13 November 03
Assembling California
I quite enjoyed yesterday’s lunchtime reunion between writer John McPhee and UC Davis geologist Eldridge Moores, who is the main protagonist in McPhee’s account of California geologic history, Assembling California. We have a long plane ride ahead of us soon and, needing a long book to read, I may choose McPhee’s Annals of the Former World which is really five books in one, three of which I’ve read. But that was a long time ago, and I certainly could fancy rereading Assembling California. It’s a brillliant narrative that made me wish I could take my own journey across the length and breadth of California with a professional geologist near at hand to interpret the terrain outside.
Alas, professionally-led geologic field trips are not in my near future, but it would be fun to learn more about local geology. My formal geologic training is limited to one course in geology and another in geomorphology way back in college, so I have a lot to catch up on. Alt and Hyndman’s Roadside Geology of Northern and Central California is a good lay guidebook to the vicinity, but when one inevitably seeks more local detail, for the most part one has to jump the gulf into the professional literature. At least there’s a long tradition in geology of field trip guidebooks with milepost-by-milepost annotations.
There are certainly easier places to study geology than coastal California. It’s not without reason that many rock units around here are termed mlanges.
12 November 03
John McPhee at UC Davis
John McPhee has been in Davis for the last few days. I caught his panel discussion this afternoon with two other writers of place, Gary Snyder and Robert Haas. Although none of these writers thinks of himself as primarily an “environmental” or “nature” writer, they all allow place to suffuse their work. And, as Gary Snyder put it, part of his project in writing is to confront the failure of our culture to realize that we live in a physical world.
I haven’t read John McPhee’s Assembling California, but Numenius went to a lunchtime talk where McPhee revisited some of the geological discussions he had with Eldridge Moores, a geology professor here at UC Davis and a long-time friend of McPhee’s.
It was an interesting day of pondering why it’s important to continue thinking hard about landscape and what lives in it, including us. Robert Haas explained about the River of Words project where children are encouraged to write poems about their local watersheds, in the United States and across the world. As he says, if these children can’t think imaginatively about the world they’ll inherit, nobody will.
11 November 03
Gossamer Afternoon
We both had the day off today, so after running an errand in town, and an excursion over to Sacramento to the Crocker Art Museum, we returned home for lunch and then sat outside on a very pleasant warm afternoon where we heard pipits in the field and a red-shouldered hawk calling from the trees by Putah Creek. And floating across the field we’d see occasional strands of gossamer. The spiders are dispersing.
I don’t know anything about what spiders make gossamer strands and googling wasn’t a whole lot of help, though this page from the nearby Stebbins Cold Canyon Natural Reserve suggests that these were orb-weaving spiders, of the family Araneidae. Time for a trip to the library for some arachnid research. At any rate, as Fred reminded us last year, it’s a pleasure to be conversant with the gossamer ways of spiders.
10 November 03
Cocoa Weather
It’s quite chilly here, at least in comparison to a couple of weeks ago. An article on the antioxidant benefits of cocoa prompted us to get out the Droste and have a cup. It will become a winter ritual, I think.
Droste-Dutch cocoa-is quite different than English, American, Spanish, or Mexican hot chocolate, all of which I’ve made. The Spanish version contains rice flour and is very, very thick (and rich); it’s sipped in demitasses and is good for dipping churros (fried dough) into. We may pick some up when we go to Spain in early December. It will certainly be the right time of year!
Numenius reminds me of the Droste effect—the package design which features a picture of the package inside a picture of the package inside a picture of the package. Unfortunately the package sold in the United States has a different design.
9 November 03
The Heiligenschein
Today was a good day for looking up at the sky, with dramatic cumulonimbus clouds and a midday thundershower (which caused us to hurry home from our morning outing to the gym to rescue the laundry on the line). And I’ve been reading a sky-oriented book, Out of the blue: a 24-hour skywatcher’s guide, by John Naylor, which discusses all manner of optical phenomena in the sky: rainbows, crepuscular rays, eclipses, and so forth. In this book I finally learned the explanation for a phenomenon I’ve viewed from an airplane window many times, and in a different guise, from the ground as well.
