Owl's Farm

Genderism

2012-01-29T12:02:00.000-08:00

Maybe it’s because I recently finished rereading the late Octavia Butler’s xenogenesis series. Or maybe it’s because I’m just getting really tired of hearing hypocrites like Newt Gingrich ranting about how gay marriage stands to destroy the structure of family values and lead America down the path to rack and ruin.

But when I read Frank Bruni’s article in today’s Times, Genetic or Not, Gay Won’t Go Away I couldn’t stop thinking about the way gender has been treated through most of history on this planet: there are only two (male and female), male is inherently superior, and females are primarily baby-making machines.

Butler’s wonderful books, Dawn, Adulthood Rights, and Imago (later reissued in a single volume as Lilith's Brood), consider the impact of introducing a third gender into the mix, but it’s really rather more complicated than that. Hers is a post-apocalyptic earth visited and rescued by a race of traders in genetic material who provide humankind with a path toward survival after they’ve damned near blown themselves to smithereens. But human beliefs about gender specificity (and proper roles for women and men) hinder the evolutionary possibilities available to the survivors.

In our present-day, so far pre-apocalyptic world, we seem so bent on making sure everyone follows the traditional paths—especially those codified in religious texts—that we end up falling into camps that don’t do much to expand possibilities. We either support gay rights because we think they have no choice (i.e. it's all in their genes), or we condemn all varieties of sexual difference because some Bible or other says it’s an abomination (whether or not the text of that Bible actually says so).

Bruni points out that whether or not someone is genetically programmed toward a particular gender doesn’t matter. Gay people just aren’t inclined to change, and there’s no real reason for them to do so.

It occurred to me while reading Butler’s novels that we really don’t have just two genders anyway. There are homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, heterosexuals and asexuals; some people may be more than one over the period of a lifetime. And trying to fit everybody into two convenient categories doesn’t really seem to do anyone any good.

Pronouncements about the sanctity of marriage based on ignorance don’t make things any better. If family values (loving parents taking care of well-loved and guided children; familial loyalty and affection; extended families) are so important, it seems to me that we should be allowing them to spread wherever they can sprout. In my own experience, some of the most engaging, respectful, creative, and clearly loved children I’ve ever met have been raised by gay people who may or may not be their biological parents. And one of the best consequences I can think of is that none of these children feels compelled to fit into any particular role just because he or she is a he or a she.

Even when I'm talking about art history, I find myself pointing out gender disparity in that vast span of human experience between the Paleolithic (when men may not have understood their role in procreation) and the development of agriculture (when they seem to have decided that they had everything to do with making babies). What anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher once called “the pernicious analogy” (semen = seed) developed during the Neolithic beginnings of farming (which seems to have suggested “planting” the “seed” in the womb, where it would be nurtured as in fertile soil), and was followed by the notion that women were merely empty vessels just waiting to host a little homunculus. Inexplicably, however, if the woman didn't bear sons it was her fault. Sigh.

Things are only now beginning to look up. When I was a fourth-grader, I wasn’t skipped to a higher grade, despite evidence of some intellectual talent, because we hadn’t covered fractions yet and girls weren’t “good in math.” But my male classmate was skipped because boys were supposed to be innately much better at quantitative skills. Nowadays, girls are much more frequently encouraged to excel in whatever they can, but that glass ceiling persists, and true gender equality still seems to be a long way off.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that consideration of multiple genders isn’t really even on the radar at the moment. Human beings seem to be really good at partitioning out “otherness” in terms of color, religion, culture, and/or political economy. Of course, we still use mere otherness as a reason to discriminate, and that’s not likely to change soon, either.

Being able to label someone as a deviant from the norm used to be the purview of despots (witness the concept of Degeneration popular in the 1930s, which became one of the excuses for annihilating Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals). If we were to expand the concept of "normal" to include not only all races, colors, creeds, and politics, but multiple genders as well, who would the bigots be able to pick on?

Image credit: 3D expanded gender symbols modified and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Ju gatsu mikka.

Year's End

2011-12-31T10:17:00.000-08:00

Having just lived through the Quarter from Hell, I've been absent from the Farm for some time. So one of my resolutions (many of which I actually keep) is to post on at least one blog a week in the new year, just to keep my brain from tangling up.

And things do look a bit more promising, especially in regard to my classes. The nightmare of teaching four different overlapping preps to a surlier-than-usual crowd of students, few of them particularly anxious to learn anything I had to teach, is over. I'll only have one new class, and it will be small; the others have been consolidated into two (although there are two sections of each level--Art History 1 and 2--with between 30 and 39 students in each) and I've spent my winter break trying to get lesson plans in shape. I somehow managed to take notes on what worked and what didn't during the Fall term, and have had a chance to address troublesome issues. So, if I can manage to seduce three or four in each section into learning instead of whining, I'll count the upcoming Winter a success.

If I sound like I'm whining myself, I probably am. But I've been gobsmacked by a surprising number of students who simply don't care how they spend their money or whether they learn anything or not. They want simply to get through the course with a D, and if they don't--well, what's another two grand and another eleven weeks with the old bitch? Without the handful of eager learners who did emerge, I might well have been tempted to give it all up, take the minimal Social Security allotment, and chuck what's left of the career.

I'm fully aware that many of my colleagues are out of work altogether, through no choice or fault of their own; I'm also well aware that I should thus be grateful for mere employment. But teaching is one of those professions folks don't go into for the money; we're often passionate and committed and convinced that we've got a mission, and that this country needs good educators. But teaching these days is becoming something of an exercise in head-banging because politicians who know nothing about what's really involved with educating children are making decisions in state, local, and national legislatures that make it almost impossible for teachers to teach and students to learn. Top all that with a growing cultural bias against intellectualism that replaces curiosity with the instant gratification of digital technologies, and we've got a recipe for an abyssal decline in the national intelligence quotient.

Just when we need smart, capable people to help us get along in the world of the future, we're raising a crop of incurious, distracted, artificially connected young people who will grow up not understanding much about history, culture, science, or how to fix their devices.

Nonetheless, I begin each new quarter with hope. Perhaps this time I'll end up with a couple of classes filled with eager, hungry students grateful for the opportunity to learn. Then I can keep on trying to offer opportunities to discover new ideas without having to dumb down my material to meet lowered expectations or lack of enthusiasm. I can also usually bank on getting one or two older students, returning after a military stint or to update their credentials in order to find new work. I guess I'm fortunate that it still takes only a few of these to make the whole enterprise worthwhile.

I find myself thinking on a smaller, more local scale these days. Grand utopian visions seem a bit silly in this time of dearth and drought; but it's a new year. Anything can happen. I keep thinking of a character in the Nero Wolfe novel, Death of a Doxy. Julie Jacquette, a showgirl with an intellect of gold, gets 50 grand for helping Wolfe and Archie catch a killer. She uses it to go to college, and when she writes Archie with an update she ends her letter with "I wish you well."

It seems like an appropriate sentiment for New Year's Eve.

Image credit: uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Magnus Manske. Apparently taken in Norway on New Year's Eve, 2006.

Losing Languages

2011-11-15T10:39:00.000-08:00

As I've posted elsewhere, I recently joined in a campaign through Kickstarter to help Tim Brookes realize his plan to display texts from endangered alphabets at libraries and museums in order to raise our consciousness(es) about impending losses. As a reward for my contribution, Tim carved the above plaque, which spells out the word for "owl" in one of those alphabets--Balinese. As many of my students already know, I'm something of a champion of language, writing systems, and the importance of translation as a model for how human beings think and create. Tim's project, therefore, afforded me the opportunity to participate in what I think is one of the more worthwhile creative projects I've come across in recent years, and the Kickstarter campaign turned out to be enormously successful. His book, Endangered Alphabets, is a treasure, and I've been sharing it with colleagues and students alike; if you haven't already done so, I highly recommend that you visit the companion website and its blog.

At Tim's prompting I looked into another Kickstarter effort, this one designed to help preserve the Balinese language itself: Balinese--A Language at a Crossroads with Endangered Script. The project is aimed at developing

the first multi-media materials for the Balinese language. Balinese script is already endangered and the spoken language is dramatically changing. These materials, which will be donated to nonprofit organizations, will provide a record of where the spoken and written language is now and will encourage the use of Balinese for the future.

The project was initiated by Alissa Stern, the Executive Director of BasaBali.org, which promotes the preservation of the Balinese language. Like many of the world's indigenous languages, Balinese is at risk of either being transformed irrevocably, or of disappearing altogether. Its script is arguably one of the most beautiful writing systems ever created. It was actually Alissa who translated "owl" for Tim to carve for me. I thought it especially suitable to photograph the plaque in one of the trees (our Bur Oak) the neighborhood owls frequent.

If you're one of those folks who's stopped buying holiday gifts from the Large Mart and have started donating to worthy causes instead, I highly recommend visiting the Balinese language project page; donation levels start at a buck, and there are only about five days left in the campaign.

One of the reasons I find this stuff so compelling right now is the growing evidence that our own language is rapidly evolving into something almost unrecognizable. More than once this quarter I've had to stop in the middle of a lecture or discussion to explain a word I was using: affable, contiguous, nefarious, wend. Good grief! I'm used to parsing words like Gesamptkunstwerk or pareidolia, not to mention more common words used in discussing art history (chiaroscuro, tenebrism, entasis--and the editor in Blogger didn't recognize any of those except chiaroscuro). But what I would consider ordinary parlance is increasingly being seen as elitist or (at best) just plain obscure.

Although colleagues indicate that they're noticing the same thing, the problem doesn't seem to be much on the minds of the country at large (perhaps because other issues loom larger). The only substantial article I could find on a quick search was one by Ian Brown in the Toronto Globe and Mail (Are we losing our lexicon?) from 2007. I thought it rather amusing that the same search ("losing vocabulary") brought me several hits about a French hip hop composer named Keor Meteor, with an album called "Losing Vocabulary." There does seem to be a hint of irony attached to that one.

But losing language actually presents some serious problems to public life. One of my big beefs about the Tea Party, for example, has to do with its collective insistence that it knows what the Founding Fathers meant in the Constitution. However, it seems unlikely that a substantial number of TP members possess the linguistic background (in eighteenth-century English, let alone Latin and/or Greek), or the contextual understanding of Enlightenment philosophy to wrestle effectively with the multiplicity of possible meanings contained in that one document. Nevertheless, we frequently hear people holding forth on how simple it all is: just read the Constitution.

I'm pretty well convinced that one reason my students don't read the same things I did is because some of the "classics" are not only "too long" (for increasingly shorter attention spans), but that they have "too many words." That is, they have too many words that students would have to look up in order to understand what's going on. It's difficult to imagine that many of today's young adults would spend an entire summer, as I once did, reading Thomas Hardy's corpus--or even take a stab at something like George Eliot's Middlemarch. I admit to having struggled through the first 250 pages of the latter--only to be rewarded many times over for my effort as I proceeded through the book.

Yesterday marked the 150th anniversary of one of the longest books I ever read: Moby Dick. Melville's opus still fascinates, as we see by Nathanial Philbrick's new book, Why Read Moby Dick?, and Sena Jeter Naslund's 1999 riff, Ahab's Wife.

Do many of us remember how funny Melville's actual novel is, beginning as it does with a tongue-in-cheek etymology of the word, whale? Even the first paragraph--containing, perhaps, the most famous three words in literature--is wryly humorous:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Mind you, I think sailing about the watery parts of the world would indeed solve a number of problems--so long as one didn't become obsessed by a whale in the process. But it seems unlikely that many young folk today will even embark on an effort to read the book.

Language, I like to remember, encompasses the essence of human being: it enables thought, speech, all manner of communication, understanding. Of course it changes--I'm not one of those who constantly laments over shifts in grammar (although I will admit that misplaced apostrophes annoy me). But losing perfectly good words and substituting irritating neologisms indicates a kind of linguistic laziness that impoverishes rather than enriches speech.

We're lucky, I suppose, that English isn't in any immediate danger of annihilation (even though it could one day be supplanted as the primary language of international discourse). Nor is our alphabet tilting on the brink. Instead, its pure simplicity enables it to be written in a seemingly endless multitude of styles--some of them quite beautiful.

Preserving the past, even if it's only for the purpose of not forgetting its mistakes, requires us to pay attention when we're losing cultural artifacts. Languages and writing systems should not be allowed to get lost in the shuffle of modernity precisely because they both mark significant moments in humanity's cultural and biological evolution: from becoming human in the first place, to becoming "civilized" when the very first syllabaries and alphabets were produced.

Eleven

2011-11-11T10:00:00.001-08:00

It's been nearly a month since my last post; things have been absurdly busy, confusing, and difficult to juggle, and I just haven't had the steam to even think about writing. But today is Veterans' Day, and I've been thinking of my father and other kin who've fought in wars or supported personnel who did. My daughter e-mailed me earlier today asking if I had any photos of her grandpa Tom in uniform, so I thought a post would present an opportunity to share my favorite. The above image was probably shot during or shortly after WWII, when Daddy was still in the Army Air Corps (at least that's what the wings indicate). What a handsome kid he was!

As I've undoubtedly mentioned many times on the Farm, my family's military roots run deep. Somewhere I have a letter from the Civil War, and there were Revolutionary War veterans on my Mother's side. Both of my grandfathers were involved in WWI, and I received a La Verne Noyes college scholarship on account my being a direct descendent of a veteran of that war. My father's war career spanned WWII, the Korean Conflict, and the Vietnam War. My brother fought in Vietnam as well. One of my mother's cousins was killed on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, and my nephew was stationed on the USS Ronald Reagan in the Persian Gulf. The connections spread through three branches of the service and through three centuries of conflicts.

Although war is one human activity I would be glad to see end in my lifetime, I regretfully doubt if anyone ever will. Utopian dreams frequently envision its absence, but that single condition is what makes the word "utopian" synonymous with "dream" (or even "fantasy") in many minds.

But there is one positive aspect: even as it brings out the worst in some, it also stirs others to the most valiant of actions and the most selfless of acts. It enables men and women to embody the notion of honor in ways that no other endeavor allows, whether its causes are just, reasonable, or even sensible--or not.

I wish that whoever reads this post would spent a few moments today honoring the memory of those we have lost to war, those who have endured it on our behalf (including many of my students), and those who continue to serve. Were I able to hold only one hope for the rest of my life, it would be that at some point in a future not too distant, their service would no longer be required.

Welcome, Rain

2011-10-13T15:00:00.001-07:00

At the moment, I'm doing something I don't usually even attempt: multitasking, by trying to write and listen to the Rangers/Tigers ALCS game at the same time. The only reason I can be doing this at all is because I'm stuck at school after an 8 am-noon class that will be followed at 6 pm by another four-hour stint of stand-up art history. I won't make the 60-mile, hour-long round trip home and back in the interim, so I've been using the time for prep and--at the moment--trying to get some writing done. And since I can't actually watch the ballgame, I've got the audio running behind Blogger on my laptop.

The main reason I feel compelled to post at all is that we've had rain: nearly three and a half inches over a period of two days (with a short stint of sunny day in between). I'm not sure I've ever been quite so conscious of rain as a gift, but after this summer it's a bit like a cool soak in a bubble bath after a hot, week-long backpacking trip. Tomorrow I'll get to spend some time out in the garden, and the soil will be dry enough to take a bit of hoeing, but still damp and workable. My garlic's going in late, but I still have time for a small crop.

With luck I'll also have a little time for a real post this weekend. I need to reply to the two lovely, thoughtful comments last week's screed about agriculture, and there's more to say about growth in other senses of the word. I miss the Skywatch Friday crowd, though, so thought I'd share these snaps. The opener shows the rain gauge with the two-day accumulation. The other two are pretty nondescript, but they show what the sky looked like to the south (cloudy) and to the north (clearing) after the rain stopped yesterday morning. All three were taken with the Nikon D80.

Back to the game. Rangers and Tigers are tied in the 6th. Have a good weekend, Folks.

Good Growth

2011-10-05T05:08:00.000-07:00

Our local Whole Foods Market is decked out with pumpkins (some pretty big ones--that a person could sit on--for $50), and the seasonal squashes and other goodies are in, if not as plentiful as last year. The summer's heat blasted many local farms, with the result that Fall menus will likely feature veg from Mexico and Chile rather than from around here as many of us would like.

I had planned to have acorn squash at least, but that gave up the ghost long before Halloween decorations even made it into the stores. So I've got a few peppers coming in, and maybe some late eggplant, but aside from the herbs, that'll be it.

What this post is really about, though, is work. Real work: the stuff that needs to get done in order for people to survive. And the work of the season is harvesting. With the U. S. economy in the doldrums, and anti-immigrant fervor at a peak, one would think that farmers would have their pick (ahem) of potential hands to pull up the onions and pop the corn off the stalk.

Not according to this morning's New York Times, however--and this isn't the first I've heard of this problem. The upshot is that although America is a far fatter and less healthy nation than it should be, and even though the unemployment rate is embarrassingly high, farmers can't find nearly enough local workers to get the job done. I've heard more than one report of people signing on to harvest crops, and leaving after a few hours because they thought the work was just too hard.

I know I tend to romanticize farming; I even have the temerity to use the term "farm" metaphorically in the title of this blog. But farming lives somewhere at the center of our American identity (think of our pastoralist forefathers, amber waves of grain, and all that). Many of our ancestors farmed this land, or the land from whence they came. My own name even contains "farmer" in German (although we still haven't figured out how one could farm owls). But farming seems to have evolved into something different in recent decades.

The growth of agriculture has meant not an increase in the number of people who farm. Rather, it has morphed into fewer, larger farms owned by conglomerates. The idyllic-sounding "family farm" has become a memory to many, because small farms now find it so difficult to compete with Big Ag: Bigger machines, more oil (including fuel manufactured from corn, which--if I remember correctly--used to be a food crop), larger spreads of monocultures, genetically engineered species. Everything's designed to be more efficient and cheaper to produce, and then we hear complaints about how hard it is for mega-farms to make a profit. Heaven help the small farmer, unless she happens to live near a city where she can sell her fresh harvest to a restaurant or at a farmers' market.

I'm always amazed at the small-government advocates who don't seem to give a hoot about small anything else, because they'd rather buy their genetically-engineered corn at WalMart for pennies, rather than pay more for better food from more sustainable sources. Yes, I know the Large Marts all over the place are touting their local sources and organic produce--but all that's a piddle in a puddle when we look at the big picture.

The picture isn't pretty. After reading about farmers' trying to hire unemployed workers to fill in gaps from lower numbers of immigrant workers, and the unwillingness of the new hires to do the work after only a few hours on the job, I couldn't help but wonder about what we've become. Fat and lazy? Disconnected from the earth that sustains us? Softened by electronic toys and digital media that distort the very idea of farming ("Farmville," anyone)? Do any of these people really care about where our food comes from--what they put in their own bodies? It seems that most folks these days would rather work at Micky D for minimum wage than get out into the open air and get some exercise for the same amount of money per hour.

At my rapidly advancing age and stage of decripitude, I can't quite afford to give up my own job--despite the increasing stress afforded me and my colleagues as we watch beloved co-workers laid off, our own work-loads increase, and as we face the challenge of teaching students whose preparation levels seem to drop every quarter. But don't think for a minute that if the axe fell on me I wouldn't be looking for seasonal work in the field to supplement my meager retirement prospects. I'd certainly be a great deal healthier, sturdier, thinner, and freer of stress-induced belly fat than I am today.

But this is a philosophical as well as a practical concern. What have we become? Why is farm work, the foundation upon which civilization itself was built, held in esteem so low that so few people think it worth doing? When we talk about culture (that ineffable essence that describes what it means to be human) and cultivation (how we educate, nurture, and exercise our vast intellectual possibilities), we're using the language of farming. (Agriculture: ager = field, cultura = tending, tilling.) Even traditional American teaching cycles are arranged around the agricultural needs of our ancestors; kids get off in the summer because at one time they were needed in the fields. And shall I also mention all those seasonal festivals that arise at planting, tilling, and harvest times?

I'm going to be talking about the origins of agriculture in my first-level art history classes next week, because when we began to farm, we also began to create the monumental works that mark a culture and provide it with a physical identity. Turkey, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Bronze Age Greece--the makers of temples and tombs were all farmers first, and only later warriors. It was to help account for crops that writing was invented among some people. Some of the most enduring painted and sculpted images from antiquity depict farming or honor agricultural products and nurturing deities.

Lately I've also been thinking about growth. And although that's a post for another time, about the only really beneficial growth I can think of these days has to do with crops and kids. Most of the other senses of the word we're currently using are essentially unsustainable. But growing crops--and growing children both provide us with hopeful metaphors. It's not coincidental that some of the first formal schooling our offspring get is in kindergarten--a garden for children.

But schooling has little to do with gardens these days. Except in a few schools that actually cultivate garden classrooms (about which I've written elsewhere), we've taken our kids out of the fields and plopped them down into over-crowded classrooms, tempted them away from the out-of-doors with myriad electronic gizmos, and taught them to eat Happy Meals that will end up making them fat, unhealthy, and reluctant to do the real physical work it takes to harvest real food.

That Mad Farmer, Wendell Berry, has the right idea. We need to re-ground ourselves in the metaphors that arose from our nation when it was young. Before we became enamored of constant growth, upward mobility, and efficiency, we knew something about the cycles of things. I just hope we can remember them before it's too late.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

--Wendell Berry
"Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front"
From The Country of Marriage, 1971

Image credit: Ansel Adams, Farm Workers and Mt. Williamson, 1943. This is a rather idyllic photo taken at the Manzanar "relocation" camp outside of Lone Pine, California during the second World War. Despite their forced internment at the camp, the incarcerated Japanese occupants contributed to the U. S. economy by farming. A woman I met in Philadelphia, who had been at Manzanar as a child, told me that farming helped the internees maintain their dignity because it was honorable work. The photo is available through Wikimedia Commons, from the Library of Congress collection of Adams's photos of Manzanar.

Pecan Equinox

2011-09-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

Time was when folk would be out celebrating today, on the morning of the autumnal equinox, and the beginning of fall. Nowadays, of course, some might notice mention of the seasonal change in the morning papers or, more likely, hear about it on the morning TV show they watch whilst preparing for work. We don't get an actual celebration until the end of October, and then it's got less to do with fall than with other nonsense.

I'm still an odd bird, I guess, for checking my east-facing dining room window (my "house clock" of which I've made note before), to mark the last morning the sun will appear in that window until next spring. But I'm a great fan of seasonal moments, especially since the weather has cooled down considerably (it'll max out in the 80s today), and we've had a little rain. Things are greener than they have been all summer, and I've pulled up most of the dead things that had littered the garden. Soon, we'll be raking leaves for compost, as all those leaves begin to drop.

The fall equinox also marks the end of another quarter at my college, so I get to spend the first weekend awash in grading--at least until Sunday, when the Beloved Spouse and I will spend the afternoon at our last baseball game of the year. We like to attend the final home game, and this year it will be especially sweet, win or lose, because the Rangers should have clinched the Western division championship by then. Baseball is, of course, the quintessential summer game, but the heat has kept us away from all but one trip out to Arlington this year.

As I type this post, the roof is being pelted by pecans. Despite the drought, the trees (we have eight of various varieties) are loaded this year. But the tree rats are underfed and are having at the still-unripe nuts, nibbling bits and then tossing them aside. It sounds a little like a hail storm's going on, and I have to keep my clogs by the back door because I can't venture out of doors bare-footed any more, even for a few inches. Half-eaten pecans are no fun to step on.

Today's Skywatch Friday entries are nothing special. But the sky's blue, the light from the autumn sunrise looked pretty on those pecans, so that's what I shot. For the moment there's a bit of seasonal promise in the air: thoughts of harvest stews, squashes and pumpkins, baked apples, pecan pie, and all manner of goodies that couldn't be cooked all summer. I just wish, as a culture, we spent more time enjoying these moments, and less time rushing about. Any grading I do tomorrow morning will be undertaken out of doors, with the pups, among the birds and squirrels, and with a nice cup of tea. And a hat to protect me from pecan debris.

Have a great weekend, Folks. And happy fall!

The End, At Last

2011-09-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I have tried to use the Farm as platform for extolling the virtues of community, and to suggest ways in which we can be better inhabitants of this planet.

I also grew up as a military brat, imbued with notions of honor, fairness, courage, and other virtues fostered and shared by the many soldiers, sailors, and airmen I met during my father's tenure as a non-commissioned officer in the U. S. Air Force. Being a good person became, for me, synonymous with serving one's country honorably. This didn't change during the Viet Nam war, even though I opposed it. It didn't change during the Iraq wars, even though I questioned one and abhorred the "reasons" for initiating the other. It hasn't changed since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, even though I think we betrayed that country when we failed to help them recover after the Soviet occupation. Soldiers don't make policy; politicians do.

And so this morning, when I received the following video in my e-mailbox from the Obama people, I could think of nothing better to do with it than to post it here. I should note that I try to consider as many points of view as possible, and receive mail from conservatives and No Labels people as well as liberals and progressives. But this video does a lovely job of marking this historic moment--this small step toward fairness and equality for everyone.

To the many gay and straight officers and enlisted people I have known through the years, and who taught me the true nature of patriotism, thank you, and congratulations. As much as I would love to live in a world in which your services would not be required, I appreciate what you do, and today I celebrate with you.

