16 April 03
Rain on the Picnic
Last Saturday’s Picnic Day got seriously rained on. Picnic Day is UC Davis’ annual open house (first held 1909) and is the largest student-run event in the country. I watched the parade and then took cover inside.
The following is a photo of Jim Thorne in the disguise of an SUV as part of the Environmental Science and Policy Club float.
And what Picnic Day would be complete without the Doxie Derby, the dachshund races held in UCD’s Rec Hall? Here is a tense moment in the finals of the competition in the Standard division.
16 April 03
Interruptions
Feathers of Hope is back online after all sorts of hardware woes on the server. It’s been moved to a new server at the ISP which will hopefully have better luck. Such interruptions definitely break the writing rhythm.
Back at home, the Davis Enterprise had a feature article on blogging yesterday, but once again they fail to put it online. If the local rag has a full-page article, I guess it means blogging really has gone mainstream.
12 April 03
Poets Against the War in Davis
The Davis Enterprise, our local paper, ran a story yesterday on the Davis Poets for Peace. The article is not unfortunately online, but it gives an extensive spot to my efforts to gather local poets and activists to protest the U.S. war on Iraq.
This grew out of the movement spearheaded by poet Sam Hamill, founder of Copper Canyon Press and a veteran activist from the 1960s, in response to Laura Bush’s cancellation of a symposium on American Poetry scheduled for February 15—on the grounds, according to her publicist, that she didn’t want poetry politicized (!). Since Langston Hughes was one of the three featured poets, along with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, this is even more ironic. And here’s a Republican who reads.
Sam Hamill asked some of his friends to submit poetry against the war. The word spread. Within days there were 3,000 poems on Poets Against the War; within weeks, the number had grown to 13,000.
Poetry readings against the war were hastily organized and hundreds were held across North America on or around February 12. In Davis, thirty of us huddled outside the City Council Chambers under the covered walkway (it was raining hard) and read poems by ourselves or by others. Another two poetry readings were held at the 24-hour peace vigil that began on Thursday evening after the war started. Participants ranged from well-known local poets such as Maria Melendez to first-time poetry writers. Many of their poems can be found through the Poets Against the War site.
All this has been possible because of the online activist community exemplified by MoveOn.org, whose focused issues and reliance on word-of-keyboard dissemination have altered the way many Americans participate in the political process. The community has grown fast, and has turned global. Simply in terms of activism for poets, there are Poets for Peace, UK Poets Against the War (great headline: “Oxford Poets Blast US Air Base with Rhyming Couplets”), Poesa Salvaje, Potes Contre La Guerre (“parce que le mot ne peut pas stopper la guerre, mais peut l’empcher de se drper du bien” [“because the word cannot stop war, but it can prevent it from cloaking itself in good”]).
Poetry provides an outlet for some people who want to protest the war but are not willing to chain themselves to buildings in San Francisco. Voices of peace, humanity, anguish, fear, and general questioning are a fresh antidote to the bombastic howling, lies, and deceit emanating from Washington. Where, we all ask, are the weapons of mass destruction? And why, even if hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis take to the streets and wave to the American and British soldiers, did that make it legal for our government to invade?
Here’s a poem I wrote after being asked to calligraph the names of Iraqis who had been killed by bombing or by sanctions since 1991 to hang on the Davis peace tree, which stood for two weeks in the G Street Plaza following the outbreak of the war.
11 April 03
McCarthyism at the Hall of Fame
The president of the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled a 15th anniversary celebration of the movie Bull Durham on account of the anti-war sentiments of would-be participants Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. There is substantial discussion of this over at Kos and at Peace Tree Farm (here and here). Doug Pappas in his Business of Baseball Blog notes how condemnation of the HOF’s move is coming from all over including noted baseball writers Roger Kahn and Jules Tygiel.
Sigh. Fortunately baseball can survive bad institutional leadership
such as we have now. I liked the comment at Kos that baseball is a
non-violent, process-oriented sport in a goal-oriented, violent society.
9 April 03
Early Season Baseball
Aaron Gleeman points out the perils of baseball in April.
Even though both Pica and I are anything but Yankees fans, I am
pleased that Hideki Matsui hit a grand slam in his opening game in the
Bronx.
Speaking of lifelong Yankees fans, the late Stephen Jay Gould’s
essays on baseball have been reprinted in a single volume entitled Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville.
8 April 03
Digital Calligraphy
Yesterday I bought a copy of Digital Calligraphy by George Thomson. It seems very counterintuitive to move away from paper and ink, though he does have a whole section on scanning work that has been made in the traditional way.
I recently got a digitizing tablet at work and have been trying out different brushes in Illustrator and Photoshop. More practice is definitely needed but so far it’s much better than trying to do this with a mouse! Mostly it needs editing, but it’s easy enough to edit.
Fontographer seems to have been the industry standard for turning scanned lettering into type, but according to a post on Typographica, Macromedia is letting it fade away. There do seem to be a couple of alternatives, though, including TypeTool, which I’m eager to try.
