10 May 04
NEAT Thing In Sky
I just had my first look at Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) which is now visible in the southwestern evening sky in north temperate latitudes. It’s a good little comet: in our 4.5 magnitude skies here, it is barely visible naked-eye but it has a nice tail in 10×50 binoculars. It is currently a few degrees southeast of Procyon, and will be climbing higher in the sky daily as well as growing dimmer. Like many comets these days, Comet NEAT was discovered by an automated sky survey, in this case the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program, hence the acronym.
9 May 04
Looking Within
When I posted my piece last week about Ron the Deranged and the American military, I didn’t yet know that some of the photographs of torture in prisons in Iraq that have now been spread around the world featured women. Women doing shocking things—things that are shocking for any human to do but especially shocking because they’re women.
DocRoc at WriteOutLoud has wondered about this in an open letter to Tim O’Brian. Of the many people I’ve spoken with and written to this week, nobody has been able to come up with any kind of explanation at all. We’re all dumbstruck.
Not one normally to find myself without an opinion, I am going to dare to do something challenged by Burningbird (thanks Alembic): I’m going to express UNCERTAINTY.
Here’s the most frightening thing I think I’ve ever said.
I’m not sure-I’m not sure that, given the same circumstances, the same boredom, the same bitterness, the same mix of factors-I would categorically not have been that woman with that leash in her hand.
Which is, I’ve decided, the most compelling reason we shouldn’t go to war. People don’t want to go to war because they don’t want to get killed; others don’t want to kill. But what I think we should be most afraid of is becoming Lynndie England.
As Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, puts it: “the line that divides us, who would like to see ourselves as civilized and compassionate, from such communal barbarity is razor-thin.”
8 May 04
Davis On The Air
David Neiwert of Orcinus has written a long and excellent post confronting the demeaning of the national discourse by the mass media (the inevitable outcome of the past two decades of media conglomeration) to arrive at a ten-point manifesto for reclaiming the media.
Well enough, but I’m not a journalist, how do I help with this revolt against mass media? A possible answer occurred while we wandered around the Whole Earth Festival today. The town of Davis is getting its own little 100-watt radio station which is going on the air in September. This is a new community radio station that has been licensed under the FCC’s Low Power FM radio rules. They had a table set up at Whole Earth and are recruiting volunteers for all aspects of their operations, from programming to fundraising. This is definitely something I’m interested in becoming involved with, being a bit of a radio geek after all, and community radio is a fine avenue for reclaiming the local. And if I ever want to become a DJ, there’s my chance.
7 May 04
A Pink Evening
The Whole Earth Festival is back: 20,000 hippies are now in Davis and will be here all weekend. The quad on campus is looking (and smelling) like a different place.
Medea Benjamin, founder of Global Exchange and Code Pink, was in town to talk to the crowd. Washington Code Pink activists seriously disrupted Rumsfeld’s testimony before the House this morning. Her talk focused a lot on this, on the need to get people engaged with the political process (a huge number of non-voters in this country include unmarried women, who also tend to be more progressive: what’s going on?), and on making a personal commitment to change.
How this woman keeps her energy up in the face of all that she knows-she’s been to Iraq several times since winter 2001, and what’s she’s been seeing is a lot worse than we know from the press-is beyond me, but I’ll take it. In pink.
6 May 04
Tangled Banks
There’s a new collaborative blogging exercise in town, similar in concept to the weekly Carnival of the Vanities. This is The Tangled Bank, and it is a compendium of weblog entries on biology, medicine, or natural history. (The name “Tangled Bank” comes from a famous metaphor by Darwin.) The second Tangled Bank collection just came out; I submitted my entry about the barred owl to it. From this collection I learned that this will be a 17-year cicada year for folks in the Eastern U.S!
5 May 04
Cinco de Mayo
I just finished one of my many concurrent Clairefontaine grid-journals, which I started in April 2002, when we were taking our Mexican poetry class here at the UC Davis Arboretum. Looking through it, there’s a lot of poetry in there; Maria Melendez made us write a SONNET A DAY for a week. Sonnets are tough. It was a tough week.
She also introduced us in this class to the chant, believed to have been the earliest form of poetry. Francisco Alarcn, a poet who teaches here at Davis and who was shortlisted for California poet laureate that year, came and read some of his chants to us. I loved them. I wrote lots, including, I now see, the chant of the ground-squirrel sentry. (No mention there of genitalia, I assure you.)
Here are a couple of poems. One’s a chant, in Spanglish, a tribute to the people we see in the fields near us, working all the time, all the time, all the time. The second is in Spanish, written as I was reading lots of sonnets in Spanish (notably Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz). The poem talks about the blind lottery ticket sellers I walked past as a child in Madrid; they sang out in a resounding tenor that they had tickets to sell. (The Spanish lottery has, since its inception, devoted a large percentage of its profits to the blind; the “gordo” is the mind-boggling sum won only at the Christmas lottery.)
Growing What Sells
The wheat. The cows. The almonds. The plums.
The earth. La tierra. Trabajo. Our hands.
Los aos. The sweat. Sudando, we plough.
We water. We grow. Cultivamos. We pick.
The food. The earth. La tierra. The bounty.
The silos. The cows. La leche. The rain.
The sun. El sol. Sudando, we work.
The mortgage. The debt. Sudando, we worry.
The houses, the creeping. The vanishing farms.
Regulations. The debts. The cows, the poor wheat.
Las casas, the lawns. These have few regulations.
The turf that we grow, that we spray, it pays well.
If there’s no more food, don’t blame us: it’s demand.
We grow grass for your lawns, it’s no sweat: it’s our land.
