2 May 03
Where Are My Words?
During the buildup to the Iraq invasion it was easy to be vocal: I read news reports (the ones missed by most of the American public) and blogs (almost always referred to me by Numenius) voraciously; I was well informed. I organized three readings of Poets Against the War here in Davis; I attended protest marches and demonstrations; even the weekly silent vigil held here in Davis every Saturday organized by the Society of Friends felt like a loud statement.
I don’t feel vocal any more. I feel defeated and silenced. I feel as though having a voice doesn’t count; the might of the American military is what’s driving the world and will continue to do so, and woe betide anyone who gets in the way. I know rationally that this is the most important time to raise one’s voice, now that so many things are at stake and seem so in danger of being replaced by whatever it is that’s coming. I just wish I had something to say.
That’s why I approached last night’s Poetry Reading Against the War with such anxiety. I made a very belated and weak attempt to publicize it. I think I secretly hoped nobody would show up, because then I wouldn’t have to explain why I had failed to write a poem for now—a poem about where we are in the wake of all this madness. I wouldn’t have to explain my silence. I wouldn’t have to admit to despair.
Nobody did. Show up. I think this stranglehold of silence affects more of us than just me.
This is why I’m so grateful to Kos and Atrios and the rest for making sure we don’t all descend into silence, which is exactly where the Administration wants us.
1 May 03
The Joys of Baseball on Radio
It’s always most satisfying to turn on the radio and find one’s team in the midst of a dominating performance. Such was the SF Giants’ 5-0 win last night over the Chicago Cubs. Barry Bonds hit two home runs, including one into the Bay, and Jason Schmidt pitched probably the best game of his career, striking out 12 and allowing 3 hits in a complete game shutout. This was after not pitching in twelve days on account of the death last week of his mother.
I enjoy listening to Jon Miller broadcasting the Giants games. He’s regarded as one of the best radio broadcasters in the game, and has a way of painting vivid word-pictures of the action on the field as well as being much the raconteur. Last night he called Barry Bonds’ second home run! “The wind is blowing straight out towards center, towards McCovey Cove. And Barry Bonds has an affinity towards McCovey Cove….” Next thing we know, Bonds launches one into the Bay!
30 April 03
An Opinion of One’s Own
I’ve been on a bit of a Virginia Woolf kick lately. I seem to be a binge reader—settle in on an author and if I like their work I read many books until I’m ready to move on, not necessarily in chronological or any other order. I tend to read greedily and if I haven’t quite given the book enough of a shot or if I just loved it, I go back to the beginning and start again.
I came to Woolf because I resisted reading The Hours—I started it some time ago, before anyone knew about Hollywood plans, but it irritated me. Mostly because it felt like monstrously bad film editing. My film buff friends tell me the editing in the movie was much better. At any rate, it felt wrong to get cross about the Cunningham book when I hadn’t even read Mrs. Dalloway so, like many others, I have read that novel in the wake of the publication ofThe Hours.
I wasn’t disappointed. I moved straight on to To the Lighthouse and am now reading A Room of One’s Own. The writing is spectacular; the eye that looks deep into the souls of every character is searing.
What Woolf does is poke at, try to get at, the essence of the interior world, which is inherently not really up for grabs—as Jess Banks used to say in class of Beckett, “effing the ineffable.” I finally did read The Hours this past weekend and found it clever but, Senator, you’re no Virginia Woolf.
Part of the blame lies in our particular cultural and historical circumstances. The world would reject a Joyce or a Woolf in 2003; the writing of high modernism would come over as overblown and bombastic now. Aping it is like copying the masters of Abstract Expressionism, not Raphael; it seems all wrong. My gender-politics friends point to the value of outing Woolf, as if that were all the license one needed. It seems like a sideline, a distraction to me.
In A Room of One’s Own, written in 1928, Woolf discusses the different attitudes of the world to women versus men writers. At worst, the world says to poor Keats or Tennyson or Carlyle, “Write if you choose. It makes no difference to me.” At best, the world says to women, “Write? What’s the good of your writing?”
In 2003, where words pour out onto keyboards 24/7 in a middle-class torrent (the poor are still, as in Woolf’s day, circumstantially unlikely to write), the charge of the world might be this: “Write if you want, but your words will get lost in the ether within three years, probably far sooner. The publishing industry is in crisis. Do not look for the next Woolf or Joyce; look instead for the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. If you in fact happen to be the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, brush up on your P.R. skills.”
