18 November 04
Hanging on Tules
Mid-November fog—Everything’s muffled and drips.
Late lone cricket-song.
17 November 04
The Salmon Return
Yesterday morning there was a sighting of chinook salmon in Putah Creek by the Putah Creek Diversion Dam, just east of Lake Solano. This was just three days after a pulse of water from the recent rains opened up the quite circuitous connection between the creek and the waters leading to the ocean.
After Putah Creek was dammed in 1957, salmon weren’t seen in its waters until 1995, and in 1998 observers saw 5 salmon spawning there. And last year there were probably about 70 to 80 spawning salmon.
I’ve never seen any of the salmon in the creek, but clearly now is the time to go look. After all, the creek is about a three minute walk from here.
16 November 04
Mixed Living
When we were in Madrid last December, we stayed with a friend just down the hill from where I grew up. When I was growing up, though, the area was fields of thistles, parched in summer and a good place for madrileos to dump their old mattresses and whatnot. Now there are high rises.
In the manner typical of European planning, this new tiny barrio has plenty of shops at the foot of the apartment blocks: pastry shops, light fixture specialists, and of course the fabulous papelera where I bought my Stypen-Up are all downstairs. There are two buses that run along the street, and two different metro lines are both within walking distance.
This is so normal there that it arouses no comment. Here, when they opened the Davis Lofts, a small mixed-use complex in downtown Davis, it was hailed as a breakthrough in planning and design. Yet if we are to make cities livable in the 21st century, this is going to have to become the norm.
This is for the Ecotone Wiki’s New Urban Place.
15 November 04
Perplexed
I pay almost no attention to football, but have to wonder what on earth is my alma mater the Cal Bears doing with a football team that is currently ranked number 4 in the country? I mean, finishing the season with a winning record, preferably after beating Stanford across the Bay, is all we’ve historically ever had hopes of. This is a team that hasn’t been to the Rose Bowl since I’ve been alive, last won said game in 1938, and whose most noteworthy moment was one year recruiting the Stanford band. Cal, a football power? Naaah—this year must be an aberration.
14 November 04
Endurance
Another one-sentence post…
So I’m on the phone with my good buddy DocRock this morning saying I’m going to Mass for the first time in God I dunno months probably Ash Wednesday and she’s just listened to Gomes from Memorial Church on the Harvard radio station over the web and he (deep bass brilliant black gay Baptist) says Memorial Church is all about peace not war then she tells me about this amazing Shackleton thing she’s been reading and how they only had wool socks (no Polartec in those days) that got soaked and cold and they stayed cold for what five years but every last one of them survived and how we should be grateful and I get to Mass across the causeway hoping for what I’m not sure peace or nurturing or something but the young Franciscan guy gets to the sermon and what does it turn out to be about but Shackleton and endurance and how we are not to despair but go for the long haul and I blink and wonder what this means as in whether it’s a sign I should get ready to go to Antarctica or at least somewhere bloody cold or be grateful for central heating or maybe just consider coming to Mass more often.
13 November 04
This Evening’s Entertainment
(A one-sentence post.)
The four of us pursued the fly as it zoomed from halfway up the wall to the lamp and back but it met its end not through any mammalian strategem neither rubber bands nor paws swiping at the ground but rather through the enterprise of a spider two feet down from the ceiling who waited patiently and then wrapped.
12 November 04
Nearly Eight Months Old
The tiny kittens we hauled out of the carport are no longer tiny. They are now outgrowing the green mat on the counter we put there to try and discourage them from sitting on the keyboard. (It doesn’t work.)
Charlie likes eating, corks from winebottles (merlot and grenache preferred, but he’ll take anything), eating, playing with balls especially ones that bounce, eating, sleeping, eating. Diego likes catnip, a feathered toy, the space behind the bathroom door, spitting in fun, getting into the bag of walnuts, and jumping up high to see out. They both like snogging (substitute nursing which I’m guessing at this point will never go away).
11 November 04
A Day With Humboldt
Today was a holiday—Veteran’s Day—and I stayed at home all day, venturing out only to go to my Spanish class in the evening. A storm came through, and we’ve had 1.68 inches of rain in the past 30 hours. My rainy day activities including pondering sparrows with the kitties and finishing the book Humboldt’s Cosmos, by Gerard Helferich. Alexander von Humboldt was one of these amazing figures in natural history, making contributions to botany, geology, anthropology, and of course geography, he founding the field of plant geography. His drive as an explorer was incredible: I can’t believe how he hauled the finest of scientific instruments and tens of thousands of specimens during five years of adventures in South America between 1799 and 1804. How nice to have the luxury to haul out the Times Atlas of the World and trace his route up the Orinoco and through the Andes.
10 November 04
Rivers
qb of Frizzy Logic went to meet Natalie of Blaugustine and bought a picture this week. There are tantalizing glimpses of them, not quite straight-on. I was mesmerized by their accounts and images of this encounter, and by Natalie’s art.
The next day I got a note from another artist friend in the UK, Brian Pike. We knew each other back when he was a graduate student in philosophy at Cambridge and I wasn’t. His topic was enthralling, though: human color perception. I argued that different cultures had a different sense of color. He didn’t think so: he said if I asked a Yanomami indian to point out their reddest red, it probably would be pretty close to mine. oh, I said. (I said this a lot when I lived in Cambridge.)
His route to becoming an artist was complicated, but I for one am so glad he did.
From the hauntingly spare images of lonely houses on Yorkshire moors to monkeys in Tamil Nadu, whose texture is only whispered across the continents at 72 dpi, I want to go buy a picture, too. I want to show up on his doorstep and have a cup of tea and plunge my face into these images that remind me of something I can’t quite remember. He says Paul Klee is the most important artist of the 20th century. Not Kandinsky, I’d say? There would be chocolate biscuits.
(I guess I’m pining for Yorkshire. People who know what Yorkshire’s like in November will probably think I’m nuts, though Coup de Vent seems not to mind.)
Brian’s art has kept us in touch, I think. And I wonder how many other friends I had who could have done something this but chose other, perhaps easier, ways, with whom I have now lost all contact. Like with Natalie and qb, the images jump, shortcircuting language. I love words. But I love breathing through my eyes, too, having this other river that flows through my soul.
9 November 04
Sketch Until You Crawl
That is the idea behind the first World Wide SketchCrawl. On Sunday November 21 spend the entire day in a sketching marathon. (From Danny Gregory.)
And if you need to find something to write with for this endeavor, have a look at Glenn’s Pen Page, with information about pens, pen stores, companies, and ink.