1 January 04
Sweet Auburn
Another joint blogging entry for the Ecotone Wiki on Cemeteries and Place.
DocRock has written about the fun involved in wandering around cemeteries, mostly in connection with the stories that are told-and made-in these places. My own passion for cemeteries originated in a passion for birds, which are often found in profusion in cemeteries, where there are often trees and water, just the thing for a 2-ounce warbler exhausted by the northward migration. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge is full to bursting with birders in May, but since they mostly arrive at 6:00 am and leave to go to work by 8:00, they don’t get in the way too much of mourners.
Hanging around gravestones for this long was bound to have an effect on me, though, and like it or not, the stories started coming. Here’s one I haven’t finished telling, yet. Lizzie died in 1869. Her stone bears the inscription “Lizzie.” (period at the end) with a garland of flowers. On the back of the stone is more information: Lizzie died a few days after giving birth to a son, Matthew; he died a month later and is buried with her. Her husband and parents lie nearby; also Lizzie’s sisters, and her husband’s new wife.
So my made-up add-on to this rather sad tale (her father’s memoirs are in the Law Library here at Davis, he being a Somewhat Important Person, yet he never mentions her at all) is that, in fact, she didn’t really love the man she married; she was torn between two brothers, who are buried up the hill where I saw my first ever Cape May warbler, and who both got killed (really, not fictionally) in the Civil War. At left is a drawing of the effigy of their dog, a sculpture encased in glass. The dog has no name; the inscription simply reads “Their favorite.” Period. It’s hard from three thousand miles away, but someday I mean to finish this novel.
For now, though, the verb “to Lizzie” means to wander around a cemetery, usually Mount Auburn, where the focus is NOT birds. (I peek anyway.)
31 December 03
Virtual Cemeteries
This is an entry for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic on Cemeteries and Place.
Not far from where we live, down the road past fields and out to the east, is the Tremont Street Cemetery, an idyllic little rural cemetery with the interments starting from the 1870s. It’s a good destination for a short bicycle ride from here. None of our ancestors are buried there. In idle moments, we entertain the thought of transcribing the gravestones there so that genealogists from elsewhere might be able to look up information about deceased relatives online.
We dabble in genealogy and too have benefited from online cemetery transcription projects. In virtual explorations of my ancestral roots in Lorain County, Ohio, I came across this page of Lorain County cemetery transcriptions, and found maybe a dozen relatives listed in the publication. It’s not as gratifying as making a gravestone rubbing, but visiting an ancestor’s virtual cemetery is still a form of homage.
30 December 03
Avoiding the Latinate
Maria from Alembic has got me thinking that perhaps I equate the Latinate in English with the bovine. At any rate, I’ve been musing on Tolkien’s rabid avoidance of it and have attempted to write a sonnet (below) containing no Latin. The problem with this is that a) you immediately get taken for a demented Scotsman, and b) you sound like you’re auditioning for Radio Shakespeare. It’s all in fun, of course, so please have a go if you feel so inclined. Anyone who spots a latin word gets a bottle of ink (poem title excluded, but as you can see, there will be plenty of ink to go around; send me your snailmail address and I’ll send one along). Oh, and one other problem with making walnut ink: your house smells like Grendel’s mother’s lair for about a week. Think wet dog plus badger carcass. Pleasant, yes? (If I had done this in October like I was supposed to, the windows could all have happily been open.)
Alchemy in Brown
The walnuts sat forlorn along the road
And, scattered by the howling wind, they thought
(Since walnuts think, crass doubter: brains they hold)
Their fate lay in a headlong drop to nought
Bestowed by crows: on railway sidings hurled,
To tear asunder husk from hull and meat;
The black birds cawing at their underworld.
No murder was more gleeful, feast more meet.
She wandered slowly through the side-strewn rain
To stoop and gather (carefully, though sore).
Into the basket, then the pot again
And sat to simmer for three days or more.
The walnuts sighed and gave their souls to ink
For words and drawings: life beyond the brink.
29 December 03
Frog-Strangler
That’s our landlord’s expression for the sort of weather we’re having now. I’m not sure where the phrase comes from.
