30 September 25
Convivencia
Having recently gotten interested in the world of the Catalan medieval rabbi Nachmanides (aka Moses ben Nachman aka Ramban aka Bonastruc ça Porta), I just read the 2002 book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal. I was initially deterred from reading it by some disappointing reviews, but I dived in anyway and quite liked it. It is not a scholarly history nor was Menocal a historian: she was a scholar of medieval Iberian literature, and the book is at its best tracing the world of translators and connections between Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance poetry and poetic forms. There is a 2019 PBS documentary based on the book; I will watch it one of these days.
I looked at some of the reaction to this book and came across a Wikipedia entry for a book entitled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Andalusian_Paradise by Dario Fernández-Morera. But reading to the bottom of the entry led me to one of the most scathing academic reviews I have run into, entitled The Myth of the Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: The Extreme Right and the American Revision of the History and Historiography of Medieval Spain, by S.J. Pearce, who is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Thus I stumbled into a war between liberal and far-right historiography, between convivencia and reconquista. Here are some choice quotes from S.J. Pearce:
By cherry-picking evidence, relying on outdated and explicitly partisan scholarship, adopting a messianic and omniscient authorial voice, and misrepresenting his opponents in order to argue against straw men he can vanquish rather than flesh-and-blood ones he cannot, Fernández-Morera uses the case of medieval Spain to further an explicitly extreme right-wing political and conservative Christian political and cultural agenda as it bears upon debates about politics, the establishment of religion, and the very place of the academy in civic life.
and
In addition to criticizing liberal ideas and values, Fernández-Morera situates his historiographical approach on the political new right through his explicit aim of vindicating Spain’s Catholic past in a way that closely mirrors and brings to an Anglophone audience the historiographical jiu-jitsu of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, which is articulated clearly in the preamble to the Law of November 24, 1939 Creating the Spanish National Research Council. This law, signed into effect by Franco himself, establishes the council in order to defend Spanish history against Enlightenment thought and the diversity of opinion.
I feel vindicated in reading Menocal, and will follow up with some of her suggested readings.
28 September 25
Mantis At Work
Our neighbor Barbara this afternoon showed me this praying mantis in her front yard. It has been hanging out in these lilies for a few days now, and the other day she spotted it devouring a bumblebee attracted to the flowers. It’s a good place to work, I suppose.
27 September 25
Goodbye
Yesterday we took my mother to Paul’s Marina on Mere Point Road in Brunswick. We sat outside and watched the ospreys fishing, the boats turning into the incoming tide, and my mother greedily eating two scoops of peanut butter pie ice cream.
This morning, she was gone, surrounded by all of us and doing it exactly like she wanted.
Farewell, mum, good travels. I have so much to thank you for. (Not sure who I’ll call now with bridge questions, but we’ll manage.)
26 September 25
The Line And Wash Kit
With this new sketchbook I have switched out some of my sketching kit. I am a big fan of Derwent art supplies and for my previous sketchbook I was working a lot with the Derwent Graphitint pan set. This is a watercolor pan set with graphite mixed into the color pans making for muted colors. I have now changed this out back to the Derwent line and wash paint pan set, which is the first paint pan set I got from Derwent.
I am giving the line and wash pan set a solid recommendation. It provides an extremely well chosen set of colors and varieties of paint for urban sketching. Specifically, it has 6 Inktense pans (sun yellow, mango, poppy red, bright blue, Payne’s gray, and natural brown), 4 Graphitint pans (meadow, autumn brown, port, and ocean blue), and two pastel pans (artichoke and storm gray). The Inktense pans provide dashes of brilliant color, the Graphitints give more muted colors, and the pastel pans are opaque and gouache-like. The kit also comes with a couple of black waterproof fine point line markers.
The sketch here of a jug in our living room shows a wash with the Inktense sun yellow and the Payne’s gray.
25 September 25
Collective Revisiting
Looking through hundreds of old photos with three generations of family members is an interesting experience. Perspectives change, what’s important changes, so many details are now lost to history…But we had a great time this afternoon sorting through some of my mother’s photos. There are more to go, but for now we are savoring the time we have with her, mining her memory and adding ours.
The photos above are the prints I’m keeping so far. I already have a lot of photos of our camping trips and of my parents in Bodega Bay and Spain. In this age where digital photos are at the end of your thumb and a smartphone, the magic of seeing old prints was a joy. More anon.
