21 June 25
Othering Oneself
Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, was published in 1961. It chronicles the journey of a white man who had his skin darkened to pass as black in the American deep South. I’ve known two people personally who have done a “passing” experiment and written a book about the experience: Ted Conover had already published his account of riding trains with hoboes, Rolling Nowhere, when he attended Cambridge University’s Centre of Latin American Studies to study for an M.Phil while I was the secretary there in the early 80s. The second was Norah Vincent who was a work colleague at Harvard University Press in the early 90s and who subsequently spent a year as a man, as told in Self-Made Man.
I have been reminded of this by a sentence in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia about needing to look like a revolutionary militiaman in order to blend in in Barcelona in the early months of the civil war, and then needing to look bourgeois once he was on his way home through France after being wounded. From what I’ve read of Orwell, he could move comfortably through these different spheres, always being a little on the outside of them. When Orwell was on his way to Spain he dropped in on Henry Miller in Paris, who thought he was absolutely nuts to go and fight fascism in a country where he didn’t even speak the language—that he must be propelled by guilt or obligation. (Orwell wasn’t alone: thousands from all over the world volunteered to fight in Spain.)
And this is my big question: why do I feel the need to join the fight for those outside my group? For African Americans who have faced centuries of enslavement, discrimination, and police violence, for Mexican Americans who right now fear for their livelihoods and indeed lives? For those with less privilege than I have? A friend raised a possible answer this morning: this is what constitutes civilization. Most, if not all, animals are propelled by instinct to ensure the survival of their offspring even if it means endangering others in their own species. We have evolved as humans to become altruistic when it is in our interest to protect the group beyond our own family. But when we expand this outside the group, expand our definition of community to include everyone, this gets us labelled lunatic fringe lefties.
In a sense I’m continuing a political fight I had with my father while growing up, and he dead for more than 25 years now. The decades have taken a toll on my enthusiasm but they have never stopped my feeling that this is where, as a moral person, I ought to stand. What action to take is always the question, but it doesn’t stop the need for it. It is a comfort to know I’m not alone in feeling this way.
20 June 25
Bread and Roses
As Pica discussed yesterday, we have both recently read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and I have just finished a good follow-up book, Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses. This is a beautiful account of how despite his fierce political activism and writing, Orwell had a side to him that was rooted in the countryside, tending his vegetable garden, planting his beloved roses. For instance in 1946 Orwell wrote an essay praising the common toad. From its second paragraph:
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature.
The phrase “Bread and Roses” is the title of the third section of Solnit’s book. The phrase originates in 1910 in a conversation among several woman suffragists. One of the activists, Helen Todd, later declared that women’s votes would “go towards helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter, and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, the government of which she has a voice.” The phrase soon got incorporated in the labor movement, and lives on today in the name of a socialist feminist movement in Latin America, Pan y Rosas. Orwell has similar sentiments. In January 1944 he writes:
A correspondent reproaches me with being ‘negative’ and ‘always attacking things.’ The fact is that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous. But I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines — they have to be retrospective, unfortunately — in praise of the Woolworth’s Rose.
19 June 25
Homage to Orwell
I had never read Homage to Catalonia before, and I just finished it. What’s astonishing about it is its raw power in the writing: a first-hand account of someone who volunteered to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War but who was so determined to be honest in his writing that accounts of his time in the misery of the freezing and terrifying fray got interspersed with analysis of what was going on at the time, especially in Barcelona, despite the utter impossibility of anyone ever knowing this. His account of the infighting among the factions on the left — the wholesale annihilation of the anarchists by the communists, for example, because when uncle Josef is paying the bills for the guns, you are 100% loyal — gives a sad picture of wasted energy. What if all this aggression had been directed at Franco’s forces?
The book came out in 1938, a full year before Franco’s victory, a full year before the decades of the dictatorship. Orwell was badly wounded in the fighting and was able, after a long and tortuous bureaucratic journey, to leave Spain with his wife. There are many passages that struck me, but one in particular, the final sentence of the book, a warning to all of us in 2025, is clanging a bell in my head. May we rise out of the deep, deep sleep of bread and circuses.
Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.
18 June 25
Crucigramas
Our local newspaper on its comic page prints four of the New York Times crossword puzzles each week. Lately I’ve been enjoying trying to do these, a good pastime while at the kitchen table. Sometimes I succeed in completing them, sometimes not. I’ve been musing about how hard it would be to do a New York Times-level crossword puzzle in a language I’m learning, let’s say Spanish. If nothing else, these crossword puzzles rely on a high level of cultural knowledge.
Happily, I just found a source of crossword puzzles for language learners. I was looking for a platform to provide verb conjugation exercises and came across Linguno which has a variety of exercises in five different languages. One of these is crossword puzzles at a number of levels of difficulty. I’ve been doing the A2 and B1 level puzzles in Spanish. It’s a lot of fun and a good way to develop vocabulary. I showed these to Pica and she’s trying out the puzzles in German. Tonight she shared a puzzle with her German conversation group and the activity was a hit!
17 June 25
Visualizing End-of-Life Comes Home
For some time now I’ve been a member of VEOLI, a group of visual practitioners that focuses on helping folks navigate the difficult decisions around their own, or a loved one’s, death. As a culture we are terrible at this, having lost the habit of deathbed vigils since modern medicine took most Westerners into hospitals to die rather than in their own bedrooms.