Lotera
“El premio para hoy,” canta el ciego:
Un chillo que se extiende por la plaza
Por encima del ron del autobs
Circulndose. “El premio para hoy.”
Tono casi rabe llamando a la
Oracin, o an canto hebreo
Que se oan por aqu hace mil aos:
La splica del ciego nos promete
Ms que la maana soleada. Un
Boleto del azar, la vida,
Premio gordo: basta comprrnoslo.
O suerte desgraciada y ciega, que vas
premiando y castigando igualmente!
Por m, elijo la maana y el sol.
4 May 04
La Presentacin
This evening I gave my presentation to my Spanish class on our trip to Spain. For my visual aid I printed out several photos from our collection and passed these around the class. I was going to make overhead transparencies of these, but it turns out one can’t readily buy inkjet transparencies in small quantities. We weren’t supposed to read our presentation; I didn’t, and did fine nonetheless. Instead, we were allowed to use a 17-word cheatsheet. Here’s mine.
- Un viaje
- El bautismo
- Un foto
- vila
- Nuestro almuerzo
- Toledo
- Andaluca
- Pajaros y caballos
- El tren
- Vacaciones
3 May 04
Gone, Gone, Gone Beyond
Unlike American college students, it was considered unusual for British university students to get summer jobs, and almost unheard of for us to get jobs while we were in session. Nevertheless, I landed, in the summer of my second year at the University of Birmingham, a killer lucrative summer job.
I was interpreting for a company that had contracted with the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture on a project of hail suppression in Albacete, about 250 kilometers southeast of Madrid. The Spanish company retained the services of an American outfit. These guys were supposed to fly planes into towering, unstable cumulonimbus clouds and seed them with silver iodide, which supposedly turned the threatening hail into harmless rain.
The “guys” were a motley crew of mostly ex-military, pleasant enough, though their marriages seemed to be in none good shape, those of them who had marriages. They were led by Larry, a jovial Colorado businessman with a drinking problem. And in the middle of them all was “Ron.”
Ron wasn’t American, he was Rhodesian. (He certainly wasn’t married.) Not, you understand, Zimbabwean. Rhodesian. He knew his way around combat helicopters, around sub-machine guns. He had, according to him, killed HUNDREDS of “blecks.” With him, “killing blecks” was a refrain; he trotted it out at EVERY available opportunity. Only, the Rhodesians had lost, and here he was fetched up in the least desirable part of the least desirable country in Europe (the Spanish say “Albacete, caga y vete”—hardly a strong selling point to tourists). There were no “blecks” to kill, just black clouds. Hardly a compensation.
I was nineteen. I had grown up in Franco’s Spain, mostly shielded from its excesses as a foreigner and as a child; I had never heard muffled screams in provincial “cuarteles” where police interrogated dissidents. Ron terrified me. He was utterly deranged; it was clear he should be in an institution, but everyone just smiled benignly-oh that’s just Ron-and got on with the tedious business of waiting for the next thunderstorm to roll in.
The American military had an air base near Madrid, the source of American candy, Thanksgiving dinners, and lots of kids my age who never, ever interacted with anyone Spanish. The Cold War happened within the confines of that base. We were oblivious.
I grew up believing the American military to be the strongest in the world; to have the worst haircuts; to contain recruits who didn’t really know any better, for whom two years of service meant a paid-for college degree, which I managed to get because my father could afford it. I didn’t really know much about what was happening in Vietnam-we heard a lot more about the rioting in the U.S. than about the specifics of the war, through the BBCbut on the whole the American military seemed overstrong, a bit clueless, and generally a bit misguided-yet not really EVIL. There was certainly no place for the likes of Ron the Deranged in the American military.
Well, it turns out there is. We’ve seen it. It’s here. I suspect it’s been there all along. And I wince at my failure to have seen it earlier. You see, I’ve been secretly hoping-against hope, against reasonthat someone would prove beyond all doubt that this war with Iraq was somehownot good, war’s never good-but at least somehow not utterly bonkers.
Wake up and smell the coffee, Pica. It smells of burned flesh and cinders. It sizzles with electrodes. Welcome to the World At War.
2 May 04
The Sound of Home
A note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on sound of place.
This morning there was a black-headed grosbeak singing in the yard from the treetops, and a Swainson’s thrush singing from lower down. Both species are migrating through the Central Valley, and won’t be here in the summertime. The song of the grosbeak is bright, cheery, and resonant. The Swainson’s thrush has a beautiful flute-like song that cascades up through the octaves.
They remind me of home. There is a little canyon below the house where I grew up, just north of Berkeley. Both species nest in the canyon, and their songs would resonate through the canyon splendidly. I’d occasionally see the grosbeaks in nearby treetops, but the thrushes would always be singing from the bottom of the canyon, far out of sight.
1 May 04
The Sound of Here
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Sound of Place
As Numenius pointed out, yesterday at 4:00 am I got up trying to locate a calling barred owl.
I am not normally walking about at that time of day. Scorpius was rising in the south and the air was still. No barred owl. Lowing cattle—polled herefords, mostly. I don’t know why they do this some of the time and not others; it seems unrelated to when they get fed or the time of day. There it was, though: the drone of I-80. At four in the morning.
I write this at dusk and we just walked out and took more or less the same route. There were quite a few cars about, disturbing the frantic chattering of the Western kingbirds. But most of the other birds had stopped apart from a lone mockingbird—and a lone great-horned owl who was just waking up.
I yearn to hear all this sometime without human sound competing with it all, obliterating it. These days you have to go a long, long way to find that. Farther, I think, than the range of the Western kingbird.