13 October 04
Smoky Days
There’s a fire burning in the backcountry on the west side of Yolo County and the east side of Napa County. It’s been going for three days, and has burned almost 38,000 acres, largely in chaparral. There’s been very little damage to structures, and only one injury so far, and fires are an ordinary part of our landscape. The smoke drifts down here from time to time—yesterday someone new to California asked me what it was—and the haze to the west is tinged mauve.
12 October 04
Auto Mechanics With Fine Binding
So I’m taking this auto maintenance class, which is sort of silly because I have a sparkling engine, inside and out. But Nicole calls up from North Carolina and asks if Phil and Phillip are taking the class—she’s one of the more-than-once crowd, as are they. Yes, I say. Well, she says, Phil is a book restorer. You should talk.
So while other people roll around the filthy floor of a high school shop changing their oil, Phil and I go into the intricacies of hand-tooled leather, the Bay Area book arts scene in the 60s, and the lamentable lack of a letterpress in Davis. This was the last place I’d expect to have a conversation like this; it beats talking about the Red Sox and their performance tonight…
11 October 04
North Wind
In fall and spring we get strong north winds when a high pressure system sets up over the Great Basin. It makes for bad chi, or is it positive ions, all around. Yesterday morning I smelled smoke from a grass fire that turned out to be a three-alarmer several miles to the northwest. And then in the evening we were walking out in the field by our house when we heard and saw a loud bang and a bright white flash. When we got back to our house there was no power—evidently it was a transformer exploding. The house was dark—so much for our evening reading.
10 October 04
Baseball Exorcisms
So I was standing above a stock pond on Point Reyes yesterday, looking at a bird that somebody called a pectoral sandpiper and someone else thought might be a buff-breasted sandpiper, when a third person said to me “you’re wearing a Boston Red Sox cap!!” It’s true. I was. This person had just flown in from Massachusetts and they were getting some birding in for the weekend; she lives in Needham.
With Red Sox nation, there’s no need for small talk, you dive straight into the particulars of this play or that home run (in the event, the two-run clincher by David Ortiz on Friday). We’re hopeful, all of us, this year, the year the Red Sox might just defy history and win the World Series.
But there’s WORK to be done, viz:
I told my new friend about the Sox fans who had taken a voodoo priest down to Babe Ruth’s grave to try and get the Curse of the Bambino lifted. She countered with the story of the vegetarian who had eaten 86 hot dogs (one for each year since they last won) in an attempt to do the same thing.
Hocus-pocus, maybe, but if they win this year I’ll believe anything.
9 October 04
Trains In The Southland
I went to Ventura yesterday to give a talk at a meeting. When I was figuring out how to get to Ventura, situated on the Oxnard Plain between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, far away from major airports, I came up with a novel plan: fly to Burbank, and take the train! It couldn’t have been easier, actually. Hop on the 50 minute flight on Southwest from Sacramento to Burbank, walk one block south to the train station at the airport, then take the train west to Ventura ($13 each way), the stop there being several blocks from the conference hotel.
This isn’t supposed to be like this: convenient public transportation in Southern California. Burbank is a good airport to fly into as well, not the out-of-the way zoo that LAX is. On my return trip this morning, there was even a group of sports fans taking the train 75 miles to go to a game. These were USC fans headed to the big game against Cal (alas, Cal lost, but they kept it pretty close): I think they got on the train at Santa Barbara.
One person in my dinner party last night was wondering if somebody would be able to give her a ride to the Burbank Airport today. I told her about the train—she was happy for the tip, since she loves train travel. So do I.
8 October 04
Senza Cuore
The second presidential debate, which I didn’t listen to, is over. The Red Sox clinched their way to the American League championship. Numenius is in Ventura at a conference. I had planned to do a piece on a book I once made about Martha Stewart but I don’t have the heart to do this, not tonight.
My mother’s cracked her pelvis. It’s not a bad fracture, but she fell while walking on Bodega Head which makes me hyperventilate. She didn’t ask for help and she didn’t even tell any of us until a week later, at which time we all offered that she might like to consider perhaps going to see a doctor. (Well, my physical-therapist sister-in-law practically screamed, which turned out to do the trick.)