And Now For Something Completely Different

2011-09-09T06:37:00.000-07:00

The sky in north Texas has been decidedly uninteresting this week, but not so in other parts of the state. Much of the region is suffering wildfires brought about by drought and high winds, and skies have been filled with smoke and haze. This makes for lovely sunsets (we may see some on SWF), but causes enormous suffering for those whose homes are burning and whose lives are changing irrevocably.

On the coast, at east beach, Galveston, the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee created the skies shown here, gifts from my daughter who was visiting family and friends with her beau. Like many of my own chance photos, these were captured with an iPhone 4, and unaltered. I particularly like the opening shot, which shows me that my girl has a good eye as well as a generous spirit.

I'm hopeful that the Beloved Spouse and I will have a chance to take the pups down to romp on the beach before too long, but in the meantime I'll be enjoying the beautiful cool weather here in the north--while it lasts. Although I've had the A/C off for a week now, the forecast promises century marks for later in the week. I'm decidedly ready for Fall!

This post marks my 250th on the Farm. Thanks to my regulars for sticking with me through my rants and musings--and welcome to any new folk who stray in, attracted by my daughter's "walk-by" photography.

Useful Work: A Labor Day Meditation

2011-09-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned on Thursday, my query about the origins of Labor Day last week elicited no correct answers, which doesn't really surprise me given the general lack of historical knowledge evident among the rising generation. Coincidentally, I showed a video on art between the wars (Robert Hughes's "Streamlines and Bread Lines" from his American Visions series), adding to the number of synchronistic experiences my students and I have been noting this quarter. Students were struck by the similarities between current circumstances and those that produced the WPA--but we were pretty sure that nobody would be willing to do much to put artists to work today. Nor do art and craft as "useful work" (in William Morris's view, the opposite of "useless toil") quite fit into our current political preoccupations.

Several headlines screamed at us this week, scaring the bejeezis out of common folk, but reflecting the realities presented by today's labor market. The "news" that no new jobs were created this month should actually come as no surprise, given the fact that corporations have figured out how to squeeze more hours and more work out of fewer people, and for lesser-skilled jobs have opted to seek labor from beyond our shores from those who will work for pennies.

Why should any of us be shocked by this? Those Americans who have jobs seem to be so afraid of losing them that they will work extra hours at no increased pay. Nobody likes unions any more, it seems, and "collective bargaining" has become code for "socialist policy" (although few actually know anything about what socialism is except what the far-righties tell them), so the over-worked and underpaid will likely not find their lot improving any time soon.

His Holiness, the Governor of Texas (HHGT), who is now running for President, touts his job-creating record in the state, neglecting to mention just how many of these are minimum-wage (of which he disapproves) labor involving fast food and cleaning up other peoples' messes. Yes there are high-wage, high-tech jobs in Texas. But our fair state also boasts a miserable educational record, and had I more time to check into it, I might find that many of those graduating from higher ed institutions consist of foreign students who will be taking their skills back home.

I frequently snort, impolitely, that my students know how to use all manner of techno-gizmos, but none of them know how to fix them. So if something goes wrong, they've got to call "Peggy" in Mumbai for tech support. Should something major happen--like the big EMP I keep promising--there aren't that many people around here who could figure out how to get the grid back up, let alone manufacture the toys to which we have all become addicted and upon which we have all become dependent.

But instead of properly educating our students (to think both creatively and critically) and putting them to work devising ways to fix the country and save the planet, and instead of valuing trades like plumbing and woodworking and home repair, we seem to be training people to be CPAs and tax lawyers whose main job is helping people to get out of paying their share of keeping the country running.

It's worth noting that even though no jobs were created last month, many of the potential job creators were sitting on their corporate earnings (which are in many cases at record levels), presumably "jittery" about the market. The simple equation is this: people need jobs to earn money to pay for stuff, and the stuff is being made elsewhere rather than here where it's consumed. But the companies that make the stuff don't want to have to pay a living wage because it would cut into their profits. Americans, its seems, won't work for crap wages, so I guess it's our fault that so many are unemployed. You hear it all the time: there are jobs out there for anyone who wants one. Yeah. Try supporting a family on 20 grand a year these days.

All this has been said before, and I really don't have the answers because thinking about it makes my brain hurt and raises my blood pressure. Other people, like Paul Krugman and Juliet Schor and Warren Buffett, offer solutions that nobody wants to hear, but might help turn things around. My only suggestion involves figuring out a way to get investors to stop treating the stock market like a casino and start putting money into promising, necessary industries with potential to help rather than harm--like alternative energy, local farming, regional grids, and less destructive forms of transportation. But as long as Wall Street is fueled by fear, rumor, and hedge funds, nothing will change and things can only get worse.

The President is scheduled to reveal his plan to get Americans back to work on Tuesday. I have little hope that it will address many of these issues, and I'm absolutely confident that the far-righties will shoot it down like so many clay pigeons being flung across the skeet range.

What we really need is meaningful work that serves a genuine purpose, whether it's farming sustainably, repairing necessary equipment, managing waste, educating young people, building thoughtfully, manufacturing responsibly, or simply finding ways of promoting the common good. What we don't need is more fast food, more cheap and/or disposable tschochkes, more expensive toys, and more ways to speed up environmental degradation.

Here's to a future in which workers are paid what they're actually worth, rather than what some over-paid CEO thinks they should earn; where we focus more carefully on needs rather than on desires or on what advertisers try to convince us that we absolutely must have; where people live comfortably without reducing the probability that their grandchildren will have to suffer from smog, drought, or other hazards that could be avoided if we change our ways now; where our representatives actually recognize that no state is an island unto itself, and that what we spew into the air or the waterways affects us all; and where people think carefully, evaluating innovations and choices instead of simply adopting the next big thing.

Happy Labor Day--especially for those who remember why this day was set aside in the first place.

Image credit: "Fruit Store," a Works Progress Administration poster created between 1938 and 1941, via Wikimedia Commons. I thought it fitting to use a poster that promoted something I'd love to see more of: fruit stands full of local produce.

Looking Skyward

2011-09-01T09:15:00.000-07:00

It seems as though I spend a great deal of time these days looking up: for clouds, signs of rain, tokens of impending change. But I'm tired of writing about the weather. It rained last Friday, providing a steady, sweet, cool respite from the heat that lasted for about an hour. The temperature fell to a balmy 103 F in the days that followed, and it should only get up to 101 today, according to the weather sources that have been wrong more often than not. From now on I'm only going to rely on the approaching equinox to signal change.

But not thinking about the weather leaves mental space for worrying about civilization and its discontents: war, famine, politics, economics, environment, health, education--with all their creeping dystopian possibilities.

So lately I've been taking refuge on a different planet. One called Phoebe, where the protagonist of my latest "old bats in space" saga (Petunia) has just disappeared. She finally reached that point after I'd spent several months thinking about how to get her there, and after I'd spent another several hours rereading what I'd already written and filling in the missing bits. None of this is for publication; rather, it's my own escape from here and now and a means for imagining alternatives to what ails us at the moment. Writing this stuff is fun, and Petunia's having fun, and it beats drinking as an avoidance mechanism.

I've also got several reads going: books that run the gamut from Sayonara Michelangelo by Waldemar Januszczak, to The Atlantis Syndrome, by Paul Jordan, to Robert Charles Wilson's latest, Vortex and John Scalzi's engaging but silly newest book, Fuzzy Nation (both just finished). Some of these I'm reading for my classes (Januszczak and Jordan), so they sort of count as work, but I don't actually have to read them. I do so mostly so that I don't deliver the same stale stuff over and over again and can add fresh material to my stand-up art history and mythology routines.

But I won't be able to avoid the real world for much longer, so for anyone who's interested, here's what's on the Farm menu for the near future: musings on cucina povera (fancy Italian for peasant food) and utopia, energy options, food deserts and obesity, creating an oasis, and coming to terms with advancing age. Probably not all at once, though.

In the meantime, here are this week's Skywatch Friday entries, all taken with the new iPhone (but not the Camera+ app, which I'm still trying to figure out how to use properly) in the early morning during the last couple of weeks. The bottom two were shot in parking lots at or near school.

For those who celebrate it, happy Labor Day weekend. But please take a moment to remember what it represents. When asked, none of my students knew. Their most frequent response was that it has something to do with having to go back to school. Sigh.

Homer The Brave

2011-08-16T13:35:00.001-07:00

Dogs are such a part of the good life for human beings that I can't imagine not having them around for any length of time. When we lose one we lose family--and some family are harder to lose than others.

Such is the case with Homer, my daughter's version of "Marley," who for a couple of years made us crazy, but then, when he finally felt safe and "at home" became the happiest, goofiest dog I've ever known.

Well, Homer died yesterday, after a long illness. Rather than telling the story myself, I'll let her do it. This is the letter she wrote to the adoption agency after he died:

I just wanted to inform you that Homer, who I adopted 5 years and 8 months ago, passed away peacefully yesterday at the age of 9-ish.

He had been diagnosed with Leiomysarcoma (cancer of the smooth muscle tissue) in November of last year. He had surgery in December to remove the tumor, however it was too intricately entwined with his ureter and too close to his spine for them to be able to remove it. We went home with Homer on "pallative care", with the vets only expecting him to live a short time. My sweet boy held on for almost 9 months. 8 months and 30 days to be exact... He was a fighter and loved his life so much he didn't want to let go. My vets were all amazed by his attitude and his determination to keep on keeping on.

Sunday night he could hardly walk, and by Monday morning he showed me in his own special way that it was time. He was tired of fighting, and he was ready to let go. Two of his favorite aunties and my boyfriend came over to say goodbye, and we all loved on him for a long time before we took him in. His passing was a true testament to his life - he was pure love down to his last breath. He was surrounded by love, and even my vet cried. He actually had to leave the room afterwards because it was too much for him. For a dog to have that much of an impact on a vet speaks volumes about Homer's personality and gentle soul.

I just wanted to say thank you for saving him, and thank you for keeping him until he picked me as his mom. I loved him so much, and he changed my life.

He was the best dog in the world, and when I am ready for another dog, Lexee's is the first place I will look.

It's fitting, I think, that Homer is still the "poster dog" on the Lexee's Legacy home page.

We'll all miss him, but I can't tell you all how proud I am of my kid, who took on a task that many had already refused. But the only thing she refused was to give up, and Homer gave us many happy years as a result.

Image notes: These are the last two pictures Esther sent me of Homer; the opening shot was taken the night before he died. For things like this I'll be eternally grateful that we've now both got iPhones.

Been Hot So Long It Seems Like Cool To Me

2011-08-11T08:17:00.001-07:00

With humblest apologies to the late Richard Fariña, the title of this post has been running through my mind since the temperature dropped from 108 a few days ago to the balmy 103 of yesterday. The 1980 record will be tied on Friday if the weather holds, and even the smidgin of a possibility of rain (if the front along the Red River pushes south at all) probably won't affect that.

But this morning I went out to check the wreckage of the potager, and to get some photos for this post, and amazingly enough it was cloudy! Even though the clouds have now moved off, the temperature's only 84 (forecast is for 100 later) and it practically feels like spring. I may well be able to haul myself out of doors for a bit of exam-grading on a lawn chair when I'm finished here.

Unfortunately, the entire garden could qualify for disaster relief. I've learned an enormous lesson about soil and mulch, and next year's efforts will be focused on deepening and enriching the planting areas. My big mistake this year was to pretty much dump the chippings from the old woodpile onto the garden as mulch, without realizing that the bits might cement themselves together and form an impenetrable barrier. I've since busted up the mats and mixed soil in, but I've got a lot of compost-management (mostly occasional watering to keep the bins active; right now they're just sitting there desiccating) and enrichment to do before next spring.

Dead beans, dead tomatoes

The woody herbs are holding up pretty well, but basils, pepper plants (which have stopped setting fruit altogether), and eggplant are looking limp and sad. The tomato plants are going into the compost this weekend, and since heirloom varieties from local farms are readily available now, I'm giving up for the rest of the year.

What's left of the herb/veggie garden

My lettuce/strawberry pot, which has afforded me few nice snacks and pretty salads, is all but dead. The froggy rain gauge I stuck in there has been empty for weeks, but it helps me measure the water I add to what's left of the lawn once a week. The pecan trees overhead, which sported a promising number of baby nuts before the heat came, are dropping stunted little pods all over the place. Even the tree rats are discouraged. I've started putting critter food out for them and the neighborhood possum and raccoon so they don't start digging up the herbs to look for goodies underneath.

The strawberry/lettuce pot

But walking through the house in the afternoon, I've noticed that the heat is less oppressive, in part due to the fact that I haven't opened the curtains for a week, so the few degrees or relief are actually making a difference. The humidity dips as the day goes on (from 60% in the morning to 29% at 5 pm), which makes it possible to sit under a tree with a cold beer or a nice glass of vinho verde in the evening.

I'm actually thinking of hitting the Large Mart for an on-sale kiddie pool to soak in--although filling even a small one would probably cost a day's salary. Water prices are rising (with good reason; the drought gets worse by the minute and all the rain is falling in Oklahoma), and neighboring cities have finally put restrictions in place. McKinney ("Unique By Nature") keeps them in effect all year, which makes us feel pretty smug.

I just wish it didn't take impending disaster or serious price hikes to get people to conserve both water and electricity. But the folks who insist on keeping their central A/C at 75 degrees are seeing power bills between $400 (for an apartment) and $700 (for a 2500 square-foot house) a month, so the thermostats are probably being adjusted as I type.

Since I started writing about the heat I've noticed that my tolerance for it is rising; the only time I'm really uncomfortable is when I have to face the furnace-blast upon exiting my decidedly over-cooled workplace. Several of my students wore sweaters while they took their exams this week, but as they left the building there was a veritable strip-tease show going on as jumpers and hoodies came off to reveal the skimpiest of tank tops.

In a blink--only a month and a half from now--it should all be over. The autumnal equinox will be especially welcome this year, even though it marks a transition to what may turn out to be a winter like the last, with its abnormal snowfall and lower temperatures than usual. And then we'll all be grousing about how cold it is, and what the ice storms are doing to our gardens.

It may actually be enough to convince Texans that climate change is actually happening, but it'll take more than a few hot summers and cold winters to make them believe that they have anything to do with it. The real test of lessons learned will come next summer, when we see how many folk have installed geothermal heat pumps.

Happy Skywatch Friday to all, and think cool thoughts.

Post Script: About an hour after I finished this post, I went to peg out the wash and was met by looming clouds sneaking down from the north and west. The temperature has dropped 6 degrees (it's now only 90, at 2 pm) and were it not for the dead baby pecans raining from the trees in the wind, I'd be out frolicking. This shot was taken at about the same place (with less magnification) as the opening photo.

Advancing storm?

I'm not particularly optimistic about rain, however; I left the laundry on the line.

Dog Daze of Summer

2011-08-08T06:35:00.000-07:00

Anybody who ever reads the Farm is probably sick to death of my grousing about the weather. Last winter I was fussing about how Texans don't know how to handle snow (a fact that lead to abnormal numbers of missed school days), and for the last several weeks I've been on about the heat. My comment du jour is "I made it through the summer of 1980, with a one-year-old, a four-year-old, and a VW bus with no air conditioning." I think I even had a tee shirt proclaiming the fact.

And we did survive. The four-year-old is now 35 (living in Seattle, where the temperature doesn't seem to have risen past the mid 70s all summer), the one-year-old recently turned 32, and the bus is long gone (most recently replaced by the lovely hybrid Vera, whose mileage is down to 52 mpg, apparently because of the heat). Mind you, in those days we had a well air-conditioned tract house, in contrast to the ageing bungalow with virtually no A/C the Beloved Spouse and I have occupied for the last decade, and I had no garden to speak of. Now, the potager that showed so much promise last spring looks as if someone did it in with a blow torch, and the lawn is a lovely shade of straw.

Of course, I'm not the only one harkening back to 1980. Daily Poop columnist Jacqueline Floyd is ten years younger than I am, and wrote this week about trying to survive that summer as a college student in Austin--pointing out that poverty is one of those conditions that weigh more heavily when the weather turns surly. My lack of air conditioning stems from my own philosophical peculiarities, but it's a choice. Many in this country are suffering deeply (and, yes, dying) because they can't afford the luxury of chilled air.

The "wallpaper" that currently occupies my computer desktop features a bulldog snoozing on a pile of ice. It makes me smile, and keeps my crankiness level lower than it might be. But since warmer temperatures are forecast for the future, it occurs to me that we really ought to start adapting to the change.

Training ourselves to endure higher thermometer readings is not only plain common sense, but it ends up having economic benefits as well. Setting the thermostat at 78 F or higher actually helps prevent rolling blackouts when the grid gets overloaded. Limiting the amount of energy we use not only saves money, but lowers the amount of particulate matter that enters the atmosphere and causes at least some of the warming.

It's likely that high-temperature summers will increase over the next decade, and unless we develop ways to rely less on energy-sucking technologies, we're going to find ourselves in a pickle--or pickling ourselves in the heat. But yesterday, as I walked around in the garden, surveying the damage, I noticed that as long as I wasn't taking the full blast of the sun I got used to conditions pretty quickly. Sitting under a tree wasn't nearly as unpleasant as I'd thought it would be. Granted, the kitchen's too hot for comfortable cooking, but if I stay there only long enough to fix a casserole that can cook itself (we have a well-insulated pizza-sized oven in the range that heats up quickly and doesn't let much of that escape) or throw a nice salad together, it's not unbearable. And then I get to go sit in a cool room and use my sweat to cool me off.

We've become a nation of sissies. We work in over-cooled offices and buildings where workers have to don sweaters to keep from getting a chill; we drive our cars with thermostats set at 70 F and then wonder why it's so bloody hot when we emerge from our commutes.

I'm here to tell you that if you set the car or house at 78 or 80 (and put the air flow in the car on recirculate), it's much easier to tolerate exterior temperatures. And even though 86 degrees overnight doesn't make sleeping very comfortable without air conditioning, it's quite pleasant in the morning, out of doors with a bit of breeze, a cup of good coffee (or a glass of iced tea), and a newspaper.

But the heat's no joke in the long run. This week we're set to break the 1980 record of 42 consecutive days registering over 100 degrees. The dogs are shedding what little of their fur they have left, and the birds walk around looking scruffy, "panting" with their beaks open. With heat comes drought, and water restrictions, so there's only so much I can do for them. I freshen the bird baths every morning, and water when I can (Mondays and Fridays before 10 am and after 6), but it's not doing much to keep the plants alive.

I do hope that eventually alternative ways of cooling us down--ways that don't involve building more nukes, burning more coal, or frakking for more gas--become viable. In the meantime, I guess I'll just order the new tee shirt: "I survived the summer of 2011."

Image note: The photo was taken near our house in Plano just before my son embarked on his first summer day-camp experience in 1980.

Other note: edited 08.11.11 to include a link to the new tee shirt; somebody beat me to it.

Looking Backward

2011-07-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

Temple of Apollo, Delphi

Forty years ago this summer, I took my first and last extended trip to Europe. Initial Spouse and I joined a charter flight from Penn to London, flew to Paris, took a train to Rome and later Naples, embarked for Greece from Brindisi on a ferry, disembarked at Patras, toured the Peloponnese by train, spent a little time in Athens, took a boat to Crete and back to Athens, flew to Rome and then to Copenhagen, took another train to London, and then rejoined the charter home to Philadelphia. We left in late May with $1200 in travelers' cheques (with prepaid Europasses and flights from Rome to Denmark), and returned on August 16 with about $600. Talk about frugality.

Last week I found the diary I kept, with painstaking notations about every bloody penny we spent. I have dim memories of hostels and roach-infested D-class hotels, lots of bananas and bread, and never-ending searches for cold milk. Fortunately for our pocketbook, I hadn't yet acquired a taste for wine, but by the end of the trip I'd become a connoisseur of Retsina and Danish beer. The best food was Greek (especially at one taverna at Pylos, where the proprietor led us into the kitchen to pick out our meal), and also the cheapest. That, (and the fact that at two different universities I had incredible instructors in Greek cuisine, both Greek wives of Classics professors) undoubtedly accounts for my abiding love for all food Greek and Mediterranean.

Toward the end of the Greek leg of the journey, on July 23, 1971, to be exact, we took a bus to Delphi. Here's the entry:

Caught subway to Liossion St. bus station (w/in a mile of it, anyway) which isn't really on Liossion St. but we found it anyway. Got to the station at 7:15 & got the last 2 seats for the 8 am bus. Some 4 hours after the bus left we got to Delphi--after the bus had to stop in driving rain so the conductor could tie a tarp over the top. It was reasonably clear at Delphi--we got caught in a brief downpour that lasted about 3 min. and that was it.

A little note on synchronicity (about which we've been talking in the myth class): Delphi was on the menu for the History of Art & Design I class this week, including the following sites:

We went first down to the area of the temples of Athena Pronaia and the Tholos. Not much left of the former 2, but they've set up three of the columns of the Tholos back into place and it looks quite nice.

Scribbling in the diary I didn't pay much attention to style. Lots of things were apparently "quite nice." We were also having camera problems (had been since Mycenae), but it seems to have been working here--which is why I've got these photos.

Then we went up to the main precinct and spent most of our time looking at the major stuff--the Treasury of the Athenians, the Stoa of the Athenians, Apollo's temple, the theater, and the stadium. Tim took off to look at some other things & I sat & meditated near the navel.

View from near the Omphalos, Temple of Apollo, Delphi

We went on to the museum to see the Charioteer (it was "nice too"), which was responsible for my having gotten into Classics in the first place, via Helen MacInnes's potboiler, Decision at Delphi. I guess we weren't allowed to take photos, else I'd have had at least one shot. (We were also stingy with our film.)

Another dim memory of the trip to the site involved holding a chicken for a lady who had too many to handle, but that didn't make it into the diary.

View of the Gulf of Corinth from Sanctuary of Apollo, Delphi

I used my new scanner to get the photos for this week's Skywatch Friday entry; they're a bit scratchy and I had to do some minor cropping, but I think they're rather lovely (or "quite nice"), considering my then-youth and inexperience. I was, after all, only 24 at the time--still an infant.

The marriage ended a year later, and I've only been as far as London again since. But the trip provided a formative moment in my life, and I'll always be grateful for having had the chance to visit Greece before it fell into such disrepair.

I hope everyone's surviving the heat, which now seems to be affecting almost the whole country. Locally, our only hope for change any time soon lies in the small possibility of out-fall from Tropical Storm Don. Otherwise we're on track to break the 1980 record.

The End of Plutopia?

2011-07-26T08:54:00.000-07:00

I wrote about the United States as a "plutopia" back in 2008, and what follows is my latest take on the subject.

Recent political shenanigans regarding the debt ceiling have brought some interesting responses from thoughtful folks who have somehow risen above the snark and recognized a very painful but evident truth: We cannot go on as we are.

Last Sunday's Opinion section in the Daily Poop ran a reprint of David Leonhardt's New York Times article on consumer spending and its role in the current economic stagnation. In it he notes the chicken-or-egg dilemma: which comes first? Consumers spend less because the economy's bad, or the economy's bad because of consumers' new-found frugality?

This has been a burning question for many, and for some time. I know I'm not spending as much and am putting much more into savings, paying down remaining debt, and being much more mindful about what I buy. But for me it's not so much a cash issue as an environmental/philosophical one. I'm trying to practice what I preach, especially in my consumption choices: higher quality, more sustainably raised food; adhering to Morris's dictum about not having anything in my house I don't consider beautiful or useful; being miserly about utility use. I can't tell you when I last went shopping without a particular item in mind, and I've lost track of the number of things I haven't bought because I decided (after much contemplation) that I really didn't need it. That's, in fact, why I'm typing this post on my three-year-old Gateway PC notebook instead of a nice shiny new iMac.

I do still slip occasionally, but mostly it's small change: an app for the iPad (now over a year old), a new DVD (we tend to watch movies more than once, and don't go to the cineplex much because of the cheesy background music you have to listen to and ads you have to watch before the feature starts), a few books from Half Price. In Whole Foods the other day, I made my first impulse purchase in quite some time--three bars of lavender goat milk soap. I fell for the smell.

Even my support for the wine industry is dwindling, because I recently realized just how much we were spending, and just how much sleep I was losing (and weight I wasn't losing) thanks to an extra glass or two above my supposed limit of one glass per night. So now we're opting for fewer bottles per week, focusing on the highest quality we can afford.

But that's just it. Frugality on one end breeds job losses on the other. Mind you, I don't think my old friend Matt Lavelle is going to personally suffer if I cut back on the fermented grape juice (especially since I don't have easy access to his wines). But if everybody got this stingy (or perhaps this thoughtful?), it would make a huge difference. Which is why I wish people would start boycotting the crap loaded onto shelves in supermarkets and demanding better quality, more nutritious, less environmentally degrading stuff.

"Wait!" they say around here. "If we stop buying our high-fructose corn syrup beverage of choice (the one with no nutritional value at all, and enormous cost to the rest of us in terms of land-use and consequential medical costs), what happens to all those poor folks who work for Dr. Pepper (or Frito Lay, or whatever)? They'll lose their jobs!" Not to mention the fact that doing anything to deter folks from buying said liquid uselessness (like taxing it) means more nanny-statism, more big gummint interference in my god-given right to make stupid choices.

