1 October 08
New Dish
The pomegranate tree I planted a couple of years ago has born fruit. Two fruits, to be precise. One of them was split open today: you KNOW we had to eat it.
I had some squash cooking in the solar cooker — it was cloudy this afternoon which got in the way of success, here, but got it started. Add to this the farro (heirloom wheat; emmer is a good substitute) I cooked like barley and the sorrel I parboiled down, and done. A little basil found its way in there. The pomegranate’s tartness was offset by the sweet squash; the sorrel’s light lemony taste did away with the need for a dressing. I wish we’d had a little salty cheese but maybe next time.
30 September 08
Bioblitz 2008
This weekend I went out to the spot I surveyed in last year’s bioblitz nearby along Putah Creek and did another species tally. As before except for the birds I can’t comprehensively identify the species I see, but here’s a species list:
Birds:
- Black phoebe
- House wren
- Turkey vulture
- Red-shouldered hawk
- Red-tailed hawk
- Scrub jay
- Nuttall’s woodpecker
- American kestrel
- Yellow-rumped warbler
Butterflies
- Acmon blue (Plebejus acmon)
- Orange sulphur (Colias eurytheme)
- Cabbage white (Pieris rapae)
Other insect:
- Praying mantis (Mantidae) (gravid: she looked at me inquisitively)
Plants:
- Narrowleaf willow (Salix exigua)
- Oregon ash (Fraxinus latifolia)
- Eucalyptus sp.
- Black mustard (Brassica nigra)
- Wild oats (Avena fatua)
- Ryegrass (Lolium perenne)
- Milk thistle (Silybium marianum)
- Yellow starthistle (Centaurea solstitialis)
- Curly dock (Rumex crispus)
- Rough cocklebur (Xanthium strurmarium)
- Western flat-topped goldenrod (Euthamia occidentalis)
- Annual fireweed (Epilobium brachycarpum)
- Chicory (Chicorium intybus)
29 September 08
Blogging the Apocalypse
Well, there’s only one S&P 500 company whose shares rose in value today. One.
PS: these guys rent our fields to grow seed…
25 September 08
Entering Stage Two
So if you aren’t already worried…
Dimitri Orlov is an author currently residing in Boston who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union and has recently written a book entitled Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Collapse and American Prospects. The book describes what an American economic and societal collapse might be like based on his Soviet experiences. I haven’t read it, but should be able to grab it from the library soon.
Anyway, Orlov just announced that we’re leaving Stage One (financial collapse) of his five stages of societal collapse and are moving on to Stage Two, commercial collapse. Soon we’ll be missing being in Stage One, he says.
22 September 08
Bookbinding
We’re starting to accumulate a small pile of books we’ve bound. I am quite enjoying the paper in the “Ideal Sketchbook” — Kelly Classic — for pen and ink. I think this may become my main bird sketchbook.
Numenius has been dazzling me with his new binding skills. Headbands and everything. I have no idea where this is leading but we’re both enjoying it. It’s companionable and that’s unusual for what is often a solitary activity.
Our trip to Art Ellis in Sacramento and lunch at Tapa the World (they catered Chris and Karen’s wedding — we were impressed then; we were impressed again on Saturday) yielded the following conversation at the next table:
“Mauritania. Sand. Lots of sand.”
“Do you get robbed there?”
“No, I got mugged in Rio. Machete.”
“I know a guy who got mugged in Rio by machete.”
“Really? Who?”
“Christian.”
“Christian left Rio a few hours before I got mugged on the beach by machete.”
“You’re kidding! You mean he took your story?”
21 September 08
New Technologies In Food Storage
We are overrun in butternut squashes. I haven’t been studying Sharon Astyk’s posts on food storage very assiduously, but keeping the squashes in a dog crate we have lying around seems like a good idea.
19 September 08
Left Unsaid
Before my mother moved back east a couple of summers ago, she handed me bags and bags of things she wasn’t taking with her but didn’t want to throw away. These included improbable numbers of bottles of moisturizing lotion; they also included all my letters home — since I first went to boarding school in 1973.
I know they must have made us write home weekly, but I was still shocked by the sheer number of them, and by their mostly uniform vacuousness, which continued on into university and beyond. They’re painful to read and mostly I haven’t. But they lurk…
I finished Geraldine Brooks’s March last night, a novel that starts out with the Little Women father writing home. It has been a horrific day, a day in which he, a green army chaplain, has tried (and failed) to save a wounded man from drowning as they retreated in terror from a confederate counterattack. He is wracked with pain and cold and shame and fear and guilt yet none of this makes it onto the page: he writes about the cooking fires around him and the beauty of the sky. The truth of that day — and many other terrible truths about many other days, truths that likewise never made it onto the pages that are sent with love and remorse about the deception — the truth of that day finally emerges as Marmee visits her “very ill” husband in hospital and tries to save him from his demons. She is transformed in this novel from a milquetoast goody-two-shoes into a raging spitfire with a terrible temper (and how we love it: tell it like it is, Marmee), and she feels anger and betrayal at the lies that have been flung her way. Yet when she tries to write home to her daughters, she is faced with the same dilemma: tell the truth and cause pain and anguish, or spare them from it and lie. And then live with the consequences of your lies.