We recently decided we’d like to make a video demonstrating this process (visual vigil planning, not dying in bed). I’m going to be interviewed next week about my choices in how I am laid to rest. (These can’t always be followed, obviously, but having clarity about how we’d like things to go if at all possible is a good initial step.)
At right is a drawing I made of someone else’s vigil plan. My friend Sherill is going to draw mine: I’m excited to see what she comes up with!
16 June 25
My First Computer Build
I’ve always wanted to build my own computer. My transition to semi-retirement seemed a good opportunity to do this, especially with the uncertainty over future computer part pricing because of the tariffs. After a couple of months of researching computer part capabilities and compatibilities, I ordered lots of different parts on 2 May 2025 and worked on the build between 11 May and 16 May. I’d describe it as a midrange desktop computer. Here are some of the technical specs:
- It is a microATX format factor build, and the case is a Lian Li A3
- The processor is a AMD Ryzen 5 9600x
- It has a MSI Nvidia GeForce 3060 graphics card with 12 GB of video memory
- I put in 64 GB of RAM, and for storage it has both a 500 GB and 2 TB SSD drive
- It’s running Linux Mint 23.1 XFCE
I’m very happy with how the project turned out. I would definitely build another, now that I understand the process. But I’m not sure when I will need to! I anticipate this computer will last a long time, and a major reason to build one’s one computer is that if you can build your own computer, you can repair it too. It’s satisfying to get away from electronic devices that are sealed black boxes, with no ability to tinker with them or fix things if a part fails.
15 June 25
Drawing the Erasure of Memory
History is, famously, written by the victors. When the victors are long-lived autocrats, the omissions scream across the generations: the state apparatus of information control and terror silence any dissent. In the case of Spain, the horrors of a prolonged civil war on the very eve of World War II made the suffering worse, because powers that might have been prevailed upon to help at least with food aid were already concerned with fighting a determined aggressor and protecting their own populations.
I grew up just to the north of Madrid in the 1960s and 1970s, a mere 5 miles away from Franco’s palace in El Pardo. His motorcade was a familiar traffic inconvenience. As foreigners we were unaware of the questioning and torture of prisoners in the now-infamous cuarteles of the Guardia Civil. See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Silence.
I tried to capture some of this in a six-page comic that was published in an anthology last year. I’m grateful for the work of Hillary Chute, author of Disaster Drawn, for giving me the idea for this comic. As we were reminded by the recent viewing of Good Night, and Good Luck and are reminded daily by an administration slouching towards tyranny, the time for the courage to speak up is NOW.
14 June 25
No Kings In Woodland
Pica and I today went to the No Kings protest up in Woodland, our county seat, which is a town of 62,000. We didn’t know what to expect, but were heartened by seeing people marching when we were approaching to find a parking place. This was a short march of about 4 blocks from the new courthouse on Main Street, to the old courthouse one street to the north, a building with a proper plaza in front of it. The energy was very good at the demonstration. People kept arriving from all directions, and cars driving down Main Street were honking and waving at us. We only saw one truck come past with a Trump/Vance sign; they were roundly booed.
This year I have been to two protests at the State Capitol in Sacramento; the one today felt perhaps more connected to the surrounding community than the ones in Sacramento. The space in front of the capitol building is large and protesters seem to disappear into the space. Also, Sacramento is a city with very little life in it on weekends. The protest today would have been difficult to miss by anybody headed into downtown Woodland this morning. I’m seeing an estimate of 3700 people all told today at the Woodland protest. What I am most hopeful about is how there were protests today all across the city from the largest cities to the smallest towns. There were 170 protestors today out of a total population of 912 in Bodega Bay, the fishing village on the Sonoma County coast where Pica’s mum used to live.
13 June 25
Bloody Banks
I’ve been needing to deal with several banking issues this week, namely:
- trying to open a bank account in the UK from the US so that my British pension can get paid in, and stay, in pounds sterling;
- waiting for a “suspected fraudulent” check to clear that Numenius had paid into our joint account, in an amount close to what he has paid in every month for years without incident;
- trying to get my mother squared away so that she doesn’t have to pay a $20 fee every time money is wired into her Maine account either from Spain or from the UK;
- trying to get myself added as the co-owner of a safe deposit box with a friend who is leaving the country for a couple of months.
All of these attempts have taken literally hours. It’s exhausting. They all want you to use an app which is, Numenius says, because nobody knows how to design usable websites anymore. I want to hide in a hole.
12 June 25
Fostering the Neighborhood
We live in a wonderful location where we can walk to almost everywhere we need: the grocery store is two blocks to the east, downtown begins two blocks to the south, and so forth. And the neighborhood is pretty old by Central California standards: many of the houses date back to the 1930s. This evening we traveled next door to attend the annual meeting of the local neighborhood association. It is very wholesome in a way. Getting to know one’s neighbors is a good activity. We didn’t discuss the grand issues of our epoch, but things that matter at a local scale: which streets need stop signs or crossing warning lights, what the plans are for nearby developments, etc. Significantly, our city councilperson showed up at the meeting. She learned some things, shared some things she knew. As I often do in our town, I appreciate the accessibility of our local elected officials.