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.
3 November 03
Nonviolence And Electronic Voting
We just came back from hearing Arun Gandhi speak as part of the Campus Community Book Project on nonviolence as he learned it from his grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi. He spoke of the culture of violence and how much of we do perpetuates it, even passively. Anger is like electricity, his grandfather would say, it must be channelled in the right direction to do good. Nor can peace just stay within—it must go from thoughts to words to deeds to values.
Out in cyberspace, a civil disobedience campaign is going on which I think M.K. Gandhi would be pleased with. A writer named Bev Harris has been researching the perils of electronic voting systems, well-known to computer security experts as posing high risks for corruption and fraud. In particular, she was investigating the biggest manufacturer of these systems in the U.S., Diebold Election Systems, and was appalled by the woeful lack of security in their systems, not to mention the lack of any auditable duplicate paper printout trail from the votes. She posted on her website internal memos from an email list archive of Diebold’s which document a pattern of mismanagement and technical failure.
Naturally, Diebold was incensed by this, and sent Harris a cease-and-desist order to take the memos off her website, on grounds of copyright violations. But the genie was out of the bottle, and many people started mirroring the memos, beginning with students at Swarthmore College. Diebold followed up with more cease-and-desist orders, but they aren’t catching up with the mirrorers. And today, the students turned the tables. They filed suit, with help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, against Diebold to block their cease-and-desist orders on grounds that publishing the memos constitutes fair use because of the importance of the memos to the public debate over electronic voting.
2 November 03
Coffee Houses
Another joint Ecotone entry; this one is on Coffee House as Place.
I remember the first time I entered a Starbucks. It was on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Mass., and what seemed so different about it was how people seemed encouraged to linger: to buy only one overpriced cup of designer coffee but then to sit there all morning. It was almost opposite Harvard Law School and I suspect most of its clientele were law students, choosing a study environment that would never, ever work for me. But I liked it that they weren’t chased out. I ordered tea.
Since those days, Starbucks has covered the globe in much the same way MacDonald’s has, and its cookie-cutter designs render it identical in Cambridge or Davis or London. I avoid it, especially since I stopped drinking coffee many years ago. Yet there are several coffee shops here in Davis: Common Grounds, Mishka’s, Espresso Roma, Cafe Roma, Chamonix—that offer a similar “we won’t chase you out of here even though you’ve only spent $2.65” message. Many of them offer free wireless internet as well (unlike Starbucks, where you have to pay). Cafe Roma features poetry slams and concerts; Common Grounds has book readings and political gatherings.
For a drink that seems to load people up with an energy that leads to the shakes, it’s a civilized antidote, this relaxed notion of how long you can stay. I like it. I can’t give any kind of critique of the quality of the coffee, but each of these havens has its own defining sense of place. Appealing to neo-hippies, Euro-wannabes, or aging grungers, the coffee houses become an extension of the people who sit in them for hours. Even when they’re almost empty, it’s easy to tell if you’d fit in or not.
1 November 03
The Three O’Clock Cookie Run
A note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Coffee Shop As Place
Not far from the building where I work is the main student center on campus, housing the bookstore and the student-run eatery (supposedly the largest restaurant in Northern California). I always get my lunch from there—the food is cheap and wholesome. Students being students, their newfound coffee habit well nourished by too many all-nighters, naturally there is a place to pick up a mocha during a five-minute run between classes. There is no place to sit down in this little coffeeshop, and people who want to settle into their coffees often sit on the tables and chairs just outside the MemU. Because no one lingers, this coffeeshop doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of place, though I’m sure it does to the student workers there.
Myself, I’m not a coffee drinker, but the coffeeshop is my destination for the usual mid-afternoon baked good run. Most often a cookie, but if I’m lucky they have blueberry muffins. Bakeries as place—now there’s a topic.
31 October 03
Halloween Costumes
I decided not to go into work today with two black boots pretending I was Frankenstein’s monster, not because they wouldn’t have been great for the purpose, but because I couldn’t figure out how to handle the head. Plus I had physical therapy during the day: difficult to do floorwork with two bolts sticking out of your neck.
Lots of my coworkers dressed up, though, and much jollity ensued.
The best costume I’ve seen for many years was on a person standing outside the front of Mrak Hall where I work. It was dark. The figure was hooded and caped and stood motionless outside the front door. A scythe emerged from behind the black cloth. Tall: Darth Vader plus scythe.
When we got round the front of this sinister figure, a full human skeleton started talking to us, explaining that his wife was a forensic anthropologist, and he wasn’t trying to scare people, and he was waiting for his ride. For a second, though, it appeared as though the angel of death were delivering a particularly interesting message to the administration of the University.
30 October 03
Periodic Tables
The cover article in Science News this week (unfortunately not online, but see this writeup in the Guardian) is about a geologist’s redesign of the periodic table of elements, that graphic beloved of chemists. The geologist, Bruce Railsback, set out to redesign the periodic table so that it would be more useful for earth scientists, who deal with elements mostly in their ionic forms. In his table, elements are arranged according to their ions, rather than their neutral atoms, and some elements may have multiple entries in the table if they have several different commonly found ions (e.g. an entry both for ferrous (Fe2+) and ferric (Fe3+) iron).
It’s a pretty amazing graphic (downloadable from here) and I’m tempted to print it out on the large-format plotter at work. It might even lead me to read up on some geochemistry. My chemistry is quite rusty, but there’s something archetypal in studying about elements, their forms, and the earth.