31 January 04
Not For Vegetarians…
This entry is part of the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Food and Place
Travelling back to Spain in early December made me realize just how much pork the Spanish eat. Even things that are ostensibly “vegetables”-peas, artichoke hearts, green beans-have bits of ham in them. Not chicken, or beef, but ham. Ham legs, cured in the Spanish manner (jamn serrano), hang in every bar, along with various cured sausages, ready for cutting into tapas or sandwiches or for omelettes or for the peas and artichokes.
There’s nothing about Spanish geography that makes the pig a more likely farm animal than, say, a goat, which is certainly eaten in other Mediterranean countries. But there’s plenty in Spanish history that has given pork such a prominent place in the cuisine. For one thing, it was outlawed for about six centuries under Moorish occupation. The forbidden food took on the aura of a battle standard.
Food is never just food, is it? The prominence of pork in Spain recalls an earlier, darker time, following the explusion of Jews and Muslims in the fifteenth century, when it was a test. Are you really one of us? Or does your refusal to eat this forbidden meat reveal you as a convert in name only? The Inquisition lurks around the tables in taverns, watching, watching.
30 January 04
Dabbling In Moon Imaging
The first-quarter moon is good to look at in the telescope, since the craters are well-highlighted, and I am more wont to be skygazing in the evening than in the wee hours of the morning (which is when you see the third quarter moon). Tonight I thought I’d try my luck at imaging the moon through my 7” reflector using our digicam. The results are at left. I’m interested in an astrophotography technique called image stacking, where you take a large number of frames of a single object, align these, and average them to try to sharpen the image. This was my first try at this technique, using the movie clip feature of the digicam to get my stack of images, and then specialized software (Keith’s Image Stacker is the one I tried out) to help align the frames. I don’t think this first attempt improved things much, but there’s a lot yet to learn here.
29 January 04
More About Pens
Pendemonium has come through as a source for the retractable fountain pen I wrote about in Pen Fetish, the Stypen. Based in Iowa, they also have an exhaustive line of inks, cartridges, the luscious Clairefontaine notebooks and stationery, and for you collectors out there they also have plenty of antique inkwells, pens, and blotters. Sam has been very responsive. I placed an order last week; should arrive soon. A caveat on their website reads “Many parts of the US are experiencing extremely cold temperatures. Ink and freezing temps do not mix very well. Rest assured that we are watching the weather where you are and we will make every effort to insulate your ink. If we think there is a chance of the ink freezing and the bottles shattering, we will let you know that we are holding your shipment and waiting for the sun to shine. This happens every year just about this time and we’re happy to say that we’ve never lost a bottle of ink to the cold!”
I bought a notebook for my class on religion and violence at the campus bookstore here and it’s inadequate: when I take notes the ink shows through the page. Grr. I’m also on the lookout for the ideal field notebook, so I make up my own grail quests as I go. This is a way to make myself crazy, but I blame it on January like Maria does in Alembic.
Ecotone wiki topic for February 1: Food and Place.
28 January 04
Take Me Out To SBC Park?
Granted at one level it is just trading one corporate name for another, but I can’t get used to the fact that the San Francisco Giants’ ballfield will now be called SBC Park. Pac Bell Park has a much better ring to it, no pun intended, given the park’s proximity to the Pacific Ocean. The unsurprising story to the name change is that the Pacific Bell phone company got bought out a couple of years ago by SBC, a phone company whose initials formerly stood for something but now don’t.
Oh well. SBC still has a reputation for lousy DSL service, ballpark sponsorship notwithstanding.
27 January 04
Abraham and Jephthah
Moving along through Vedic and Hindu tradition, Ahimsa and Buddhism, to their polar violent opposite Aztec human sacrifice, to the revealed religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), the class I’ve been taking on religion and non-violence is getting really interesting. The texts are spare and leave lots of room for interpretation. Consider two: Jephthah (Judges 11) vows to God that if he is victorious in his war against the Ammonites, he’ll sacrifice the first thing that walks out of his house when he returns (it turns out of course to be his only child, a daughter and virgin, whom he sacrifices as promised and has no issue. What was he expecting to walk out of his house? A chicken?). The other is more well known: Abraham (Genesis 22) is told to sacrifice his only son Isaac, which he prepares to do, but his hand is stayed at the last minute by an angel.
