15 August 03
A Place In Cyberspace
This is a post on weblogs as place for the Ecotone Wiki.
Writing this weblog has really been my first endeavor in online community. I have been on the Internet ever since 1990, but would only post very occasionally to places like various mailing lists or Usenet, and never hung out for very long in IRC-land. Nor have I been inclined to participate in web communities such as Kuro5hin or Slashdot, though I lurk omnivorously. There I sense my identity would get lost in the tumult of voices, whereas this weblog is more my own home, a place where my own sensibilities can emerge.
Is there something special about weblogs that make them possess more of a sense of place than other online fora? Place has always been an important metaphor for the Web—witness the use of “home page” and “web site”—and perhaps the combination of the graphic design elements of the Web and the prominence weblogs give to the individual writer’s voice enables a strong sense of place. And a weblog is happiest when other people stop by—it is always reaching towards community.
To turn the metaphor about, a weblog feels like a home on a street with neighbor bloggers who frequently visit, or at least check if your cat is outside. From outside your neighborhood, people occasionally drive through and comment on your choice of house paint. Outside your town, the world of bloggers is vast, growing unfathomably, but all share a desire to create their own little nook in cyberspace.
14 August 03
O.R. As Place
Yesterday was one of those extraordinary days that was supposed to be awful and turned out to be just amazing… I was scheduled for surgery at 9:45 am and had to be in two hours earlier, not having eaten or drunk anything after midnight. There’s a lot of paperwork and different rooms to go and sit in in a kind of ritualistic sequence. But a morning with no tea for someone who drinks two or three pots before work is definitely starting off on the wrong foot (the left one, in my case).
First unexpected thing: they let my mother come in and sit with me in the pre-op room. The anesthesiologist shows up: he’s an affable, chatty guy who after a couple of jokes tries to talk me into a spinal block as opposed to a general anaesthetic. No way, I say. I don’t want to hear, smell, feel, or see anything. That’s what they all say, he says. He explains how he needs to get the muscles REALLY relaxed and in order to do that with a general he’d have to put me way under, which would make me very, very sick. But he can give me an out-of-body experience, half and half, so I’d be like a centaur. Now I’m interested—shades of Harry Potter. He’s selling me this like it’s a truffle.
Second unexpected thing: the surgeon shows up, instantly wants to talk to my mother, wants to make sure I’m okay, wonders if I have questions, is fine with my emailing him. The anaesthesiologist hands him a line and says “hook that up there, will you R—?”-and explains that he has known R- since R—was twelve and that he used to send him all over the Operating Room to get things. They have a very comfortable interaction. I’m instantly intrigued and forget, frankly, to be nervous.
When the time comes to wheel me in to the O.R., after R—explains that he needs to go and get into his pyjamas, the nurses cluck sympathetically to the story of the jig on my wedding day (I am getting a lot of mileage out of this) and then THEY start bantering with the anaesthesiologist, whom I’ll call Dr. F.—and everyone wants to know what music I want to listen to (even though I’m assured I’ll be out cold). Not heavy metal, say I.
The Operating Room, a forbidding, scary, and chilly place I last saw at age seven when I was having my tonsils out when syringes were the size of walking sticks, is now a cozy, mellow haven where Beethoven is welcome. I didn’t ask for Beethoven but nodded an assent when they asked “Classical okay?”. The minute I came to, I was totally alert. They were still joking, two hours later. And I felt elated, elated to be alive, to have gotten through this ordeal, and to have been part of this almost coffee klatsch (even though I was asleep through most of it).
I didn’t hear, feel, smell, or see anything, I say to Dr. F. That’s because I’m your anaesthesiologist, says he, and disappears off into the C Section in the next room.
13 August 03
Tofu-Cilantro
2 bunches cilantro (fresh green coriander)
2 green peppers
2 jalapeño peppers
12 oz firm tofu
soy sauce
Finely chop cilantro and peppers and stir-fry in a large saucepan or wok. Add cubed tofu and 2 tbsp of soy sauce. Cover and let simmer for 10-15 minutes. Serve over basmati rice.
This is Pica’s favorite dinner which she was quite glad to have after returning home from surgery this afternoon, which went well. The jalapeños today were deliciously picant.
12 August 03
A Different Wedding of Place
We weren’t the only people to get married on Sunday: Yuri Malenchenko married Yekaterina Dmitriyeva by video link—from space. See this report from the BBC.
Photographs from ours are dribbling in and making their way slowly onto our gallery—hope to have a huge chunk of photos to sort through by this weekend.
11 August 03
Catching Up On The Baseball
Pica is reclining on the couch right now, left leg elevated, and is happily scoring the Boston Red Sox-Oakland A’s game. This is a key four-game series between the Red Sox and the A’s, since the two teams are very close in the AL wild card race. It’s always a matter of conflicted loyalties when these two teams meet, since Pica is a Red Sox fan and I grew up following the A’s, but I’ll have to admit my loyalities have shifted so that I root for the Red Sox in such matchups. After all, the Red Sox have a longer history of disappointments to overcome.
On the day of our wedding yesterday, one of the rarest of baseball events occurred: an unassisted triple play. Rafael Furcal, the shortstop for the Atlanta Braves, turned the play in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. This is only the 12th unassisted triple play in major league history. This surely must be a portent for us, or at least the answer to a good trivia question.
Pica will be headed in for surgery on her ankle early Wednesday morning. I don’t think we’ll be catching the rest of the A’s-Red Sox series in person, alas.