We’ve had 1.62 inches of rain in the last 20 hours or so. There have been high winds, lots of snow in the mountains, highway closures, and flooding. The electricity just went out here, which is hardly unexpected in big storms like this one. I’m typing this on our laptop’s battery, and better post this before the phone goes out as well. Pica was in the middle of the letter ‘g’ on a new font she’s designing when the power loss interrupted everything.
At least we have lots of Double-A batteries…
28 December 03
Christmas Bird Count—A Bit
Every year a bird census is taken in winter during a two-week period around Christmas. It is the largest volunteer data collection activity in the world. Thousands of people go out in all weathers to count the birds in a given area and tally them at the end of the day. Spikes or dips in populations can be seen and hopefully explained. It’s a good and useful activity, even though it has a tendency to become an exercise in finding rarities (irrelevant to science) and competitiveness (ditto).
We were not signed up to do the Bodega Bay count this year because there seemed to be no leader; we had a dinner engagement that morphed into brunch this morning; and we had the fall-back excuse of a dodgy back and achilles tendon, respectively. We got a last-minute plea to do a very abbreviated count yesterday. This means that today we counted robins, starlings, housefinches, California quail, and turkey vultures in and around French toast with poached dried fruit in a citrus sauce at the fabulous new organic eatery in Bodega Bay, the Seaweed Cafe. Melinda and Jackie are taking January off for a well-deserved rest but will be back in February. The dinner menu is not great for vegetarians (though seems spectacular for omnivores) but brunch is superb. Incredible teas.
If any of my serious birding friends are reading this, yes, we know we’re slouches. We didn’t find the immature goshawk and we failed in our mission to find a rough-legged hawk or even a cowbird. Next year.
27 December 03
Ablatives On The Rebound
Thanks to the excellent blog Mirabilis.ca, there is an article in The Economist about contemporary advocates of Latin, including that center of Latin as a living language, the Vatican. Some tidbits from the article:
– In his upcoming movie The Passion about the last hours of Christ, Mel Gibson initially didn’t want the film, which is spoken entirely in Latin and Aramaic, to be subtitled. – The Finnish national radio broadcasting station YLE each week has a 5-minute world news broadcast in Latin, entitled Nuntii Latini. It may be heard worldwide via satellite or shortwave radio. – Every Thursday, a five-man team in the Vatican argues about how to translate modern words into Latin. Try globuli solaniani for potato chips.Though not mentioned in the article, there’s even a programming language, specifically a dialect of Perl, in Latin!
26 December 03
New Zealand as Middle Earth
This is a very belated entry to the Ecotone Wiki’s joint post on Mythic Place.
I doubt whether J.R.R. Tolkien ever visited New Zealand but Peter Jackson has ensured that it is now on the global mythic map of the 21st century. It is said that Tolkien was disappointed that England had no native myths, so he set about writing one—about an England that had long disappeared first into Enclosures and then into the Industrial Revolution. (The Arthurian legends are all of French origin.) The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion read like the Icelandic sagas that were the professor’s day job.
Claude Lvi-Strauss insists that myths are a language because they only exist in language; that they must be retold. Jackson’s retelling must count, in part because of the introduction of this landscape into the contemporary consciousness.
A quick rereading of parts of Tolkien has struck me in its almost obsessive avoidance of the latinate. Use an Anglo-Saxon word where there is one, he seems to say. Perhaps the latinate in English is less able to evoke myth than the language of Beowulf.
I wonder whether Maori New Zealand is as excited about the success of the films as everyone else seems to be. Ideas, anyone?
25 December 03
A Dog’s Best Christmas Present
...is to spend a good part of the day bounding across open terrain. We went today with my sister, her boyfriend, and her dog Hooper to Pt. Isabel Regional Shoreline, which is a bit of open space on the east side of San Francisco Bay that is well-known to East Bay residents as a place to let dogs run off-leash. There were many dozens of dogs of all shape and variety out there today, enjoying the Christmas sunshine, some retrieving frisbees and balls, and a few going swimming in a channel leading to the Bay. Remarkably, all these dogs were getting along with each other quite well, many of them no doubt exchanging holiday wishes and email addresses. At left we see Hooper returning after venturing hither and yon.