I am grateful to Michael Cunningham, all the same, for getting me on my reading binge in the first place—this particular one was long overdue.
29 April 03
Museums and Memories
I went on a half-day trip to Berkeley today for a meeting of informatics folks of the Berkeley Natural History Museums. The meeting was in the Grinnell-Miller library of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
Berkeley is where I grew up and went to school as an undergrad studying zoology. I don’t think I’ve been inside MVZ for almost twenty years. Much, much has changed there, most notably the complete rebuilding of the interior of the Life Sciences Building in the early 1990s. MVZ is now on the third floor in the center of the building, now near the University and Jepson Herbaria and the Museum of Paleontology, the latter having a T. rex skeleton mounted in the building’s exact center.
We had a little tour of MVZ and the herbaria after our meeting. Our guide pulled out all sorts of specimens for us, including resplendently-colored tanagers and, at my request, the long-billed curlews. Much of our knowledge of the California biota has come from work at the MVZ and these herbaria.
My trips to Berkeley now are always very focused and precise. Either to visit family, to visit a store or restaurant, or to pass through on the way to other places in the Bay Area. I know Berkeley well but in no sense do I live there. I note the changing storefronts there, not the events and issues of daily life.
Where the bike path turns south to leave the Arboretum, returning home this evening I heard and saw a western tanager in one of the oaks. Spring migration is underway!
28 April 03
Shower-dodging
A spring cold front blew through the area today, and we were dodging showers all day. When I left for work in the morning, there were blue skies overhead, a very low-to-the-horizon, almost flat rainbow to the northwest, and a big rain cloud to the south. I didn’t outrun the rain cloud, and got wet on my bike halfway to work. More showers at lunchtime, including some hail; I waited at the Memorial Union for it to pass and thus gave the bookstore some business.
Some sprinkles on the way home, but not enough to get me wet.
While running errands downtown at dusk today, we saw a flight of several hundred Vaux’s swifts circling low over a house! And another observer independently confirmed them. They are migrants, and were no doubt looking for a place to roost for the evening.
27 April 03
Coastal Migrations
We went to Bodega Bay this weekend to visit Pica’s Mum. We got there too late in the afternoon yesterday to do much in the way of exploring, but this morning we did our usual poke around the Bay. We weren’t birding very intensively, as Pica and I were more interested in doing some sketching and digiscoping. The tide was very high, so our first stop was Doran Pond, on the east side of the bay. There were a few peep in there, lots of dunlin, some dowitchers, and a couple of egrets. At right is Pica’s painting of one of the egrets.
I meanwhile worked on photographing the shorebirds. The light was very good, but digiscoping is still very much a challenge! The biggest difficulty I was having was focusing—how to get the autofocus to behave through the scope. Next time I will experiment with manual focusing. At left is one of my dunlin images.
While walking on Doran Beach, Mum meanwhile found washed up many translucent sails from small jellyfishes. She asked another beach walker about them, and he said they were called by-the-wind sailors, or Velella velella. When dried out, the sails open flat making a perfect heart shape.
We then went up to Bodega Head where we did a couple more quick paintings. And looking down on one of the rocks, we saw a black turnstone in breeding plumage.
26 April 03
Riding Again After Twenty Years
I’ve been riding again after a long absence. Horses are large, unpredictable creatures that seem to have a soul that resonates with mine. I know that spending even a short time around them makes me forget everything else. The smell is something we used to dream of distilling as adolescents. Basically, you either love it or hate it.
Like riding a bicycle, riding a horse is a skill remembered mostly in muscles that don’t necessarily work as well as they used to. But the old instincts are still there: I can still tell when a horse, frisky in the north wind, is about to bolt. Not that this will necessarily save me!
The UC Davis Equestrian Center is adjacent to Highway 113. There are about 60 lesson horses and many others that are owned privately. It’s time for it to move on. There’s a ranch out on Russell Boulevard which has been earmarked for the new Equestrian Center and which is being celebrated this coming week. I hope there will be an indoor arena: riding in the mud in winter and searing heat in summer is no fun. If Davis is successful in its bid to get the new Biosafety Level 4 Lab from NIH, it will sit on the current site of the Equestrian Center.
