1 November 25
Loading Dock
Today’s weekend urban sketch is of the loading dock in the back of the Davis Food Co-op. I did the ink sketch first, using De Atramentis Urban Gray ink in a TWSBI Eco fountain pen together with a Pentel pocket brush pen with gray ink for the bold parts of the sketch. For the wash I used Derwent Inktense pan colors, except for the blue in the sky which was done with a Museum Aquarelle cobalt blue watercolor pencil. I’m experimenting with the Inktense pan paints to provide bursts of color on the fairly thin paper of the sketchbook (a 7”×7” Stillman and Birn Alpha softcover sketchbook.)
31 October 25
Field Notes
About a month before my trip to Maine, I submitted a proposal to do a 6-page comic to be included in an anthology called Field Notes. I actually submitted two ideas: one about the scars on my body, the second, much less edgy, about Anna’s hummingbirds. The second was accepted, I turned in my first draft, was given a couple of suggestions which were easy to accommodate, and then I went to Maine, where a one-week stay turned into three weeks that included grieving, visits to lawyers, clearing out an apartment, and no Anna’s hummingbirds in sight.
I have said before that I am the queen of first drafts, and the gap between this idea and its deadline next week has made it really hard to get back to the project. I’ve been forcing myself to take my ipad to a coffee shop to work on it because at home there are too many distractions.
The panel at right is one of the pages. I originally had hoped to do this on paper. I’ve turned to Procreate in the interests of time and my sanity. I have some refining to do of all the pages. My one question is whether to leave the watercolor paper texture in the submission or not. Still pondering.
30 October 25
End of the Season
We haven’t paid too much attention to baseball this year but it has turned into an exciting World Series at the end. A major reason why we haven’t followed much baseball lately is the Los Angeles Dodgers have over the past few years developed into the overlords of the National League West, leaving our favorite team the San Francisco Giants to struggle. It is not surprising to see the Dodgers being the National League team in the World Series.
But it is a bit unusual to see the Toronto Blue Jays as their opponent; I don’t think they’ve been in the World Series since 1993.
Naturally we are rooting for the Blue Jays, who have taken a 3-2 lead as the series heads back to Toronto for the final game or two. It is difficult to find the games on the radio however, and we don’t have streaming access. I have been able to barely tune in ESPN Radio on KTCT 1050 AM in San Mateo, though I fight a lot of interference to pick up the station, such as from a neighbor’s noisy solar inverter. It was easier listening to baseball on the radio when we lived just outside of town. One advantage to listening to baseball on the radio is that it is closer to real time than streaming or even the television. Based on comparison with our next-door neighbor also following the game, the radio seems to be a few pitches ahead of the television broadcast.
29 October 25
A Visit to Berkeley
I took myself to Berkeley yesterday to visit my mother-in-law whom I love but don’t see very often. She had recently had a heart procedure but wanted to give me a hug in person following mum’s death.
I don’t see her very often, but I almost NEVER see her alone. Our conversation ranged far and wide — I told her about alchemy and what I’d been reading, we talked about music and its relation to poetry. I have always wondered whether composition is like poetry, in that it seems to fall out of the sky. Well, yes, she said, but there are rules.
I have never listened to much Schubert outside of the Lieder but she pointed me to his final piano sonata (D960 in Bb major). Sharon says he was the master of juxtaposition: in one bar your dog died, in the next, you’re eating cotton candy. I listened to this sonata after I got home and it really does plumb the depths of grief, so I think I’ll be listening to it some more. When she told me that Numenius’ father had asked for it to be played during his last 24 hours of life, it made me determined to listen to it even more carefully.
Write a book, she said. Write a book about your mother, since it’s really hot now. Even if only 10 people read it. Hot like an alchemist’s flame? It’s a thought.
28 October 25
Soup Day
Fall chilly weather is here which means it is time to be making weekly soups. We do our grocery shopping on Tuesday mornings which means it’s a good time to draw vegetables. Here I’ve sketched the dandelion greens that made it into today’s soup. I am drawing this on Stillman & Birn Alpha paper which is pretty thin, so I’m starting to experiment with washes over watercolor pencil rather than using straight watercolor.
27 October 25
Alchemical Psychology
I’ve been reading/listening to a course by James Hillman, The Alchemy of Psychology from the mid-oughts, on alchemy and the light it can shed on psychology. Hillman takes his cue from Carl Jung with whom he studied in Zurich and who was deeply interested in alchemy. Hillman returned to alchemy again and again in his writing. In Re-Visioning Psychology, for instance, he writes:
The materials, vessels, and operations of the alchemical laboratory are personified metaphors of psychological complexes, attitudes, and processes. Every one of the alchemist’s operations upon things like salt, sulphur, and lead were also upon his own bitterness, his sulphuric combustion, his depressive slowness… By means of concretely physical fantasies, the alchemical psychologist worked at the same time on both the soul in his materials and the soul in himself… So much is this the case that when we enter the thought of alchemy these events lose their stigma of sickness and become metaphors for necessary phases of the soul-making process.
