Ett Hem

Carl Larsson, Stugen (The Cottage) 1899

Back when I was teaching art and design history to animation, multimedia, and graphic design students, I spent a good deal of time trying to find them historical sources of inspiration for their work. Beyond The Usual Suspects (the dead European white guy canon), I spent more time than most of my ilk on prehistoric and non-Western cultures. But I also looked more broadly into the Western tradition, looking for the origins of modern design: especially into the Arts and Crafts movement as expressed both in Europe and North America. But in addition to William Morris in England and the Greene brothers in the US, I also introduced them to Carl Larsson and the Scandinavian branch of the movement.

I know, I know. Larsson is in some ways the poster boy for dead white guy-ness. A Swede, no less. But just as I had found his work compelling for a number of reasons, my students were attracted to his depictions of domestic intimacy and his admirable hand skills. Like many of the great Scandinavian illustrators (Kay Nielsen, Gustaf Tenggren) Larsson plumbed mythic connections to the past, but depicted everyday life as well--as interpreted by him and his wife, Karin Bergöö. In the '70s, while working at a co-op book store in Philadelphia, I had come across his book about their home, Ett Hem (A Home) which in the real world is every bit as charming as in his paintings. I'm not sure why I didn't snap it up at the time, but years later I found a couple of nicely illustrated explorations of the Larssons' home life. I especially liked the depictions of their garden, which looks much more like ours than one might find in today's house-porn mags.

What interested me most about Larsson's work was the fact that he treated his home as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art. The concept was originally applied by Richard Wagner to his operatic integration of music and drama (especially in his Ring cycle), but has since been applied to works of art and architecture conceived as an aesthetic whole. In the most valuable course I ever took at UT Dallas ("Vienna 1900," taught by Charles Bambach), I began to explore the idea as it could be applied to something as seemingly mundane as one's own home--just as Larsson had done, and I began to see the integration of house and garden as part of a long-term domestic artistic process. 

I doubt that anyone who sees our place is going to be struck by its artfulness. At the moment, thanks to the heat, the front garden is a mass of dying annuals amidst the better-chosen, drought-tolerant perennials. I keep better care of the food plants and herbs on the back quarter-acre, but what once looked like overgrown rainforest in the spring now droops pathetically, and leaves are beginning to yellow and fall, as if it were already autumn. And it's not quite yet August. But learning what will grow, under what conditions, and how to keep things thriving under problematic circumstances, is part of the process.

However, as I mentioned in my June 18 post ("It's Not Easy Being Green"), living here is not just about us, or even just about us and Molly and Nylah and their predecessors. It's also about creating a home for the critters that are finding it more and more difficult to survive in this area.  As a result of local habitat destruction, we've tried to make this little half acre habitable for as wide a variety of wildlife as we can. And our efforts seem to have been rewarded. 

Last March, I discovered in Woody's Garden (an herb- and pollinator-focused memorial to one of our previous dogs) a hole that had been softened with what looked like feathers--but which later I discovered to be fur (top photo). I had used the spot to shelter an injured Carolina wren fledgling. I finally figured out that it had harbored rabbits. More recently, in our raised bed for growing fennel, catmint, and oregano, I discovered what was clearly a rabbit nest (evidence of a warren beneath?). I've often seen a bunny near the spot, so now I know why. These are not stupid rabbits, by any means, though. They've figured out when the dog and cat are likely to be afoot, and make themselves scarce during those outings. 

I included a photo of the pecan-knot-hole resident squirrel in an earlier post, but I recently caught it entering its nest for an afternoon kip, and then saw it snoozing a bit later.

I could go back into my archives and find an almost identical photo to the one below from each of the last five or so years. It's a Neon Skimmer, and for some reason they like to use our back yard as a mating arena. This year I had removed the rebar pole from next to the repurposed copper firepit we use as a bird bath. When I realized that this fellow seemed to be looking for a perch, I replaced it. Almost immediately, it was occupied. When they don't land here, they'll rest on the rusty hog wire cylinder we use as a fennel support.

Some years ago we brought back from California an old metate that a Paiute woman from Owens Valley had given my grandmother. Nowadays it serves as a toad pond, as does the blue pot with handy brick ladder inserted for Mr. Toad's convenience. 

