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…
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!