Sketchcrawl!

Pete Scully organized us all for another sketching outing in Davis. Today we dodged rain showers in the UC Davis Arboretum. I drew lots of birds, some of which can be seen here.

It was a fantastic opportunity to draw early flowering trees and shrubs.

I took my new Maruman accordion-fold sketchbook, and pretty much filled on entire side. This made me very happy, being out with a pen. It was a minimalist pack, too: a pen, my tiny watercolor set, a waterbrush, and the small red book.

FARM 2.6

Back in September we went on Yolo Audubon Society’s fall field trip to Point Reyes. Riding with us was a postdoc from Chile who told Pica that she was involved with a fiber collective, mostly UC Davis students, who were interested in spinning, weaving, and dyeing and had ongoing plans to start a fiber garden. Somewhere along the way, this group had met up with a woman named Robyn Waxman, who several years ago during her studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco had a thesis project where she created a community garden on an abandoned plot of land near the college. She had since started community gardens near City College in Sacramento where she teaches and one on K Street in Davis. Last summer, she and her husband bought a house with 2.6 acres of land about 6 miles of Davis with the plan of turning this into a community farm, dubbed FARM 2.6.

The fiber collective saw this as their chance to start their garden and plant flax, indigo, and so on and began to plan for the farm’s first workday, held in the middle of February. I went to one of their planning meetings, toured the plot of ground, and somehow had the idea of putting in a grainfield. (Now that I’ve been doing some baking again, there’s quite a fantasy of baking bread from wheat I grew myself). The workday was well-advertised and quite a success. The fiber garden got started, about 50 fruit trees were planted to form a food forest, and irrigation pipes were put in. Two big patches had been tilled earlier with a tractor, one for the orchard, one for the grainfield. For the grainfield I decided that I’d put in a cover crop of red clover for now, and plant some portion of it in wheat in the fall, so I did that a couple weeks ago at the subsequent work day. At left and above is a picture of the grainfield plot. It’s huge — about a quarter of an acre. Watering it turns out to be a challenge: we need to come up with a better system than a single high-efficiency sprinkler. At right is the fiber garden, starting to take spiral shape.

Back from the San Juans

I spent last week on Orcas Island in Washington at a spinning retreat with Judith Mackenzie McCuin, one of the world’s most famous spinners. And certainly one of its best teachers.

What I learned, among other things:

1. Not to be afraid of qiviut.
2. That the reason I’ve had so much trouble with my cable plying is because I’ve spun the singles normally, which for me includes a lot of twist. Underspinning and overplying result in perfect cableplied yarn. When this involves bison, it’s a bit unicornish.
3. Almost any lichen will make a dye, not needing a mordant. Almost all the colors are like compost, though. For people with pink skin and white hair, this is a disappointment.
4. JMM and I share a bewilderment at the Canadian obsession with the Queen.
5. Angora bunny is held to have curative properties such as an ability to alleviate arthritis pain, and that it’s REALLY warm. I don’t think it’s as warm as qiviut, though.
6. Spinning flax with spittle is better at breaking down pectins than spinning it with straight water. Break them down further by boiling in Tide.
7. To spin semi-woolen. OMG. The possibilities.
8. That bald eagle courtship happens in late February in the San Juan Islands.
9. That spinning cotton straight from the seed isn’t just possible, it’s easy, no super-fast flyer required. I’m going to try and get all kinds of cotton bolls from now on. We’re planting cotton later this spring at Farm 2.6. Cotton grows in many natural colors.
10. Cross-plying pygora onto reclaimed cashmere yields a yarn of unimaginable luxury and makes the pygora go oh so much further. Pygora, a cross between African pygmy goats and angora goats (the cashmere ones), is the world’s newest fiber animal.
11. One load of laundry from a week’s worth of exotic fiber spinning will yield enough dingleberries for a large tweed sweater.