Well, maybe not. The other day, having not had time to drop by Starbucks for my weekly venti non-fat latte (major indulgence), I went to the school bistro for something with a tad of caffeine in it to get me through the afternoon. For a while they stocked HonesTea, but that was gone. Ultimately, the only thing I could find that wasn't simply vitamin-enhanced sugar water or HFCS laden anything (or ginseng-augmented "energy drink"), was "all-natural" Snapple Lemon Tea. A bit too sweet for me, but it only had water (filtered, of course), tea, lemon, and sugar. I'd have been happier with it unsweetened (having long ago weaned myself from sugary drinks), but at least this offered an alternative to the rest. Snapple, of course, is owned by Dr. Pepper. And get this; the company has a manifesto ("social responsibility report") that includes, among their five year goals, "Continue to provide a full range of products, with at least 50% of innovation projects in the pipeline focused on reducing calories, offering smaller sizes and improving nutrition."

I'm a bit suspicious of their motives for offering smaller sizes, for which they will probably ask current prices, but hey. It's a step.

Frito Lay, another big local employer, has already started marketing more healthful choices, although I've yet to take them up on any new, more nutritious offerings. I'll have to wait until I run out of Clif bars and have to run down to a machine for a snack. At any rate, Frito Lay, too, has a section on their website devoted to "Our Planet," and it includes 43 things they're doing or going to do to help save the earth (they apparently started recycling their packing materials back in 1939), including using renewable energy sources and other fairly expensive investments. There's also a "your health" section which is somewhat less convincing (potatoes and corn, although "all natural," are, after all, pretty low-quality carbs to load up on--especially since we all know that "you can't eat just one" chip). You can also pretty much bet that the farms that corn and those potatoes come from are laden with chemical fertilizers.

Given that we're not, as a still comparatively wealthy population, going to give up ours snacks, I guess all this represents a small step in the right direction. Especially when one considers the under-served poor in areas where few supermarkets exist and a cheap way to fill your stomach is to buy a bag of Fritos or down a slug of Snapple from the local ice house (Texan for convenience store).

When we look at what confronts a large part of the world, however, we're still an absurdly wealthy country. For example, we don't generally die of intestinal diseases because almost everybody has access to a toilet and we don't have raw sewage running through our neighborhoods. I actually attribute my iron gut and resistance to tummy upsets to my childhood in then-underdeveloped Asia, where I was exposed to all manner of bugs I'm now apparently immune to. But appallingly huge numbers of children and adults elsewhere die every year of diseases that could be eradicated with decent sanitation (and it doesn't have to be water-hungry flush-toilets, either).

What I do want to question here is the basic premise that in order to be a great nation, or even a fully-employed nation, we have to keep buying stuff. And we have to keep employing people to make stuff. And this stuff should be big and/or expensive: refrigerators, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, houses, computers. But in order to keep these folks in jobs, we have maintain the whole planned obsolescence ethos we bought into, probably as far back as when Henry Ford started turning people into automatons on assembly lines. None of this big stuff can last so long that we only buy it once, or twice, or even three times in our lives. We have to keep buying new ones, the more frequently, the better.

Now, I can see trading in the old energy-inefficient fridge for a shiny new one with LED lights and that uses far less electricity. I can even see trading in the ten-year-old Civic that gets 35-40 mpg (if you drive like an old lady) for a new hybrid that gets 50-55 (again, if you drive like an old lady). But there are people who buy or lease a new car every couple of years and actually go through dozens of automobiles in a lifetime. These folks are also more likely to buy bigger, more expensive vehicles that get much poorer mileage on a tank of gas. But that's what the Plutopian economy requires: buy more, more often.

But alternatives do exist, and before I go off on this any further, I'd like to recommend that folks take a look at Juliet Schor's web page on Plenitude. Her suggestions are rather radical--for example, perhaps we should work less rather than more to create a better economy--but I think truly promising. I've mentioned her before, but I'm in the process of re-reading her book (the first one I bought for the iPad) and she makes even more sense now than she did a year ago.

Your homework, Dear Reader, is to go to her blog and meander through it. That alone should give us more to talk about . . . And while you're at it, check out this week's Owls' Parliament for a related article, and a superb comment by one of my former students. It offers me hope for the future, because these folks are the ones who're going to have to live in it.

Image credit: A US Food & Drug Administration poster promoting corn, from 1918. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Farewell, Wild Blue Yonder

2011-07-22T07:18:00.000-07:00

It's hard for a space junkie like me to look at the sky these days. As I watched the last liftoff of Atlantis last week, I already missed the space program. At the moment, we really don't have anything to replace it, and it's occupied a considerable portion of my adult life.

Ever since, at an Angels game in Anaheim in 1969, I watched the cheesy animated graphics on the scoreboard that mimicked the first moon landing, I've been a devoted fan. I've had a NASA TV gadget on my desktop since I got this computer. The first apps I bought for my iPhone and iPad were NASA and/or space related. The newest app I have for the iPad (after the Star Trek PADD, which is seriously cool if not yet perfect) is a catalogue of exoplanets. I can't get enough of this stuff.

I can remember where I was and what I was doing when the two shuttle disasters took place, and when Columbia broke up over the Dallas area, my son immediately called me from Seattle because he knew I'd be inconsolable. I always regretted the fact that I'd been socialized out of science and maths as a child (girls weren't considered capable of either in my day, and I didn't yet know I could buck the system), because I think I'd probably have tried out for the astronaut corps otherwise.

And now, perhaps only for the time being, it's gone. Unlike many of my fellow citizens, however, I'm not going to rail against the President or anybody else for cancelling the show. Our holy governor is screaming about the jobs lost in Houston, while he hacks away at education and rails against clean air. Space programs cost money, and we don't really have it to spend these days, and nobody seems willing to pay the taxes it would take to keep it going, so that's that.

I will probably send letters shortly to our representatives, asking them to please raise my taxes, but I doubt that anybody else will. It's an empty gesture, I know, but I do realize that a country of damn near 300,000,000 people takes a lot of money to run and we all have to pay a share of that. You can't want to be the Greatest Country in the World if you're not willing to fund the programs that keep people safe, make sure their air is breathable, their water potable, their poor and sick taken care of. And you can't have leaders in science, engineering, or the arts if you aren't willing to build and support a superb education system with teachers paid in accordance with their responsibility to train the children who will one day have to run this country.

I'm glad the ISS is still up there, and I'm grateful to the Russians for maintaining a system to get the astronauts up to it. But I'm going to miss the launches, and the cute group pictures of folks floating around and smiling at the camera, and the glorious shots of spacewalks. And I'm certainly going to miss the boost to kids' imaginations that the space program has fostered over the last forty years.

Live long, prosper, and dream of better days.

Image notes: Taken with the iPhone 4 Camera+ app on one of the last cool mornings with clouds we've seen this summer.

iSky

2011-07-15T07:13:00.001-07:00

Not much time for posting today, so I thought I'd share the weather. Hot. Hot. More hot.

Mind you, it's still not as bad as 1980, when I had a one year-old and a four year-old and an old VW microbus with no air conditioning. So far it's only thirteen days of over-100 degree heat. 1980 gave us 39 consecutive scorchers.

So, things could always be worse.

The two photos are among the first I've taken with the enhanced capabilities of the iPhone 4. I took the opening shot in the CVS parking lot, and represents just about the last time we saw serious clouds around here.

The photo on the left was shot at the Ballpark when my daughter and her beau took us to a game a few weeks ago. It happened to be the one in which Dirk Nowitski threw out the first ball (pretty funny; it was a basketball), and I think that's why the helicopter was hovering. But the sky was just sky; no clouds at all, and it's been pretty much that way ever since.

Said daughter is in Maine this week, on an island, near the sea, soaking up the fresh air and cool temperatures (it was 70 when she landed yesterday).

Happy Skywatch Friday, people. Rantings start again soon.

Water

2011-07-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

The photo is a bit of a cheat to make it work for Skywatch Friday (note the sky reflection), but it's also a fitting illustration of elements from earth to air to fire to water. The "birdbath" is actually a former copper fire pit, which was rendered useless as such when a huge branch from our neighbor's tree fell on it. But it makes a nifty spa for the feathered folk who visit my potager, and the sundial makes a nice launching pad for frolics. Earth is represented by the rocks (from a cairn of Sierra samples my father pinched from some hapless geologist's cache many years ago). The air and water symbolism is rather more obvious.

The coalescence of themes in blogs and life never ceases to amaze me. Here I am, sitting down to prepare this week's contribution to the Farm and to end my recent attempt at theme-blogging (The Elements Project). But during this week I've also been updating a course I teach on myth, and water--the element du jour--keeps showing up as I select new readings and augment the slide shows. Water is a pretty powerful metaphor, after all, and it's a basic component of stories about origins and creation. It's also a topic I've written about frequently on the Farm (Good News and Bad News in the Water Wars, among others), and it'll probably creep into future posts as well. If I'm repeating myself, think of this as an update.

Yesterday I got tired of heat and work, and indulged in a bit of what I call "Valley porn": looking through the Owens Valley real estate offerings and fantasizing about winning lotteries and settling down on a couple of hundred acres, preferably with a trout stream running through. Water (and sometimes the lack of it), in fact, has been an abiding theme in my love affair with my home ground.

I probably need not remind anyone that the sprawling southern Californian megalopolis we call Los Angeles owes its very existence to water that once flowed freely through the Owens River Valley. LA would have been much smaller had William Mulholland not purloined the rights to water flowing between the Inyos and the Sierras and built the aqueduct that enabled population growth to the south. The old adage "blood is thicker than water" was transformed into "blood is water" when it comes to making a huge city possible on land that could not otherwise have supported all the millions that now occupy the region.

There are, of course, many sides to this story, but I've lived with it for long enough to know that every time I travel home I see signs of increasing dessication, and for fifty years I've watched the joshua trees from the south marching up the valley, harbingers of encroaching desert. It's always been desert--but the oases are becoming fewer and farther between.

In fact, I love the desert. There's nothing like dry, granite sand, sagebrush, and creosote bush to make one really appreciate water in the first place. I even harbor a special fondness for the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which flows by the Cottonwood Power Plant where I spent summers and holidays until my grandfather died and my grandmother moved to town. The "Innapennants" (Firefly joke) in my family had harbored no long-term animosity toward the city of Los Angeles, and my grandfather worked for them for over twenty years until, as my uncle recently noted after a visit to the old plant, he "left feet first, as did the chief operator before him." My uncle also reported that the city had put up water meters next to the houses there--no more free water for anybody.

As I mentioned in the introduction to More News From Nowhere, the water situation in the Valley isn't all bad news--at least for the nostalgic few like me who are glad it didn't turn into one big long city on the way to Reno and Tahoe. The median income in the area is low, but there's work in the tourist industry, and a few ranchers and others make decent enough money to build half-million dollar houses up in the Alabamas (as I discovered in my romp through the properties-for-sale ads).

One of the more ironical aspects of valley life is that a fairly new employer has set up shop in Olancha, just south of Owens Lake: the Crystal Geyser water bottling people, who truck water pumped from underground snow-fed springs down to folks in LA who apparently don't like the taste of the river water.

As I've recently been reminded, the relationship between water and life shows up constantly in creation myths, and these stories have been around for as long as human beings have been around to tell them. Like fire, water has both its creative and destructive elements; although life comes from water, nearly every mythic system contains a flood story. When the gods don't get it right, they send a flood to wipe the slate clean so they can start all over again.

Every religion I've ever been involved in also uses water as a symbol of birth and rebirth. When I was six months old, I was baptized with water from the River Jordan (according to the certificate) in the First Congregational Church in Pasedena, California. In Japan, at age 7, I was re-baptized Catholic (my mother had converted some years earlier, and my brother had been baptized at birth), and then in my mid-twenties I got the Christian all washed off in a mikveh in Allentown Pennsylvania while three Orthodox rabbis waited politely behind a door to hear me say the blessing that made me Jewish.

Just a couple of weeks ago (in the Air post) I was grousing about how water has been responsible for the increased use of air conditioning by raising regional humidity, and lamenting our inability to use evaporative cooling instead of heat pumps around here. Thanks to my daily dose of Good, however, I'm now aware of a new technology that promises to reduce electric power use by 90%, and that uses a system descended from the old swamp cooler--and that "works well in both Gulf Coast humidity and desert heat." Systems like this could also make it easier to get off the grid, since (according to the Miller-McCune article), 14% of American electrical use goes to air conditioning.

As most of Texas continues to suffer drought ranging from severe to exceptional (except for our little area of north Texas where we've had enough rain this year to move us out of any category), the wild fires will continue to burn, and water shortages will make it harder to endure them. I feel a little guilty when I water the veggies, but try to make up for it by not taking showers when I don't have to go out in public. Only a year ago, I reported (in the above-mentioned post on water wars) that Texas as a whole was drought free for the first time in recent history.

If we don't get rain soon, we'll probably be nudged back toward the "abnormally dry" or "moderate" drought categories; but McKinney seems to have learned some hard lessons about water, and wise-use policies are now part of everyday life. Some fairly effective television ads from the Water IQ campaign have started appearing, too--with coins representing water, flowing, for example, into a storm drain. Even more evocative, I think, are the Save Water, Save Life ads that are showing up all over the world--one of which quotes Ben Franklin: "When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."

Lets hope that all those folks who're anxious to adhere to the tenets laid out by the Founding Fathers can be as frugal with their water use as they want to be with my tax money. The deficit that really endagers our children and grandchildren involves water, and I can't think of a better example of a public good than making sure we use what we have wisely.

Image notes: the photo was taken with the Camera+ app for my iPhone4. It doesn't quite make the smart phone into an SLR as it claims, but some of the features are very useful (zooming, for instance, and the cute borders). I'm really enjoying the higher resolution, which can be augmented even further by another app: 8.0 MPX Simulator.

Fire

2011-06-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

Human beings are always trying to figure out all the ways in which we're not only unique, but uniquely unique (different in ways that no other species is) among others in the animal kingdom. But as each of the previously identified means of being special have either evaporated or diminished, the fact that we cook our food seems to be holding. As far as we know, there isn't another species that deliberately starts a fire in order to hustle up some dinner.

We once thought that our possession of language was a significant marker, not shared even by other primates; but Koko the Gorilla and other apes after her have shown that they can communicate not only among themselves but with us, using a form of human language, and can pass that knowledge on to others. I used to think that the truly remarkable talent possessed by homo sapiens sapiens was not simply language, but the ability to make and use metaphors; I dubbed us homo translator, and built a good many lectures about human nature upon that seemingly clever designation.

But, alas, Koko also devised some nifty metaphors (her little roly-poly kitten was "All Ball"), so there went that theory. Since then we've discovered chimps (and even birds) that use tools (bye, bye, homo faber), long the measure of human specialness.

Human culinary proclivities, however, have held up pretty well over the years as a measure of human-ness. Claude Lévi-Strauss's important study of myth, The Raw and the Cooked, focused on the symbolic aspects of cooking, and a rather wonderful book that came out a few years ago--Food and Culture: A Reader (edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, Routledge, 1997) --includes most of the important anthropological musings on the topic by the likes of Margaret Mead, Roland Barthes, Marvin Harris, Mary Douglas, and Lévi-Strauss himself. The book has recently been updated (2008), which attests to continuing interest in the topic.

More recently, Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009) poses the possibility that moving from raw to cooked food actually promoted the transition into full humanitude, bringing with it all manner of social consequences. It's an engaging book, and even though I'm always suspicious of single-impetus theories, this one's more convincing than most. That may be because I'm such a foodie, but Wrangham does back his hypothesis up with substantial evidence and a good argument.

The cooking-made-us human notion also ties in with the cultural importance of fire--the main topic of today's musings. Few natural phenomena manage to connote both warmth and comfort and abject fear and dread at the same time. But fire does this: the cozy campfire all too often turns into the killer wildfire, as seems to be the case in Arizona's ongoing Wallow fire (which began a month ago and still isn't 100% contained). However it started, the currently burning Las Conchas fire is threatening Los Alamos National Laboratory's nuclear materials--piling one concern on top of another.

As I've been prepping for my up-coming class, Myth, Mythography, and Mythology, I keep coming across interesting articles about myth and natural phenomena--not the least of which is fire. One of the more potent symbols in human cultures, fire takes many forms in the stories people tell about themselves and nature. Our ambivalence about it shows up famously in the story of Prometheus (who steals it from the gods and suffers dire consequences), and I frequently remind students that the disastrous eruptions of Vesuvius and Thera are what preserved significant aspects of Roman and Minoan culture for us.

Just yesterday I discovered an article in Mosaic by the philosopher David Farrell Krell and his actor/producer daughter Salomé , "Why Santorini? A Response in Two Voices," in which he considers the caloric (and metaphorical) aspects of energy--produced by the heat of the sun, but more so by the underlying seismic activity in the Mediterranean. It was the continuing interaction of tectonic plates, after all, that produced the massive Bronze Age eruption that left behind the remnants we now call Santorini. The poetic value of marrying heat-driven energy to human hospitality brings us back to cooking: "human energy," Krell notes, "passes in good part through great food."

When I was thinking about how to illustrate this post with something appropriate for Skywatch Friday, I kept remembering a photo I took in Riverside, California about forty years ago, of the U. C. campus carillon tower against a flaming sky. When I found it, I realized that my memory was far more vivid than the actual image, which wasn't even worth scanning. But my evening sojourns in the back yard in recent years have contributed a large number of much more appropriate images, like the one I ended up using (taken last summer)--the kind of photograph that immediately brings fire to mind.

Fires are breaking out everywhere, both in nature and in politics. A world in which suicide bombers ignite hotel fires, demonstrators throw Molotov cocktails, planes drop bombs, human beings light barbecues for patriotic holidays and set off fireworks (which can, in turn, set off wildfires), is one in which fire holds power far above its physical presence. Few symbols maintain such an uneasy balance between the beneficial and the baneful. And as we settle into yet another very hot summer, the likelihood that the world will end in fire--in any combination of its many forms--seems entirely possible, if not inevitable.

--Since I haven't posted in a while, I thought it worth noting that the Farm turned five on June 22. To those of you who've read these "pages" on and off over the years, thanks for keeping me going.

Air

2011-06-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

The image that opens this post shows exactly how difficult it is to break the elements up into tidy little packets, because it illustrates the interpenetration of components like air and water--the composition of clouds.

But the original perspective I wanted to pursue for this series--to borrow shamelessly from Sigmund Freud--is "civilization and its discontents," and the modern human interaction with air points to the constant modern war between need and want.

We love our air, but our desire to regulate its temperature, our inability to keep from spewing crap into it that may be damaging our genes and our general health, and our utter disregard for how we use it in general affects every aspect of our being.

We can imagine living without land, perhaps (although even living in space would involve finding a substitute), but air is right up there with water in the "absolute necessity" column. We can't live without it, but it also seems to be more and more difficult to live with what we're doing to it.

Compound that with natural events, like volcanic eruptions, and we frequently end up trying to breathe an unfortunate soupy concoction of all four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.

At this very moment, in Colorado and New Mexico, citizens are breathing a mixture of smoke, fire retardant chemicals, water used to put out the fires, and dust blown by the wind and the fire into the mix. In other parts of the world, folks are breathing ash from volcanoes in Chile and Eritrea (during a bit of a respite from Icelandic eruptions).

Sometimes the ash in the atmosphere can produce beautiful effects, as it did during yesterday's lunar eclipse, or in the nineteenth century when Krakatoa's reach into northern Europe colored paintings by Edvard Munch. Even as inconvenient as modern travel becomes during eruptive phases, however, volcanic activity rarely contributes significantly to climate change, unlike the persistent effusion of CO2 from human activity.

Our search for alternative sources of energy that don't contribute to the CO2 load actually led us to use air to generate our power. Wind turbines are sprouting like so many daisies (or dandelions, depending on your perspective) all over the world--even here in Texas, which now generates an increasingly significant portion of its electricity from wind, and has the potential for much more.

An article in the Daily Poop today even compared the development of wind power in Texas and in Britain. The likelihood that Brits will soon begin to use much more environmentally friendly energy sources stems in part from the very real threat posed by rising sea levels if global temperatures continue to rise. Add to that the fact that England's fossil fuel prices are significantly higher because, despite abundant sources, costs are rising.

Texas still gets cheap natural gas (well, cheap in the financial sense; nobody can convince me that hydraulic fracturing is safe in the long term because the technology itself stinks--in more ways than one), and will continue to draw electricity from plants fueled with it because Texas itself lives, eats, and sleeps with the oil and gas industry. The state spends a good deal of its time officially denying the reality of climate change, and despite its investment in coastal economics (fishing, oil production, and tourism) it fails to worry about sea levels at all.

When states do wake up and start planning, they often pursue remedies that might in themselves prove unwise. Just last week the New York Times featured an article on what Chicago is doing to prepare for higher temperatures, and noted that they're already thinking about adding more and more air conditioners to buildings being erected--although they also plan green roofs for those same buildings. As Stan Cox and others have pointed out, however, conditioning the air engenders a never-ending cycle; hotter temperatures produce the desire for cooler indoor air, but the heat extracted ends up raising the temperature outside, generating more "need" for air conditioning.

At the core of all this is the perennial issue that I wrote about last week in "Dirt": increasing populations of people spreading out over the land, choosing to live in places that aren't always capable of sustaining them.

For example, in north Texas, the number of reservoirs built to supply an ever-growing demand for water increased by over a hundred between 1960 (when I was living in west Texas) and 2000. Just since I moved here in 1979, another 44 have been constructed, according to John Wier, Historical Chair of the Ft. Worth Branch of the American Society of Civil Engineers. The relationship between these reservoirs and air conditioning is subtle, but the added moisture load contributed by these artificial lakes increases the relative humidity substantially, and makes the air feel hotter and heavier because the cooling effects of sweat in drier air don't work.

While driving across north Texas in 1969 on the way to Pennsylvania, we used a swamp cooler that hung in the window of our VW Squareback to keep us comfy. Nowadays, evaporative coolers don't work around here (although they're highly effective in the California desert), because the humidity is too high. Electric air conditioners succeed in cooling us off in part by extracting moisture from the interior air and--you guessed it--transferring it back outside. It's not difficult to see how the very act of using these appliances contributes to dampening (ahem) the desire to spend much of the summer out of doors. The only advantage to this I can think of is that summers are quieter because kids aren't outside playing--they're inside playing video games in their climate-controlled media rooms.

Once again, the elements collide: land, water, air. It's unfortunate that many folks don't even think about how their daily lives affect the future, and how small choices like raising the thermostat on your A/C a few notches can have a significant effect on climate and energy use.

Over the years we've tried our best to reduce our reliance on refrigerated air by using our attic fans (although one's no longer functioning; it's high on the summer to-do list, along with insulating the attic), not installing central air (we're waiting until we have to upgrade our gas furnace, and will then have a geothermal unit put in), and being really frugal with our use of window units. We only have three, and right now, at 1 pm with the temperature at 90 F, they're still not on because there's a nice breeze blowing through the house and the sun's not coming through the west windows yet.

By 2 or 3 pm, all that will change, the windows will be closed, the shades pulled down, and the doors to this room shut (or curtains pulled across doorways). The unit's thermostat will be set at 82, and I can grade comfortably for the rest of the afternoon. Whenever possible, we open things back up when we go to bed; but if the humidity's too high, we can't sleep, so the A/C in the bedroom stays on all night, powering on and off as the temperature hovers around 80. The rest of the house stays open, and the whole place stays cool through the morning. This works for most of the summer, and on occasion, when the humidity goes below 45%, we can shut it all down and just sweat to keep cool.

When I mention all this to folks I know, they roll their eyes and affirm their belief that conditioned air is a fundamental right (like carrying guns in public places, and driving jacked up pickups) in Texas. But reading Stan Cox's book, Losing Our Cool, might help the more reasonable among us to change their ways, especially since many of the remedies he suggests are simple and effective.

Air is a genuine need; hyper-cooled air, like that in most of the buildings we work in, is not only a luxury, but a character-softening luxury. I wouldn't be surprised if the decline and fall of Western civilization hasn't been engendered by Sesame Street at all, and could instead be laid at the feet of air conditioning.

But that's another rant, and it's getting toward time to shut down the house and crank up the coolant so I can get all those projects graded.

Happy Skywatch Friday to anyone visiting who's managed to make it this far.

Image notes: The lunar eclipse was shot on June 15 by Chris G. and posted on Wikimedia Commons. The color was deeply red in many areas because of the current high volcanic ash content in the atmosphere. The clouds are from my interminable collection, begun when I discovered the nice folks at Skywatch Friday and started contributing on a semi-regular basis.

The Sage of Midlothian

2011-06-12T08:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but shelved it for the Elements series; see the addendum, below, for why I've inserted it now.

The good news is that Tom Dodge now has a website. I'm not sure how long he's had it, but it's about bloody time.

Those folk who read this blog and who live outside of North Texas (and most of my students who live inside of North Texas) may not have heard of Tom Dodge, but I've been an unabashed fan for years.