 

When the weather's better, it's nice to be able to inhabit the hammock next to Porco's parking spot, and watch hummingbirds sip from the trumpet vine. There are four hanging feeders around, but the hummers seem to like a more authentic experience just as well. When I'm not out there reading Margaret Renkl essays, though, one of the local anoles will often explore the space, which is unfortunately too warm now for either woman or beast. Maybe in the fall.

Despite the heat, Molly and I are still spending an hour or so in the garden each morning; later in the day we spend less time, even though the entire yard is shady by then. For as long as we can stay comfortable, we both enjoy watching the squirrels splooting at the bases of the trees to keep cool. Squirrels are endlessly fascinating to Molly anyway, but she also seems to enjoy imitating them, with her belly plastered against the cool grass.

At some as-yet unforeseeable point, the 100F+ days will have faded into the past.  And I fully realize that along with the intemperate summer we'll no doubt "enjoy" its polar (ahem) opposite come winter. But knowing that these animals can find shelter, shade, habitat, water, and some comfort here with us gives me some hope that we'll all make it together. 

For all of us here, it is--in one form or another--a home.

Image credits: Carl Larsson, Stugen (from Ett Hem), 1899, via Wikimedia Commons.

It's Not Easy Being Green

For the last several years I've let the Virginia creeper take over large swaths of space in the garden, and it's become a tradition to let it overflow the decrepit, mangled (from branch that fell from the elm overhead) Adirondack chairs and an old sawed-off patio table. After the elm branch fell, I thought I'd just have to get rid of them, but now, more than a year later, they're still there, swathed in viney decorations that now include wild grapes (descendants of vines that grew on the south fence and once provided fruit for some really bad wine we found under the house) and English ivy from next door--as well as the creeper. It won't be long before wisteria and trumpet vine gain a foothold, since I've no plans to eradicate any of it.

An article in the New York Times (Yes, You Can Do Better Than the Great American Lawn) prompted me to muse on the unorthodox nature of our own "lawn," and to offer an alternative to the tidy, suburban, pesticide-laden, water-hungry model that presides around here. There is some attendant irony in that the city motto of McKinney, Texas, is "Unique By Nature." But the fact that there are no other houses on our block with fireflies may suggest the duplicity in that coinage. I'm clearly not the only one mindful of these problems (see especially Margaret Renkl's May 16 article for The New York Times, "One Way to Do More for the Environment: Do Less with Your Lawn," which I only just got around to reading), but the older I get, the louder and judgier I become.

This morning, whilst potting up a rescued plant from the back (one I'd tried to kill earlier in the spring, but that proved amazingly hardy), I watched the neighbor across the street mowing his smallish patch with a large, loud gas thing with a grass catcher. He dumped the clippings into a large paper bag for the city to pick up next Friday. He then brought out his new, also loud, also gas trimmer, tidied up, and then use a blower (also loud, also gas) to blow the stray bits out onto the street. Weenie that I am, I said nothing, because I have to live here, and most of my neighbors already think I'm a tree-hugging commie.

But we don't do that. We use our electric (battery-powered) utensils to mow and mulch, trim, and blow the bits back onto the "lawn." Such as it is. A large section of the front yard is composed of mulch from various trimmings of the eighteen Very Large Trees within the property boundaries. We've got another pile sitting in the driveway, waiting for The Beloved Spouse to distribute it appropriately after the most recent care-taking (see last week's post). 

We have in place a few rules that have endured for many years, beginning long before we moved to McKinney, and that have served us well:

If it's green, let it grow--at least until you know what it is (and if it's in a place you might want lawn, mow it).

We do have some hardy St. Augustine grass growing, but where it doesn't, we let anything grow that wants to. Our yard is also replete with edibles (henbit, purslane, dandelion, plantain, chickweed, cleavers, wood sorrel, onionweed, pigweed, mullein) that periodically get added to salads. I'm hoping to add lambs quarters to the list, if I can get some to root out of what I bought from Profound Microfarms. It used to grow wild, but I haven't seen any in some time. Were I to spend more time at it, I'd probably discover more, but it's getting harder to spend that kind of time out in the heat.

When we first moved in, everything was very tidy, with the southwestern section of the property set aside for growing veg. There were the grapes, too, and blackberries galore. Those kept up for a few years, but eventually got shaded out from all the squirrel- and bird-planted trees that now line the back part of the lot. After trying a more formal herb garden, I eventually gave up and let a copse grow, which (much later) was mostly cleared for a caravan driveway/parking area when we bought our little Shasta. 