24 September 25
One Eagle Hill
I finally finished reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biographical tome about J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus. One of the things that draws me into the Oppenheimer story, both this book and the blockbuster movie of a couple years back, is that my family history intersects quite strongly with the places, the people, and the science in the narrative. Both my parents studied chemistry as undergraduates at Ohio State University, and they moved out to the Berkeley area in 1948 when my father started graduate studies in nuclear chemistry at UC Berkeley. His major professor was Glenn T. Seaborg, who in 1940 discovered plutonium and worked on the element’s chemical extraction at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago during the Manhattan Project. Seaborg knew most everyone in the Oppenheimer story, and because Berkeley became the premier center for nuclear chemistry, my father met some of these scientists as well.
Oppenheimer came to UC Berkeley around 1929 to develop a research program in theoretical physics. An article in the magazine Berkeleyside that came out around the movie illustrates the places that figured in Oppenheimer’s time at Berkeley. Two of these places I know well. Around 1940 the Oppenheimers rented a house at 10 Kenilworth Court in Kensington. I know this place because it was just around the corner from where chemistry professor Joel Hildebrand lived. Hildebrand lived to be 101, and when I would walk to high school in the late 1970s I would sometimes see Professor Hildebrand ambling about near there. (Also, scholarly longevity can be a family thing I guess. Joel Hildebrand’s son Milton became a distinguished zoologist and professor here at UC Davis. Milton died in 2020 at the age of 102).
The Oppenheimers then bought a house at One Eagle Hill Road in 1941. This house is 75 yards away from the home on Edgecroft Road where I grew up and my sister still lives. My parents bought the Edgecroft house in 1953 by which point the Oppenheimers had already moved away, but it’s fun to think about the coincidence in space if not in time. As a kid I played up and on the hill a stone’s throw away from where the Chevalier incident took place (Oppenheimer’s conversation in 1943 with his close friend Haakon Chevalier that would lead to Oppenheimer’s downfall in the 1954 security clearance hearings).
There’s a detail in the Berkeleyside article is of interest to Davis folks. When Oppenheimer moved to Los Alamos in March 1943 to lead the atomic bomb research there, he rented out the Eagle Hill house to a food scientist at UC Berkeley by the name of Emil Mrak. Mrak would go on to start the food science program at UC Davis and then became chancellor in 1959. The administration building at UC Davis is named Mrak Hall after him.
A final astronomical note. I remember looking at Comet Kohoutek through binoculars probably in January 1974 from the top of Eagle Hill. Kohoutek was not the spectacle people hoped for, but it was still fun to see.
23 September 25
Horoscope Reading: A Short Play
M: D, Scorpio, here’s yours: you need a break. [Laughter]
M: A, Virgo: get ready to roll up your sleeves… [interrupted by howls of laughter]
M: Me, Capricorn: get out. [Laughter so loud tears stream down faces]
22 September 25
L'Shana Tovah!
Apples and honey for a sweet new year 5786.
In addition to being Erev Rosh Hashana, today also was the autumnal equinox. This combination seems like a pretty rare event, seeing as how Rosh Hashana moves around from being as early as 5 September to as late as 5 October. I did a little research and found no reliable source to tell me when was the last time this occurred.
21 September 25
Back From Boston
I came back this afternoon from my short Boston outing on the train. Yesterday I took a ferry trip with a friend from the North Shore to the North End, Boston’s original neighborhood whose ethnic identity has changed from settler to wealthy Bostonian to red light district to Irish to Italian, though I doubt that many or even half of the people who live there now are of Italian descent: it’s turned into boojie wealthy, though unwise to own a car if you live here.
This morning my friend Linda and I went birding on Plum Island, where we saw a lot of migrating songbirds (including some warblers I haven’t seen for a while). Batteries? recharged!
20 September 25
New Daily Sketchbook
I started my new daily sketchbook today. For my weekend sketching outings using this sketchbook I’m going to be doing general urban sketching. Today’s sketch was of a house on G Street not far from the food coop.
My new sketchbook is a 7”×7” softcover Stillman and Birn Alpha sketchbook. My previous square sketchbooks were 5 1/2” × 5 1/2”, so there’s a bit more area to cover in each sketch. In today’s sketch I used my gray Pentel brush pen for accents; maybe I’ll be doing more of that in this sketchbook.