24 April 03
Gelly Roll and Wash
Pen and wash is a favorite medium of mine—it’s a great way to do landscape sketches quickly yet introduce a bit of color with some watercolor washes. And watercolor field kits that contain a set of small pans of paint are readily available and work well on outdoor sketching expeditions. One issue though is the choice of pen. Dip-nib pens are great in the studio but porting around bottles of ink is a risky thing to do in a backpack. Fountain pens are somewhat more portable, but generally too precious for the field, and fountain pen inks aren’t waterproof, a desirable quality if one is going to paint washes over the ink drawing. I have often used Sakura Micron Pigma pens, which are pigment-based archival-quality felt-tip pens, but these have a harsh feel to them.
Anyway, I can’t believe it has taken me so very long to discover Gelly Roll pens, also made by Sakura. They are roller-ball gel pens, and it turns out they are both archival and waterproof. Moreover, they are cheap and are available almost everywhere. Above is my first Gelly Roll and wash landscape, looking west towards the Putah Creek gap in the Vaca Mountains.
23 April 03
Boxing the Political Compass
Kos in an excellent post today discusses how the Democratic Party may now be a better home for libertarians than the GOP, since the Democrats are doing more of a job of protecting personal liberties than the Republicans are these days. It is interesting to visualize how this plays out in a more sophisticated representation of political space than the traditional one-dimensional left-right line. One such depiction may be found at the Political Compass. (Spoiler alert: if you are at all inclined to take online quizzes, I recommend you go to this site and take the quiz there before reading further).
The depiction at the Political Compass maps political positions in terms of two dimensions. The horizontal axis represents an economic dimension in the traditional sense from left to right, but the depiction adds a social dimension as the vertical axis. Authoritarian positions are at the top of the diagram, and libertarian positions are at the bottom of the diagram. The axes divide political space into four quadrants: the libertarian left (today’s progressives and Greens), the libertarian right (traditional libertarians), the authoritarian left (Marxists), and the authoritarian right (e.g. the territory of the neocon right wing).
I think most people in the U.S. today are arrayed on the diagonal stretching from lower-left to upper-right. There are relatively few traditional libertarians, and even fewer Marxists. But the diagram suggests questions for Democratic strategists. In this era of the PATRIOT act and other such perfidies, has the authoritarian-to-libertarian social dimension become more important to most people than the economic left-right dimension? Is there enough of a bloc of voters who are either libertarian left or libertarian right that the Democrats should reach downwards on the diagram—remaining centrist on the economic dimension, but becoming more libertarian on the social dimension, becoming as Kos puts it, the party of personal liberty? And for the traditional libertarians and the Greens, is it now time for a libertarian-Green alliance?
22 April 03
A Small Rural Cemetery
The Tremont Street Cemetery lies about five miles southeast of Davis in the middle of the farmlands that grow wheat all winter and tomatoes all summer. It’s the burial ground for the Presbyterian church in that same spot. The church is no longer used but is well cared-for, as is the tiny cemetery.
Mostly German names are listed on the stones. There was a significant German migration to this part of California in the late nineteenth century. After the opening of the trans-continental railroad in 1869 which obviated the need for covered wagons or perilous trips round the Horn, California must once again have seemed a land of gold, though the gold rush was long over
Walking through a cemetery allows me to picture family life a hundred years ago—these people worked hard, were modest in their aspirations and lives, and often lost many members to illness or hardship—at a young age. It seems they were not untouched by the flu epidemic of 1918. Though this cemetery is small, it is a lovely place to sit in the heat of the summer with its mature, tall trees providing a good nesting site for red-shouldered hawks and great-horned owls as well as blue grosbeaks and northern mockingbirds.
I have a secret hankering to live in a cemetery, to be a “caretaker.” I find them restful places of memory, not morbid or frightening—and the birds are almost always in abundance. My hopes were raised when the caretakers’ trailer was moved from this cemetery recently, but it’s been replaced by a new one.
We’re considering doing a census of this cemetery for the online genealogy project so that relatives of the people buried here but perhaps living far away can get the data they need to find a “missing link,” the eureka moment of every genealogist.