Before we began the house renovations, the garage was painted white, and most of what grew around it was what most folk would call weeds. As below, to the left, where the garage peeks out from behind a stand of cow parsley. We don't grow much of that now, though, because it turns into burrs that love dogs' tails. So it only grows outside of the fence. Occasionally I pick it for wildflower bouquets, which I like to keep on my writing table on the screened porch. 

Above the back door to the garage (which you can barely see at left) we installed a miniature pergola (below) to support a heavy branch of wisteria.  It was so successful that the growth extended onto the roof--until one of this spring's storms knocked the whole plant over and off the support. Reluctantly, we cut it down and are now training stray shoots back up the structure, but it will take another year or two for it to offer much decorative cover. I'm trying to root some more, but am not having much success because the heat keeps drying out my twiglets. It will clearly be a while before it regains some of its flamboyancy.

But perhaps not as long as I thought, because just this morning I noticed that the  stump of the big vine we'd had to cut off was (as TBS had suggested it might) sprouting anew. Vigorously. So, we may have some well-established beginnings of a refreshed tangle of wisteria by the end of the summer. 

With humidity at tropical levels, things will continue to grow lushly until the summer drought takes over and I have to spend time judiciously watering to keep it all from dying off. 

All this has illustrated the lesson of letting things be: that it's not always easy to maintain any kind of order, even if one doesn't demand much. I'm not a total anarchist in the garden; I do decide where I want things to grow, and often move them about from place to place. Mostly, I'm successful--but then I have to ride herd on what I change. 

At some point during one of our evening animal outings, I realized that Woody's garden (a circular planting area ringed by tree stumps from previous prunings) really needs to be a butterfly haven. I've already got some attractors planted in there, so realized that a few more might help support the few visitors we see once or twice a day: Tiger and Black Swallowtails, an occasional Monarch, and various smaller and less regal types. This leads me to another rule: 

Focus on supporting wildlife, not people.

This morning I transferred some yarrow (suggested in an article I'd read only yesterday, but can't remember where) into Woody's garden, and will find some salvia to move as well. Because the summer heat is already here, I won't get more ambitious until next spring, but this will fill in some bare spots, and provide more food for the abundant number of pollinators who already visit. Unlike most of our neighbors, we don't try to get rid of most bugs (the main exceptions are the mozzies that see me as food dispenser), and thus provide haven for bees, wasps, fireflies, dragonflies, ladybird beetles, spiders, and others generally seen as beneficial. But we also harbor all manner of less well appreciated critters, like assassin bugs. As annoying as all the "baddies" can be, they still provide food for all the birds we capture on our Merlin sound-identification app and for the bats that whiz past us overhead in the evenings.

Occasionally we're rewarded with something especially nice, and late yesterday afternoon this beauty showed up on one of the repurposed logs:

I saw it from across the yard, and proceeded to sneak up on it--after having run into the house for my phone. Although it's not the first Luna Moth to show up in the yard, it came in earlier and stayed longer than the only other one I'd seen in the garden. One showed up on the front screen door several years ago, but this is the first one I've seen taking advantage of the habitat. 

 

Habitat lounging is common in this kind of a garden. The arborist who came to assess the recent tree job was very impressed with the number of places critters could comfortably occupy. Even the structures provided for plants can offer a perch for an anole on the hunt:

This one is lazing on the support frame for the fennel we use to harbor swallowtail larvae--not a good sign for this summer's prospects. But I'm hoping to harvest at least a few baby butterflies to host in my mesh hatchery, where I can keep them safely away from this guy. Although chances are that Molly will already have had his tail by then, and he might not be so spry. She's separated at least four other anoles from theirs already.

Many years ago, Kermit the Frog lamented the difficulty of greenness, which can still be seen as a metaphor for current problems in the human world. On several levels. But this gives rise to one more rule worth considering:

It may not be easy being green, but it's our only hope.

This week's events in Yellowstone are bringing home more of the reality of climate change. If we don't start making efforts to restore the environment immediately, precious habitats everywhere will just be washed away. Or suffer from another of the myriad plagues our species is inflicting on the planet.

Earth Island Institute's piece from last year,  "It's Not Easy Being Green: What if we were mutually accountable not only to the environment, but to each other?" takes this a step further, and challenges us to to embrace the whole: humanity and environment, persons of every color, all beings, the whole planet. Everything we do has impact. Responsible choices, meaningful gestures--anything we can do to acknowledge the fact that no matter what color or gender we are, we are all part of the natural world. It could all go away as quickly as a road can be washed into a raging river. 