10 August 03
The Marriage Of The Place Bloggers
What we did today: rose before dawn, heard curlews in the field (Numenius americanus), drove to a hilltop above Winters, had our hair done by Pica’s sister, watched friends and relatives gather, processed down towards a maypole structure to a fiddler’s hornpipe, professed our vows (see left), got enveloped by rose petals and love, and became husband and wife.
After the potluck brunch, the calamité. Pica was dancing a merry jig entitled “The Bride’s Favorite” when a loud snap almost stopped the festivities — Pica suspected her Achilles’ tendon was no longer functioning. No tandem exit for the bride and groom today. A trip to the hospital confirmed her suspicions. We await more news following an MRI tomorrow morning.
We are in good spirits and can’t complain about the number of attentive friends, relatives, and complete strangers!
This was a wedding of place. We invoked the watershed and gave the birders present the task of finding a golden eagle, a totem bird for us. They were successful after the accident! Both Pica and Numenius saw the bird.
We will be uploading photos from the wedding to a gallery here. [note, August 20: many more have been added…]
9 August 03
Mudpies
A recent entry from Bright Field on Renaissance Man (dated August 7 — there is no permalink) brings to mind my own struggle with breadth and depth. I compare my creative process to the making of mudpies: you roll up your sleeves, get mucky and have fun, and if what comes out of it is interesting or beautiful you give it away; if not, not. And then you move on to the next mudpie.
I wrote a poem about this last year — calligraphed it, rolled it up into a scroll, tied it with a green ribbon, and handed it out to folks in my writing group at the time: a mudpie about mudpies. I like the villanelle form, not widely used in English (but best known in Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night), because it’s like a dance, a song — and very appropriate to the kind of lightness I’m trying to explore. Thomas, of course, was able to plumb the searing depths of human experience with this “light” form — every time I read his villanelle I gasp. Anyway, here’s mine:
Ars Poetica
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
I flit from here to there, I breathe it in.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.
Mudpies are shaped in ink, or paint, or clay
Or paper, leather, sewn with linen strands—
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
If good, or beautiful, they multiply:
Plucked, like August squash, then loved, and given—
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.
Proboscis searching, reaching for the sky—
The canon, though shot down, gnaws deep within.
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
Perhaps the newer gods have a reply:
Express yourself. It’s all the same. Just spin.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.
I wander, search, a light-fingered magpie.
I learn the rudiments but don’t dig in.
I yearn for depth, but I’m a butterfly.
My hands corral my flight: here’s a mudpie.
8 August 03
Alfalfa Bales
Rows of hay bales in the fields here are an ephemeral sight. The hay baler, equipped with powerful headlights, does its work at night, and the bale harvester, shown at left, gets right to the task straight away in the morning.
They’re getting many crops of alfalfa this season out of this field south of our house. Alfalfa seems like an easy crop to grow: once you cut it, it comes right back for another crop. It just takes lots of water from parched groundtables.
7 August 03
Children and Trees
On August 1 a group of us collaborated on a joint post about trees and place at the Ecotone Wiki. I was tempted, as I have often been on these joint posts, to write about childhood memories. I resisted, since I didn’t want every entry to make it seem as though the place blogging exercise was a narrative of lost childhood, yet this seems to be something that recurs quite a lot with this group.
Trees are something that children seem drawn to naturally, but there are other places too, miniature houses, secret gardens. They are all places of safety that seem to affirm the child’s individuality.
One secret place I went to often with my friend Jennifer was what we called “our little woods.” This was a stand of a few spindly locust-type trees-ten or twelve, maybe-that was bravely holding out against suburban expansion north of Madrid. We buried little treasures there, hoped to find bigger ones.
The copse was almost druidically circular which must have been a lot of its appeal. The magic of the place contained us. Even when our parents were nearby, eating picnics on ground that has been built on for over thirty years now, we had our secret connection to those trees.
Jennifer now lives in a land that is almost entirely magic-southern Sweden. The lore of trees and the creatures that live in them, and around them, and under them, make this a good place for children to discover secret places. Jennifer’s red wooden house is flanked by trees, kept at bay through lots of sweat. The geese honk in the morning and the common cranes feed in the field west of the house. Everythingapart from the spruces-seems almost diminutive, cowed by the immense forest. And magical.
Sometimes when I’m hot and dusty, coming home into the delta breeze, I remember our little woods, sparse and circular, and I think of Jennifer’s vast expanse of northern woods. Different choices have led us on different journeys, to different trees.
6 August 03
The Meetup Dance
I went to the first Yolo County Meetup for Howard Dean’s campaign this evening at a coffeehouse in South Davis. The previous local Meetups have been in Sacramento, but there is now sufficient interest in the campaign on the west side of the causeway for groups to start officially meeting over here. There were about 35 attendees, and apparently 8 or so other were meeting closer to campus, as logistics still need to be sorted out. Prominent at the meeting were three local elected Democratic party officials who had seen Dean speak at the California Democratic Party annual conference in March and were amazed and flabbergasted by his performance.
I am an independent voter and haven’t committed to supporting anybody in the Democratic primaries (which apparently I can vote in without having to re-register as a Democrat), but Dean certainly has most of my attention. It comes down to a matter of pragmatics: who has the best shot of sending our loon of a president off to permanent ranchside brush-clearing duties? Dean, a fiscally responsible centrist with a great deal of gumption, is looking very good.
Meanwhile, the latest news from the Let’s Make California A Laughingstock electoral saga is that Arnold is running, Arianna is running, Dianne is not, and the rumors are that Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante will be running as well.