19 September 25
A Trip to Boston
I lived in Boston for eight years before I moved to California. I’ve been back to the east coast many times over the past 30 years but rarely to Boston proper. Today I went south on the train and took myself to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum and the Museum of Fine Arts where I found a lot of old friends and at the latter saw the astonishing Rachel Rausch exhibit. Recharged the batteries for sure, maybe at the cost of sore feet.
18 September 25
Save Our Signs
I went to a Zoom session yesterday for the Data Rescue Project that featured a presentation by organizers of an effort entitled Save Our Signs. On 27 March 2025 Trump issued an executive order (“Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History”) that directed the National Park Service and other land management agencies to remove and replace content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), or, with respect to content describing natural features, that emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur of said natural feature.” A subsequent order gave the park administrators 120 days to remove and replace such content, which worked out to the date of 17 September 2025.
The organizers of Save Our Signs, who are librarians and public historians at the University of Minnesota, realized something had to be done, and launched a crowdsourced effort to photograph as many of the signs in the National Park System possible. By September 15 they have received 8070 photographs from well over 300 parks. They have already documented some alterations for instance to signage in Muir Woods.
I am appalled and horrified by the wholesale erasure of history that is underway, but at the same time I am inspired by Save Our Signs and related efforts to keep history and memory alive, and hope to find my own niche in this domain.
Footnote: in my YouTube feed there just appeared a news story from WBOY 12 in West Virginia entitled Certain exhibits being removed from Harpers Ferry under Trump administration order which says that they “are removing references to slavery” in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Harpers Ferry is the site of John Brown’s famous raid: it’s kind of hard to tell its story without mentioning slavery!
17 September 25
Dried Plants
I’m visiting Maine with minimal art supplies… and that’s great.
16 September 25
September Grapes
The grapes draping our backyard fence are starting to turn color and many of the bunches of grapes becoming raisins. Here is a sketch using De Atramentis Urban Gray ink, Derwent drawing pencils, and Derwent graphitint pan colors.
15 September 25
River Lighthouse
A lot of the people I send postcards to request postcards of lighthouses, and it’s easy to see why: essential features of 19th century coastal navigation, they are now quaint relics in an era of GPS and accurate weather forecasting. But today we chanced upon a singularly rare lightouse: a river lighthouse near Bath, Maine, tiny compared to coastal ones but evidently helping ships across a sandbar.
14 September 25
Pendulous Oak
I am nearly to the end of my current daily sketchbook and will be moving on from sketching only trees on weekends. So I’ve finally sketched this handsome oak in our neighborhood — I think it is a cork oak. I’ve sketched it with Derwent drawing pencils, a fountain pen filled with De Atramentis urban gray ink, and watercolor wash, the greens being Daniel Smith green apatite genuine.
13 September 25
Fraught
Last night I finished reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, which is divided into three parts: the first deals with his trip to Senegal, the second with time in South Carolina, and the third and longest, a trip to Palestine.
The book came out last year before the current ongoing destruction of, and genocide in, Gaza, but the message resonates even more because of what’s happening now. I am not Jewish, but I’m married to a Jew, and I find this is a fraught tightrope to navigate as a gentile. Netanyahu’s contention that any criticism of Israel or zionism is necessarily anti-semitic has been incredibly effective at silencing criticism. Yet criticism is there and hasn’t abated, as the recent protests throughout northern Spain during the Vuelta a España have demonstrated. The United States funds Israeli violence. I pay taxes which fund Israeli violence. I am complicit in the Palestinian genocide.
And I know this: my Jewish friends and relatives are in agony right now. They are ashamed of the atrocities being done in their name, they are terrified at the new wave of antisemitism the violence has dragged along in its wake, and they don’t know what to do about any of it. The horrors of the Holocaust were real and no amount of German reparations have been able to erase them, but as Mandy Patinkin says, why would you turn around and do this to somebody else? Below is a chart I made during a discussion of these issues a month or so ago from a Reconstructing Judaism perspective.
Ta-Nehisi’s final exhortation is to allow Palestinians to tell their stories. Ever since Edward Said’s death (he was an author of ours when I worked at Harvard University Press and cut a striking figure at conferences), celebrity Palestinian voices have been few and far between. So let’s let the ordinary people speak: those who were removed from their villages during the Naqba, during various violent flare-ups and wars since 1948, by settlers who claim that this land was given to them by God, even though it had been continuously lived on, loved and worked by Palestinian Arabs for over 1,000 years.
If Israel has a right to exist, does it through crimes against humanity forfeit that right? At what point does the international community step in and say Enough? The answer is, it doesn’t, because the United States is in the way. And the triumph of Evangelical Christian Zionism keeps the status quo.
Let the Palestinians speak. Let them tell their stories. Before they’re all wiped off the face of the Earth.
12 September 25
A Notebook Accounting
We watched today’s keynote for the Wild Wonder Conference on nature journaling that is currently taking place. The keynote presentation was given by Roland Allen who recently wrote the book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, and was billed as an incomplete history of nature notebooks. Allen traces the history of notebooks in Europe back to the introduction of paper manufacturing in Xàtiva in Islamic Spain. This technology gave people cheap and durable surfaces upon which to write, and in Florence the paper was bound into notebooks for common use. Accountants were some of the first ones to take advantage of the technology, inventing double-entry bookkeeping via ledgers. Paper was also a much more satisfying material to draw on than parchment, and this led to the first realistic nature illustrations by individuals such as Conrad Gessner.
Allen is a great advocate of the notebook as a cognitive tool, and he shared some of the different notebooks he keeps. Both Pica and I keep many notebooks as well, and here is a perhaps incomplete list of the ones I have:
- My bullet journal. A list of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and events, together with notes on various projects. This is a Moleskine gridded notebook.
- My daily journal, entitled “A Journal of The Unraveling”. I complete one page a day in this, and always end the page with a quick sketch of a cat.
- My daily sketchbook, currently in vertical format with the subjects being plant bits.
- A work notebook, which I mostly used for taking notes on conference calls.
- A nature journal. Unlike most of the attendees at the conference, I rarely make entries in it.
- A notebook of astronomy observations.
- A notebook for my Catalan studies. I don’t seem to have a notebook for Spanish, and instead use a card file to record interesting words.
- A notebook of Hebrew vocabulary from the Duolingo course which I got through in spring of 2022.
- A notebook of astronomy observations.
- Two notebooks from the days when I was actively doing radio. First, a logbook of my ham radio contacts on HF.
- Second, a notebook of interesting shortwave radio loggings.
- And a miscellany of other sketchbooks.
11 September 25
Wild Wonder
The Wild Wonder Conference is going on at the moment. Numenius gave me a conference pass as a birthday present and this year they are spreading it out over several days instead of having concurrent sessions, which is great. It’s been happening for several years now, the brainchild of Bay Area artist and educator John Muir Laws, who has been a major part of the nature journaling wave which is now worldwide and who came and taught a bird drawing workshop for us at Yolo Audubon over 20 years ago. The keys to nature journaling: see; observe; wonder; associate (ISIWIRMO=I see, I wonder, it reminds me of).
Nature journaling is a practice I return to intermittently and every time I do I wish I’d been more consistent. Yesterday I was able to take a workshop by Grant Snider on poetry nature comics; this intersection was an intriguing challenge for me. Naturally I tackled hummingbirds, since that is very much where my interest is these days.
10 September 25
Game Of Cones
Winston Cat was full of high rambunctious energy last night, and we found a new game to play. Here is a bit of video from the game.