I'll be celebrating Juneteenth with both the brown and green anoles in the garden tomorrow. I'll be remembering my father, who taught me that race was a human invention, and that color had nothing to do with being human. And I'll be grateful for every person I've known who has reinforced that understanding throughout my life. 

Recognizing that the earth belongs to us all and that we all depend on its survival for our own should be a universal goal. But starting small, in the garden, and keeping safe what we can is easier than it might seem.

Sanctuary

Spring had been toddling along, with repairs to the plumbing having been effected, and maintenance of our forest canopy having been attended to (see above), and various garden entities having budded, bloomed, hatched, fledged, hopped, and flown. The process is continuing apace.

But two weeks ago the unspeakable happened again, and I have (for me, at least) been rendered speechless. On May 25, The Dallas Morning News reported the killings in Uvalde with a one-word headline: "AGAIN." This week's New Yorker's cover (by Eric Drooker) says it all, wordlessly.

I grew up in a war-threatened world, but never had to worry that anyone would ever take a war-weapon and kill children, Black people, old people, religious people--anyone who got in the shooter's way. But it has happened here--in the country my father, brother, and both grandfathers had spent significant years of their lives defending--again, and again, and again. And it won't stop because our country lacks the moral fortitude to do what needs to be done, and our populace--in absurdly and frighteningly large numbers--lacks the interpretive skills to understand the very Constitution they insist they're "protecting." And Texas is at the epicenter of the madness.

I cannot do anything about it. Godless folk like me don't see prayer as helping anything, and I'm pretty sure any "thoughts" I might be able to "send" to the catastrophically bereaved families would amount to a teardrop in an ocean of sadness. I can send a little money where it's needed, and I can vote. Which I will do--to agencies that support children's welfare,  and for people who will try to rectify the damage done by intellectually and ethically challenged public "servants." But unless enough people are as angry as I am, these efforts may be for nought. We'll see in November.

In the meantime, with temperatures oddly low and rain uncharacteristically abundant at the right times, the seasons move along. My tomatoes are about to be turned into jam, and roasted, and eaten out of hand. In a week they'll be gone, and I'll spend the next three months trying to keep the plants from withering on their stems in hopes of a fall crop. 

And since I have little to add to any conversation at the moment, here are some photos of our little oasis--our sanctuary amidst the madness. These are the reason and the means for our survival.

Flora

Blue-eyed Grass

Yarrow

Alliums

Rain Lilies

Rose of Sharon

Late Wisteria

Baby figs

Rose of Sharon (double, blue)

Fauna, wild and domestic

Green and Brown Anoles

Lady Bird Beetle, developing (on oregano)

Molly, meditating next to Emma's grave

Bunny (near the hogwire fence, avenue of escape)

Molly, being lectured by a squirrel

Nylah, keeping watch nearby

As long as the weather holds, it's easy to find solace in our little patch. Word from our families is generally good, although my 99 year-old cousin, Willma Gore, died recently only weeks away from her hundredth birthday (which is today). That makes me one of the oldest surviving Chrysler-Tate women; time to get my part of the story set down in prose, which I should be able to do thanks to Willma's efforts to record my Grandmother's memories of nineteenth-century pioneering in Nevada and California.

The Beloved Spouse has taken over some of the burden of researching our house for historical registry purposes, so we're hoping to get that completed by the end of the year: a nice hundredth birthday present to the house we love--and in which hope to finish up our time on the planet. Meanwhile, we'll keep taking care of the house and garden, and I'll keep writing about it when I have something that might be worth putting down. 

My father's dying instructions to me were to "write at the end of your stint." He came from a family of historians (his mother Clarice Tate Uhlmeyer, his aunt Myrtle Tate Myles, and his cousin Willma Willis Gore, were all history buffs and also wrote about the family in many contexts), and he often wrote about family and Owens Valley stories for local outlets. My mother was a journalist, but her focus was on Taiwan, where she spent much of her adult life. Nevertheless, my genes have made it difficult for me to keep my mouth shut, which is why I've managed to keep this blog going for this long (fifteen years this month). Thanks to encouragement from some of my former students and occasional readers, I guess I'll keep going for another fair while.

Writing, as it turns out, is way of pursuing sanctuary: by imagining better times and better ways of living, we keep hope alive. Meanwhile, I guess I can just follow the advice of the old comedians, Bob and Ray (my Dad's favorites), who used to say, "Meanwhile, hang by your thumbs." Or at least by harnesses appropriate for preserving the welfare of trees.