Hillman is very concerned with soul and psyche and, obviously, metaphor, though he is less charitable when others draw the “wrong” conclusions about the metaphorical significance of alchemy, specifically, moral. The lectures are chaotic and brilliant, but the audio is so bad that the questions are not audible, so the answers to them are puzzling. Still worth a listen, though. I have not dipped my toe much into alchemy and I imagine there are worse ways to do so!
26 October 25
The Traitor of Arnhem
One of the great pleasures of heading to the library is picking up an unexpected book of interest, often on the new books shelf. Recently I found there a new book entitled The Traitor of Arnhem, by Robert Verkaik. I have been interested in the battle of Arnhem ever since seeing the movie “A Bridge Too Far” back in 1977, and this book threads a spy story into the narrative of the battle. Actually, it presents two spy stories, one of which was briefly discussed in the Cornelius Ryan history of the same title that the movie was based upon. This first story was that of the double or triple agent Christiaan Lindemans, who was a Dutch resistance fighter who visited a German HQ in Holland two days before the battle started and evidently leaked information about British armor positions as they prepared to move north towards Eindhoven.
The second story involved an intelligence source that was almost completely forgotten until Verkaik started researching his book. Three days before the battle started (i.e. on 14 September 1944) a German spymaster in Stockholm received information via a diplomatic pouch about an upcoming airborne operation in Holland involving the British 1st Airborne and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. The following day the spymaster received more detailed information about the plans in a set of microdot photos, and this information was communicated to the German field commanders by 17 September, when the battle started. The source for the intelligence was a shadowy figure somewhere in the heart of the British state who was going by the name of Agent Josephine.
A mole in British intelligence. This is starting to sound like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy territory. This isn’t entirely coincidental. John le Carré, who wrote Tinker and many other fine spy stories, worked in British intelligence from the late 1950s until the early 1960s, the period when the Cambridge Five spy scandal came to light. Before reading Verkaik’s book, I didn’t realize that the Cambridge Five spies were actively passing information onto the Soviet Union during World War II, prior to the Cold War.
Who was Agent Josephine? Verkaik presents a lot of circumstantial evidence that this was one of the Cambridge Five spies, namely Anthony Blunt. Of the Cambridge Five spies, Blunt’s reputation fared the best, and he kept his career as an art historian going well into the 1980s. But perhaps he was as dastardly as the others.
One wonders what le Carré would have thought of Verkaik’s book. At any rate, this just got me to reread Tinker and rewatch bits of the 1979 TV series starring Alec Guinness, always a fun thing.
25 October 25
Stammtisch
Last night I rewatched Downfall (Der Untergang in German), which chronicles Hitler’s final few days in his Berlin bunker. A tour de force by actor Bruno Ganz, the film draws heavily on material from survivors, especially Traudl Junge, who was one of Hitler’s secretaries. The spectacle of not just Hitler’s, but of many minds unravelling as the Soviet army advanced on the German capital, is something I find particularly interesting in light of where we are in the world.
The term “malignant narcissism” was coined by social psychologist (and Holocaust survivor) Erich Fromm to describe the type of grandiose sadistic paranoid pathology displayed by Hitler. It is a term that has also been leveled at various dictators or would-be dictators such as Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Kim Jong Un, and Trump, and whether or not the armchair diagnosis is an actual pathological condition, there are certainly traits in common to all of them. “Becoming unhinged” is a fate most of them will face.
I have been very remiss in my German study since before Mum died but wanted to do some preparation for today’s Stammtisch, a monthly gathering for my German conversation group where we get together and speak German for an hour or two. Given that we often end up talking about politics, this seemed a good entry point. I am not sure about the usefulness of the “No Kings” rallying cry since most kings nowadays have little more than a ceremonial role and exert little to no power, unlike the characters mentioned above, but it does have resonance in the American context and certainly brought people out in their millions last week.
24 October 25
Slippers
Today’s daily sketch is of my slippers, essential for chilly fall mornings and during Sunday house cleanings.
23 October 25
Can't Get You Out Of My Head
One of the things I noticed about my last few days with my mother was how often she brought up the name of “the Colonel,” the husband of her Aunt Eleanor, who had rowed over to great-grandpa Sam’s boat with a shotgun saying he was taking Eleanor to marry.
This man was volatile, irascible, and in his later years blind, and my grandmother went to his house regularly to tend to him after Eleanor died of breast cancer. My mother once told me the story of how he had tried to kill her when they were all staying at a house in Acapulco — she was so frightened she jumped out of the window into the scorpion-infested night and pounded on her parents’ window. Whether this actually happened or not is irrelevant: she was deeply traumatized and this man occupied space in her head up until the end.
Would therapy have helped her? Who knows? She was so fond of one of her cousins, Henry, but seeing him necessarily meant being in the company of the dreaded Uncle Edwin. Who insisted that his staff answer the phone with “the Colonel’s residence, this is the maid speaking.”
We are no strangers monstrous men. One of them is even president. But let’s not give these reprobates any more power by allowing them room in our heads. Mum, I wish you could have been free of this. I never met the guy but I hate him on your behalf…