Choices, these are. At the time, it doesn’t seem so momentous. “I’ve started smoking” is a truth I felt able to divulge in a letter home, difficult though it was, leading to a reminder my grandfather had died of emphysema; “I lost my virginity in the darkroom on Saturday” is one I left out. It reveals to me, again, how difficult parenting must be: choosing between honesty and wanting to protect your young. Of course my own omissions can be explained in terms of teenage rebellion, but looking through these letters, there’s more.
If I had been encouraged, or decided on my own, to share with my parents the struggles I was facing — wanting to fit in, wanting to be “cool,” feeling the pressure (of course this would have involved acknowledging it, which was far from the reality) — it may have been possible to write the letters with the integrity that, in hindsight, I wish I’d had. And it’s possible I might have made different choices, guided by parental wisdom and love and, perhaps, honesty.
My grandfather — the one who died of emphysema — was a man for whom lying was close to a crime; it was certainly a sin. He raised my mother and uncle to share this view. Yet, looking through his own letters home during World War I, I see the same reticence to reveal the truth in letters in as Mr. March’s. “I’ve had the grippe but some poor fellows have it much worse” is the only mention I’ve found in any correspondence anywhere from family members that touches on the great flu pandemic of 1918. It is left to my imagination to fathom what he was really seeing, because in tents in western France with thousands of soldiers, many of them ill and dying, it can’t have been something you’d want to see, ever.
Much has been written on the impossibility of language to convey some things so horrific most of us would rather they remain unsaid. This is the project of many films about the holocaust: say the unsayable, because it is the truth, speak it even though you don’t find the words. Truth becomes a driving imperative. We recognize it when we see it — if we’re lucky.
At a time when most of us expect lies of all our leaders, even those at the highest level, when outright untruth or misremembering or failure to remember or I’ll take the fifth or other permutations of culturally sanctioned lying from the top down, lying that has led to, for example, people still dying in Iraq — now is the time to take baby steps to learn how to tell the truth again. It can start with the innocuous things. I didn’t, in fact, make my bed this morning. I got a less than stellar performance review. I made some stupid mistakes in the stock market. We can then progress to “I did have sex with that woman” and “we knew all along there were no weapons of mass destruction.” From there, perhaps, when there are real consequences inherent in the truth we tell, we might make wiser decisions in the first place…
17 September 08
Blogger Bioblitz 2
The second annual Blogger Bioblitz is coming up! The idea is for ecobloggers to head to a favorite spot and count all the species of living things they see there, post this information to their blog, and preferably participate in a data gathering exercise. Last year I went to Putah Creek: I will return to that spot this time too. The bioblitz runs from Sept. 20 to Sept. 28: leave a comment here if you’re interested in playing.
15 September 08
Three Novels That Touch on, or Skirt, War
My sister sent me, as a birthday present, a new novel by Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book. I had read Year of Wonders a while ago and loved her heroine who survives the plague and loss of her family and everyone she knew to end up in a place of unlikely redemption. My sister D. thought I’d like this new one because bookbinding and calligraphy and Spanish history are all part of the plot. She was right; the sequences of the book’s violent journey through history and Europe bracket each other like a book of hours, plus there’s a great gutsy Aussie heroine.
Some Spanish friends recently gave me a copy of Los Soldados de Salamina by Javier Cercas, which apparently was a bestseller in Spain in 2001 but which I’d never heard of. It recreates the story of a falangist (Spanish fascist) writer who faces, but improbably survives, a firing squad at the end of the Spanish Civil War and whose story is recreated by a journalist with writer’s block — the metaphors are as unsubtle as the people whose story is told — and to whom not all the facts are available. (Think Rashomon under Franco.) It was fun to read a novel in Spanish again, something I should try more often; if I read El Pais on Fridays I can start to make a list of thing that look interesting to me.
Finally, well back into the Brooks mode, I’m reading March, which is a fictional retelling of the absent father from Alcott’s Little Women, and which draws heavily on Bronson Alcott’s diaries and correspondence. This book is not about the American Civil War but the war is the backdrop.
Trying not to be too violent in my reading, here, but maybe there’s a lesson in all this…
15 September 08
Books Two and Three
I was inspired by our whirlwind course on binding a sketchbook three weeks ago to start taking the introduction to bookbinding series at the San Francisco Center for the Book. This weekend I went down to the Bay Area and took the Bookbinding I class. I made two books over yesterday and today, so including the one from three weeks ago, these are the second and third books I’ve ever made (at least of the sewn signature hardback book variety).
It’s very satisfying to hold and open a book that you’ve sewn and glued yourself. I’ve already signed up for Bookbinding II, and I think I will take Bookbinding III this fall as well.