Image notes: most of the photos were taken by iPhones, including my new mini; for the larger format ones I used the Canon Eos. Thanks to the guys from Preservation Tree, who have been taking care of our little forest for about fifteen years, for letting me snap shots of them doing their sometimes scary work.

Summer Is Icumen In

Rather than celebrating the coming of this particular season with Medieval rapture, I'm tempted to substitute Ezra Pound's snitty little salute to winter ("Lhud sing goddam!") in place of "Lhud sing cuccu!" This is, after all, Texas, and it's only by the grace of some current climatic weirdness that we're not slow-cooking in our own juices already.

I'm generally a bit ambivalent about summer anyway, because I fully realize that what's actually happening is that the daylight hours are now beginning their long decline toward the winter solstice,  the "darkest evening of the year," and the end of my 67th--even though I'm "only" 66 (and a half) at the moment.

Until I read Akiko Busch's op-ed post in the New York Times last Friday (The Solstice Blues), I thought I was alone in not necessarily seeing this moment as some grand seasonal celebratory event:

The moment the sun reaches its farthest point north of the Equator today is the moment the light starts to fade, waning more each day for the following six months. If the summer solstice doesn’t signal the arrival of winter, surely it heralds the gradual lessening of light, and with that, often, an incremental decline in disposition. 

In North Texas, the end of June is usually marked by the onset of 100-degree days; but this year we've been treated to a bit of rain and temperatures hovering around 90 during daylight hours and low enough at night to sleep without air conditioning. Even the dogs don't seem all that uncomfortable with the humidity--although we do tend to hole up in a small room with a window unit to watch TV in the late afternoon/evening, by which time the house has heated up enough to make the humid air a bit heavy.  Still, by bedtime, it's tolerable again; with a breeze it's even better, because the bedroom has windows on three sides.

When I was looking for an image to illustrate this post, I had wheat in mind for several reasons. For one, a search for "summer" on Wikimedia Commons inevitably produces photos of wheat. In addition, I'm working on a new philosophical perspectives course called "Food and Culture," and my first lecture involves the early history of human victuals--inevitably involving the ancestors of modern wheat. Since a later topic in the course will consider food and art (or food in art), I snapped up the Carl Larsson painting (which I've probably used before) because it touches on both, and because his stuff always makes me think of utopia.

The Food and Culture course has been (ahem) cooking in my brain for several years, but it was only recently that I realized I could teach it without having to go through the bureaucratic effort involved in getting a new course accepted.  Years ago, when I helped design the general studies offerings for our baccalaureate program, I pinched an idea from SUNY Stony Brook and crafted a course called "Philosophical Perspectives," thinking that whatever philosophical types we might hire could then teach what they knew, from within whatever intellectual context they were trained.  I've taught several topics under this catch-all rubric (The Arts and Crafts Movement, Pioneers of Modern Design, and Technology and Utopia), and it finally occurred to me last quarter that Food and Culture could easily fit under the umbrella.

As it turns out, I'm only catching up with a trend that's been evolving since the '90s, and even in the immediate region there's a Philosophy of Food project developing out of the University of North Texas. What this means is that although I'm not exactly on the cutting edge of things, I can take advantage of the work people are already doing in order to locate resources for my students (30 as of the last time I checked). It also means that thinking about food and its cultural meanings is being taken more seriously than it was at first. In a Chronicle of Higher Education article I had saved from 1999, it was clear that the scholarly value of food-studies was somewhat suspect. Since then, however, a looming variety of food crises (scarcity, waste, obesity, malnutrition, and myriad others) has forced folks to start talking about the many ramifications of food consumption, including the effects of global climate change on the future of food.

William Morris's effort to move the education of desire into the center of our consciousness about how we live (and how we might live) fits squarely into the aims of my course: to get students to start thinking about the difference between need and want, and how understanding that difference can inform sustainable futures.  I'm not sure how this lot will respond to having to read and write and think about something most of them don't consider except at mealtime. But there's some potential here to poke a stick into complacency.  Since most of those enrolled are in a culinary management program, the results could be quite interesting.

We will, of course, be suffering through the worst part of this region's summer weather. But we'll be doing so within an overly air-conditioned classroom, sucking down cold bottled water, iced tea, diet sodas, and energy drinks--matters I'll have to design another course to deal with.

