Mail Carrier Appreciation Day

I’ve been making a lot of zines lately, a folded piece of paper that is cut in the central portion to allow the “pages” to wrap into an eight-page booklet. Postcrossing is very good about reminding us about events that have to do with mail (for instance, February is International Letter Writing Month, which I’m following more or less), and I saw a notice about February 4th being Mail Carrier Appreciation Day. All these calendared days seem a bit arbitrary but never mind.

I quickly folded a zine up and made a little narrative about a letter on a journey, flying through the air, and thanking our new mail guy. (Mail carriers are under a tremendous amount of stress at the moment, which is easy to spot but they always seem to have a smile and a kind word, at least here.) This note was inserted into our mailbox today.

Quince With Bee

I snapped this on my early afternoon walk today. The quinces in our neighborhood are flowering and one bush six blocks from here had many honeybees active on it.

Hourly Comics

There is an annual challenge on February 1 to draw a comic for each hour you’re awake. I thought I’d give it a try. It’s hard work, and I didn’t exactly do the things depicted here exactly at the time depicted, but it does give a fairly good glimpse of my/our Sunday.

Central Park Stroll

For today’s urban sketch, I walked a few blocks down to Central Park in Davis and settled down in front of this interesting tree. This was sketched with ink and Neocolor II aquarelle crayons.

Hungering After Nobels

In the 1980s I worked as the secretary of the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. Though the Centre itself never had more than four students at a time for its M.Phil programme while I was there, it was a lively focus for leftist politics (though my boss, David Brading, a historian of Mexico and devout Catholic, never gave much credence to any of it). The Sandinistas had finally overthrown Somoza in Nicaragua, and it was the early days of the revolution, before the levels of corruption and power grabs had tainted it. I was immersed in socialism and joined my academic and administrative colleagues in marches against Thatcher during the Miners Strike. It was when I first became interested in Liberation Theology.

The Centre had an endowed Chair funded by Venezuelan oil money, the Simón Bolívar professorship, which hosted Latin American men of letters (they were all men up until 2008). While I was there, the professor was Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist.

Fuentes was born in Panama to Mexican diplomats and lived in various different Latin American cities and in Washington, DC, where he was educated (his English was much better than that of most other holders of this Chair). He was handsome and debonair. My colleague Ana was his dedicated secretary. He had an office at the Centre which he almost never used, though he did hide a letter from his Venezuelan mistress in there once, a fact we discovered when Fuentes’ wife asked to be allowed into the office (how could Ana refuse?). We giggled about the imagined sparks at the dinner table that night.

Fuentes would come into the office I shared with Ana and dictate letters (he never learned to type and wrote all his novels longhand). Many of these letters were addressed to members of the Nobel literature committee, enclosing copies of translations. One of his predecessors as SB Chair was Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, who was in 2010 awarded this pinnacle, and who was obviously a source of great jealousy to Carlitos.

Fuentes died in 2012. All his courting of Nobel committee members was for naught. Remind you of anyone?

Rejuvenation

Several years ago Pica planted a pineapple guava in a bed in our backyard. But then a none-too-astute landscaper hired by our landlady came along and hacked it all the way to the ground in a fit of shrub trimming. Happily over the past year it has been growing back and it is now looking pretty happy. Here is a sketch of it from today done with Derwent Graphitint pencils.

Olive Trees

I rode my bike over to campus today in order to sit and draw the line of olive trees along Russell Boulevard. I’ve been illustrating the borders of my journal and wanted to try series of trees across the top of a spread.

While I was drawing, I looked up and saw two raptors, a turkey vulture next to a much larger soaring bird with a white head and tail: a bald eagle! This is a very unusual bird to see in Davis — in the lower part of the county at all, in fact — and I called Numenius to see if he could catch a glimpse of it from the house (yes, we keep a yard list). He couldn’t, but I made sure to report this eagle on e-bird.

Dinner Shallot

The smaller portion of this shallot made it into our dinner this evening, which was stir-fried green beans and mushrooms over rice. Sketched with Derwent Graphitint pencils.

Young In Iran: A Comics Fundraiser

I am thrilled to report that the Sequential Artists Workshop opened a Kickstarter for young Iranian artists to tell the story of what it’s like to be young in Iran these days. It got fully funded in 3 days! They are now upping the goal to be able to print more copies and, if funds permit, to be able to pay the editors.

From the fundraising blurb:
WHY SWALLOWS?
“Why swallows?” you might ask.

When we asked our students to speak about their experience of being Iranian, we knew their works would end up being very different from one another. In fact, we had a kind of patchwork quilt in mind, one that could reflect the diversity of Iranian identity.

Yet, unexpectedly, a recurring theme kept appearing in the works: migration.
Even the students whose pieces were not directly about migration were, in different ways, still grappling with the concept.

Swallows in Iran are known for being migrants, for their freedom to travel across all lands.

Unlike us Iranians, swallows don’t need visas or security checks to make their journeys. They don’t have to struggle with travel bans.

This anthology is meant to travel, reaching different parts of the world. It is going to fly free!

That is why we chose the swallow: in its own way, this book, too, is a migrant.

Note from a birder: barn swallows, the species pictured in the book, are circumpolar, meaning they occur in all continents apart from Antarctica. They are famous long-distance migrants.

Back To The Moon

This upcoming journey doesn’t seem to be getting much attention now given the train wreck of current world events, but the United States is on the verge of launching four astronauts on a trip around the moon. This is the Artemis II space mission, which will start no earlier than February 6th. The launch vehicle arrived at its launch pad last week. There are monthly launch windows, so if the initial attempt has to be scrubbed, they will postpone to the next or subsequent months. The mission profile is similar to that of Apollo 8 in December 1968, although unlike in Apollo 8, the spacecraft will be sent on a “free return” trajectory to the moon (the spacecraft will not have to fire its engines to get back to Earth).

I am excited and nervous and will be following closely. 1968 wasn’t exactly a year of peace and harmony either, so there’s that.