I first "met" him, and his sonorous Texas twang, in the late '80s (I think) on the local public radio station where he occasionally holds forth on topics that interest him. Many years later I happened upon a copy of his chapbook of translations, A Generation of Leaves: Greek Lyrics of Love and Death at Half Price Books and read them cover to cover in the store, before I snatched up the little book and carried it home--still amazed that this was the same Tom Dodge. After all, as erudite as he sounds on the radio, he comes off as more of a cowboy poet than a philologist.

Not many people anywhere translate ancient Greek poetry any more. I do it in my spare time to keep up my Greek chops, but I have always fancied myself a Classicist at heart despite my meandering academic career. Never in my wildest dreams, therefore, would I have imagined that this denizen of Midlothian, Texas was also a fan of Simonides.

I especially love his rendering of the little Sappho fragment I have my Humanities students translate, using a trot. After they struggle through the process of transmogrifying a literal translation into a poem, I show them numerous other versions from over the centuries, but Dodge's is one of the best:

The moon has faded,
the Pleiades dimmed;
it is midnight,
the watch passes by,
and I sleep alone.

It's comforting for exiles like me to know that we're not stuck in a complete wasteland, and over the years he's helped in my project to learn to love the prairie.

More recently he eased back into my consciousness with his lyrical review of the Library of America's new edition of Kurt Vonnegut's work, Kurt Vonnegut — Novels & Stories 1963-1973.

Lovers of Vonnegut, especially of his early work, will automatically love this book (and buy it, even though we already own the whole oeuvre, just because it's edited by the venerable Sidney Offit), but Dodge's review will undoubtedly attract new readers (if, of course, anybody actually reads the book reviews in the Daily Poop).

Over the years I've taken every opportunity available to get students to read Vonnegut: Player Piano in a course on philosophy of technology, Galápagos in "Technology and Utopia" (although I left it out of my most recent version of the class; I think I'll put it back for the next time I teach the class). If I ever teach a science fiction segment of my ever-popular (ahem) philosophical perspectives class, it'll be hard to choose a single Vonnegut work to include.

Dodge's assessment of Vonnegut's continuing appeal sums up a generation's experience:

So, with Vonnegut and many like-minded others of his G.I. Bill-educated generation gone now, a cultural revolution financed by the dividends of peace seems but a romantic schoolboy’s fantasy. But each time a Vonnegut collection is printed, each time someone quotes from one of his books, the aging schoolboy’s faltering heart races, if but for a moment or two.

So it goes.

Thanks, Mr. Dodge, for the memories. And the poetry.

Addendum: Today's Daily Poop featured another of Dodge's reviews, this one on Roy Blount, Jr.'s Alphabetter Juice: The Joy of Text. In his introductory paragraph, Dodge has this to say about himself:

Full disclosure. I am a philologist. I guess I have known for a long time, as the signs were always there. But nothing in my background pointed me in that direction. I have no relatives who were, no ancestors either, as far I know. No one personally influenced me and I had no role model.

As I was saying . . .

Image credit: Good old Romantic Lawrence Alma-Tadema again; this time it's Sappho and Alcaeus (1881) via Wikimedia Commons.

Dirt

2011-06-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

Many human creation stories start with dirt, with our having come from the earth. The god of the Judaeo-christian tradition makes the first man from Eden's red earth and names him Adam after it. Native American stories from the Southwest see the attachment as more communal in the sense that human beings as a whole emerge from under the ground, making the earth a literal home. The small depression called a sipapu in Basketmaker pit houses and their descendents, Pueblo kivas, symbolizes this emergence; and the houses themselves are partly dug into the ground, providing a physical connection between earth and sky. At any rate, this is my excuse for starting with earth, rather than air, in this series of (be)musings.

In the modern world, connections with the land seem to have taken on the cloak of commerce. The preoccupation with "property values" has little to do with anything but finances--nobody's really talking about moral value. Around here, a common practice after the tax bill comes is to refute it, and the newspaper always includes advice on how to challenge your home's "value" on the tax rolls. Never mind its worth to one's family, and to life and memory. But this makes a certain amount of sense in a world where housing has more to do with status and fad than with the idea of home, the art of architecture, and the building of stable, sustainable communities.

When white folk decided that manifest destiny decreed ocean to ocean occupation of what became the United States, we took over other peoples' homes, evicting them from their property, and imposing an alien culture on land that had been sparsely but deeply occupied for thousands of years. And then we began building in places that most sensible natives wouldn't have chosen or, if they did, they would have been acutely aware of the danger of doing so and built accordingly. So upstart Europeans decided that they liked living by rivers, on bluffs overlooking the sea, in balmy climates, and other spots where nature periodically unleashes catastrophe in the form of floods, earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, tornadoes, and the like.

Some people try to mitigate the effects of natural weather extremes by building houses on stilts, or by creating tornado shelters, but many more don't. Some accept the possibility of disaster as part of the cost of living along the Mississippi or in the earthquake-prone regions of California, or along the Gulf coast, but many more seem shocked when inevitable natural processes finally catch up with them.

Sometimes we can prevent disasters by building and planning wisely, but more frequently, it seems, desire gets the better of us, and we build unwisely, we over-graze, over-build, over-plant, or otherwise abandon common sense for reasons of ignorance or general lack of wisdom.

In west Texas this year, the juniper forests that had grown up over former ranch land (where cattle and selective burning had kept the problems at bay for generations) exploded into wildfires that destroyed thousands of acres, and hundreds of homes. The desire for shade in a hot climate meant that the well-adapted junipers were cultivated and encouraged; few seem to have paid attention to the chemical properties of juniper species. As one article on fire prevention in Nevada notes, "Firefighters often refer to ornamental junipers as little green gas cans."

In much of Texas, prairie grasslands have been replaced by the heat- and drought- tolerant junipers, and in some areas have been left ungrazed in order to conserve the land. However, as land gets sold off and parceled out to developers, fewer preventive measures are taken, and people end up living in a tinderbox.

Fire-climax vegetation such as juniper, chaparral, and pitch pine has to be carefully managed if people are to live on or near it--but human beings cling stubbornly to the notion that they can build any damned place they want to, only to weep at the loss when the inevitable overtakes them.

There are, in fact, few places that don't come with some kind of potential disaster attached. But some places practically beg for catastrophe because they're built up in areas that just aren't suitable for huge populations, such as Los Angeles--laid out as it is on its net of earthquake fault lines and with little in the way of water resources--or seaside communities with nuclear power plants in eastern Japan, or cities in Florida built on drained everglades and lying in the path of frequent hurricanes. Smaller populations or wiser fuel sources might well mitigate some disasters, but we insist on being stupid and ignoring probability.

In cultures where earth is seen as sacred, and viewed as the mother of us all, populations have traditionally remained small and people tend to know their environments much more intimately than the city- and suburb-bound throngs of Americans that pile up in cities. I actually don't have that much against cities (because concentrating the humans in smaller areas leaves more land open), except when they're inappropriately located. Cities might also have a deterrent effect on some kinds of weather (such as tornadoes), and localize damage rather than spreading it out over large areas as the recent tornado cluster in Joplin, Missouri did. The notion that tornadoes don't hit big cities is based on bad understanding of what tornadoes do (as this list of myths about these storms form The Tornado Project indicates), but urban sprawl does mean that more populated areas are subject to potential damage from big storms.

In my last post, I proposed a series of discursions on earth, air, fire, and water--but realized almost as soon as I started taking notes that one really can't consider any of these ancient "elements" in isolation from one or more of the others. Add in the related concepts of heat, drought, wetness, and cold (plus aether, the quintessence), and the whole project gets even more complicated.

Fortunately for us all, Richard Hamblyn has written a book, Terra: Tales of the Earth, Four Events that Changed the World, a much more ambitious exploration of the formative effects of natural disasters on modern conceptions of such things. The link is to Jonathan Keats's October 2009 review in the London Telegraph, which itself provides some interesting context.

So I'll continue my elemental meanderings, but don't expect anything too profound given the end-of-quarter load, the onset of summer home-improvement efforts, and my own ongoing struggle to cope with dirt. Meanwhile, I'm off to a bookshop to see if I can snag a copy of Hamblyn's book.

Image notes: This is my cheesy effort to link this post to Skywatch Friday, which I visit all too infrequently these days, but is a wonderful place to see skies from all over theworld. The photo was taken in 2004 in the Owens Valley. The dirt road seemed an appropriate illustration for the topic, but the sky dominates--as it usually does in the Valley. Just another example of how hard it is to separate the elements. The four elements representation is from Wikipedia, because I was too lazy to draw one myself.

Inspiration Nation

2011-05-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

It all started with a romp through my blog roll, trying to catch up on what other folks were doing. I tried to go through the list again this morning, to find out where I'd gotten the link, but couldn't find it. So the credit ends up going to Stan Cox himself, whose book Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) opened up yet another path of inquiry for The Farm.

I've actually dealt, obliquely, with the topic of air conditioning (or the lack thereof) on this blog in the past (there are some eleven posts that mention it; use the search field if you're interested). Always interested in folks who share my concerns, I bought the book for the iPad. Before I'd finished the first chapter, I'd decided on a new series of posts about civilization and its discontents, roughly organized around the four ancient elements: air, earth, fire, and water.

Before I begin the musings, however, I wanted to acknowledge the many bloggers and other writers whose work continues to fuel my own, and who provide me with philosophical support. Some of these, like Wendell Berry and Herrick Kimball are grounded in the Christian agrarian traditions associated so closely these days--accurately or not--with our Founding Fathers (only some of whom were farmers). I've been reading Berry for twenty-five years and make sure I buy his books in hard cover as much as possible because they get re-read frequently. He's decidedly not fond of digital technologies, so eschews the blogosphere--but that's fine with me. Kimball, however, whom I've only recently discovered, has a whole slew of blogs. My favorites of these are The Deliberate Agrarian and Agrarian Nation (which inspired the title of this post).

Reading Kimball's most recent articles on Agrarian Nation sent me back to the iPad, because one of the first things I did when I got it was to download all the old-timey cookery books and home-keeping volumes offered in the Free section (through Project Gutenberg). These include luscious stuff like Things Mother Used to Make: A Collection of Old Time Recipes , Some Nearly One Hundred Years Old and Never Published Before (1914); The Healthy Life Cook Book (second edition) by Florence Daniel (1915); Culture and Cooking, or Art in the Kitchen by Catherine Owen (1881)--and more. No doubt I'll be able to scare up even more on Free Books, but haven't yet taken the time, probably because I'm too busy reading interesting blogs where other people introduce me to even more old stuff.

I also read a considerable amount of material on Peak Oil (The Oil Drum, ASPO), including Sharon Astyk's blogs (Casaubon's Book and The Chatelaine's Keys) and books (Depletion and Abundance, A Nation of Farmers). The combination of technical discussion on what I really think is going to happen at some point in the not-too-distant, perhaps-even-before-I-die future, and Astyk's comments and advice (as well as the stuff she links to) is almost enough to keep me busy all of my waking life. Unlike Berry and Kimball (as much as I admire their work), Astyk's perspective resonates with me because she's Jewish, a woman, and unerringly practical.

While I'm on the topic of practical advice, I would be grievously remiss were I not to mention Ruth Stout (just Google her), and Helen and Scott Nearing. They are all, alas, dead now, but their legacies live on thanks to the digital universe--at least until the grid goes down.

No paean to self-reliant agrarianism would be complete without mention of The Mother Earth News and the Whole Earth Catalog, both mainstays of my early leanings in this direction. You can now get almost the entire run of TMEN on CD (1970-2010), cheap (60 bucks). Somebody on eBay probably has the whole thing in paper. In an unpublished short story I wrote a few months ago, an entire community manages to survive after an EMP because somebody had squirreled away all her back issues.

Many years ago, in a graduate class called (I think) "The Future As Present," we were asked to give an oral "book report" on a publication we considered essential. One of my fellow students almost caused our instructor to enter a monastery (or at least to retire early) when she reviewed David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries. I didn't help matters when I chose the Whole Earth Catalog. The inspiration of this particular choice was a sort of vision of having a copy of the WEC on hand when the apocalypse came. See? I was thinking ahead even twenty some-odd years ago.

I'm looking forward to looking outward for a while. I've been so internally focused on my own discontent for far too long. And the weather has been great, my garden is beginning to flourish, and I'm getting way too comfortable. The first essay, on Air, will show up as soon as I finish Stan Cox's book and get my notes organized. Meanwhile, I heartily recommend his book, and the stuff I've linked above.

Image credit: I couldn't resist a bit of artistic nostalgia here. After searching on the Commons for historic agriculture photos, I found one of Carl Larson's sweet paintings of farming in Sweden.

Nostoi: Journeys Home

2011-05-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

Well, just because I've started a concerted effort to become a prairie-loving homesteader in north Texas doesn't mean I've stopped longing for eastern California. In fact, a double-whammy caught me off guard a few weeks ago, when my humanities class focused on Homer's Odyssey and I received a group of photos from my uncle. The latter were taken on his recent trip with my aunt, my cousin, and her new husband to the Owens Valley. They hit many of our old haunts, including the Department of Water and Power plant at Cottonwood, and the photos included shots of the plant and of the old house that had served as home ground for travelling children and grandchildren until my grandfather died in 1959.

The house, alas, has been severely remodeled and no longer looks anything like what I remember. In the old days, several families lived in the vicinity, in city-owned bungalows, with access to horse pasture, an orchard, walnut trees, and blackberries. My grandparents' house had a pantry and a back sleeping porch, an old wind-up telephone, and a screened-in front porch with an army cot under which a box of toys was stashed awaiting whatever visiting child wanted to play with them.

I still bear a scar in my eyebrow from tearing through the house from the front porch to the kitchen, where I ran headlong into the open oven door and got a gash that probably earned me a helping of my grandmother's Little Horse cookies (made with a press that I've since inherited).

All that's gone now: no horses, no orchard, no porch. No workshop where my grandfather kept his tools and puttered around. He had the infamous Marilyn Monroe-on-red-silk pin-up calendar, but since we weren't allowed in the workshop, we could only see it by peeking into the window. I do, however, still have the cookie recipe, and will make an effort to reproduce it for Owl's Cabinet when I've got a free moment.

I've often wanted to make this trip myself, but have always lacked the nerve; and now I'm glad I didn't cross the aqueduct and brave the short drive up to the house. I'd probably have cried for days. I'm also glad that my uncle actually visited the spot and did the dirty work--so I won't wonder about it any more, and can just hang on to a child's charmed memory.

As if the photos weren't enough, my class session on the Aegean cultures of the Bronze Age featured some consideration of the homecoming theme in the Odyssey--the nostos, or journey home. When I checked my Liddel and Scott for some elaboration (from nosteo, to come home or return), I discovered that it also means, when applied to food, abundant, nutritious, wholesome.

So nostalgia, the ailment to which I have become so prone, unites nostos with algos (pain), to create a word that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, connotes not just longing, but a "form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one's home or country." The literal translation would be home-sickness, but I tend not to see the condition quite so negatively. Because it encourages memory (and is often generated by memory), nostalgia can be somewhat energizing. More than once, after musing over old photographs, or re-reading letters from my parents or grandparents, I've sat down to write, often taking up projects I'd abandoned for some time. Since much of what I write comes from or is set in the old turf, the act of recovering memory can transport me there and reignite creative embers.

I often remark about the serendipitous nature of research, and simply looking up the Greek origins of nostos led me to a connection I'd never made before, but is really foundational to notions of home and comfort: food. Many of my childhood memories are grounded, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, in kitchen aromas and favorite meals. The aforementioned "Little Horse" cookies were frequently included in care packages, lovingly tucked into old coffee tins by my grandmother, and sent to Taiwan for Christmases and birthdays. Pies, made from blackberries freshly picked from the brambles behind the Cottonwood house, and applesauce cake (with its "secret" ingredient of chocolate powder; the original recipe is here) were staples of family gatherings and perennial choices for comfort food among several generations of children. The connection between fragrance and memory is never as clear as when it's churned up in the kitchen.

True melancholia, the debilitating depression that seems to plague so many (if we can believe the pharmaceutical ads), is undoubtedly not at all productive. But I have found that missing someplace meaningful, while saddening in some sense, is also therapeutic because it juxtaposes past with present and can remind us of those parts of the past that have made us who we are. I don't mean to belittle true depression or make light of those who do suffer; but I often wonder if we're so conditioned to seek happiness (whatever that is!) at all costs, and to feel like failures if we're not "up" and "positive" all the time.

It's not that we should wallow in occasional home-sickness, but I do think that we might well benefit from letting our minds wander along old paths more frequently--perhaps to explore both senses of nostos: of returning, but also of nourishing and sustaining. Home, even when we can return only in memory (and even if it takes us ten years to get there), is still restorative, as long as we don't choose to get lost on a path and forget where we are now.

Not long ago, I came across a book by Norman Fischer, Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls (New York: Free Press, 2008). It's a Zen-ish take on the idea of the homeward journey and, although I am decidedly not a fan of self-help books, I found his essays interesting. I've used some of his comments in my discussions with students of the relationships between ancient literature and modern life, and the notion of coming home to oneself seems to resonate with them.

Another recent acquisition, Robin Lane Fox's Travelling Heroes in the Epic Age of Homer (New York: Vintage Books, 2008) demonstrates how potent and how prevalent the heroic journey is, not just in the West, but in the East as well. Journeys, and especially nostoi, seem to be part of the literary landscape of most cultures. But in an era when "travelling" seems to connote pleasure cruises on gigantic floating hotels or trips to theme parks, voyages of discovery like those undertaken in antiquity appear to be diminishing.

Our so-called "globalization" far more closely resembles a kind of entropy, where the world is blurring into a homogenous blob of sameness. Fewer and fewer of my students travel anywhere (some have never been out of town, much less out of state), and the curiosity that used to drive adventure seems to be dwindling by the second. I'm not sure what all this means, but one possible outcome is that few of this generation's survivors will every have to make a journey home, because they'll never have left.

Image credit: One of many Victorian paintings dealing with Odysseus and his long voyage: John William Waterhouse's Odysseus and the Sirens (1891), via Wikimedia Commons.

Skywatch Friday: Learning to Love the Prairie

2011-04-22T06:38:00.000-07:00

I spend far too much on this blog whingeing about my "exile" in north Texas, and longing for the desert. At my age, and having made choices earlier in my life that brought me here, you'd think I'd have resigned myself to my fate and begun to make peace with the place in which I will probably breathe my last--even if that happens (as I hope) some distance into the future.

Years ago, when I was involved to some small extent in the local environmental movement, and volunteering regularly at the Heard Museum down the road from where I now live, I was somewhat more enamored of blackland prairie. Since those days, now a quarter of a century past, I've lived at the upper end of the prairie (in Chicago) where I got a taste of city life on a really big natural lake, and then lived in a more politically energizing part of the Dallas area before being chased north by the advancement of mega-houses and the destruction of the tolerable parts of the city that I could afford to live in.

We settled in McKinney over ten years ago, attracted by the historic district covenants that prohibit tearing down old houses to build new monstrosities. We found an old prairie-craftsman on a bit of land, where we've managed to build a little organic sanctuary in the midst of a pesticide-loving populace. The city tries to foster green-ness, but the neighbors all use loud gas-spewing mowers and leaf blowers, and dowse their lawns with chemicals. I think things might be getting better, but I'm too busy hiding out to notice.

My Earth Day resolution this year is to start doing what I can to preserve this wonderful old house and its half acre, and in doing so to renew my earlier efforts to come to terms with living here. I'm going to go back to the Heard, with an eye toward once again volunteering there when I reduce my course load in a few years, and begin my emeritus career. I have a feeling that it'll be considerably easier to recover my affection when I'm not driving through rush-hour traffic and dealing with folks who don't like my adherence to the speed limit.

It's time, after spending thirty years in the Midwest, to develop a bit of topophilia for the place I chose (at least in part) for child-rearing. The children themselves probably won't end up with as much love for their auld sod as I did for mine (they, in fact, harbor the same affection for the Eastern California desert as I do). But if I have to live here, it's about time I stopped regretting that fact and started to embrace the job of home-keeping in earnest.

Last week, after I'd mowed the back lawn (which was by then practically a meadow), I sat back to enjoy my handiwork and noticed how beautiful it all looked: no uniformly green monoculture in this yard. Instead, I'd trimmed down a variety of grass and "weeds" that formed small variegated mounds, closely-spaced enough to serve as an aromatic carpet just the right size for romping dogs. The color variations reminded me of the subtle hues one can see in the desert, that only a true lover can spot. My eyes, it seems, have adjusted to the "new" locale--much as the children do in Ursula Le Guin's short story about adaptation in place, "The Eye Altering."

Chairs under a tree in front of the Carbon Sink

When I'd finished mowing, I placed a couple of chairs under one of the pecan trees next to the Carbon Sink, and added a small table for holding coffee, after I'd been chased away from my usual spot by a gaggle of pooping Cedar Waxwings. The new seating area offered me an entirely different perspective, from where I enjoyed the chiaroscuro effect of sun alternating with shadow, emphasizing one area, then another. The wild gladioli, which I've let naturalize and cover more of the yard every year, are just past their prime, but still lovely to look at with their vibrant fuchsia blossoms. They form a short wall, beyond which lies the potager. In another month I'll mow them down to extend the produce-garden, salvaging the disturbed bulbs and replanting them in borders and in other spots where they might do well and add some welcome color next spring.

Wild gladiolus wall in front of the herb and veg garden

As I type this today I'm reminded of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Survivors," in which an alien being and the re-creation of his dead wife live on a green patch of ground on an otherwise-devastated planet. There are times when I feel a bit like that, living on my own little island of sanity in a world that seems to be going a bit mad. I lack the energy to fight the good fight any more, but do find some solace in being able to keep this place a little wild, with small reminders of what used to be here--the occasional basketflower, a few native grasses, and a number of gifts from birds who propagate all manner of seeds--sometimes in the middle of the book I'm reading.

The birdbath in the potager, at sunrise

This week the air is redolent of sultry privet, sweet catalpa, pervasive honeysuckle, and even some of the irises left in bloom. The nandina will follow, along with roses, lavender, and rosemary as they begin to blossom. The promise is all here, with burgeoning vegetables and ripening figs. We're occasionally reminded, though, that we enjoy our bounty at nature's whim; along with all this fortune come the wildfires in the west, and the ever-present, more local threat of tornadoes.

I'll try to remember to revisit this post in another year, to see if I've been at all successful in fulfilling any part of my resolution. In the meantime I can certainly enjoy the good weather, the blooming garden, the approaching figs, and the promise of a decent harvest. At least I managed to get the garden in early this year, so it stands some chance of settling in and producing before the relentless north Texas heat replaces the balmy mornings we're enjoying for this year's Earth Week. But today, in the still-cool morning, I find it easier to love the prairie. Sometimes, I guess, all it takes is a bit of reflection on one's good fortune to make the cranky world go away for a while.

Image notes: all photos were taken in the garden with the Nikon D80. This year's Earth Day/Skywatch Friday shot was taken under the pecan tree, fortunately (for these purposes) empty of Cedar Waxwings--else there'd have probably been a blob in the middle of the picture.

Be Here Now

2011-04-15T07:49:00.000-07:00

Most of my musings over the last few weeks have taken place among friends and colleagues, all of whom are noticing the rapid passage of time and tide. I was beginning to think that I was alone in lamenting the loss of what now seem like copious amounts of free time--moments that used to allow me to post more than once (on more than one blog) per month, and when I used to be able to sit in the garden and simply enjoy a few minutes of pleasant lethargy, watching butterflies alight on blossoms, raptors gliding aloft, squirrels pilfering seed from the bird feeders, and "puppies" lounging in the shade after a hard romp--without feeling guilty about not doing something more "productive." But others report feeling the same way, as if we've lost something important.

One reason I'm not posting much these days is that I don't have anything particularly helpful to add to political discussions going on in Washington and/or in Austin. Mostly they're not really discussions at all--more like bickering and spouting. I'm quite simply tired of it all, and thoroughly disgusted that people of all flavors seem to have lost any notion of common sense, common purpose, or common good. I'm too dispirited to rant; I lack the energy necessary to compile cogent arguments in favor of anything. I simply delete pleas that appear in my mailbox to contribute to any conversations, even those from groups like No Labels that are actually trying to do something to ameliorate the situation.

I've turned my efforts toward the tiny things I can actually do, like put together more interesting discussion topics for students in hopes that at some point in their lives they will become concerned about some of the big questions I've been pondering most of my life. I've actually put in a garden this year, too, with some vegetables (eggplant, beans, squash) in addition to the usual tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. I expanded the portion of the back quarter acre devoted to food crops, with plans for further expansion for fall plantings in the now-trimmed Carbon Sink. The former "accidental garden" has been shorn of some of its volunteers, and the wood will be harvested for projects and mulch.

As the puppies age (they're now seven, officially "senior" according to our vets), they're beginning to slow down, too. Woody now has arthritis in his hips, which recently required doses of NSAIDs and the addition of very expensive supplements for the rest of his life. So far Arlo is doing fine, but because he's long and low, we anticipate back problems for him in future. The three of us get out into the garden to "work" more--I with the planting and digging, they with the squirrel-chasing and protecting me from dangerous babies strolling by--if I don't write. What free time I actually find seems now to be spent out of doors, except when I'm driven in by loud music or noisy lawn equipment.