There seems to be far more arabic calligraphy available in a digital format than western calligraphy. When I see Shahram Shimi’s gorgeous digital calligraphic landscapes, for instance, I wonder when western calligraphers are going to catch up, but also what has propelled so many calligraphers of arabic in that direction.
7 April 03
A Lament for Snow
I’m back from Ithaca, having decided in one day’s worth of explorations that it would be a great place to live, except that you have to deal with winter there. Indeed, the Northeast and Upper Midwest are getting their last(?) wintry blast now; the counties to the north of Ithaca got hit by a major ice storm, leaving 300,000 people without power.
But I like the snow and ice. It’s fun to be out in the cold weather, and see the ice on trees, and to kick your way through the snow. To get to the Ithaca airport yesterday, I walked from the Ramada Inn, maybe 1 1/2 miles, with a few hints of snow flurries in the air. Quite pleasant.
The weather back home in Davis just isn’t very interesting. It snows once every fifteen years or so, there are no nor’easters, never much chance of severe thunderstorms, tornados, or baseball-sized hail. Perpetual sunshine for most of summer. I think I’m too much of a weather hound to be living in the Central Valley.
Still, today was the best of spring days here, clear and with the temperature in the 70s. The western kingbirds are back—Pica noticed them on Sunday—but the american pipits and white-crowned sparrows haven’t left yet.
5 April 03
Ithaca Meanderings
I’m blogging this from the Ithaca-Tompkins County public library, a excellent library one block from the downtown Ithaca commons. Today is the day I’m devoting to exploring Ithaca; happily, the weather is nice, it being overcast and 40-ish but no rain yet. The past two days were very foggy, and we could scarcely see the Sapsucker Woods pond from our meeting table in the library of the new Cornell Ornithology lab building.
I am staying in the Ramada Inn, three or four miles from downtown, and right next to the Pyramid uber-mall. Talking to Diane Hillmann, a long-time Cornell University librarian who was at our meeting, the big-box malls are definitely changing the character of Ithaca, and the current mayor is pro-growth. Let’s hope the downtown area stays healthy.
There are at least three used bookstores downtown, two on the commons area. I picked up a copy of Jasper Fforde’s new Thursday Next book at The Bookery, a bookstore whose used sections features artists’ books. And there is a printmaking center, The Ink Shop across Cayuga Street from the commons. On the commons are mostly small businesses, including the food court where I picked up an mixed vegetable curry plate with a mango lassi from a fast-food Indian place for lunch.
It was too wet and the windows were too misty to see much from the bus going downtown yesterday, but on today’s trip there were good views. My plan was to get off somewhere in the middle of Cornell and explore there. The bus passed through North Campus, an area mostly occupied by residential dorms, went south, and I did a bit of a double take when we passed over quite an impressive creek. Off the bus I got, and went back to have a look at the gorge of Fall Creek. A campus with its own waterfalls! It’s very neat. It’s very hilly topography, the water draining into nearby Cayuga Lake. Downtown is more-or—less at the elevation of the lake, and the campus is on the rise northeast of downtown.
I am about to have a look at the local history collections here in the library, my ancestors having lived one county to the north 200 years ago or so. And after that, off to the local food coop.
3 April 03
Other People’s Gardens
Numenius and I have been housesitting in Village Homes, an eco-topic community built in the 1970s in Davis, California. The fronts of the houses face pedestrian walkways, not roads and cars; all the fruit trees are commonly owned; there is a large village green where we saw some children playing cricket (!) on Sunday; and the community vegetable gardens are lush and productive. The names of all the streets in this part of Davis are either places or characters from Lord of the Rings, which may have been an attempt to give them some kind of amulatory power against the evil cars (with mixed success). Originally this was the “alternative” place to live. Now houses sell within an hour of going on the market for staggering amounts. The demographic? Doctors with pony tails.
I have never really been much of a gardener, but I have been enjoying hauling out the weeds that have overtaken the front yard. Despite the origin of most of the inhabitants of this little paradise in 60s counterculture, overgrown weeds are not welcomed by neighbors. Neither, of course, is Round Up. So I have been getting sore hamstrings hauling them out by the roots. But I’ve been loving it… This is almost certainly because it’s not MY garden.
Perhaps we should all swap houses periodically so we can clean and weed with joy instead of dread. At any rate, the pink-and-green tulips in the raised bed that watch me, along with the Western scrub jay, while I furiously try and get the grasses out before they go to seed, are making this activity much more fun than it has any right to be.
1 April 03
A Bit of April Rain
Some rain early this morning, just enough to get the ground wet. Pica in her morning weedings had to be careful not to injure the worms now on the surface.
But the storm didn’t stick around and the sky was clear at sunset, with only a few clouds over the Vaca Mountains.
The weather where I’m headed tomorrow won’t be as pleasant: snow today, with chilly rain to follow. I’m going to Cornell for several days for a meeting. But I’ve factored in a day to explore Ithaca, and certainly plan to go to the Moosewood Restaurant.