Image credit: Carl Larsson (1853-1919),  Summer (date unknown). Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Niklas Nordblad.

Skywatch Friday: Summer Garden Surprises

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.

Skywatch Friday: Another Summer Sunrise

The moon at dawn . . . recorded on an iPhone. At times like this I wish I had the cute little Nikon CoolPix job we just bought my daughter for a graduation present. But I can't not take sunrise pictures if there's anything at all handy to use.

The opening shot is taken from my driveway before I left at 6:15 for work.

The rest were taken from the roof of the parking garage (at about 6:45) except for the last--which doesn't involve much sky, but was kind of interesting. It's what greeted me when I came downstairs from the roof. The problem with having this stuff in your blood is that during the whole drive to Dallas I keep noticing the shots I'm not getting because I'm on the bloody freeway.

Ahh, smog. Gotta love what it does to a sunrise photo:


I do promise better stuff in future, but this is midterm week and I'm up to my eyeballs in grading. I'll also start hauling around the D80 again, in hopes of doing future sunrises more justice. Have a great weekend.

Summer Daze

Were there some rain in the forecast, I could probably break out of the dog days a bit more easily. Rain has a way of freshening things, even if it provides only a brief respite from heat and usually means a rise in humidity. Earlier in the week, when I saw tropical depression/storm Edouard forming in the gulf and heading into the Houston area and tracking north, I was somewhat optimistic. A small storm can bring relief without much damage, but we only got a couple days' worth of cloud cover from it. The temperature did get low enough (mid-90s) to keep me from turning on the A/C for the duration; today, however, things are back to normal, and the animals are draped all over the house like limp fur rugs.

Even last night's spectacular opening ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics offered only an evening's worth of distraction. But they were cool in the metaphorical sense--though clearly not in the literal sense. Leave it to Zhang Yimou to put on the most spectacular of events and to combine tradition and state-of-the-art technology to dazzle us and bring a tear of gratitude to the eye of someone who still hasn't shed the spell of things Chinese.

I had, in fact, only a day earlier, ploitered (there's that lovely word again) away a morning by looking at northern Taiwan on Google Earth, trying to figure out where I had lived as a youngster. I'm getting closer, I think, although it's probably a fruitless search, given the forty-five years that have passed since I left. But it's fun, and every time I try it, the images are better. As much as I want us to start doing a better job of evaluating our technologies before we adopt them, I can't help but be amazed by what we've learned to do in the past half century--including the incredible electronic scroll that rolled out in the middle of the Bird's Nest stadium last night.

Here at home about the only beings who seem to be enjoying my back yard these days are the birds. I'm trying to be really conscientious about filling up the watering holes for them, and there are, at this moment, several flocks hopping around on the lawn looking for bugs in the grass (which is still a bit damp from having been watered last night), and a few individuals bathing themselves energetically outside my window. If I were slightly more energetic, I'd head to Target to see if I could find an inflatable kiddie pool on sale for a few bucks, fill it up, and go join them.

But I'm too lazy even to do that. The most physical thing I can manage this afternoon is moving my fingers across the keyboard. I'm still working on assessment strategies for my classes, and trying to strike a balance between satisfying the administration and sticking to my philosophical guns about what education's all about. It astounds me that with all my experience and training, and my love of my subject matter and my students, and my assurance from those who contact me years down the line to tell me that yes, I have in fact enriched their lives--that somehow it's not enough. I have to produce numbers, because quantification is now everything.

It's fortunate that my particular institution recognizes this tension and tries to help us negotiate the obstacle course laid out by the all-powerful accreditation machine, but all of our effort is really directed toward making it easier for outsiders to understand what we're doing. They can't come in and spend a couple of weeks actually attending classes, talking to instructors and students within the learning context, and discussing how we construct our classes, how we evaluate our students, what we are trying to accomplish, and how to do a better job when they find things lacking. They want grids and charts and rubrics. They trust not, because they believe only in the myth of objectivity, and not in the reality of meaning. And education is all about meaning.

And so I plod. Instead of spending the time augmenting my knowledge about my field and learning new things to pass on to my students, or discovering new ideas about what the past meant to those who lived it, I labor to translate what I do into something measurable.

Oh, to hell with it. I'm going to ice up a pitcher of tea, take a book, and go out and join the birds in the shade, under a tree. That's the way to spend a summer day.