24 December 03
Pen Fetish
I have often felt frustrated when going to stationery stores in the United States. It seems they are full of junk and contain very poor, mediocre selections of, well, stationery. Lots of rotten pens, some of which end up costing quite a bit. I won’t go so far as to blame the decline of Western civilization on the abandonment of the fountain pen, but I do cling obstinately to my belief that the world would be a better place if people WROTE better—and for this the fountain pen is the ideal tool. (Of course it would be better if they wrote at all, but that’s another piece.) I’m bleating in the wilderness, on this, to a world of keyboardists; to a world where children can routinely get to be almost adults without being able to read cursive; to a world of the ballpoint superseded by the rollerball superseded by the next miserable effort. Baaah, baaah.
Spain has, on the other hand, no shortage of good stationery stores—tiny closet-type spaces packed to the ceilings with unknown treasures in boxes. My guess is that this is one unintended but excellent result of the Napoleonic invasion of 1808 (the French REALLY know stationery: whoever has not had the sybaritic pleasure writing in fountain pen on Clairefontaine paper, papier velouté [velveted paper], should definitely try it; it will cure all manner of woes, aches, pains, and even warts).
Anyway, there was this tiny closet stationer downstairs from the apartment with the Oxford Spanish Dictionary which kept Numenius so busy for hours (we now own a copy, and a splendid thing it is too). We popped in to see what they might have in the way of fountain pens.
I don’t want something fancy. I don’t want laqueur, mother of pearl, bakelite, ebony; I don’t want a venetian glass dip pen which looks elegant on a female executive’s desk but can’t write for toffee; I don’t want a collector’s item to be stored in a vault or even just a drawer. I want something that can WRITE, by golly. It’s all in the nib, the nib, the nib. The rest of the pen is simply a vehicle to hold the nib; to facilitate smooth, even transfer of ink to the nib; and to permit the hand to HOLD the nib (balance is the next thing I look for; good pens are designed to be balanced when the cap is on the body, and to write best like this).
A happy curiosity: the RETRACTABLE fountain pen, made by Stypen (French, bien sûr). I bought one immediately. We went back a few days later and bought one for Numenius. It made writing in our travel journal a pure joy; we did lots of sketches on buses stuck in traffic; and, of course, we made sure to remove the cartridges before getting on the plane home to avoid the dreaded blue-black menstruation, where ink gets all over everything you ever owned and everyone else’s too.
I keep this pen in my pocket all the time; it fits into even the smallest pockets. It’s my current favorite. Good, fine nib. Great balance. Great price: 12 Euros.
Postscript: some readers in England read this post and did some research (thanks Clare and Alan). The Stypen-Up is available at a fabulous shop in Brighton called Pen to Paper. The fact that this pen takes small standard cartridges means that there are many colors of ink from which to choose.
I am contacting these people to see if they ship to the United States…
Further postscript, January 23, 2004: The fabulous Pendemonium, based in Iowa, stocks the pens, the inks, and the paper, along with a huge number of collectibles. They seem to be out of stock of several items but are very prompt in responding to inquiries; even though they’re at the Philadelphia Pen Show this week I heard back the same day. I have bought pens from them before but didn’t realize they ran to what in France is a typical supermarket brand…
23 December 03
Immersion Learning
At left is a bit of typography from a sign outside a bank in vila. Pica noticed this sign on account of the unusual DE ligature; meanwhile I did what I was doing throughout the trip to Spain – notice the language. Try to figure out patterns in words, phrases and make sense of a language that I’ve never studied. My favorite book in one of the places where we stayed turned out to be a copy of the Oxford Spanish Dictionary.
I’ve returned from Spain determined to learn Spanish. I don’t know what it will be like to learn a language at age forty. I’m monolingual, but along the way I’ve studied Hebrew, some German, some Latin, and most of all French (six years in secondary school). I’ve signed up for a class in the new year, and right now I’m starting by trying to read, with aid of dictionaries and grammars, whatever Spanish I come across.