Windy and Dry

There was a wind advisory in effect yesterday and today — big north winds. Not as windy as I was expecting yesterday but it really picked up today, and the weather station recorded a record gust of 38 miles per hour. The air is very dry, too — 21% humidity, so everything is drying out in a hurry. Not that there’s much moisture in the ground to begin with — I think we’re at 40% normal rainfall for the season. At left is the current infrared satellite view with an overlay of surface conditions: note the big high pressure cell off the coast blocking all the moisture, the winds coming down from the intermountain northwest, and the storm system off the British Columbia coast. Pica is up in the Puget Sound area this week getting all that rain; we aren’t.

The Last Crop

We went to see a showing of a film on Thursday night following the travails of an organic family farm near here, Good Humus. We know the produce of this farm intimately and Annie by sight, since she’s often in Davis talking about local food sources. The filmmaker was in attendance along with the protagonists.

Farmland in the Capay Valley is valued way above its farm value because developers have their eye on it for 5-acre ranchettes that will likely end up in foreclosure if the signs in the English Hills to the south are anything to go by. This is prime land, 6” of topsoil in a fertile river valley that is under threat. The Mains are more concerned that their land be continued in farming than that they leave it to their children, none of whom has expressed a firm interest in continuing in farming.

Looking at the film, you can see why. It’s backbreaking work; you’re always behind; there’s always the unexpected huge expense, so that saving for retirement is a risible suggestion. And yet:

The room was filled to capacity with people across the age spectrum who have a passionate interest in making sure these kinds of farms don’t disappear. Hosted by the Agricultural Sustainability Institute on campus, it drew a wide and diverse crowd.

Something seems to be happening, something big, and it doesn’t seem unrelated to Occupy Wall Street. Food security. A passion for growing things. I feel caught up in it and don’t know where it will go, but it seems much more hopeful than some of the alternatives…

Weather Station

We’ve had a hankering to have our own weather station for a while so recently we finally took the plunge, ordered one, and last weekend I set it up next to the veggie garden. Looking at the displays and graphs on the console in our bedroom of temperature, humidity, dew point, wind speed, wind direction, and barometric pressure has become a frequent ritual. It’s fun watching the anemometer cups spin which they do readily even in the gentlest of breezes. It gets one pondering local meteorological phenomena — for instance the station said that the minimum temperature last night was 36 degrees F, yet there was frost on top of the car. That’s radiative cooling for you. Maybe someday we’ll put the station on the net as part of the Citizen Weather Observer Program, but there’s no shortage of weather stations around Davis so that can wait. If we’d only get some rain now! (we’re at about half normal rainfall for the water year).

Native Daughter

I spent the weekend with my Farm Club friends in San Francisco. We stayed at the home of the Native Daughters of the American West, a house on Fulton and Baker you’d almost miss if you didn’t notice the modest plaque and the flags five floors above the street (US and California).

I have mixed feelings about these organizations. On one hand they’re harmless groups of people doing good works like the Shriners and Rotary, involving arcane and zany initiation rites. On the other they are exclusive by gender, race, birth, status, and no doubt other secret criteria.

Fun: We knit and spun and wove in our jammies in a Julia Morgan parlor and ate buttermilk lemon pie for breakfast (I was skeptical, but am a convert). We shared the floors with the Girl Scouts of America scrapbooking club. We explored the basement and the roof, the rooms decorated by individual chapters (also called Parlors, up and down California). We looked at the museum (tiny boots for six-month-olds, fans for grand San Francisco or Pasadena ladies in improbably sized corsets). We looked in the archive room where lists of all pioneer families who made it to California (and some that didn’t) are listed.

We wandered around the neighborhood stumbling across a silkscreening workshop-in-progress (they also offer cheesemaking classes), two excellent restaurants, and not a single Starbucks.