The stories of Abraham and Jephthah both involve a test by the deity: will you obey me so far as to sacrifice your only child to me? Both men pass the test. Abraham’s perfect obedience is enough to prevent the death occurring. (This passage is interesting in what it omits: what’s Sarah’s opinion of all this? What’s Isaac’s?) In the mythological continuum that moves from the creation of Eve through the violent removal of Adam’s rib, through the destruction of the world by flooding save for a few chosen souls and propagatory animals, to Avram’s hearing and heeding of the voice of God and departure on his journey as Abraham, leaving his family behind, to the subsequent violence incurred in the Exodus against Egypt and idolator, what we have here is a model of violent action, sanctioned (if not actually perpetrated) by the deity. Jephthah’s vow to God in wartime, to sacrifice the first thing that emerges from his house on his return should he prove victorious, fits well within this model. That the choice in the latter example is Jephthah’s, not God’s, seems less important than the fact that the sacrificial victim is his only child, the thing most dear to him, and the toll exacted for his military success.
What I find really telling is that people I know who are practising Christians tend to disavow this God. The usual line runs “I don’t like/hate the God of the Old Testament.” It’s a curious statement. Both the above stories set up a startling sequence for the birth of Christianity: the sacrifice by the DEITY of his only son. The sacrifice to end all sacrifice; to absolve humanity of sin; to rid the world of violence. A rebirth through a violent act.
What seems to be emerging in the reading I’m doing and the discussion in the class is that there is almost no way to separate the violence that is an essential element in religion from the non-violence that is an equally essential element. It’s fascinating. I’m reading with new eyes.
26 January 04
Magpies In The Morning
There is a little ditch that separates us from the field to the north. A couple of wooden planks serve as a bridge; I just crossed it to toss the kitchen leavings out in the fallow field (the ants were starting to sell tickets to the apple core from our dessert this evening).
We’ve just starting putting these leavings a few meters over to the east, where they can be seen easily from the kitchen window. For birds that are so raucous, yellow-billed magpies are surprisingly flittish, but the windows work well as blinds.
The other day we tossed out on the field some stale, undercooked white rice. The magpies descended upon it the next morning, flying off with chunks so their neighbor bird wouldn’t be tempted to snag their particular chunk.
One is for sorrow, two is for joy. A solitary magpie is indeed a sad thing—they like their social lives after all!
25 January 04
Living Among Jackrabbits
jackrabbit wakes
jackrabbit peers jackrabbit hops jackrabbit hears jackrabbit leaps jackrabbit flies jackrabbit loves jackrabbit sighs jackrabbit flees jackrabbit hides jackrabbit sees jackrabbit’s alive24 January 04
Sketching at the Raptor Center
This morning we went to the California Raptor Center to do some sketching. The Raptor Center is a rehab facility operated by the veterinary school here at UC Davis that treats orphaned and injured birds of prey for re-release. Some of the birds are too injured to return to the wild and become long-term denizens of the center, often getting taken out on educational tours.
It’s a great place to sketch birds, and why we don’t go there more often, seeing as how it’s just up the road from us, is a bit of a mystery. Today when we got there two of the volunteers had taken a ferruginous hawk and a Harris’ hawk out of their cages, and both birds were posing nicely for us. A little down the path, they were hosing out the cage with the turkey vultures, who seemed none too pleased about such activities. The two turkey vultures are named Balzac and Juliet. Juliet used to be called Romeo, but a year ago last summer she laid an egg. Determining the sex of birds can be a challenge.
Above is my sketch of their barred owl.
23 January 04
Rosy-Fingered Dawn
Homer’s repeated rosy-fingered dawns break lots of rules outlined in a list of ten mistakes often made by writers (via Hoarded Ordinaries and Burningbird), but I think Homer had different rules, and aren’t we glad he did?
I woke this morning to a thick tule fog which turned pink as the sun, somewhere out there in the east, rose. I tried to draw the tree outside our kitchen window with my walnut ink. I have altered the hue on the drawing to approximate the hue I saw: it was completely monochrome, just different levels of saturation.
22 January 04
Abecedarian Fun
An abecedarian sentence, also known as a pangram, is one that contains every letter of the alphabet, such as “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” They are favorite things of calligraphers and typographers, and have a long history. (According to Marc Drogin’s Medieval Calligraphy, an eighth-century one is Te canit adcelebratque polus rex gazifer hymnis [The hymn, oh treasure-bearing king, sings of you, and the pole also honors you.]). When I practice my calligraphy, I often write “Mad brother Jarvis was quickly axed for crazy praying.”
Now it is easier than ever to come up with one, thanks to Mark Simonson’s Pangrammer Helper. My favorite sentence in the thread discussing this tool on Typographica is “Vexed, George W. Bush just zooms like crazy puffs with no I.Q.”.