28 August 08
Amaranth in Bloom
The mystery plant which Ron correctly identified as as an amaranth is now blooming, thanks in part to the alfalfa field recently being flood irrigated.
Meanwhile, Pica’s solar garden cooking has been highlighted on the blog Veggie Meal Plans: she has a guest post for a recipe for aduki bean and quinoa stew cooked in a solar oven here.
26 August 08
Lunchtime, Yesterday
My sketching buddy Claire’s partner’s had the twins so no Raptor Center for us today at lunch so I went home to load the solar cooker having run out of time before work but there in the field were about 200 white-faced ibis so I sat on the kitchen stool and peered through the scope and these outlandish schnozzes and wild colors pink green copper red blue and drew and drew and then it was time to leave so I got on my bike and heading north under the walnut tree a refuge from the heat for panting crows a plonk onto my helmet that oozed through the vents warm and slightly sticky and I said to the gals as I hosed myself and my helmet down back at work it could have been worse at least it wasn’t a condor — that could have killed me.
26 August 08
Optique
A course description which came in a flyer today has me intrigued:
Halloween Optique. An optique is a wondrous, seemingly flat object that expands to reveal layer upon layer of scenes containing little surprises. Inspired by two antiques in his collection that date to the 1700s, [the instructor] has built optiques that have made their way into very prestigious collections. In this class, he’ll show you how to create a Halloween version.
I’m not intrigued enough to take the course, which is being taught at this Berkeley chichi writing and crafts store called Castle in the Air (their website is all Flash-based, about what you’d expect from this place), but would someday like to see one of these artifacts. Searching on the term brings up lots of links to antiquarian print dealers. Here’s a fuller description from one of these:
Vues d’optiques were hand-colored etchings and engravings intended to be viewed through a convex lens. The devices, known variously as zograscopes, optiques, optical machines and peepshows, were an optical entertainment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The form emerged in 1740, and engravings were published mainly in London, Paris and Augsburg for roughly the next 100 years, until better stereoscopic technology supplanted it. Vues d’optiques were rendered in high-key color and dramatic linear perspective, which enhanced the illusion of three-dimensionality when viewed through the lens. According to the Getty Research Institute, street performers would set up viewing boxes with a series of prints giving a pictorial tour of famous landmarks, dramatic events and foreign lands. Some vues d’optique also had parts of the scenes cut out and the openings backed with translucent papers so that when the print was backlit, it appeared as an illuminated night scene. They most commonly depicted landmarks in large European cities or the Holy Land.
24 August 08
A Bit More About Books and Binding
A bit more about the bookbinding course we took yesterday… Dominic Riley’s workshop is in the Lake District, not too far from where William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived for a while. Dominic was asked by the Wordsworth Trust to restore some of his notebooks. Wordsworth was editor of the local paper and had access to all kinds of machinery for binding, but after taking them apart, it was clear that the notebooks had been made at home: they were rough-cut, had no formal backing, and didn’t need a press. They were super-sturdy, though: they open flat and can take a lot of pounding in the constant drizzle. The Ideal Sketchbook.
Who knows if these books were made by Dorothy on their kitchen table? Dominic suspects they were: in his words, “Wordsworth didn’t seem to do much.” He and Dorothy walked, though. (The results of one of these walks was a poem called the Leech Gatherer, about which Seamus Heaney has much to say, and which has put me in a slightly more charitable frame of mind toward the Lake District Luminary, but I’m still betting he wasn’t sewing signatures on tapes at the kitchen table.)
Running between the I-80 traffic and the wedding I found in the bottom of a drawer the first sewn book I ever made, sometime in the early 1990s in Cambridge, Mass. I took it with us to the wedding and used it to record blessings offered, at the request of the now newlyweds. I filled it. I can’t imagine a better use for this book…
24 August 08
Take Me Out To The Wedding
Back just now from Karen and Chris’s wedding, a wonderful event ending a long day — Pica’s birthday — which we celebrated by going to San Francisco to take a course at the San Francisco Center for the Book on making the ideal sketchbook (patterned after a creation of Dorothy Wordsworth) taught by master bookbinder Dominic Riley. The drive back from SF took longer than usual because we got stuck in traffic from the Giants’ game but that was in keeping with there turning out to be a baseball motif in the wedding, the ceremony ending with a chorus of “Take me out to the ballgame”.
Congratulations, Chris and Karen!
21 August 08
For 21 August 08
Self-Aware
Magpies have recently been identified as the first non-mammals to exhibit self-recognition, using the usual protocol for self-recognition experiments of daubing paint on the animal and seeing if they react to it while looking in a mirror.
Surely self-awareness comes in more cognitive flavors than can be captured by the mirror test. Often when I scritch Diego, for instance under the chin or behind the ears, he’ll reach for my hand with his paw and use it to guide my hand to the spot he really wants scratched. Is that glimmerings of self-aware behavior? I don’t know but it’s pretty endearing.
18 August 08
15 August 08
Printer's Companion
Diego is not the first cat to develop an interest in the printing arts. The special collections librarian Donald Kerr at the University of Otago discovered on page 250 of the library’s copy of Astesanus de Asts Summa de casibus conscientiae, an extremely rare work from 1472 or 1473 printed in Strassburg by Johann Mentelin, three cat paw prints in ink.
Kerr noted that Mentelin had been described as “a careless printer”, so perhaps this was a good example. He checked with several other libraries holding copies of the work to see if there were any other cat paw prints to be found, but no such luck. The librarian at the State Library of Berlin noted however on their copy that there was bad damage on the initial and final leaves from rodent nibblings, which could explain why Mentelin kept a cat around the print house.
(From PhiloBiblos.)
14 August 08
Discovery of Local Sketchbloggers!
I ran into Pete Scully at lunch. We sketched together a while ago during one of the sketchcrawls, and he said he’d recently started a website. (He produced a card, a must for bloggers; I think we’ve run out.) It’s astonishingly good. He mentioned he’d participated in the How to Save the World sketchbook project, and he also mentioned Blue Bicicletta.
It is a huge deal to discover that people are sketching daily and blogging about it not five miles from where I type this. I feel some of the initial excitement such as finding Brazilian Davis-based blogger Fernanda some five years ago. She now has another blog, as I do.