I was born in California, so I technically qualify to join the NDAW. It provides a very cheap way to stay in San Francisco. But San Francisco is easily close enough for a day trip for us and I can’t handle the politics. I am technically qualified to join the Mayflower Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames, and the United Empire Loyalists for the Tories among you. I don’t sound like I belong in any of them, but my accent would be seen by all of them as a plus, as opposed to my skin color or last name which can so easily be a minus, a fact which writes them off for me. I left all this behind when I left the UK, I thought, 23 years ago. But no. Exclusion comes in many forms and I am not an excluder.

Colusa Outing

We went on the fairly brief trek today up to the Colusa National WIldlife Refuge, about 55 minutes north of here, attempting to see the Falcated Duck which has been at the refuge since early December. The bird was seen all day yesterday, so we figured our chances were good, but no luck, it seems the bird did not put in an appearance today. Nevertheless, the refuge is a beautiful place, and for some reason we had never been there before. Whenever we’ve headed up north to go birding we’ve either gone to the Sacramento NWR or Gray Lodge, just a bit further north and to the east. A weak storm had blown through today, leaving a very pretty cloudscape. Just to the east of the Colusa NWR lie the Sutter Buttes. When we arrived they were practically hidden by clouds, but as sketched at left, by the time we left the clouds had cleared save a stratus layers just above the buttes.

Encouraged

So long since I’ve posted here…

I am so encouraged by a post (permalink wonky, dated December 13, 2011) by Antonio Muñoz Molina whose blog I’ve been following faithfully for some months now. The part that encourages me:

… la conversación deriva a una defensa de la artesanía como saber modesto, tangible y material frente a los caprichos y a las tonterías cada vez más exagerados de lo que se llama el arte. Le digo algo que pienso hace mucho tiempo, que ahora cualquiera es artista, con solo decir que lo es: lo difícil de verdad es ser artesano.

…the conversation drifts to a defense of craft as modest, tangible and material versus the whims and increasingly exaggerated nonsense of that which is called art. I tell him [Philippe Bataillon] something I’ve thought for a long time, that everyone is an artist now, just by virtue of saying so; what is really hard is to be a craftsman. (Translation mine.)

So much of this resonates with me. Craft seems like something worth perfecting.

1,010,361 and Counting

That’s the number of views on YouTube of the video of students at UC Davis being pepper sprayed at a non-violent demonstration on Friday as of this moment. We’ve made international news: here’s a story on the BBC front page. This isn’t the sort of acclaim one wishes of one’s university; we may have now eclipsed Penn State on the campus hall of shame billboard.

There are many, many excellent pieces and comments on the incident on Friday, and I have spent hours reading these. Here are some that have risen to the top for me.

This MetaFilter thread was posted yesterday afternoon and continues to be lively.

The “Wall of Shame” video. This hasn’t gotten quite as much attention as the first video above, but it may be equally powerful. Yesterday afternoon Chancellor Katehi held a press conference but excluded the students. When she left the building a couple of hours later the students were seated arms linked, allowing her a path from the door to her vehicle. The students say nothing as she goes past, shaming her with silence. She looks shell-shocked. (Linked on BoingBoing).

Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon about the roots of the UC Davis pepper spraying, setting the incident in the broader context of the history of police violence.

The Davis Wiki is providing continual on-the-ground coverage as events unfold.

In the above MetaFilter thread, one member of the MetaFilter community who is a professor somewhere shares the following letter he wrote to the President of UC, Mark Yudof:

Dear Chancellor Yudof,
Having familiarized myself with the details of the pepper-spray assault carried out against peaceful, nonviolent student demonstrators at UC Davis on Friday by Lt. John Pike and other officers under the orders of Chief Anette Spicuzza and, ultimately, under the responsibility of Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi, and having watched the several videos of the incident in question that have been widely disseminated, and having heard the nonsensical explanations and excuses proffered by Katehi, Spicuzza, and other Davis spokespeople, I have come to the conclusion that a serious crime was committed by UC Davis police, and ordered and abetted by their superiors. It is unconscionable that a university in the United States would deploy such disproportionate use of force against its own students for acts of conscientious civil disobedience that were completely non-violent in spirit and execution.

