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
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.