My mum’s an independent gal who doesn’t ever want to leave the ocean again. Since my father died she’s made a life for herself in the town where they spent ten years together, from my perspective their best ten years. But she lives 45 minutes from a hospital, and all of her friends—the ones that are still left—are older than she is; she spends a good deal of time taking care of them. I’m two hours away, which is too far to just drop everything and head over there for this or that purpose… There are some tough choices ahead. My brother and sister and I want them to be made by her, not by us under a time gun.
This all weighs a bit. Sorry if I sound morose. There was a beautiful sunset this evening which I could see because the corn’s been cut down and the stalks turned under, attracting a huge flock of geese (at least fifty, all Canadas).
7 October 04
Urban Swine
Part of my dissertation was about mapping the distribution of feral pigs in California. But I had no idea that wild boars could be an urban species. It seems that Berlin has a population of about five to seven thousand wild boars, their numbers increasing two-fold after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And they cause over 400 traffic accidents each year. After all, I don’t see a crosswalk in this picture.
6 October 04
Three Things
1) I’m very tired, because last night I was in an automotive maintenance class until 11:15 pm (you may wonder what there is to maintain in a brand new car, and you’re right—I should have taken this class with my beat-up old Subaru).
2) I’m wondering whether to recommend that we at least consider Persepolis (thanks K.) for next year’s Campus Community Book Project (really, really important not to set off a new iteration of Iran-bashing), and will they go for a graphic novel?
3) I’m really disturbed by a new trend which says we have to vote online in as many places as possible to say that OUR candidate won a debate we believe was a tie (if we even watched it, which I didn’t, since I was learning to tell a distributor cap from a radiator). This place is getting weirder and weirder, like we’re being told to applaud on cue.
5 October 04
Eyeing The Volcano
Those who want check up on what Mount St. Helens is currently up to should look at the VolcanoCam which is situated on a ridge about five miles from the peak. When I checked it this morning there was a large and ominous cloud tapering away from one side of the summit.
Four hurricanes, a volcano that is becoming feisty, and a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in the past several weeks. Are the gods speaking to the United States, or what?
4 October 04
Writing Words
I’ve been working on a display for the UC Davis Campus Community Book Project which kicks off next Monday with recollections about the Rodney King beatings and riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers who were caught in an act of horrific brutality on a neighbor’s video. The display brings together many voices, too, remembering that time.
It would have been very easy to do all this on a page layout program (I use Adobe InDesign) but I’ve been writing them out, longhand. In different longhands, actually. It has made the process much more meaningful for me as I struggle to understand different points of view, to come to terms with my privilege as a white person. There’s a meditative element in doing calligraphy. I slow way down, something I’m generally not very good at. It opens many doors.
This task is miniscule compared to the calligraphic event of the century (actually, of the half-millennium): the St. John’s Bible, which is currently underway by a team of calligraphers and illuminators under the direction of Donald Jackson, the scribe royal. Jackson came up with a new hand for this 7-volume project, a kind of loose Carolingian-foundational with an Italic edge, excellent for doing long patches of text (which, obviously, the Bible is). His team of world-class calligraphers has been working at his scriptorium in Monmouth, just over the Welsh border, since 2000; they’ve completed volume three. I’ve been studying this hand a bit and while I can’t claim to have mastered it yet, it’s definitely working even in its very imperfect form.
Of particular interest to me is that a local natural history illustrator, Chris Tomlin, has included Minnesota flora and fauna in this version (St. John’s Benedictine Monastery is in Minnesota). This is a bible of place. I’m eager to see it—looks like a trip to Minnesota is in my future at some point.
Donald Jackson urges people to get out their pens and write passages of the bible out in longhand in order to come to a closer understanding of the beautiful words. Having spent a mere weekend doing this, although they’re different words, I’m starting to get it. Perhaps this is why writers of graffiti feel such power?