6 May 03
Mother Tongue?
It’s been just over fifteen years since I moved back to the U.S. from England (and previously Spain). It’s hard to remember the sense of dislocation—primarily linguistic—that I know I felt at the time. Within two weeks of my arrival, though, I had picked up Paul Fussell’s Class which provided a crash course in decoding the quite complex but often ignored American class system.
A clerical job with an architectural firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, immersed me in the world of young, hip Tufts-educated musicians needing a day job and slightly older and more sophisticated urban architects—and the American English they spoke. Within a few weeks I had learned the correct usage of the words “like” and “totally” in addition to being able to quote Harvard architecture guru Jorge Silvetti (“Jess, but it is very very ogly”).
My mother, a Philadelphia native, returned to American shores from Spain a few years later with my father. Unlike me, she did not have exposure to the rapid office banter of my young colleagues. Life in Bodega Bay was much less edgy, but her re-entry into the American linguistic arena has consequently taken a lot longer and been fraught with perplexing neologisms and, worse, re-introduced words and expressions.
During our recent trip to Bodega Bay she showed us her ongoing lexicon: a notebook with strange, unfamiliar, and interesting uses of American English with which she is able to navigate this morphing of her mother tongue. She subsequently shared her discovery of the online version of this: Wordspy. Today’s word: Upshifter. I suspect she will politely decline.
5 May 03
The Cooperative Swainson’s Hawk
When I returned home after work today, I did my rounds around the place to see if there were any birds about that I might try to photograph with the spotting scope. I thought there was a bird on one of the walnut trees left remaining south of the house after the lamentable road-widening project. I ran inside and got my binoculars. Yes, it’s a Swainson’s hawk! I ran back and got the digicam and spotting scope, already set up for digiscoping, and took a few pictures.
I then realized the hawk was staying put for a bit, and was perfectly positioned to bring out the Dob. I have a 7” Dobsonian reflecting telescope that is great for visual astronomy, and has much better optics than any spotting scope, but far, far too unwieldly to be useful for birding. Unless one is very lucky that is, and I was! I ran to the house, got and set up the Dob, and took a series of photos: the one at left shows him calling.
Swainson’s hawks are threatened in California, largely due to the loss, especially in the Central Valley, of trees suitable for nesting. Still, the Davis area is a good place to see these birds after they return from migration to Central and South America (especially western Mexico and Argentina) early in spring. These birds like to forage in farmlands and nest in riparian trees, and there is enough of this habitat combination in Yolo and eastern Solano county so that a reasonable breeding population still remains here.
In other birding news, in my lunchtime browse through through the bookstore I discovered that David Sibley has written yet another pair of bird books. The Sibley Guide to Birds, published three years ago, is now considered the standard advanced bird identification guide, but it is a bit of a tome to carry about. The books by Sibley that were just published are a pair of field guides to the birds of western and eastern North America — that is, they actually fit in one’s pocket! Our bookshelves are groaning already at the thought…
4 May 03
Ice Cream With a New Friend
The world of the weblog just got smaller-about five inches wide on this monitor, to be precise. In the Flash-animated World as a Blog, launched recently, you can watch little red lights pop up with the first couple of lines of the latest blog entry from someone in Finland, Australia, Seattle, or Davis. You need to enter your geographic coordinates correctlylittle red lights way north of Siberia are undoubtedly errors-but it’s fun to watch this almost real-time unfolding of newly coordinated bloggers.
A Brazilian neighbor spotted us in just this way: sent us a quick note saying “it says here you’re zero miles away! Do you live in Aggie Village?” The Chatterbox, Fernanda’s blog, has been going for 2-1/2 years now. It’s in Portuguese—I was pleased that I could understand so much of it with my Spanish.
Fernanda, Numenius and I all met at Ben and Jerry’s yesterday afternoon during several torrential rainstorms. It was fun to hear from someone who’s been doing this so much longer and faced the early heartbreaks of unstable blogging software. Plus it’s a wonderful way to stay in touch with family and friends who are so far away.
Someone asked me earlier in the day what the difference was between a blog and a website. I gave the “frequent entries, links to other sites and blogs” answer, but I think the real answer is this: a website is not necessarily an invitation to community; a blog really is.
We’re going to try to identify other Davis bloggers!
3 May 03
Putah Creek Spilleth its Banks
We’ve been getting a fair amount of late-season rain—in the past day we’ve had about 0.90” of rain here. Upstream, Lake Berryessa is at capacity, at which point overflow water spills down through the Glory Hole, an event that started this season in the middle of March. So there is much water in the creek now. Just east of Old Davis Road, there is a lot of ponding, inspiring thoughts of wetlands restoration work. And the water birds are definitely having a good time.
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.