I guess this is really what's going on: a change in priorities. Whereas during the last four years of messing about in the blogosphere and thinking on digital paper I've had the chance to locate my philosophical core (sustainable economies), I appear lately to have reached a plateau. I don't seem to need to get it all written down, although I still appreciate having recorded some of what's been going on and being able to go back and see where I've been. As life winds down, though, and memory gets less and less reliable, priorities seem to be shifting to the immediate: what's happening this week, today, now.

The irony involved here is that for years I've practically berated my students for not thinking past the moment, for not planning ahead, for not investing in the future. They're so totally involved in the local, personal, and immediate, that they develop only vague notions of what all their hard work is leading toward. Instead, the songs playing on the iPod, the phone call or text message interrupting my class, the inevitable call to the restroom after consumption of an energy drink--all these take precedence over everything else.

Perhaps the common ground between the old and the young lies here: in the realization that the moment really does count. That we can't spend all of our time planning for the future or yearning for the past.

My sweet, gruff, funny brother-in-law, who spent several years waiting for a heart transplant, died this last weekend, only a couple of years after he'd received his new heart. He was only sixty-six, but in the last fifteen years he seems to have packed in more living than most of us achieve in much longer lifetimes. I don't think he spent much time planning very far beyond the next day or two, and over the years I've watched him savor life with abject appreciation for what time he'd been given.

I think, in the end, I'd rather spend my time in the garden, savoring days like this one, clear and scrubbed clean by last night's storms, than keep fussing over things I can't do a rutting thing about. Thanks for the lesson, Dennis. We will all miss you.

Image notes: this is a photo I took with the "wet" Nikon during one of our last trips to California by car, in 1999. On our way back from Porterville, we took the Death Valley Road out of Big Pine and headed back east. While remembering Dennis this week, I thought about this trip because he had lived with my sister-in-law (who has managed several refuges for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) near Porterville, and they had met in Pahrump, Nevada, not far from Death Valley. It seemed like a fitting shot, both for the topic, and for Skywatch Friday.

The Precept of the Teacher

2011-04-07T13:24:00.001-07:00

The other day, during a Library Committee meeting, one of my colleagues used what's probably an old saw by now (the toilet paper analogy) to characterize the way time works on old folk: the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes. The perceived phenomenon of the increasingly rapid passage of time has been weighing on my mind much of late, because there never seems to be sufficient time for getting done what I'd like to.

So I haven't posted on any blog in nearly a month, and am seriously thinking of bundling everything except the Parliament back under the aegis of the Farm so that I don't feel so much pressure to compartmentalize my musings. I'll probably end up using the others as an archive and--at least until I'm not teaching as much--restrict my efforts to the original focus.

A new quarter has started, with a fresh batch of students (the one class of mostly "old hands" doesn't meet until Friday), along with yet another massive effort to keep them engaged. Oddly enough, my two 8 am classes are, so far, the most enthusiastic and vocal, making it easier for me to muster the energy to embrace the educational cheerleader roll my job requires even when--as is the case on Wednesday mornings--I've only left campus at 10 pm the night before.

For many years my pedagogical philosophy has involved emphasizing common ground as a means of connecting with my students. I use translation as a model for teaching, so finding out what my students know that I know (and vice versa) is part of my engagement strategy. But as I told them yesterday, it's now easier for people of their generation to connect across cultures and continents than it is for my generation to connect with theirs.

The advent of social networking media has created a web of interaction among young adults who share interests in popular culture that transcends national boundaries. But because many in my Boomer cohort find it extremely difficult (if not downright impossible) to embrace various aspects of that culture, the gap can often broaden into an unbridgable crevasse. In my case, unless I've got a class full of science fiction geeks or Miyazaki fans, I have to work really hard to locate areas of common interest and knowledge. They just don't know what I know--and not all that many of them really want to.

It does help that we're at least all designers, and that I know some stuff that they will eventually find helpful. They seem to appreciate my sense of humor, and my acknowledgment of my own shortcomings, but keeping them with me for the entire eleven weeks gets harder and harder every quarter. It seems to me that at this point in my career I shouldn't have to work quite so hard, and I should have more time to just enjoy getting old. Shouldn't I be resting, Buddha-like, on my laurels or something?

And this is probably where the time-perception problem originates. Between every quarter I now spend a considerable amount of time going over old lesson plans and presentations to freshen them up and integrate new material I've discovered that looks promising. Education, as I've often preached, is an ongoing process; so if I keep learning stuff, chances are I'll be able to keep the small parcel of common ground from eroding completely in a world that seems to share my values less and less.

A footnote of sorts: As I was looking for an image to illustrate this post, I typed a few keywords into Wikimedia Commons, starting with "crevasse" but ending up with "teacher." The latter led me on an interesting quest to locate the painter whose work I used. Not realizing initially that "Nicholas Roerich" was the anglicized name of the Russian painter Nikolai Konstantinovich Roreicha, I spent some time transliterating his Russian name from Cyrillic into Roman letters and looking for some information on him. This took longer than it should have, but I was rather well rewarded in the end. Roerich died the year I was born, this was his final painting, and I'd never heard of him. However, the discovery does seem particularly fortuitous, given the focus of this post.

According to the biography on the Nicholas Roerich Museum page, the painter "constantly sought to connect ethical problems with scientific knowledge of the surrounding world. . . It was Roerich's gift that these 'connections' appeared so natural to him and presented themselves in all life's manifestations. And it was this talent for synthesis, which he admired in others and encouraged in the young, that enabled him to correlate the subjective with the objective, the philosophical with the scientific, Eastern wisdom with Western knowledge, and to build bridges of understanding between such apparent contradictions."

On the Wikimedia Commons page from whence I pinched the image, the title of the painting is listed as "The Precept of the Teacher," although the museum page calls it "The Command of the Master." "Command" doesn't make much sense to me, but since I don't know much Russian, I'm not in a position to question either translation. But I like "precept" better than "command," and "teacher" better than "master." By using "precept" in the title of the post, I'm calling on its connotation of a "guiding principle"--in this case, nature. Roerich clearly possessed the same appreciation for montane landscapes that I do, and I find the image of the solitary teacher atop a peak to be especially evocative.

In the end, another lesson emerges. As I continue to lament the evident loss of curiosity among a growing number of students, the process of locating this image, and eventually discovering this artist, reaffirmed my assertion that not only does philosophy begin in wonder, but so does creativity.

Spring At Last

2011-03-25T05:29:00.000-07:00

March Madness has nothing to do with basketball in this household. While I relish the beginning of spring and enjoy a brief respite between frigid cold and oppressive heat, my work-life becomes a morass of grading and preparation marked by an even briefer "break" between quarters.

Things are worse this year, because winter's "gift" of snow days has left me with two classes for which I had to arrange an alternative meeting date, and for which some material couldn't be made up. My poor Intro to Humanities class was good humored (especially when I forgot that I'd arranged to meet them at the Dallas Museum of Art last Sunday to make up for the extra snow day), but a bit dazed by our last meeting. I tried to smooth things over with sushi and other nibbles as we performed a modified Popul Vuh and they showed off their projects for the quarter. But now I have to revise the next version of the class to avoid any potential confusion, especially since it's an eight o'clocker on Monday mornings. At least this next class will begin when we're well into Spring's promise, and (barring really weird conditions) won't have to worry about snow.

The universe is helping. Once again we got a spectacular heavenly display, this time at the equinox when we enjoyed a "super" perigee moon. Beloved Spouse and I snapped on the telephoto lens and set the tripod up in several locations, hoping to get a decent shot. The next morning (on the equinox itself) the moon was still visible, but it had gone cloudy so I couldn't get a dawn version. The opening shot for this post was one of the first I took, hand-held, and thus rather fuzzy. But I liked the effect of the tree "cradling" the rising moon. By the time we got the one below, the clouds were gone and we had the camera on a tripod. I'm pretty sure the Beloved Spouse took this one.

And then, of course, the House Clock performed on schedule, as the sun rose for the first time this year through the east window of the dining room, spilling sun on everything. A couple of days later I noticed another potential feature tied to the equinox: the possibility that the sun reaches from the front (glass) door to the back of the house for the first time on the first day of Spring. I'll have to wait a year to test it, but on the 22nd I noticed a straight line of sunlight. It may have appeared earlier, but I just didn't notice.

At any rate, the photos provided me with my first Skywatch Friday entry in weeks. And since I'll undoubtedly be out of commission next week, this may be it for another fortnight. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Geology Lessons

2011-03-12T11:33:00.000-08:00

The enormous, near-apocalyptic temblor off the coast of Honshu would have been surprisingly tame, had it not been for the tsunami. The main reason for the comparative lack of architectural damage from the earthquake itself has to do with lessons the Japanese had learned well from history.

The great Tokyo earthquake of 1923 nearly flattened the city, with a notable exception to the general devastation: Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel. It stood intact, surrounded by the debris of neighboring structures.

Since 1995's Great Hanshin earthquake in Kobe, the Japanese have implemented building codes and disaster plans designed to mitigate the inevitable destruction associated with the different kinds of earthquakes to which Japan is subject. The Kobe quake took place near a large population center, under the island itself, rather than offshore, so it didn't have to cope with a tsunami. Still, it wasn't as prepared as it could have been, and the human and economic impact was immense.

This week's quake was different, and the map below indicates why. It occurred along a subduction zone in relatively shallow water, not far from the coast: a recipe for large-scale tsunami impact. The numerous aftershocks haven't helped. I counted over 30 of magnitude 6 or higher on my iPad earthquake app--so many, in fact, that the big one had already dropped off the list. The pushpins on the map formed a huge, solid blob because the graphics weren't designed to depict hundreds of earthquakes. The map below is clearer, and if you click on it and then enlarge it, you can really see the enormity of an event that really hasn't stopped yet.

Having lived in four major earthquake zones (Japan, Taiwan, the Owens River Valley, and southern California), I'm no stranger to the earthquake experience. Even when small ones occur in unlikely places (such as Pennsylvania and Dallas), I sense them early and seem like a prophet to those around me (or a complete nut; take your pick). My interest in geology may, in fact, have stemmed from wondering about what caused it all.

But the aftermaths are also indicative of how human beings respond to disasters when they live in areas prone to them. There are few places on the planet that aren't subject to some dangerous phenomenon or other. Here in North Texas, we're on the lower fringe of Tornado Alley (which seems to be widening as the climate changes), and always teetering on the brink of drought. Hurricanes, floods, katabatic winds, wildfires, avalanches, and all manner of catastrophic events occur in places that might be safe from earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis--although many are located within areas with a wide variety of potential natural disasters to withstand.

How we live when faced with these consequences is where clear-thinking and lessons from history should prevail when making choices. Sometimes what seems to be a good idea at the time turns out to be problematic, as with Japan's increasing reliance on nuclear power. In order to reduce its dependence on oil, the country has chosen to bet on nukes. Now, to me this sounds absolutely crackers, given the location of the island: at the edge of a plate boundary subject to ten centimeters of movement in a year. Sure enough, the Guardian is reporting today that the Japanese nuclear industry has barely dodged a bullet at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, and avoided a meltdown. At least for the time being.

In 1872, what may have been California's worst earthquake in recorded history (around the same magnitude as the one in San Francisco in 1906) occurred along the fault line over which I was born. The valley's population then only numbered about 300, and twenty seven of them died. They're buried in a monument just outside of town. The land slipped down on the eastern segment of the fault, all the way up to Big Pine. On one of my last trips there before my father died, he pointed out the spot on the family's old property where a spring opened up as a result of the quake. (I love the lurid headlines at left; a sign of things to come in the Murdock era of tabloid journalism.)

The adobe structure in the center crumbled, leaving only its roof.

The frame house survived intact, losing only the flimsy shed attached.

The lesson from this rather small-scale local event (when compared, at least, with what Japan is going through today) was that adobe houses don't withstand earthquakes; only the frame houses survived. From then on, frame-built buildings took the place of adobe, which might be fine for fault-free Arizona and New Mexico, but clearly not the material of choice here.

On the other hand, the frame houses in Japan have never done well, probably because the quakes are different, the earthquakes bigger, the populations larger. But the effort to earthquake-proof buildings in Japan is focused on tall structures in business districts. Japan's real success has been in disaster-proofing its citizens, with drills and signs to direct them away from danger when possible. We can probably thank these measures for keeping the death toll down, even though it will probably keep climbing for a while.

I can't help but think that we'll never get it right if we don't stop pretending that our huge footprint on the planet doesn't make disasters worse. If we didn't rely so heavily on oil refineries, nuclear plants, and giant skyscrapers, and if we were spread about more wisely, might we not prevent much of the unnecessary suffering that attends our choices to live where danger is part of the landscape? If we didn't have huge energy grids susceptable to shutdowns due to weather or attack, wouldn't our energy needs be met more efficiently, without the potential for massive impact? If we weren't so very in love with using internal combustion engines to move us around unnecessarily long distances at ridiculous speeds, couldn't we vastly reduce the amount of dirty crap we spew into the air that, in turn, seems to be intensifying natural disasters?

Thinking smaller seems to make much more sense today than ever: more local food and energy sources, fewer commuter miles, more responsive local economies. I don't think for a minute that we'll ever decide to address any of these issues in any meaningful way, but when the latest disaster news takes over the wires, I can't help but long for a more thoughtful populace, and wiser political leadership.

Image credits: An old postcard view of the Imperial Hotel opens the post; it and the photo of the earthquake aftermath are from Wikimedia Commons. The map of what's now being called the Sendai Earthquake also comes from Wikimedia Commons. The shots of damage from the Lone Pine earthquake come from Susan Hough's report report on the event, "Owens Valley: Then and Now" on the USGS Pasadena pages.

Winter Weirding

2011-02-24T07:07:00.000-08:00

Deep winter now feels like spring, and our recent spate of very cold weather makes the current respite all the more pleasurable. It's 64 F now, with a light rain, and the weekend temperature is expected to reach the high 70s. The cold-weather cleanup has begun in earnest.

Our eight-year-old chest freezer went to its eternal rest (it was in an unheated shed), so we went shopping last Sunday for a small (12.1 cu. ft.) upright that's now in the laundry room on the back porch. We want to be able to stock up on pastured meat when the farmers markets reopen, and this one's half again as big as the old one. It does block part of a window, but we moved a bookshelf in front of another window--which will allow me to spy less obtrusively on birds bathing just outside. Yesterday I caught a flock of cedar waxwings having a grand old time splashing out all the water, but had to shoot through the window and the screen in front of my desk.

Waxwings après le bain

I can't refill the birdbath with the hose yet, because the cold also did a number on the water line. Beloved Spouse came home one day to a spraying fountain behind the washer, and had to spend a fair amount of time cleaning up the wet after he'd shut off the valve. Fortunately, the broken pipe seems to be just the one leading out, so we haven't had to stop doing laundry. Our favorite plumber will be called in soon to check out the lines under the house and to effect repairs as necessary. I'm particularly fond of these folks because they do one of the dirtiest jobs there is, but they do it efficiently and with good humor. I've never understood why people complain about how much it costs to have that sort of work done, when none of them would be willing to do it themselves, even if they knew how.

The plumbing issue is rather timely, actually, because we're about to start talking about poop in my utopia class. I was inspired to include the discussion by an article in the Penn Gazette last month about this year's summer reading project for incoming freshmen, Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (Metropolitan Books, 2008).

Utopians, after all, seldom talk about the nasty bits associated with human life, so I made sure to include composting toilets in More News From Nowhere. But discussing these matters gets to the heart of issues that need to be addressed in the real world: use of water, treatment of waste, who has to take care of it all, etc. Excrement is also a dandy metaphor for all manner of human excess, as Ursula LeGuin uses it in her "ambiguous utopia," The Dispossessed.

The discussion in a couple of weeks should be interesting, and I'll probably have more to spout on the subject then. For now, however, I've sorted through the various winter sky shots I've managed to take over the last couple of weeks. These could be the last of the leafless-tree-against-the-sky photos I get until next winter, because the elm next door is already budding. Pear blossoms, pecan catkins, and wisteria blooms can't be far behind.

The opening shot gets the moon just before full. The other two are evening and morning images carefully framed to miss the ubiquitous power lines. Happy Skywatch Friday, all.

How to Make a Revolution

2011-02-11T13:07:00.000-08:00

A night time view of the roundabout on Tahrir Square in 2007

I know it's way too early to be completely rejoicing about today's events in Egypt, but I'm finding it difficult to keep my enthusiasm down. The unrest in Cairo during the last couple of weeks has presented opportunities for both optimism and disappointment, and has carried with it an undercurrent of fear that things could go terribly wrong. It looks now as if the optimists have prevailed-- along with the demonstrators--and that Egypt is on its way toward constructing its first truly democratic government ever.

The best assessment I've seen of Hosni Mubarak's situation and Egypt's response appeared yesterday Thomas Friedman's column for the New York Times, "Out of Touch, Out of Time." I was especially moved by his account of the group of students and other demonstrators who were cleaning up around Tahrir Square, and the sense of real ownership expressed by the participants. People who are ready to clean up the inevitable detritus that accumulates around large crowds, regardless of whether or not they're personally responsible for the mess, are ready to take on the hard work of governing themselves. They're making it clear in this single gesture that they're not looking for somebody else to do the dirty work.

Comparisons with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 are inevitable. People had been showing all over Eastern Europe at the time that they were tired of autocrats, dictators, and statism, and by November 9 the wall began to tumble down--having stood since 1961 as an emblem of oppression.

When the photos and film footage of the crowds happily hammering away at the structure began to fill the world's newspapers and television screens, I yanked my children out of their rooms to watch. I blubbered like a fool as strains of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" chorale began to serve as a sound track for the demonstrating and dancing that went on around and atop the wall.

Watching ululating women, grinning children, and ecstatic students and young professionals in Tahrir Square today has engendered a similar tearful response--and an e-mail to my kids to pay attention, to which they quickly responded and assured me that they were.

My students don't seem to have been all that aware of this week's events. They tend to focus on their own lives, and that's understandable during midterm week. But I hope that at least a few will take note of this moment. Egypt has made its own revolution, and will probably undergo some rough moments in the weeks and months to come. But I'm becoming much less jaded about the impact of social networks and digital technologies as they become instruments of positive change, and rather more hopeful about the possibility of eventual peace in the region.

Image credits: The opening shot was taken by "Crashsystems," and the Berlin Wall Photo by an unknown photographer; both from Wikimedia Commons.

Coming of Age in the Multiverse

2011-02-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

I wrote this on Friday, but didn't get around to posting it until today.

No good comes of being cooped up for days in a location not prepared for real winter. One doesn't go out of doors, except, briefly, to admire the beauty of the new snowfall or just enjoy the quiet. The former (not going out) stems from the general lack of "native" driving ability, the latter from the relative lack of actual driving going on. We're about a mile from the freeway, but can--on a normal day--hear the constant traffic buzz as a soundtrack for our lives, especially in treeless winter. But few are venturing out, and the streets are much quieter than usual in part because the fluffy lovely snowy stuff is acting as a sound baffle.

Instead of doing anything truly useful (like house-tending--hoovering and dusting mainly, since we can't wash clothes when the temperature's this low, 23 F at the moment, because the washer is out on the unheated back porch), I've been tucked up under the furry throw rug I bought for the cat (who's terrified of it) when his brothers died, thinking that it would be nice for him to snuggle into. It suits me fine, though, even though it's synthetic. I'm utterly amazed at how lifelike the "fur" is, and only need to feel guilty about the plastics that went into making it, rather than the deaths of small furry critters. It's quite warm, too, which helps mitigate the low ambient temperature in the house, despite our pumping more natural gas-heated air into the place than I'd like so the interior pipes don't freeze.

We've run out of dry firewood, but I'm still in the living room, in the comfy chair, laptop on lap, reading away (at the preview of Sunday's Times Book Review mainly, and other odd bits). What I'm reading is pretty discouraging: a review of a new book about the imminence of serious climate problems, and Mark Bittman's piece about American food. Even a review of Brian Greene's new book, The Hidden Reality (about parallel universes and such) hasn't lifted my spirits as much as it might normally, because the other two are so very discouraging.

The first of these, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, by Mark Hertsgaard (reviewed in the Times by Wen Stephenson), reminds me, once again, of why I'm glad I don't have grandchildren. The same forces that are churning up record floods and cyclones in Queensland, and record ice, snow, and sub-freezing temperatures across the Midwest in this country are evidence of the need to make significant changes in policy and practice by 2020 in order to forestall utter disaster. The prologue is available on Google Books, and what makes it so compelling is that Hertsgaard is the father of a young daughter--one who, like so many of our children and grandchildren, will have to live in this over-heated, climatically disturbed, drought-stricken, disease-infested world full of poor people who have no chance to change things either because they don't understand what's going on or they've been convinced that global warming is a political conspiracy devised by "liberal" scientists and fostered by left-wing politicians for their own nefarious reasons.

Of course, the doomsayers have been wrong before (notably Paul Erlich, whose prediction of a Population Bomb fizzled as birth rates fell in response to the fear--and to the growing number of people entering the middle class from the '70s on--but see his rejoinder at the end of the Wikipedia article on his book.), but regardless of the art of prognostication's record I'm just not particularly sanguine about the future because so many variables are now in play.

Not unrelated to the climate problem is the list of changes in food policy this country needs to make, itemized by Mark Bittman in this week's Opinionator column: A Food Manifesto for the Future. I'm already an unabashed Bittman fan, and this simple list of real solutions confirms my reasons for adulation. Unfortunately, he too is preaching to this particular choir member, and I doubt that many of those who think we ought not to interfere with parents' choices regarding their children's nutrition, or that we ought to keep government regulation to an absolute minimum, are going to be hopping fervently onto this bandwagon.

You'd think that some might, though--embracing at least a couple of the points (like ending government subsidies on processed food, potentially saving at least $16 billion, which would pay for some of his other ideas, like subsidizing small farmers instead of large ones, or establishing a "Civilian Cooking Corps" to help educate families on good nutrition and the benefits of cooking for themselves). He promises further columns to elaborate on each point, and I for one can't wait. It's too bad that many around here would see these provisions as market-meddling or nanny statist propaganda, because Texas could really use some sensible political action to help make up for the various absurdities coming out of Austin at the moment, like firing teachers and slashing Medicaid when we're already near the bottom of the educational barrel and have rejected "Obamacare" because of its "socialist" provisions.

About the only hope I have these days--and it's only a fancy, not really a hope--is that somebody will discover a key into another dimension, where (like the characters in More News From Nowhere) those of us who think it's a good idea to move toward solving problems rather than pretending they don't exist, could start afresh. It would be good to be able to create a world in which technological and economic "progress" weren't the only measure of human accomplishment--and where our ability to live rewarding lives (using measures other than the amount of stuff we can accumulate before we die) without destroying the planet in the process could be realized.

The possibilities of multiverses also arose because I read Timothy Ferris's review of a new book about dimensional physics, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene. Current concepts like string theory and hyperdimensional sheets are like popcorn to me--nutritious and addictive, but I don't really know how they work. Nevertheless these ideas are fodder for the imagination, especially for those of us who have run out of ways of doing much to help out except to rant about problems on our blogs.

It's usually easier for me to be more hopeful when the byproducts of human existence are buried in several inches of snow, so that everything looks clean and fresh (as in the opening photo). The peace and quiet will, however, last only until tomorrow, when it's all expected to melt away. The region will be aflood with football fans spending absurd amounts of money, contributing significantly to local air pollution levels (increased flights in and out, traffic to and from the stadium, and considerable amounts of media hot air). The sheer excess recorded in this week's issues of the Daily Poop indicates that if all this money were put in a pool to use otherwise, we might well be able to address some of the issues reported so eloquently in Hertsgaard's book and Bittman's manifesto.

Instead, the Super Bowl becomes its own metaphor--a symbol of all that's wrong with us: bad food choices, billions spent on unneeded crap, over-paid sports stars, inane celebrities celebrated for their own excesses, a preposterous stadium, itself a monument to the vanity of a man who also symbolizes over-indulgence and questionable judgment. Some folks get rich off of this stuff, some live vicariously through it, and some of us--those who'd enjoy a good rivalry more without all the pomp and silliness--just end up feeling guilty for even wanting to watch the game.

Well, Go Steelers. Anyway.

Skywatch Friday: Deep Winter

2011-02-04T06:36:00.000-08:00

The Daily Poop said yesterday that the winter of 1983 was colder than this one--or at least that spoiled North Texans suffered some 295 continuous hours of sub-freezing temperatures that December (we're hovering around 100 hours at the moment). That particular December has been squeezed out of my little memory cells, but I probably will remember this last week, if only because of the fuss folks have made over it. Part of the concern has to do with the impending Super Bowl game on Sunday, but mostly it's because this part of the country is full of weather sissies.

I awoke Tuesday morning to a phone call from my boss, telling me that the school had been closed down for the day. Well done, considering the fact that SUVs, pickup trucks, and 18-wheelers were sliding into one another all over the Metroplex for the next two days. So school was canceled again on Wednesday--and the Beloved Spouse's campus was closed again on Thursday (I had to meet class, with only 8 out of 30 attending). They were planning for tennis practice today (although this weekend's tournaments have been abandoned), but we'll see about that. I have my doubts about the ability of Texans, Argentinians, South Africans, Fijians, and Australians to whack balls around in freezing weather. Especially with snow all over the courts. It won't be as cold today as it was yesterday (20 was the high; it's 18 and climbing at the moment, with four inches of lovely white stuff on the ground) but things aren't expected to thaw until Saturday.