Image Credit: Another Cézanne translation, this time into an Art Nouveau version, from the summer of 2006, by Kevin O'Flaherty.

Walking in Place

Perhaps it's simply the season--the lethargy and inertia that emerges in the heat of summer--or maybe it's the specter of change in the work environment that shadows my teaching life these days, but I can't seem to get much done today. To paraphrase (badly) Bob Dylan, I ain't goin' nowhere.

In the first place, it's getting hot. In a house without central air conditioning, temperatures over 100 can be debilitating--even when some of the rooms have window units that keep them cool enough. These days we're only using two rooms--the bedroom and the study. We'd probably leave the bedroom out of the equation, except at night, but we have an old cat (18 years) who doesn't like to come downstairs. The other three feline members of the family occupy open window sills and the grate where an old heating unit used to be housed, but which is now simply open to the space under the house. The attic fans pull cool air up through it, and at least one cat can be found lounging on it all day. The dogs stay in the study where we do most of our work, and which is curtained off with a portière from the rest of the house so they can still run out and bark at the mail carrier and any passing dogs or baby strollers that have the effrontery to use the sidewalk in front. I've jacked the thermostat on the units up to 83, which is quite comfortable, but it's really hard to get any work done in any other part of the house.

The summer quarter is in full swing, and my students are, so far, engaging and hard-working; but the department in which I teach is bereft of a director at the moment, and the search for a new one entails a certain amount of angst among the affected faculty. Because ours is a proprietary school, run by a corporation interested in its profit margin, we tremble at the notion of being saddled with martinet fixated on assessment and student retention, rather than on the problems of teaching the liberal arts in an institution that tries hard not to be seen as a trade school, but is still ambivalent about the necessity of what we do. While all this is going on, I'm spending most of my non-teaching time revising lectures to make them more visually exciting in order to combat student prejudices against history courses. The past just isn't immediately relevant to these guys, so I have to show them how cool it all really is--in 100 images or fewer per week.

But even the rather pleasurable task of finding some new images for my upcoming Vienna Secession/Art Nouveau lecture hasn't been enough to stave off entropy, and I was busy procrastinating this morning (by playing with my new printer/scanner, reading today's New York Times online, and sorting through my image library). In the Times I ran into a review of Ammon Shea's new book, Reading the OED--about reading through the entire Oxford English Dictionary. Since noodling through my compact edition of the OED is one of my favorite ways to ploiter ("work to little purpose"--a word mentioned in Nicholson Baker's article), I enjoyed both reading the review and checking out Shea's minimalist web page.

Later, while revisiting my image library (which is, as it turns out, enormous--about 5000 strong), I ran across the results of a workshop my students used to do at midterm. Before, that is, the assessment regime caught up with me and I had to start administering exams to gauge their progress on course objectives. At any rate, the assigned task involved setting up a still life patterned after an impressionist or post-impressionist painting, taking a digital photograph of the results, and then manipulating the photo back into an image in the style of a nineteenth-century art movement. It was always fun, and the results were often brilliant; and now I'm thinking of making it a segment of the exam.

The still-lifes were usually patterned on works by Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh, and usually involved plates of fruit, pitchers or glasses, and table cloths. But at one point I brought in my hiking boots and a copy of van Gogh's painting of his shoes--made philosophically notorious by Martin Heidegger's essay, The Origin of the Work of Art. I've used some of the results to illustrate this post--and included Wikipedia's image of the painting here for comparison.


Just this week I have been newly amazed with the creativity our students muster, especially in light of tight deadlines, heavy work-loads, and an accelerated program. While sitting in on a colleague's course in Conceptual Typography, I have spent the last three weeks (four hours per week) trying to keep up with these kids, and not doing a very good job of it. The software is difficult for an old fart (Adobe Illustrator and In Design, neither of which I had even opened before the course began), the assignments are challenging (although rather fun), and the students' solutions are always far more creative and energetic than mine are. Still, I can see how what I'm trying to teach them can help them to ground their creativity and perhaps make some new connections.

So now, having completed my ploitering for the day, I'm inspired to get back to work on the lecture. At least until the sun hits the west windows and I'm forced to close the shades and retire from the heat with a cold beer in front of the A/C.

Image credits: Midterm workshop in History of Art and Design II, Summer 2006: Amy Saunders, Brent Hollon, Lucy Miron, [Vincent van Gogh], and Tiffany Obenhaus. Click on the images for larger views that show them off quite a bit better than the thumbnails do.