What I notice from the airplane window, usually on descent, is a glowing bright halo on the ground and moving with the plane. The glow is at the antisolar spot —the sun on the opposite side of the plane, and once the plane gets low enough its shadow can be seen at the center of the glow. This phenomenon is a heiligenschein, which means ‘holy glow’, and is caused by a self-shadowing effect. The shadows cast by objects, such as trees seen from the plane, in the antisolar spot are directly underneath the objects themselves, and what one sees is just the light being reflected back by the leaves, rather than a darker mix of light-and-shadow. Hence the glow. Back on the ground, riding my bike, I also frequently notice a glowing spot opposite the sun on the pavement or from road markings, where tiny reflective beads have been incorporated in the paint. It’s the same effect—the light is shining straight back at me.
Remember to look up at the sky, or down at the ground—you never know what marvels of light you may see.
8 November 03
Atomic Cafe Revisited
Numenius and I had an abortive trip to the gym tonight-Saturday hours have changed-so we picked up a DVD of the Atomic Cafe to watch on a rainy, rainy night (no lunar eclipse for us!).
What struck me so forcefully, seeing it today, was how close the rhetoric of the 1950s was to today’s administration. Formulation of the evil other. Projection of a pro-American god. Systematic perpetuation of ignorance in the population.
George Lakoff, a member of the Rockridge Foundation, explains how conservatives have been working on language to dominate politics over the course of many years (and with the help of millions of dollars). Lakoff thinks this has the Democrats on the run, and his foundation aims to counteract the conservative think tanks. Good luck. My fear is that the electorate doesn’t want to think. They don’t, for sure, want to know that they aren’t thinking. This will be a tough sell.
7 November 03
Signs Of Winter
The rainy season is creeping in on us, and there was partial overcast much of the week. On Monday morning it rained a bit, though we’re not sure how much. We like to keep track of rainfall amounts, but the rain gauge fell over in strong morning winds from its hole in the parched earth. There was more rain today, some this morning and a little bit this evening, 0.25” total for the day. Right now there is the first tule fog of the season, which happens when damp air above chilling ground in the evenings condenses to form a dense fog at ground level. They can be quite thick and dangerous to travel in.
There’s a total lunar eclipse tomorrow evening, but I don’t know if the weather is going to cooperate for us here.
6 November 03
Doodling with Friends
Some friends just came over to swap cars, have some soup, salad, cheese, bread, and ice cream, and discuss the design of their wedding invitation.
I offered a while ago to do their invitation as a wedding gift. N. had doodled a beautiful asymmetric card with a butterfly clasp and the word “equinox” below it (they are getting married on the spring equinox next year).
There is something so compelling about thinking through design ideas with someone who knows what you’re talking about… it’s like being able to see through someone else’s eyes, see into their head. I am never so energized as on these occasions. It reminds me that I derive my creativity from being around other people rather than in a solitary place away from the world. I have to bounce ideas around with someone else rather than draw away into a safe haven; it makes sitting in a restaurant with a napkin and pen an incredibly productive experience.
Hope to see you in a cafe sometime soon! Bring your pen.
5 November 03
Things They Don’t Want You To Notice
A visit to The Memory Hole is a good place to find some of these. This site preserves documents such as government files and corporate memos concerning things we’re not supposed to know or should forget. For example, the Justice Department recently released a report on a study of racial and gender diversity in its attorney workforce, but the PDF document was extremely heavily censored. But blacking out the text in a PDF doesn’t delete it, and with a little bit of trickery the owner of this site was able to turn the blacked-out sections into yellow highlighted ones!
4 November 03
Sophia: Living Wisdom
I spent Saturday at a women’s retreat exploring Sophia, the embodiment of wisdom in the Hebrew bible and New Testament (and well suppressed over the centuries) but also present in similar form in many traditions. Or so I’m told: this was all very new to me. The speaker was Ann Denham, who explained how Sophia is being reclaimed by feminist theologians and thinkers, both Christian and Jewish.
Attributes of Sophia include the cosmic divine wisdom, spoken of by the mystic Hildegard of Bingen; the shekhinah, the spirit of god present among us, a sister, a midwife, and a prophet; and as Lover, eros, the mother, bride, and queen, the source of creativity and erotic energy.
A divine feminine image like this is definitely more interesting for me, at least, than some others we might be asked to swallow, and we spent the afternoon session working on soul collages of wisdom—of Sophia. Mine, pictured at left (click for a larger version), revolves around she-coyotes, wily and nurturing, full of power and stealth; it reclaims the apple and exalts it; it delights in the pair as well as in solitary power. It swims through the cosmos, providing the life force and creative drive.