As an academic myself, I resolve to do no business of any sort with any branch of the University of California system until
a) Chancellor Katehi is fired or resigns
b) Chief Spicuzza resigns, is fired, or faces significant discipline
c) Officer Pike and any others who used pepper spray in the above-described incident are fired and/or severely disciplined, and criminally charged if appropriate
d) Students who were assaulted receive apologies and compensation for their injuries

Until these things happen, I won’t serve on any UC dissertation committees, I will not act as a tenure referee for any UC system tenure cases, I will not recommend any students for graduate programs in the UC system, and I will not give any talks or attend any conferences at any UC campus (which means, among other things, canceling an upcoming talk at [UC Campus XXX]). Nor will I review any manuscripts for UC press or its journals. Many of my colleagues at [XXXXX university] and around the country are considering similar stances. It is incumbent on the UC system administration to take vigorous control of this situation, require Chancellor Katehi’s resignation, investigate promptly, discipline all the perpetrators of this assault, and apologize to the victims of this assault as well as compensate them fairly (including expunging any arrest records related to this protest).

Sincerely, etc.

Other academics across the land are reacting with outrage as well. Cathy N. Davidson, who is a neuroscientist and former vice-provost at Duke University, writes on Why this is a Gettysburg Address moment for higher education.

President Yudof steps up to the plate. His statement released this afternoon pleases me. Of course what the UC Office of the President says and does are two different things, but it sounds like there will be substantial pressure coming down from the top.

Given that last statement, my hunch is that Chancellor Katehi will end up having to resign, though I doubt immediately. Her leadership may just too be compromised at this point for her to manage the den of ants that is a university campus.

More important is will any reforms emerge concerning the practice of policing at the University of California. It would be all too typical bureaucratic behavior to throw a couple of bad actors in the police department under the bus, make a minor procedural change or two, and declare the matter done. This solves nothing since the problem is a matter of deep culture within the police department.

Next up: there will be a rally and general assembly on the quad at noon tomorrow. Chancellor Katehi is planning to address the students at that time.

Updated 8:20 AM, 22 November 2011

I attended a bit of the rally yesterday. The crowd was ebullient, the energy positive. This concluding paragraph from “Jonathan Eisen’s post” on the event sums up my feeling as well:

Overall the day was exhausting. But exhilarating too. I did not agree with everything everyone said or did. But that was not the point. The power and the passion of the protestors and the people of the University. That was the point. I left feeling good about UC Davis again. Not sure what will happen tomorrow. But the people on campus have risen above the pepper spraying. They have shown strength beyond what I could have ever imagined. The world is certainly watching now. But I am not too worried. I like what I see.

And I was particularly thrilled by the balloon! My geography grad student colleagues Michele Tobias and Alex Mandel used a helium balloon as a lifting platform to take aerial photographs from high above the crowd. Michele’s research involves using kite-aided photography to study beach vegetation, so this was a variant on her basic platform.

The connection of Chancellor Katehi to events at Athens Polytechnic in November 1973 has taken a deeply troubling turn. She was a student at that university when the regime used military force to suppress campus dissent, killing many students. The backlash from this event led to the fall of the regime some months later. Katehi referenced Athens in her brief speech to the crowd, saying “I was there”.

But — tthis post at Crooked Timber from today is revelatory. A couple of excerpts:

Among the legacies of the uprising was a university asylum law that restricted the ability of police to enter university campuses. University asylum was abolished a few months ago, as part of a process aimed at suppressing anti-austerity demonstrations. The abolition law was based on the recommendatiions of an expert committee, which reported a few months ago…

Among the authors of this report – Chancellor Linda Katehi, UC Davis. And, to add to the irony, Katehi was a student at Athens Polytechnic in 1973.