When we lived in Chicago, nobody blinked an eye during snow and ice (although this week's storm has caused the public schools to shut down for the first time in several years), and you would never see people going out in thin jumpers and jackets--they'd be bundled up appropriately. But one woman on the local news was complaining about how cold her house was (60 degrees; ours doesn't get up to 60 degrees in weather like this!), and she was sitting around in a tee shirt. Meanwhile, the BS and I are layered in fleece hoodies, sweaters, and extra socks--enjoying a morning sit in front of the fire. The puppies, deprived of long forays out of doors yesterday because of the wind chill (and Woody had already started shedding from last week's warmth), spent the day lounging on the sofa. This morning they've already been out for one romp in the snow, and will be begging for more as soon as they've slept this one off.

A couple of new suet cakes are in the feeders for the birds (an intrepid and inexhaustible brown thrasher, a pair of downy woodpeckers, assorted cardinals, chickadees, titmice, a starling, an olive sparrow, numerous English sparrows--and this morning a pair of fox sparrows), and the new hanging feeder is stocked with sunflower kernels, so the birds are happy, too.

Colleagues will undoubtedly be snarking next week about the "fallacy" of global warming, and I'll have to remind the climate-illiterate about last week's unseasonable heat, suggesting (icily, perhaps, ) that they might want to take a course in glacial processes or climatology in order to understand the relationship. I doubt, however, that it'll do much good. One thing I'm learning about modern "politics" is that folks are not going to listen to reason if they've already made up their minds--no matter how good one's argument or how solid contrary evidence is.

The photos were taken Wednesday morning (Groundhog Day, and the 90th anniversary of my late father's birth), when the temperature was at about 10 degrees F. Alas, the camera battery is busy charging at the moment, so no update featuring snow-laden trees. But here's one I took a few weeks ago after our last "blizzard."

Happy Skywatch Friday--and have a cozy weekend. Go Steelers!

Good News Amidst The Bad

2011-01-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

Since the benefits of urban life have begun to come to those of us in the hinterlands of north Texas, unexpected pleasures have emerged. The recent opening of a Whole Foods Market just to the south (and thus on the way home from school for both of us), has meant that the Beloved Spouse is now increasingly involved in home keeping--in that he's doing much of the grocery shopping because most of my classes are at night, and he gets off early enough for a foraging stop.

I used to be the one who succumbed to the magazines at the checkout counter, frequently picking up the latest issue of Cook's Illustrated despite my efforts to cut down on the number of magazines that litter our coffee table. But since he's the one tending to the shopping these days, the BS is the one who gets snagged by an interesting article. For the past two months, issues of the Utne Reader have shown up in the canvas bags that are supposed to contain food. I am thankful that he's not one of those husbands who gets seduced by improbable snacks or unnecessary goodies. But he does like his alternative press, and Utne's the best source of it.

So this morning, after I'd finished the Daily Poop, I settled down to read an article on the marshlands in Iraq, in the January/February issue featuring Marge Simpson as Rosie the Riveter on the cover.

My interest in the people referred to as the Marsh Arabs began back at Penn, when I took an archaeology class on Near Eastern prehistory, and then took a geology course that required a research paper on the interactions between people and their landscapes. The work I did then has stayed with me because the people themselves were so interesting, and their way of life almost a model for sustainable living. The pictures in the Utne article are astonishing, considering what things had looked like after about 1991 (then a veritable desert where once had flourished the probable inspiration for the idea of the Garden of Eden).

The update includes scenes the likes of which I haven't encountered since I conducted my research back in the '70s--when the marshlands around the Shatt al-Arab (the river formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers) had covered thousands of square kilometers: people pushing their boats around reed-filled marshes dotted with small islands of land on which the Maʻdān (as they are sometimes called in Arabic) build reed houses and raise livestock.

The interior of a Mudhif, a traditional reed-built guest house.

By the time I wrote my paper, the life of the Marsh Arabs was already at risk, due to expanding irrigation to the north, and because of increasing political conflict among Muslim factions in Iraq, and growing tensions with Iran. For an account of what happened next, see this article from Human Rights Watch, documenting Saddam Hussein's program to to punish the population in the south for supporting a Shiite uprising by draining the marshes and destroying the local culture.

The good news is that the marshes are beginning to recover, and their champion, Iraqi American Azzam Alwash, is optimistic about its future--even though potential problems still lurk: Turkey's erection of dams at the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates, as well as continuing political instability in the region.

The fact, however, that the marshes are recovering at all gives me some hope that wetland restoration in other areas, including the Everglades in Florida, and the lower Owens River Valley, might succeed more rapidly than one once might have hoped.

For folks interested in pursuing this topic, there are two good articles available from the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (from the Museum journal, Expedition). One is from the fall of 1962, E. A. Speiser's piece on the connection between the area and descriptions of Eden in Genesis (perhaps of particular relevance to my Technology and Utopia students), and a more recent (but before Saddam's devastation project had taken its highest toll) essay about "Life on the Edge of the Marshes" by Edward Ochsenschlager (1998), which focuses on connections with the ancient Mesopotamian past. For good historical photos, see the archive of Wilfred Thesiger's evocative photographs at the Pitt Rivers Museum of Oxford University. The Google image pages for "Marsh Arabs" is chockablock with rather lovely pictures from all kinds of sources.

The update in Utne Reader, "Birds Not Bombs," by Samiha Shafy for Der Spiegel, is a welcome bit of news--even if the situation is still fraught with danger.

Image credits: Both photos are from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

Only Connect

2011-01-21T06:27:00.000-08:00

Before last week's snow, we were treated to a couple of dramatic sunsets, but here in treeland it's hard to capture them; I have to run down the alley next to our house and shoot over the houses on the next block, to get clear of trees and power lines.

I did manage to catch an odd moment of orangey light on the clouds overhead, but by the time I got things more or less focused (I had the telephoto lens on without realizing it), most of the glory was over.

Not only that, but a cranky neighbor yelled at me, "What're you takin' a picture of?" Since he didn't say, "What're y'all takin' a picture of?" he wasn't making a friendly inquiry. Seems everybody's paranoid these days, and I'm pretty sure he hadn't even noticed the sunset.

It's been a long week, but rewarding in its own way. The Utopia class is a joy; the kids (and some not-so-kids) are lapping it up like kittens at fresh milk. I guess that since art students don't get much time to discuss ideas, they're really enjoying having a chance to show off their brain power. The discussion, about E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" and its similarity to life on today's social media (as well as connections with contemporary stories like Wall-E) was fodder for a rousing discussion. I'm looking forward to next week's response to Morris's News From Nowhere, which presents a rather stark contrast to Forster's nightmare future.

Connections these days seem to be fleeting and superficial most of the time. So it was good to share ideas with those who'll be living in whatever world we create over the next decade or so. But it was also reassuring to note that even the youngest members of the group were highly aware of the technological snares we're setting, and that there's some hope that we'll not end up in underground hives, deprived of everything but dim images of one another, and disembodied voices.

Last night I had a chance to get together with an old friend from Penn, who was in town for a physics conference. After playing phone- and e-mail tag (he's as much of a communications technology doofus as I am), we finally managed to spend a few hours reminiscing and catching up on news both good and bad. It wasn't nearly enough, and one realizes on occasions like these how precious friendships are ("Only connect," as Forster says in Howard's End), and--using the above photo as a metaphor--how little time left we have to nurture them at our age.

We've promised to keep in closer touch, though, even though he and his family all live on the East coast--and its the very technology of which I'm frequently so critical that makes that connection possible (but no, we don't need Facebook to do it). The best thing about old friendships is that re-connection is its own reward, and it opens up new paths of memory: new stories shared, new joys and sorrows. Our children are all grown and embarking on their own lives, with weddings and perhaps grandchildren still to come. It's enough to gladden even the most mechanical of hearts.

Snow Days

2011-01-14T09:26:00.000-08:00

When the Beloved Spouse and I awoke last Sunday morning, it was rainy and dreary. But the puppies were strangely eager to be let out, and persistently (and repeatedly) begged to be released from house arrest, only to return immediately as soon as they were exposed to the rain. We kept trying to ignore them after that, busy at our Sunday paper, until shortly before noon when they practically started a revolution, demanding to go out. We'd kept the curtains shut to keep out the cold, so we couldn't see what was happening. By the time we acquiesced, however, the landscape had been completely transformed by a couple of inches of snow.

Now, these dogs have always been particularly fond of snow, having been exposed to it almost immediately after being adopted seven years ago. We got them on a Tuesday in February, and on that Friday it snowed a good five inches, so that they had to plow their way through drifts taller than they were (at three months old). Ever since, they've loved frolicking about in it, the deeper, the better.

Most of the area got an inch or two this time, but because we're further north we ended up with about five inches total, and it's persisted for several days. The weather's been cold enough that we've been putting out suet cakes for the birds, along with the usual feeders, and one intrepid little woodpecker kept returning to get his share, even though he had to peck through the snow.

On Monday the skies cleared, but it didn't warm up enough for the snow to melt. The contrast between the white on the tree trunks and branches against the bright blue sky just begged to be photographed.

Serious melting didn't start until yesterday, so I took this as I was leaving for work--knowing that by the time I got back the icicles would be gone.

There's still a bit of the white stuff left on the ground and on tables and chairs about the yard. It looks rather like we could get more today, but our weather prognosticators (who were terribly wrong about how much snow there would be last weekend) say not. Since I've got a class tonight (old people with no lives are prime candidates to teach Friday night classes), I do hope they're right this time. There is positively nothing worse than a Texas driver in a snow storm, and I'd rather not have to deal with them at 10 pm.!

Happy Skywatch Friday, everyone, and have a great weekend.

Engaging Chaos

2011-01-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

As time goes on, I'm finding it more and more difficult to get a handle on things. It's as if the flow is going by so fast that I when I reach into the stream, I only manage to grab a handful of water. Meanwhile, all sorts of detritus is washing up on the banks, and none of it makes much sense.

I keep trying to tidy up the house, but get distracted or run out of steam before anything significant gets done. The holidays weren't much help, because I spent most of my time off constructing a new course (Technology and Utopia) and updating the old ones. I began to wonder why the only thing I could accomplish was related to what I was supposed to be vacationing from.

During this last week, our "faculty development" period before the new quarter starts on Monday, I discussed the problem with a couple of colleagues, and we agreed that the combination of advancing age and an ever-increasing work load seems to suck the psychic energy right out of a person. And since I'm older than most of the people I work with, I seem to notice it more than they do.

Admittedly, I've taken on quite a bit. Nearly four years ago, when I started this blog, I was also participating in an online forum. I joined another when it became apparent that I'd have to have heart surgery again. The spin-off blogs (the Cabinet and The Owl of Athena) probably didn't expand the load because I soon realized that I wasn't going to be able to maintain them all with any regularity. Since then, though, my total output has diminished, and the forums are all but abandoned. I do wonder, as a result, how anyone who's on Facebook manages do do anything at all.

My selectivity toward social media has paid off to some extent. Not "doing" the Facebook thing (nor Twitter, which I find preposterous) may have been my wisest choice. I still keep hoping that if I can just get the course prep all snugged up, I'll have more time to write. I did, after all, manage to get a short story written in November for a contest I never entered. But while I'm teaching, most of my (remaining) little gray cells are tied up with the growing problem of engaging students who want less and less to do with what I teach.

If it weren't for the small number of adoring (and, I might say, adorable in their own way) current and former student acolytes, I might be tempted hang up my guns altogether. I'm pretty sure I won't end up watching soaps and eating bonbons all day when I retire, but the prospect of not teaching still seems more empty than enticing. Every now and then, too, I manage to come up with an idea that works with the over-connected generation, and that buys me breathing room.

As the new year rolled in the urge to organize increased: clear off the desk, get things in order around the house, and rid myself of distracting clutter. But at heart I'm still an archaeologist, and the piles of stuff represent layers of discovery--strata that I can carefully mine for scribbled notes and pages stuck into stacked books that record ideas gleaned from the op/ed pages of the newspapers I still make time to read. There are useful artifacts to be discovered, deposited during decades of enjoying the life of the mind. The spirit is still willing, at least until the flesh poops out.

One tangible result of having accumulated the thousands of books, piles of notebooks, and collections of tear sheets from magazines I've managed to recycle, is that constructing the new course has been an adventure in serendipity. One day I walk by a bookshelf and my eye lights on a book I haven't picked up in years. I sit down to leaf through my marginalia (few books I own aren't marked up with comments and my personal set of hieroglyphs to indicate important passages) and rediscover something useful. Or the end notes in an essay lead me to other forgotten works that reveal further fodder for the course. And so it goes.

The slow, episodic excavation of what amounts to an intellectual midden has allowed the new course to evolve into a reasonably organized, well-focused introduction to philosophy and how it works, as well as how we can use it to understand an increasingly technologized world. I get to ask my students to wrestle with questions I wonder about all the time, and I'll probably learn a great deal from their contributions. If the course numbers hold through today (fourteen), I'll get my first real seminar in sixteen years.

I've begun to think of my desk as a metaphor for my brain: it seems to be muddled, but it has its own internal coherence and logic. I still have to clear it off and sort things out, but that's the kind of cataloging process I love--and it may enrich the new course even further, as I uncover more forgotten bits under layers of more recently encountered material.

As an added bonus, by Monday I'll have opened up enough space to hold the new piles that are sure to build up over the next eleven weeks.

Skywatch Friday: Solstice Birthday Lunar Eclipse

2010-12-24T07:30:00.000-08:00

The best thing about enjoying one's birthday on the winter solstice (Robert Frost's "darkest evening of the year") is that it's important for reasons other than personal. This is the day of Sun Return on old Druidic calendars, Yule to Germanic and Scandinavian peoples, celebrated in the vast Roman empire as Saturnalia, and all manner of lively festivals among the world's peoples. This seasonal moment was considered so significant, in fact, that early Christianity appropriated it for Christ's birth day (Saturnalia occurred on December 25 of the Julian calendar). Tax collecting time in the ancient world tended to be in the fall, after harvest, and there's considerable dispute over the actual date.

So despite the fact that babies born around the Winter Solstice tend to lose out on the loot because of the proximity to Christmas, this birth date has its own specialness. Very occasionally, solstice babies are awarded with extra celestial goodies, as we were this year.

On the 20th I received this cute text message from my son: Happy early birthday mom! I assume you'll be staying up to see the present we all convinced the universe to get you?:)

And what a present it was, compounded by an ancillary gift from the Beloved Spouse, who had spent the day locating a lens and a device for marrying our digital camera to our telescope so that we could take pictures of a rare solstice lunar eclipse.

So we did stay up (well, until just at totality, when the clouds moved in) and this week's Skywatch entries include some of the results.

The evening of the 20th presented us with a pretty moon-infused sunset, through the now-bare trees:

Before the eclipse started in the wee hours of the 21st, we got a good clear shot of the solstice full moon. Since we're novices at astrophotography, we ended up with too much image for the frame; the only complete shots were from the telephoto lens. The ones shown here offer a great deal more detail, however, and we're quite happy with our first attempts.

Just before totality--and in advance of some unwelcome clouds that cut our observations short:

Of course, not all celestial portents are good ones, as the idiots prognosticating the end of the world on another solstice have warned us. But as I tell those of my students eager to seize on arcane meanings of ancient texts, truly the only thing of cosmic significance that will occur on December 21, 2012--is my 65th birthday.

Happy Winter, everyone. And Happy Yule, Merry Christmas, an enjoyable Festivus, to all.

Finding the Middle

2010-12-06T09:40:00.000-08:00

I feel like Peter Finch's character in Network--who has become a metaphor for frustration since the film premiered the year my son was born (1976--which probably explains why I never actually saw the movie itself). But the tag line "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" has been floating around my head for the past couple of days.

It doesn't help that I've also been watching Max Headroom, via the bad-transfer DVDs we bought last month--another emblem of a good concept (not unlike Firefly) that couldn't get the ratings it needed in order to keep it in production. Max was a mid-eighties phenomenon that presaged digital media expansion and inhabited a dystopic future similar to that depicted in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner (1982).

Admittedly, I'm rather preoccupied with things dystopic/eutopic at the moment, because I'm writing a Philosophical Perspectives course for the Winter quarter (Technology and Utopia), and am finishing up a short story that involves life after a Coronal Mass Ejection causes an Electromagnetic Pulse, knocking out all solid-state electronics and screwing big-time with The Grid (the stuff I was talking about here last month). The story, however, is a utopia. No, I don't think we'd necessarily find ourselves living in garbage dumps and smacking each other about with machetes after a big calamity.

If all this isn't enough, I'm also reading Charles Robert Wilson's Julian Comstock, a thoroughly engaging literary thought experiment about life after Peak Oil and the False Tribulations. Wilson, at least, hasn't forgotten that it hasn't been all that long since we were doing without electricity altogether (emphasized rather vividly in the two movies we watched this weekend, Silverado and The Illusionist). He's also about the only science fiction writer I'm reading these days, because I'm so not into cyberpunk and military SF/schoolboy warcraft crap. I think that one reason I'm fond of non-zombie-related Steampunk is that it tends to rely on rather imaginative combinations of old technologies and Art-Deco streamline-aesthetics, rather than on blood, guts, and dismemberment by squiddy aliens.

So, yes, I'm being cranky again, primarily because I'm getting more and more frustrated about the state of modern politics, and their handmaiden, modern media.

Why all the movies and old TV shows this weekend? Several reasons: pledge fortnight on PBS (I've paid my dues and I am not willing to sit through hours of drivel from Yanni and Celtic Women which have not one thing in common with regular programming; I want my Doc Martin, damnit!), and the growing number of utterly annoying commercials for pharmaceuticals, primarily the ones that deal with male erectile issues.

My main objection to television these days actually lies in the coverage of the news, and (except for PBS) the apparent inability to report events without hyping them into the stratosphere. The ratings games that gave rise to critiques in the form of Network and Max Headroom are alive and well twenty and thirty years later--and I'm just plain tired.

The demise of civil disagreement and calm, reasoned, argument has driven me away from my television set as a primary vehicle for news. Since I haven't been able to stomach having the tube on before four or five in the afternoon for the last several years, my mornings begin with a good cup of coffee and the Daily Poop, usually the funnies first, and then a leisurely stroll through the various sections. Since I've got my mornings off this quarter, and can afford the time if I'm not grading, I can then peruse a magazine or two either in print or on the iPad, before I have to get to work. I'm frequently rewarded in one venue or another, and today I found an article that warmed my little soul right up: about a new organization called No Labels. According to its website (and a nice little introductory video), its aim is to bring back the same civil discourse I've been lamenting the loss of. Whatever our views, we ought to be able to share them, discuss them, and locate some kind of common ground without screaming at each other, and this organization is grounded in that hope.

Normally, I'm not much of a hopeful person. But that may change if this movement gets up enough steam--before that's all we have to run the show.

Image credit: Hungarian television set from 1959. ORION AT 602 - 1959. By Istvan Takacs, via Wikimedia Commons. The font is "Typewriter" by P22.

Look! Up in the Sky . . .

2010-12-03T08:35:00.001-08:00

Or, even better, "Look! Down in the Mud!"

This is a shameful weasel of a Skywatch entry, but I needed to get two things done--put up a couple of the photos I took during our Thanksgiving break, and celebrate the news of "alien" life on earth found in none other than my beloved Owens River Valley.

First, the shots are nothing special, but they are evidence of the lengths I will traverse in the name of Skywatch Friday. The Beloved Spouse and I spent nearly two hours out enjoying the unseasonably balmy weather on November 24 waiting for a sunset. Enough leaves had fallen so that we could actually see the sky whilst sitting out in Grandma Clarice's old metal lawn chairs (which we'd had to move the day before because a huge branch was dangling overhead; once it fell, gifting us with a day's supply of firewood, we moved the chairs back). This is always the best place on the property to enjoy sunsets and the evening glass of Chateau Thames Embankment.

At any rate, I spent those hours wandering about and shooting up (ahem). But the longed-for sunset never came. The light, however, was luminous, and so the photos at least provide a record of a pleasant evening. The weather changed fairly dramatically the next day (and the Thanksgiving sunset, during which we were en route to our daughter's loft and therefore didn't photograph, was spectacular), and the leaves are pretty much gone. There will be a great deal of raking happening this weekend.

Far more interesting is NASA's announcement about a nifty bacterium found in Mono Lake, north of Bishop, California. The discovery of amazing biotic flexibility is the best news science fiction buffs have head since Sputnik was launched. It's such a big deal that the Daily Poop even ran the story on the front page, and we're not exactly known for our love of science around these parts.

Mono Lake (pronounced "moe-noe," not "mah-noe" as the newsies have been calling it) occasionally makes news related to the old Owens Valley water controversy (about which I've written in earlier posts on The Farm). For some time the water level lowered ominously due to the diversion of water to Los Angeles, and the seagull breeding site on a tiny island in the middle of the lake was threatened by coyotes via an emerging land bridge. In the '90s, however, efforts began to avert dessication of the lake and the demise of the gulls. Here's a good shot of the lake by Michael Gäbler:

Skywatch Friday folks are probably already familiar with Martha Z's photos of the site; for some of these, see her Sunset at Mono Lake post from September 8.

The newest chapter in the Saga of Mono Lake just makes my little SF-loving heart go pitty pat. According to John Matson's article in Scientific American, a bacterium found in the lake uses arsenic (poison to life as we've known it) in the same way other life forms use phosphorous--in photosynthesis and other life-processes. The fact that one element can replace another in DNA like this opens up the possibility that similar replacements might occur to produce different forms of life than those with which we are familiar.

'This study really drives the point home of how adaptive life can be and that we should go out expecting the unexpected,' [astrobiologist Dirk] Schulze-Makuch says. 'If you look at other places, from the hydrocarbon lakes of Titan to the subsurface ocean of Europa to the deserts of Mars, we really should not underestimate the abilities of life to adapt to these places.'

Yum! There's just nothing to rev up the old creative juices like confimation that one's speculations about the universe have at least some scientific grounding. I have long (and boringly to my friends) insisted that life "out there" is probably (or at least possibly) very much different than it is here on earth. This confidence was sparked long ago by SF stories involving silicon-based life instead of carbon-based, and by thought experiments about what might have happened if that pesky meteorite hadn't plowed into the Yucatan sixty-three million years ago. It's hardly an original notion, but even though I've managed not to feel too smug about driving a hybrid car or not shopping on Black Friday, I will not hold back now.

To all the doubters and skeptics and people who've rolled their eyes and smirked, "there she goes again," I told you so!

I'm really happy for Felisa Wolfe-Simon and Ronald Oremland, who authored the study, and admire their curiosity and persistence more than I can say. But I'm even happier for those science fiction writers who have been inspired anew; I can't wait to see what kinds of "nowheres" appear as a result.

Image credit: Lakeside of Mono Lake, by Michael Gäbler, via Wikimedia Commons.

New Traditions for Old

2010-11-29T08:53:00.000-08:00

As I look out into my back garden, at the leaf-covered yard, and sheets hanging on the line, I'm musing about the changed character of holidays in our household. The weather is uncharacteristically (for this time of year) fine, after a brief morning shower that barely dampened the laundry (which has been hanging there since Saturday, sort of on purpose because leaving it overnight softens and "irons" bed linens better than anything one could add to the washer or dryer; I just forgot to take it in yesterday, so it got another night of airing). My long Thanksgiving break is coming to a close, and there are three more rather hectic weeks before the quarter's finished and a slightly longer winter break begins.

It occurred to me that over the last couple of years two new traditions have arisen for the Beloved Spouse and me. The first I've mentioned--the change of venue for the Thanksgiving meal from our house to our daughter's loft. The second, however, is probably more meaningful in the end: our refusal to participate in "Black Friday," which has become an emblem of corporate control over modern lives, and of the meaningless greed for stuff (and more stuff) that seems to have penetrated into the very being of American life.

The news yesterday was full of stories about how the economy seems to be turning around at least slightly, because so many people were apparently hopeful enough (or solvent enough) to go out and spend themselves into a frenzy after stuffing themselves with turkey. Some even seem to have foregone the feast in order to feed their desire for--what? Big screen TVs, elaborate and kitschy plastic toys, trendy clothing, digital gizmos of all varieties . . . and the list goes on. And on.

The stories were illustrated by footage of people standing in long lines overnight, and/or rushing through doors at ungodly hours to grab the "great deals." More videos followed of people standing in endless lines with shopping carts stuffed and piled high with goods (just what is "good" about "goods," I now wonder). Families, according to the Daily Poop, have made their own new traditions: shopping together. But stories of fights in malls and shopper stampedes indicated that not all of this was simply a pleasant way to spend time together after a good meal.

