazing essay by Jarrett Walker on the Central Valley, Im quite stoked about exploring on paper, with ink all over my right forefinger and glue in my hair, what it means to live in this part of the world, where we are currently being pummelled with blustery rain. After a long, hot, dusty summer, Im in ecstasy over it, walked to work today almost getting blown off the Putah Creek bridge.
18 October 04
Fenway’s New God
Pica and I were following the Red Sox-Yankees game late this afternoon on our computers at work. Down 4-2, David Ortiz lead off the eighth inning with a home run, and the Sox tied it up with a sacrifice fly that inning. We then had to run to meet Nicole and Mike for dinner at Thai Nakorn; I left work just as the game was going into extra innings. Two hours later, we’re driving home from the restaurant and a quick trip to the coop. I turn on the radio to see if I can find out who won. Amazingly, the game is still going on! David Ortiz is at the plate, and Johnny Damon is on second. And David Ortiz singles home the winning run in the bottom of the 14th inning! This is just 22 hours after David Ortiz hit a two-run home run (at 1 in the morning Boston time) to win yesterday’s game in the 12th.
I think tonight’s was the longest game by time (5 hours 49 minutes) in postseason history. Apparently the blimp overhead had to fly home before the game was over because it was out of fuel.
After the game, Pica talked to Doc Roc. Loyal Red Sox fan that she is, Doc Roc might be interested in hunting down something like this.
17 October 04
Writing for Oprah
When I lived in the 13th (Vietnamese) arrondissement in Paris in the early 80s, my then husband and I were befriended in the supermarket by a sephardic couple (he was learning English, overheard us, wondered about English conversation). They had a television, we did not. They invited us over regularly on Friday nights (their Shabbat evening featured an oil lamp and exquisite stewed clementines) to watch Apostrophes, a show on which the host, Bernard Pivot, interviewed about five or six authors whose books he had read (another gluttonous passion of his was wine, so when he did the wine week with Hugh Johnson and other oenophile writers, it was a double treat: watching this guy ENTHUSE was a spectacle).
The French in general have a much higher level of popular discourse than we do here or in Britain —philosophy is taught as a compulsory subject in high school, so even kids whose destiny is to become mechanics or plumbers have a vague understanding of Descartes and Hegel. Pivot’s show was watched by hundreds of thousands; book design is almost nonexistent as a profession except for children’s books, because the French buy BOOKS to read, not because they’re pretty or enticing on the cover (this would render them suspect, in fact). However, Gallimard, Grasset, and Garnier Flammarion rubbed their corporate hands and stocked up local bookstores in preparation for Friday nights when one of their own was to be featured on Apostrophes, because sales would skyrocket the next day. (Pivot saved them millions of francs in marketing.)
Oprah Winfrey triggers the same hand-rubbing mechanism in publishers here. The books she plugs are in general quite different; though I don’t watch her show (still don’t have a TV), I know enough from spending time in bookstores where the Oprah Book Club sticker pops out at you from all over the place (salivate, salivate go the publishers) that she leans heavily toward fiction about women in history whose stories were inadequately told (if at all). (The genre has become a self-perpetuating one—Maria of Alembic and I were giggling about this during a recent visit: imagine a woman in history about whom almost nothing is known, and make up her life story; get it published; get on Oprah. Pass it on.)
That Oprah is getting millions of Americans to read when they otherwise wouldn’t is a) astonishing b) mahvelous c) slightly sad. But I’m reminded by Siona who is going to lead a discussion about The Red Tent soon that I balk heavily at reading a book that is either recommended by Oprah or that is making the book club circuit. I confess this is probably just on principle. My sister has two small kids and felt her mind turning to jelly—a book club is perfect for her, because she doesn’t have the time or other resources to choose reading material for the couple of hours a week she can spare. (I did read The Red Tent on my sister’s recommendation and did enjoy it, but it adheres to the above formula perfectly.)
I hope my powers of discernment never deteriorate to the point where I can’t figure out what to read by myself, from reviews, or through the recommendations of intelligent, literate friends, many of whom I’ve never met but whose words I read daily in blogland.
The irony is I participate in a pre-digesting activity myself by sitting on the committee to choose next year’s Campus Community Book Project. The irony is that this committee has tremendous power and weight (hey, we do a lot of work for it outside our regular jobs; there has to be SOME payback). I sometimes wonder whether the book project shouldn’t be, instead, the whole campus being the committee: everyone reads all these books and then we vote…
15 October 04
The Terror Myth
Here’s a documentary you’re not likely to see on American television in the near future. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear argues that “the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion…a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.” This is a three-part series being shown on BBC2 starting this Wednesday, and is written and produced by Adam Curtis, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. The series traces two intellectual threads that start in 1949 with the the thinkings of the radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb and the American political philosopher Leo Strauss and shows how these run very much in parallel, both movements believing that liberalism is amoral. Saying that “in an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power” is something of a heretical message—I like it!
14 October 04
Rumsey Fire
Coughing didn’t help:
The fires jumped south and west
Pinkball spooked the gloom