One good thing about living in the Bible Belt is that Sundays are pretty good days to shop, especially before church lets out. So the BS and I finally braved the crowds--which turned out to be sparse--and went out for several hours yesterday. We stopped in at Half Price Books and then had a long lunch at a sports bar (all the better to watch the finals of ATP tennis), picked up some small stuff at several stores in the "Villages" (a newish local outdoor mall that straddles the road between two adjacent towns; the one dud was a visit to the newly opened "a Real Bookstore," which turned out to be nothing of the sort), and ended our trip at Whole Foods. This was, after all, a milk run for the most part. But, including lunch and a late-birthday set of Deadwood for the BS, the whole thing set us back very little--especially since we hadn't done anything like this in months.

I've realized over these last few years of trying to live more thoughtfully, frugally, and responsibly, that small pleasures are fairly easy to come by. Meals based on pastured meat, humanely-treated cows and chickens, and well-raised plants don't even have to taste better (although they generally do, in part because I think more about how to cook them) to feel better. Spending more on food than on non-essentials means that farmers are getting more of what I pay for what I get. At some point in the near future, I'm going to write about the high cost of cheap food, but in the meantime I'm trying to plan meals and purchases ever more carefully so that I can afford to spend what they're worth.

Many people, I know, are in no position to be making these choices, because they don't have the time or the income or the opportunity; but I do, and so I can't ignore the consequences of what and how I buy. I've learned to do without a great deal, and I could certainly do without much of what I still buy. But I haven't yet reached the point at which I can live happily without my computer, the DVD library, the occasional new book or download to the iPad.

The balance between need and desire around here is still tenuous. At least, however, shopping is no longer an arbitrary activity, undertaken for its own sake. I've learned to postpone purchasing anything new until I've had time to think about its impact. I avoid going out to shop at all unless I can combine trips, and make sure I've got the cash for it; credit cards are reserved for dire emergencies (usually pet-related). The immediate result of these strategies, oddly enough, is increased enjoyment and appreciation for what the object (such as the aforementioned iPad) adds to our lives: the ability to read the New York Times on the exercise bike, or a digital edition of a magazine that doesn't have to be recycled.

A better man than I would probably think me frivolous for even desiring a new toy like this; and I'm likely to agree with him. But as the Beloved Spouse pointed out to me yesterday, while we were reflecting on our shopping trip, these are our small means of escape from an increasingly heavy burden: educating young people who have grown up in a culture that values entertainment more than intellect, instant gratification more than curiosity, and quantity over quality.

We have miles to go before we sleep. And so while I am always eager to rant away about the profusion of things that seem to preoccupy most lives, I do try not to feel smug about my sources of delight. Nevertheless, I can't help but feel good about the fact that I get at least as much pleasure from smelling my freshly folded, line-dried sheets as I do from reading the Times Magazine on the little digital reader we mulled over buying.

In truth, we would have bought it on the spot had it been available, rather than waiting the week or so before they were in stock at the local Buy More. My examination of technology and necessity will, therefore, have to remain a work in progress.

Image credit: Berthe Morisot, Hanging the Laundry out to Dry, 1875. Wikimedia Commons.

Skywatch Friday: Nothing But Blue Skies

2010-11-18T10:50:00.000-08:00

The title of the post is pretty prosaic, but it's what's out there right now. The temperature's cooler, but no real freeze has hit us yet, and the weather has been swinging from gray and dismal to blustery to bright.

As I mentioned in my previous post, a couple of weekends ago we drove down to the San Antonio area to celebrate my father-in-law's eightieth birthday. The Beloved Spouse, my daughter, the puppies, and I all piled into the Element for my first trip out of town in a couple of years. I remembered to thank poor old Koko, who's recent demise made the trip possible in the first place, and raised a toast to him that evening.

This week's rather unexceptional Skywatch photo was taken from my father-in-law's patio in a posh retirement subdivision in the hill country. He's got a great view (and had an "Arlo and Woody Memorial Fence" built when he bought the place, just so we could take the dogs). On top of that, the weather was fine enough for me to sit out to grade exams before the surprise party we threw for him. We had a wonderful time seeing family again, and enjoying good company, good food, and very good wine.

But the sky was relentlessly blue all weekend. We didn't see a single cloud until we neared Dallas at sunset the following evening. Today's sky is pretty much the same. The last time I saw anything with any drama was on the 1st, when I ran outside in my slippers to get this one before the sun plummeted:

Next week's Thanksgiving, and although my son and his wife won't be flying out after all, I'm looking forward to a six-day holiday, my daughter's cooking, the company of her charming (and young) friends, and her big goofy dog.

The holiday forecast is for pleasant weather (sunny and 58). As Mariana Greene, the Daily Poop's feature garden columnist, put it this morning, "I try to remind myself every little chance I get that these kinds of days in November (and often in December through March) are our payback here in North Texas for six months or more of heat. " I'm with her. If we put up with the worst of this climate, we deserve the best it offers in recompense.

And those six days off? As much time as possible will be spent winterizing the garden. That North Texas weather has a habit of turning around and biting us in our collective backsides.

Reconsidering Electricity

2010-11-14T09:55:00.000-08:00

While doing research on the effects of EMPs (electromagnetic pulses) on Life As We Know It for a short story this week, I kept coming across comments about how we'd be jerked back to 5000 BCE were one of these events to knock out electricity.

EMP survival is a staple on the armageddon/end-times/survivalist websites and blogs, and it's really the only potential catastrophe I worry about because there is some real possibility that it could happen--whether as a result of a terrorist explosion of a nuke over the US or in space, or as an effect of an especially large solar coronal ejection (CME), as occurred in 1859 (now referred to as the Carrington Event). I've been getting quite a lot of CME chatter in my mailbox from science news feeds, so this stuff is on my mind.

I won't go into the details, because the dangers are nicely outlined in the Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. But I do want to consider the claim that modern civilization would come to a screeching halt, and we'd be consigned to neolithic lifeways (I refuse to say "lifestyles" in contexts like these--because of the element of choice implicit in our current use of the word) if we were to suddenly lose access to electricity.

In the first place, the real danger is to solid state electronics and all the fancy computer devices (like the laptop I'm using to write this post, and the internet I'm using to publish it) that rely on sophisticated infrastructural and telecommunications technologies upon which the United States and other first-world countries have come to depend. As the report points out, less well-developed countries are potentially in much less danger of collapse than we are:

"Our vulnerability is increasing daily as our use of and dependence on electronics continues to grow. The impact of EMP is asymmetric in relation to potential protagonists who are not as dependent on modern electronics." (Report of the Commission, 5)

In fact, simple electrical devices would still work--or could easily be developed--but almost everything we do these days depends on more complex systems. Most doomsday scenarios follow similar assumptions about how we'd end up in the aftermath of an EMP: cultural collapse, mass rioting and mayhem, takeover by one militia or another (foreign or domestic), rampant chaos, and eventually we'd be consigned to small pockets of "good" survivors at the mercy of "evil" ones.

Really? Good, helpful neighborly folk will turn on one another, co-operation wouldn't even be considered, the gun-toters would rise triumphant and ascendant, and shoot all the tree-hugging liberals and/or rape all their women folk and steal all their stuff.

To me this all amounts to a pretty dismal view of human nature (not that I really think there is any such thing). I can sort of understand the Apocalyptos who think the end is near and that god's going to rain tribulation down on all us non-believers (and on those who don't truly believe in their hearts according to one website I'm not going to link), smite us with hellfire and brimstone, set loose the beasts to devour us and all that. I mean, these folks rely on their literal interpretation of the most metaphorical text in the literary pantheon (fortunate choice of word, that), and they've been waiting for something like this since Jesus died, so they're actually looking forward to it.

But the rest of us? Wouldn't we be able to band together and sort things out? In the worst of times, don't we tend to work together--even when our government drops the ball (as with Hurricane Katrina)? And without electricity?

It's no coincidence that in my own view of utopia the occupants choose not to use electrical devices--and they get along fine without them. Of course, they've planned their lives around the complete absence of electricity (it's the first thing they decide they don't need), but they end up living pretty well, and with technologies that surpass those of the neolithic to some significant degree. Bronze Age, maybe, but not neolithic. In truth, there are degrees of technological sophistication that don't require any electricity at all, such as steam power. Just remember how much fun people are having with Steampunk these days.

Today's edition of the Daily Poop, in the "Lifestyles" section, there's an article by Alison Miller called Recovering Lost Arts: Brazos de Dios carefully crafts cheese, furniture, community--and a way of life. This is another reason why I still read the newspaper, and why I so enjoy coincidence. Just last weekend, as we drove south on I 35 to San Antonio, I noticed for the first time ever (after twenty years of making this drive) a sign for a town called "Elm Mott." I joked about how British it sounded, and wondered why I'd never seen it before--and then here it is: the very spot where Brazos de Dios is located.

The subject of the article consists of a community of about a thousand people on five hundred or so acres who "place great value in traditional craftsmanship, doing things by hand, and gathering ingredients from the earth and animals that surround them" (Miller E1). Begun in the seventies (like so many other intentional communities, only a few of which still exist) by a group of New York Christians, they now operate as Homestead Heritage and provide educational programs in crafts from cheese-making to boat building to letterpress printing. Their beautifully designed website offers this evocation of ideals that William Morris would have loved: "Our Traditional Crafts Village showcases a community of craftsmen who have returned, not to the past, but to the enduring values exemplified in handcraftsmanship. True craft requires more than skill: it expresses the craftsmen's care and concern, their personal investment in everything they do."

Now, I know that places like these are relatively scarce, although I'm going to spend some time finding more of them (before I lose the use of my electrical devices), because this kind of effort gives me hope for the future. I've been laboring under the illusion that my views of the good life are alien to most Texans (hence my continuing sense of exile). It's good to know that I'm wrong, at least to some extent.

It's also good to know that I'm right about the attractiveness of simple technologies. The folks at Brazos de Dios use electricity. But I don't imagine for one minute that they couldn't carry on just fine without it.

If, of course, they could also manage to keep the zombies and whackos from invading their farmstead in the event of an EMP.

Image credit: The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, shines above Bear Lake, U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Joshua Strang, taken at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska in 2005. It was the Wikimedia Commons Featured Picture of the Year in 2006. The photo has been manipulated a bit, but the original is posted on the commons. For an artistic interpretation, see the painting by Frederic Edwin Church, below, from 1865--also from Wikimedia Commons. Some really good photos and videos of solar activity in general are available from the Telegraph (UK) page on solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and aurora borealis in pictures.

Home, Keeping

2010-11-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

To hermit should be a verb. My usual modus involves driving down to school and back three days a week, and occasionally accompanying the Beloved Spouse on a shopping trip that may include a meal at one of our usual haunts. Otherwise I don't get out much.

Part of this is Vera's fault. She's training me to hypermile, which means that the longer the trips, the better the mileage, so I've become really hesitant to go anywhere nearby unless I can combine stops for overall fuel efficiency. I made my first close-in, purpose-driven trip last Monday to Fairview (the town just south of McKinney) to the new Whole Foods Market on opening day.

It's rather unfortunate, however, that I can now shop so close to home, because it means I'll be getting out even less frequently. WFM is on the way home for the BS, so he will be picking up his Old Growler and muesli by himself, and I won't be forced to head south early on Fridays to stock up on food for our one remaining cat, Harpo. (My previous WFM venue was in the complex where I work.)

So what?, one might reasonably ask. My only reason for mentioning these trivialities is that I've been doing a lot of thinking about home and hearth of late. My gnawing homesickness for Eastern California has been exacerbated during the election season by the relentless lack of intelligence reflected in the Texas electorate. California doesn't usually do much better, but I used to like Jerry Brown and he's got to be an improvement over Arnold (after all, Meg Whitman thought so, too). I'm lately tempted to buy a travel trailer and a plot of land in the Owens Valley and just move back out there.

But I'm not really in a position to go anywhere, so I've taken refuge in my hermitage. I've started clearing out the garage and the attic, sorting through assorted closets, recycling stuff I don't need--all in preparation for making a real effort to fix the place up. Finally.

I hear a great deal of buzz around work about how exhausted people are from "house work" and "yard work." It makes me wonder at the differences in attitude between those folks and people like me who talk about "home-keeping" and "gardening" instead. Yes, it's hard work; but it's enormously satisfying when one can sit in a comfy chair or in the garden after an afternoon's effort and enjoy a hot cuppa. I would like nothing better than to do "house work" all the time, at least when I wasn't at the computer yapping on blogs or writing the great American science fiction novel.

If the physical space that contains one's home isn't pleasant or well-loved, or if one has no occupational choice, necessary tasks like hoovering or dusting or tidying up might well seem like drudgery. Occasionally, while Koko was still alive, I grew tired of the constant cleanup associated with caring for an ailing pet. And perhaps a bit of my current fondness for nesting in, rather than venturing out, comes from my recent release from that small burden. Koko's brother, Harpo, seems to sense it, too; he's become an affectionate companion rather than a timid soul who hides most of the time.

My own isolation (hiding?) will come to an end this weekend, when we venture south to San Antonio to celebrate my father-in-law's eightieth birthday. Granted, we'll be with family, and we'll be taking the "puppies," but it'll be something of an adventure. I don't think I've been further south than Dallas in at least two years.

Nevertheless, my efforts at clearing cobwebs from the attic are helping to clear them from my brain, and this connection may lie at the heart of why I find these activities pleasurable rather than onerous. Lately I've been able to work in the breakfast room, refurbishing some old bookends by decorating them with Japanese papers and ephemera, only because I finally cleared away months' worth of collected detritus from atop the table.

For the last couple of years I've been stymied by the length of the list of things to do, most of them major: re-tile the bath upstairs, put in a new floor upstairs, re-roof the house, re-glaze the windows, re-paint assorted rooms, re-finish floors downstairs, re-screen the porch. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I've made endless lists, prioritized, and worried over it all whenever I wasn't busy worrying about school. Of course, this strategy accomplished nothing.

Then, around the end of summer, I started simply doing things. Small things: making sure the dishes were done and the downstairs tidied before bed (so I wouldn't be greeted by a pile and/or a mess in the morning); running the vacuum cleaner through the house once or twice a week (instead of waiting until the place was three-inches thick in dog fur); picking up stray twigs from the garden (mostly bits of fallen pecan branches) and adding them to the twig "wall" that edges part of the Carbon Sink (instead of pitching them on the brush heap); making weekly forays into the garage to find objects that have to be thrown out rather than re-purposed or re-positioned; recovering old electronics boxes from the attic for recycling.

Slowly, I'm retraining myself. Instead of pining away about the lack of time I have to get anything accomplished, I've started using the existing time more wisely. I no longer keep long lists, although I do jot down ideas for small, do-able tasks. In time (time, again!) the empty boxes will be gone, the garage will be more accessible, and there will be even more time.

This is not unlike getting out of debt. Once one starts paying things down, the lower the balance becomes, and the faster the debt melts away.

What I didn't realize when I started paying attention to the process (in terms of both monetary debt and "junk debt") was the sense of well-being that ensues. One source of my periodic funks, it seems, was simply being overwhelmed by mounting numbers of tasks. "Just do it," the ad preaches.

For once, advertising seems to be doing some good. I'm just not quite sure why it took me so long to get the message.

Image credit: As always, when I think of home, I think of Carl Larsson's evocative watercolors. This one is Lathörnan ("Cosy Corner") from Ett hem, 1894, via Wikimedia Commons.

Skywatch Friday: Stormclouds Gathering

2010-10-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

The news has been full of storm stories, including rather stunning videos of the tornado that touched down in nearby Rice, Texas on Sunday. This week's Skywatch photos are of that same storm, but it only grazed us. As it approached, I shot both north and south/southeast, turning 180 degrees alternately: blue skies and white clouds on one side, gathering greyness on the other.

On Saturday, as I waited for the Beloved Spouse to return from east Texas with the tennis team, the tornado sirens went off here, but despite the wind, rain, and chaos, nothing much happened. By the time he got home that night, we'd suffered no more than the usual scattered pecan branches. The next afternoon I decided that the impending drama deserved documentation, and these are the results.

The shot that opens the post shows a slightly different view, toward the southwest. The rest show the contrast between what was going on to the north and south.

As the storm moved up, the sky gradually became darker, but since the sun was shining in other directions, the contrast is more apparent in some of the photos:

To the north, the front line gradually became apparent, but even when it passed through, a small patch of blue was still visible (at the bottom left of the image).

I've resurrected my project to photograph each named full moon for a year, only because I've managed to capture the last two: the Harvest moon on the equinox last month, and the full Hunter's moon last Friday night. This, of course, was the night that the Texas Rangers captured the American League Championship title and headed to the World Series for the first time in the club's history. Buzz from folks who attended the game mentioned the spectacle of fireworks over the stadium lit as much by the full moon as by the park lights. I've shot many a moon over Ranger's Ballpark, so it seemed a fitting astronomical tribute to an historic event. Here's my usual lame effort from the front porch.

The rest of the week didn't go as well. It became apparent on Sunday night that our cat Koko, who's been suffering from lymphoma for several years, was ready to meet his maker. The poor cat looked like a skinned monkey, although he was once so round and fuzzy and black that we named him after Koko the gorilla. He was so thin we could see the blood vessels in his legs when he sat in the sun. He was a pretty valiant cat, and had endured all manner of indignities over the length of his illness.

Our vets do a very sweet thing for clients when a pet is euthanized. They cast its paw print in a little clay heart and present it to the family when they come by to pick up the little cedar box containing the pet's ashes. Unfortunately, the last two years have not been good to our cats, so we now have a collection of four clay hearts--and an entire shelf of a closet devoted to pet urns. One day I'll figure out an appropriate memorial for the back yard and deposit all the remains together.

Koko's demise has produced mixed reactions. I'm glad he's not suffering (we were never sure whether he was in pain, but he certainly seemed to experience embarrassment when he couldn't make it to the cat box), and feel somewhat guilty about the relief that brings. For the past four years we've been caring for and cleaning up after a cat who's never complained and who remained cheerful throughout. Constant medication and litter-box issues have meant no holidays, so his death brings freedom from the burden (and the expense) of maintenance and the ability to take the pups on a camping trip or a family visit. We're down to one easy-to-care-for cat and the two dogs, which is probably an appropriate number of pets for a couple of geezers.

Last night's first game of the World Series didn't help our moods much, with the Rangers' being trounced by the Giants. Here's hoping things go better tonight. Have a happy Skywatch Friday, all, and a pleasant weekend.

Nature Red in Beak and Claw, Part Two

2010-10-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

My Thursday afternoon ride on my stationary recumbent bike presented me with an interesting conundrum. I've been using the iPad to read Juliet Schor's new book, Plenitude, while I ride, but am easily distracted because the bike is on our screened-in porch, and I've got a nice view of a large pecan tree upon which all manner of activity takes place.

I guess one can tell I'm not a real photographer, or I might have slipped off the bike and tiptoed into my study to get the camera when a nearly full-grown red-tailed hawk alit on a nearly horizonal branch of said tree. I thought he was just resting, and kept an eye on him, but kept riding. By this time my dogs had settled down next to me to watch as well.

We soon discovered just why the hawk had chosen this particular perch. A young squirrel was making his way up the tree, and the hawk sat watching, patiently. The little guy got closer and closer, and turned his back on the bird for a moment. The hawk crept down his branch rather noisily, but the squirrel seemed not to notice. The next time he turned around, however, was his last, because the hawk gracefully lifted his big body up and down onto the tree rat, flew back to his perch, and then down onto the grass, prey between his claws.

The only camera handy was my iPhone, so I tried to snap him on the grass, but he was hidden by some cannas (dash those big leaves!). I got up off the bike for a better shot, but spooked him, so no picture to accompany text. I also lost .10 mile off my workout. Fortunately, Wikimedia Commons came through with a rather lovely shot of a similar event.

A better person than I might have tried to save the squirrel, but as I've mentioned, they're currently the bane of my little domestic world: plants dug up, fruit devoured, pecans wasted (this will be our third year with no yield at all). So I watched silently as nature had its way.

I'm not sure how I would have felt if the little squirrel had screamed in pain, but it didn't. The hawk did his work quietly and efficiently before he flew off to enjoy his meal.

Image credit: Hawk eating prey by Steve Jurvetson. Be sure to read his description of the event he caught on film. Even if I'd had the camera I couldn't have captured anything nearly as amazing. (The link is to his Flickr page, but I found the image on Wikimedia Commons.)

Skywatch Friday: Gallimaufrey

2010-10-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

There's no consistent theme in this week's offerings. I've been busy settling in to the new quarter and spending my two days at home during the week working on course prep instead of blogging as I'd planned. Not much time for photography, but not much to capture on the camera anyway.

Except for one rather nasty thunderstorm a few days ago, the skies have been relentlessly blue. Fall is most definitely here, but we haven't had enough of a cold snap to loosen the leaves' hold on the trees--so there isn't much color in them, either.

The opening shot was taken a couple of weeks ago, before the new quarter started. Since I work from noon to 10 pm two days a week and from 5 to 10 on Friday nights, I don't get to see sunsets on my way home--although after daylight savings time ends, I should be able to catch a few on my way down to Dallas on Friday as winter nears.

Now that the sun rises behind my comfy chair in the living room, I get to see some pretty reflections of sunlight through our old wavy-glass windows projected on the opposite wall. This one's a bit fuzzy, but it shows the effect. This wall is about to be painted a sagey green (it's now a sort-of gold with glaze over it--to match the harvest gold shag carpet we pulled out of the house when we moved in; I'm only now getting serious about getting the painting done), so the next time I take a shot like this it will be substantially different.

I hope everyone has a happy Skywatch Friday and a lovely weekend--and that the weather is as pretty where you are as it is here.

Old Friends

2010-10-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

As I prepare to enjoy my long weekend before classes start for the Fall quarter (my first is on Tuesday afternoon), I've spent the morning in my comfy chair reading about dirt.

Speaking more specifically, I've been reading about microscopic bugs and a class of bacteria (Mycobacteria vaccae) that turn out to be particularly beneficial to humankind. Since I'm planning to spend most of the day at home-keeping (especially vacuuming, doing dishes, dusting, and generally tidying up after an insanely busy month), it seemed to be a fitting way to use my morning reading time.

Among the now-old magazines piled on my coffee table (old because I've almost completely stopped buying magazines, opting now for digital versions, library holdings, or quarterly or bi-annual publications) I unearthed the April 2010 issue of Body + Soul, the "Whole Living" periodical from the Martha Stewart bunch. I had picked it up because one of the teasers included mention of natural ways to lower cholesterol--guaranteed to arouse my interest. As I thumbed through it, I noticed a couple of articles on the cleanliness/antibacterial mania engendered by the H1N1 scare. Since I'm an avowed bug-(and dirt-) worshipper, I snagged a copy and it's been on the stack ever since.

The article "Talking Dirty" by Rachel Dowd considered the down-side of antibacterial cleansers and the like, quoting one researcher's observation that the challenges bacteria present to our immune system actually teach our bodies "how to deal with germs."

Now, I'm sure I've mentioned over the years that despite my mostly genetically induced heart disease, I'm ridiculously healthy. I can't tell you when I caught my last cold. I haven't had flu since I came back to the States at age 15. Some of my doctors tell me that the large doses of statins I take to lower my astronomical cholesterol may have something to do with this, and they're probably right. But I also think it has a great deal to do with where I grew up and how much dirt I put up with in my house.

It's not that I'm innately slovenly. But I doubt that many in my acquaintance allow spiders to have their way to the extent I do, or that think tidying up a stack of magazines is more important to a well-kept home than a dusted tabletop. I actually felt sorry for the spiders that reside in many window-corners in my ancient house when I turned the hoover on them a couple of weeks ago in a fit of pre-autumnal cleaning. The usefulness of the little beasties is quite apparent when one sucks up not only the webs and the fuzzy little egg caches, but also the remains of the other bugs--particularly mosquitoes and ants--from which the spiders have protected me.

My childhood in Asia seems to have exposed me to enough influenza viruses that I've emerged completely unscathed over many a seasonal outbreak. Before my last surgery my DO talked me into getting a precautionary shot, and I'll likely get one this year to satisfy my insurance company, but I probably don't need them.

At any rate, the article reminds us that slathering ourselves with antibacterial preparations (like those found in the dispensers next to the elevators at school) isn't just unnecessary (and probably ineffectual) but potentially harmful. By rubbing out all bacteria, we risk losing the ability to fight off new species or varieties.

I was rather pleased to learn that getting down and dirty may be good for the psyche. According to an April 2007 article in Science Daily, Mycobacterium vaccae seems to activate the neurons that produce serotonin, and thus produce an anti-depressant effect. Chris Lowry (author of a study that tested the effect of M. vaccae on mice, and mentioned in the Body + Soul article) wonders, as a result, "if we shouldn't all be spending more time playing in the dirt." These bugs are referred to as "Old Friends" in the bacteria-study biz, because their ubiquity has generated health benefits throughout human evolution. For more on the "old friends" relationship between microorganisms and the increase in maladies like allergies and autoimmune diseases, see "Should auld acquaintance be forgot. . . " by Holger Breithaupt in the December 2004 issue of EMBO Reports (European Molecular Biology Organization).

I do wish more people would relax about a bit of dust and the occasional muddy footprint tracked into the house, and concentrate on really effective ways of preventing outbreaks of the bad guys like salmonella--things like tossing dishcloths or sponges into the washing machine frequently, cooking one's meat properly, and wiping the cutting board down with soap and water, or a bit of lemon juice. Overusing stronger concoctions may turn around and bite us in the backside if the bad bugs learn to resist antibiotics.

The all-time best guide I've found to cultivating a good-bug friendly house can be found in Ellen Sandbeck's book, Green Barbarians. I've touted this small compendium of very good advice a couple of times, and still plan to review it for B&N and Amazon, but for now I recommend the chapters on the Barbarian Body and the Barbarian Table. Some of my favorite people wouldn't be caught dead without a bottle of hand sanitizer, and some day it may kill them. But Sandbeck's fans may well survive bacterial Armageddon, because we can live with mother Earth--in more ways than one.

Time to go play outside.

Photo credit: Cryptobiotic Soil from Arches National Park, by Daniel Mayer via Wikimedia Commons. For more on this particular dirt, see Cryptobiotic Soils: Holding the Place in Place, by Jayne Belnap of the USGS. Cryptobiotic derives from the Greek for "hidden life"--and these soils are full of it. For more interesting information on bacteria, see this week's post in The Owls' Parliament.

Skywatch Friday: Fall Has Fell

2010-09-24T06:02:00.000-07:00

The various heavenly activities occurring over the last few days have made the night sky pretty interesting. Even so, I've only managed cheap shots with no tripod (I'm now thinking of setting it up and keeping it ready) that do a lousy job of capturing the conjunction of Jupiter and the Harvest Moon. Nonetheless, I had to try, and of the dozen or so shots I took, these are the best--this one from last night just as the moon was rising above the house and Jupiter peeked through the leaves (the same leaves I'll be raking in another week if the weather folk are correct).

I got it in the back yard--after standing in the middle of the street in front, risking my very life to try and get a cleaner view, to no avail.

This morning I looked out the upstairs window at about 6 am to see if the moon were still up, and since it was still well above the trees I took my time--made the bed, opened the shades--before going downstairs, grabbing the camera, and heading back out. By then, however, the clouds had started interfering, and this is what I got. Fuzzy and weird, but kind of interesting. It's pretty hard to tell that it's the moon, but again, no tripod.

And finally, a word about the House Clock. I actually remembered to shoot the last appearance of the rising sun in my dining room window on Wednesday morning, on the last day of summer. Some of you may remember that it first appears in that window on the first day of spring. I love this odd seasonal reminder, and it only took me about two years of living in the house to notice it. The almost indiscernible object in the lower half of the photo is my telescope, which languishes in that corner for most of the year.

Like my distant Celtic ancestors, I've always been conscious of phenological signs and celestial markers that point me through the year. So living in a house aimed in the right direction (facing east) and blessed with a serendipitous architectural feature suits me just fine.

I'm hoping to put the telescope to better use now that I've got a nifty app for the iPad, Star Walk, that tells me what's going on overhead. It really works, and its super cool. I need a more powerful (and digital) telescope to do any serious capturing of heavenly bodies, but that's something to look forward to.

Happy autumn, happy Friday, Folks.

Skywatch Friday: The Photo That Saved My Life

2010-09-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

No kidding. On Monday afternoon I was leaving school, and stopped at the traffic light just outside our parking garage. I saw the cloud and, since the light had turned to red just as I got to it, and it's usually pretty long, I whipped out ye olde (antique) iPhone and quickly snapped the picture--thinking that it'd be good wallpaper for the phone.

I turned it off and set it down, looking up to notice that the light was now green--but because of the fraction of a second of extra time it took me to get rid of the "camera," my left turn into traffic was delayed.

Good thing, because just as I was about to pull out, some jackass came shooting through the red light at about 50 mph. If I had actually gotten going "on time," I wouldn't be posting here today, and despite Vera's nifty side air bags and terrific frame, I'd undoubtedly have ended up as a smear on the road, given the speed at which I'd have been hit.

So, thank you everyone, for being such inspiring skywatchers that I can't pass up a good cloud, in hopes that I'd end up with something worth posting. In terms of composition, etc., this ain't much. But it did save my life.

Happy weekend!

A New Year

2010-09-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

Although my super-religious days are long behind me, and I'm pretty much settled into the skeptical life for what's left of mine, I do understand the need for marking important moments in the year--and the Jewish High Holy Days stay with me because of this. I always find myself in a reflective mood, and remember the rituals (although I don't really practice them anymore) with fondness.

As I was cleaning house this morning, I mused on the fact that most of the recognition we pay to time is grounded in religious practice. During the last few weeks I've been lecturing about the building of cathedrals, illuminated books of hours, the liturgical year, and various religious observances, all of which acknowledge time in some way. Most festivals enjoyed by the faithful were originally tied to the agricultural year (planting in the spring, growing in the summer, harvesting first fruits in the fall), when one thanked one's god for his/her bounty.

In grad school I wrote a paper on ancient Greek agricultural festivals, many of which were suffused with mysterious rites of fertility, and dramatic performances that ended in catastrophe and catharsis. Emotionally purged, spectators went home chastened and renewed. I always thought that this sort of thing would be good for us moderns, but we seem to be too busy. A quick weep in a sad movie is about all we can muster.

Nowadays, most of our holidays are spend-fests, milked to the last nickel by our communal need to express ourselves by buying stuff. Even the most deeply moving feasts of the year seem to be less about the season or the event being commemorated than about buying Easter candy and outfits or Christmas largess. The common complaint about the earlier and earlier arrival of "the Christmas shopping season" reflects the fact that even our most sacred holidays have been co-opted. Although people complain incessantly, however, they still participate.

Because it's been quite a long time since I escaped that particular aspect of American modernity, I've had the luxury of seasonal reflections on life, the universe, and the garden, and these have taken the place of official celebrations as my children have grown and moved away into their own lives. Lately I've been hankering after real family gatherings--at least one or two a year that involve actual meetings and food and being together, and it looks like this year I might get my wish, at least once, at Thanksgiving.

This is actually a terrific holiday in theory. It's essentially secular, having no real religious connection except with a rather mythical image of Pilgrims. But it's seasonally appropriate, celebrating as it does the end of the harvest, and the enjoyment of plenty before dearth. If one can look past the cheesy holiday decorations and pre-Christmas "sales events," the couple of extra days off and the promise of a good meal and good company can really lift the spirits before the winter cold sets in and the heating bills start to go up.

My son and his wife, as it turns out, have decided to join my daughter and her new beau and me and the Beloved Spouse this year for the long weekend. I'm not quite sure when it happened, but the actual meal has become my daughter's province, and will be held in her loft in a funky-hip area south of downtown Dallas. I bring Grandma's dinner rolls and good wine, and she does the rest. She's turned out to be a damned good cook, and I'm happy to turn the real work over to her. I imagine that we'll do something in our digs as well, especially if the weather's fine, as it often is at that time of year. The end of summer is now thick with promise.

Even though I don't really celebrate Rosh Hashana these days, I mark it, if only by reflecting on ways to make the next year better. One of my promises to myself is to write more, especially on the Farm, and to improve the garden. The possibility of the former has been enhanced by the likelihood of an accommodating teaching schedule, and a quarter off from administrative duties. I'll be teaching one course I haven't taught for three years, and another for a year, so the variety alone should perk me up. I'll have a fair amount of mental reconnoitering to do at the weekend, since Yom Kippur begins Friday night and it does tend to sober me up--in more ways than one. By then my college's accreditation visit will be over, and the quarter nearly done, so endings and beginnings will commingle rather poetically.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go make a start on the garden. After last week's visit from Hermine, it needs my help in tidying up.

Image credit: I was looking around on Wikimedia Commons for an appropriate seasonal picture, but wanted to avoid the usual pumpkins-and-autumn-leaves fare, lovely as some of the offerings were. Thinking about Yom Kippur led me to the Wailing Wall, and this lovely painting by Gustav Bauernfeind (1848-1904). It also seemed appropriate given the day on which this post was written.

Skywatch Friday: Winding Down

2010-08-26T12:32:00.000-07:00

Even the moon is now diminishing, after the Full Sturgeon Moon two days ago. I only got one shot before my camera's battery died, but I rather like the odd effects one gets whilst trying to hold the camera steady and change settings in the dark.

But the title of this post more accurately applies both to the season and to me. The weather finally broke yesterday, and today's been more like very early summer than late. It's 88 degrees out, as opposed to a record-setting 107 on Tuesday, and since most of the mosquitoes were done in by the heat, I managed a nice sit in the garden this morning--enjoying the weather, the paper, the dogs, and a damned good cup of Joe.

There's even chicken soup a-stewin' on the stove. I had the remains of a big fat pullet to deal with, and thanks to the weather I didn't have to freeze it and wait for later. Which means that I finally had a chance to defrost the chest freezer in the potting shed so I can start putting up things to save me a bit of time (or maybe guilt) as the quarter itself winds down and I get too busy with accreditation visits and student projects to cook supper.

Some seasonal activities seem almost instinctive: slowing down, cleaning up, sorting through, clearing out. I've had a hankering for doing some of this for some time now, perhaps due to wishful thinking (Fall is my favorite season, even though most folks I talk to like Spring better) during the hot spell when the heat bore down like a weight. Lethargy is probably also instinctive in such times.

As I enjoyed my garden for the first time in weeks, I noticed that there are still surprises to be had. One clump of chives is blooming mightily, and the steadfast cucumber plant is showing signs of renewed life. The big pot of tiny basil (like minette, but it drapes more) I bought on a whim last spring is still with us, and the sweet basil is starting to come back as well. The mint family is blossoming, and even though my big mess of catmint has pretty much gone under from heat exhaustion, its babies are showing up all over the yard, thanks to a couple of rain showers. My tomato plants have survived--only just--so if the weather stays cool I may actually get some fruit out of them.

I've pretty much resisted the urge to prep for classes today, so I should be able to enjoy my tiny Friday afternoon class (about fifteen students left, I think) and save the real work for Sunday. Thursdays are becoming my Sabbath, offering a moment of rest and recuperation from the heavily laden beginning of the week. Like the garden, I'm slowing down, but showing signs of new life as well. If I can avoid watching the news and get another good night's sleep sans air conditioning, I'll be considerably less curmudgeonly than I have been for the last month.

Enough weak metaphor. On to the weekend, and the lovely skies people share from all over the world. Have a great one, Skywatchers.

SkywatchFriday: Dog Days

2010-08-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

Although I suppose they're officially over, we're feeling the Dog Days of summer around here: hot, sultry, heavy, oppressive, and did I mention hot? Even the clouds I've been watching look overheated.

Typically for me the summer heat wave usually corresponds with midterm exams and grading, so I've been out of communication over the last week or so. It rained rather heavily a couple of days ago, and on Tuesday we managed to get a night's sleep with windows open and A/C off. It rained again for a bit yesterday, but it looks like it'll be a while before we get any more. The small photo above is another iPhone shot I snapped as the front began to move in. The opening image is from the Nikon--one of many I took in hopes of snagging something terribly dramatic. I didn't, but I still enjoyed looking up for reassurance that change might come. Cumulus clouds offer a bit of promise, but sometimes a cloud is just a cloud, and nothing happens.

The heat is even getting to the local raptors, and our neighborhood sharp-shinned hawk paid a visit to the yard, looking for water or a tasty tidbit (i.e. a smaller bird enjoying the bird bath). I grabbed the camera and shot through the window, so the result's pretty fuzzy.

The feature section of the Friday paper is always about gardening, and more than one story this morning was about how nobody could work in the garden while the weather's like this--so at least I don't feel like a reprobate for hiding inside. And I actually did read the paper out of doors. It didn't take long for the heat to drive me back inside, but I felt pretty virtuous for a few good minutes. Most of the mosquitoes have been fried by the heat, making it safe to enjoy the relative coolness just post dawn.

Hope everyone has a comfortable weekend and some good skywatching.

Skywatch Friday: Summer Clouds

2010-08-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

The summer cobwebs and hobgoblins have entered my brain full-tilt as we enter our second week of 100 degree days. The temperature has been hovering around 105, and in north Texas, this is hot, because the heat index brings it up to about 112. The garden is wilting, and drought restrictions mean that I can't legally water it with a sprinkler except on Fridays and Mondays before 10 am and after 6 pm, although I have done a couple of times because I can't stay out more than five minutes without becoming a mozzie-banquet. All I seem to be able to do is remember what it was like in the summer of 1980, when I was driving a one year-old and a four year-old around in an old VW bus with no air conditioning. For a solid month the thermometer dipped under 100 only after sunset.

The then four-year old is now living in Seattle, where it looks like the high today might get into the '80s. Sheesh.

So I'm obsessing, it seems, about clouds--which promise quite a lot, but deliver little. The next chance of rain is tomorrow night, although the local forecasters' track record on predicting rain is abysmal. But since it's too rutting hot to go out, and I can't stand the stench of even "unscented" mosquito repellent anyway, I went back to the archives for cloud pictures, and came up with these from last summer. Most were taken in the vicinity of the Ballpark in Arlington, and one or two may have been posted previously in conjunction with baseball musings.

Since I have to take these into Photoshop to optimize them for publication (the original files are huge), I decided to run them through "auto adjust" to see what would happen. I wouldn't normally do this, but the program cost a few quid and thought I'd see what it would do to my shots.

For the most part, they're a bit brighter than the originals, but nothing really dramatic happened. I thought they were all pretty, though, and worth sharing--even in retrospect. I'm too fuzzy-headed to rant about anything, so y'all can just enjoy the pictures (as I will yours) on this hot, hot, hot midsummer Skywatch Friday.

Have a good weekend, wherever you are. I'm rather envying the skywatchers from below the equator today!

Hope

2010-07-31T09:11:00.000-07:00

I was amused by some of the responses to the Skywatch Friday post, about how easy it is to be distracted by the sky whilst driving. In fact, I almost had two separate accidents on two different days simply because I was overwhelmed by immensely beautiful goings on above me: big billowy cumulus clouds, wispy cirrus feathers, gorgeous colors and rays of sun highlighting brief bits of prairie. All this was almost enough to take me away from the world. In more ways than one. Of course, then I read the newspaper and my euphoria quite quickly evaporated.

Those of us who aren't prayin' folk are sometimes asked how we can keep going on in tough times if things are as bleak as the news makes them seem.

I mean, only this week the Population Reference Bureau forecast 9 billion inhabitants on this small, endangered planet, by 2050 (7 billion by next year). Couple with this the prospect of there being not nearly enough young people to help take care of the old (the birthrate is falling, despite the projected population increase, so that the old will vastly outnumber the young), and the prognosis is grim.

And then there's the Gulf. After 100 days, the Deepwater Horizon well has been capped, and the "kill" is to begin next week. The font of oil has been stanched, at least for the moment, but stay tuned in China, Michigan, the Red Sea--oh, and Louisiana again: Barataria Bay, where a boat hit an oil well and caused a new leak of oil and gas into an extremely sensitive area already compromised by the BP spill. The New York Times recently ran a good slide show on the Environmental Impact of Oil Spills, in case anybody's been hiding in a cave for the last three months. If that makes you want to get out the checkbook and fund something, try Stop the Drill at Oceana.

The "slow" economy figures in all this, of course, but the whole picture presents such a damned if you do, damned if you don't conundrum that I'm not sure how anybody can get out of bed these days.

I mean, think of the pickle: We stop spending ourselves silly, and the economy stops growing fast enough to create jobs, which adds to the recessional outlook. We stop drilling and killing wildlife, and more jobs are lost. The ultimate quandary in the Gulf is instructive: vast numbers of people along the coast make their living from oil (drilling, refining, exploring, supporting)--but they're all now suffering the consequences of the country's insatiable oil-thirst, which threatens the livelihood of other inhabitants, who depend on fishing, shrimping, and tourism.

Sometimes, homo sapiens sapiens seems an absurd name for our species. We're hardly wise. If we were, we'd think things through, not see constant growth and accumulation of "wealth" as worthy goals, and think far enough ahead that we don't arrive at crises of our own making. All those people shouting about the deficit we're leaving our grandchildren would do well to think about how much they've contributed to the real legacy: a crowded, polluted, hot planet--and the consequences thereof. Forget about the money. Think about the quality of life. Forget about satisfying wants, and think about what it will take simply to satisfy basic needs.

As conscious as I am of all this, however, I do not contemplate throwing myself off a cliff in the Grand Canyon or other colorful and poetic means of ending myself. Instead, I get up every morning, have a good cup of coffee, and go about the work of educating young designers--in hopes that they'll somehow, someday figure it all out.

Family members have asked me how I can possibly exist without having faith that some god (well, actually, a particular one) will somehow take things in hand--if only we can believe enough, or pray hard enough, or trust in his wisdom to sort things out (it's always a he). How can I go about my daily tasks with no sense of ultimate purpose?

The simple answer is hope. I hope that we will become smart enough and generous enough over the next few years to see that constant, unrelenting growth does not provide a path toward a sustainable future for our children. I hope that we will become better assessors of new technologies so that we don't keep feeding greedy corporations that exploit poor workers in third-world countries, who mine dangerous minerals to construct the newest, fastest, sexiest digital machines. I hope we slow down, anchor ourselves in our environments, and begin to really see and experience the world we're poised to lose within a couple of generations. I hope we stop playing with our children's education and start teaching them what they need to know in order to survive in a depleted world.

After Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, one of the books that helped to raise our consciousness about what we're doing to the planet, he wrote another, less celebrated work: Hope, Human and Wild, in which he describes several communities that live in ways that offer promise for a different kind of future. He tries to "imagine a future vastly different from the present, one where people consume much less and restrain themselves much more. Where 'public' is no longer a curse word, and 'growth' increasingly is" (1). He contrasts hope with mere "wishing" that things will get better on their own. "Real hope," he says, "implies real willingness to change" (3).

I wrote More News From Nowhere as a descriptive act--a speculation about (as William Morris put it) "how we might live." But McKibben's book focuses on actual communities living actual lives: Curibita in Brazil, and Kerala in India, where people are actually doing, rather than just talking.

To this list, one could add Gaviotas in Colombia, although the population is quite small. But check out the Sustainable Cities website for larger efforts. And for an even bigger lift, search Google for "sustainable cities" and more pages on efforts around the world.

If I have any faith at all, it's that the human brain is wired for survival; that the instincts we've developed over the last couple of hundred thousand years will kick in and we'll realize that if we don't ramp down we're out of the game. To me the ultimate act of despair would be to go on as if nothing has happened.

The United States seems to be mired in American exceptionalism these days, comfortable in our cocoon of assumptions about who we are and what we're entitled to. I'm not sure how many oil spills or other disasters it'll take before we wake up and notice what we're doing to ourselves--let alone what we're doing to the rest of the world by exporting our excesses.

Still, I hope. I do what I think I can, although certainly not all that I probably could. As long as efforts go on somewhere to address the problems, I'll keep hoping and keep doing--even if, at this point in my life "doing" has more to do with driving a fuel-efficient car and going without air conditioning than with real political action. And if y'all who pray want to go on doing so, I'm pretty sure it's not going to hurt.

Image credit: this today's Wikimedia Commons's "photograph of the day," Hazy Blue Hour in Grand Canyon, by Michael Gäbler (take a look at some of his other contributions at the link). I went to the Commons to find an evocative photo of our home planet, and this came up. I thought it provided a good reason to hope that we manage not to screw it all up.

Skywatch Friday: A Midsummer Sunrise

2010-07-29T13:44:00.000-07:00

These are nothing spectacular, but given their source (my antique, first-generation iPhone) I consider myself lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.

I took the opening shot as soon as I parked for my morning class last Monday. The sun had risen splendidly during my thirty-minute ride down to Dallas, and I'm somewhat surprised that I didn't wreck poor Vera in my efforts to keep an eye on the drama in her rear-view mirror. At this time of year, the sun rises in the northeast, and I was headed south, so I didn't get to enjoy it much.

The next two photos were taken a few seconds after the first, and do catch some of the changes that happened so rapidly that I'm grateful to have caught anything at all.

Busy-ness has kept me from posting recently, so this may be it for another week if I don't get caught up. I usually use this blog as a means of thinking things through, but there seems to be so much going on that I don't have much time to think, much less write. I haven't had time, either, to check out the wonderful blogs I try to keep track of, and I miss you guys.

Still, the weekend's coming up, and there's Skywatch Friday to meander through, so I'll try to take some time tomorrow morning to see what's up--literally! Happy Skywatch Friday, and thanks once more to the team who keep it going.

Skywatch Friday: Summer Garden Surprises

2010-07-16T06:03:00.000-07:00

After staying indoors for most of yesterday morning, I braved the heat and bugs in quest of figs and pears, hoping to rescue both from the barbarian critters (mostly mockingbirds and squirrels) that nibble and run. Don't these guys know you're supposed to finish what you put on your plate?

Anyway, I took a few quick (i.e. not very carefully framed or composed) shots of hot, sultry, summer clouds and of the garden and was rather amazed to find late-blooming wisteria and fairly dangerous-looking mushrooms--as well as a streak of white fungus that, on first glance, looks like old wet loo-paper. I didn't include that one, and I haven't had a chance to identify the 'shrooms. They'll be gone by the time I go out again--but the recent wet weather and abundance of rotting wood around here has turned this place into a mushroom aficionado's dream.

The Rose of Sharon bushes are still in bloom, although the white one's dropped most of its flowers, and the purple one has gone pink. This happened once before; the first round of blooms are followed by smaller, pinker flowers for a second show. It'll stop now, for most of the rest of the summer, and then bud up and bloom again in early fall.

The Chinaberry (opening shot; I know it's cheating, but the sky really is peeking through the leaves) is fruiting, although it'll be a while before they ripen and start attracting grackles. The Cedar Waxwings seem to have left for less balmy climes, but there will be plenty of drunken poopy birds after the berries are fully ripe.

As I sit in my study typing this morning, I'm enjoying a veritable parade of birds taking advantage of the two bathing areas outside my window. The goldfinches are out in posses of three to six, but get out of Dodge as soon as the mourning doves decide to take over. There have been robins, brown thrashers, cardinals, and sparrows as well. I'll have to refill before long, because they've splashed out so much of the water.

Thanks, as always, to the Skywatch Friday team for giving me something to do besides grouse. I wish you all a happy third anniversary, and hope everyone has a great weekend.

In the Doldrums

2010-07-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

Classify this one under meteorological metaphors: a weather-related phenomenon that applies to mood, most commonly in hot, sticky, muggy, calm summer conditions.

Like now.

The "doldrums," or (according to the Glossary of Meteorology) "equatorial calms" refers to very specific conditions occurring in a very specific region of the world: the Intertropical Convergence Zone where the tropical winds from the northern and southern hemisphere meet and generate the trade winds.

I was watching Serenity (yes, again) the other night, and Mal's remark about the albatross sent me back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where we get the sailors' experience of being becalmed in the region when the winds die down (often for significant periods) described for us in grim but painterly detail:

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
’Twas sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Landlocked as we are here in north Texas (and the map that opens the post shows just how far away the Doldrums are), we can nonetheless sympathize at times, especially after a period of relatively cool, rainy days when the temperature starts rising and the humidity with it.

This is the first July I can remember when we haven't had a single day over 100F into mid-month. Because of the humidity, though, the heat index makes it feel much hotter and these conditions persisted well into last evening in some areas. For the last several weeks we've been able to sleep without the air conditioning on, but no longer. And this morning I didn't even shut it down and open up for a few hours. We're only talking two rooms here, but to me that's an extravagance.

I may be more sensitive than some to this kind of weather because of the time I spent in the tropics, where spells of 90 degree temperatures accompanied by 90 percent humidity characterized our summers. We had no air conditioners in those days, and running through a sprinkler offered no respite. A few hours at a spring-fed swimming pool or a trip to the beach or a local lake offered our only relief before I moved back to the States.

Years ago, when I lived in Philadelphia, I remember a particular summer during which a tropical depression hung over the city for the better part of a week. My memories of the time run in slow motion, and are so palpable that I can remember being conscious of my blood flowing through my veins (back when it could do so without the aid of anticoagulant drugs!):

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion . . .

Things aren't much different now, although the present moment lacks the kind of intensity twenty-somethings can feel. Still, the weight of the air will make it hard to do anything today that doesn't take place in the air-conditioned study. As inviting as the back yard looks, with its shady areas and comfy chairs, the air will be too thick with moisture and mosquitoes for me to accept. I'll have to brave it all for a few minutes if I want to snag a few figs before the mockingbirds take their daily toll, but that'll be the extent of out-of-doors activity this morning.

Perhaps the only good thing I can imagine about climate change and its local effects is the element of surprise: who knows what will happen next? The usual patterns are changing so rapidly that the next two months might not turn out as expected. The albatross may yet show up to bring us luck--unless, of course, it's befouled by the mess in the Gulf.

I find myself checking in at least once a day on the hurricane watch app I've installed on the iPad; except for Alex (and the tropical depression called "'Two"), there hasn't been much activity so far, but he season promises to be "interesting" according to the forecasters. One can only hope that we don't get another big storm until the leak gets capped and they've had a chance to do some more cleanup down there.

As I was moderating comments this morning I noticed that this is my 200th post on the Farm, a couple of weeks past my third anniversary on Blogger. Although I don't get around to posting as often as I'd like these days, I did want to let anyone reading know that I have appreciated all the comments and input over the last three years.