The pursuit of boredom

The other day a friend pointed out an article by Sandi Mann in The Guardian. The title was Why are we so bored? The author got me wondering: should we think about boredom as a bane or a boon -- a feature or a bug -- in the trajectory of our lives?

Here’s the gist of Why are we so bored?, datelined 24 April 2016:

With so much to occupy us these days, boredom should be a relic of a bygone age – an age devoid of the internet, social media, multi-channel TV, 24-hour shopping, multiplex cinemas, game consoles, texting and whatever other myriad possibilities are available these days to entertain us.

Yet despite the plethora of high-intensity entertainment constantly at our disposal, we are still bored. Up to half of us are “often bored” at home or at school, while more than two- thirds of us are chronically bored at work. We are bored by paperwork, by the commute and by dull meetings. TV is boring, as is Facebook and other social media. [...]

There are a number of explanations for our ennui. This, in fact, is part of the problem – we are overstimulated. The more entertained we are the more entertainment we need in order to feel satisfied. The more we fill our world with fast-moving, high-intensity, ever-changing stimulation, the more we get used to that and the less tolerant we become of lower levels.

This spin on collateral damage -- boredom -- caused by our 21st century distractions, including the device + social media distractions with which many now fill every interstice of otherwise-unclaimed attention, is more interesting to me than the usual gnashing-of-teeth over decreasing attention spans. (Though I do think there’s merit in observations about decreasing attention spans. Oh -- look! Squirrels!)

Sorry. Back to boredom.

Here’s what technology observer Jerry Mander wrote about the experience of watching TV, foreshadowing a 21st Century link between distraction and boredom in his 1978 classic, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television:

You are looking at a face speaking. Just as you are becoming accustomed to it, there’s a cut to another face. (technical event) Then there might be an edit back to the first face. (technical event) Then the camera might slowly draw back to take in some aspect of a wider scene. (technical event) Then the action suddenly shifts outdoors to the street. (technical event) Intercut with these scenes might be some other parallel line of the story. It may be a series of images of someone in a car racing to meet people on that street we have just visited. (technical event) The music rises. (technical event) And so on.

Each technical event -- each alteration of what would be natural imagery -- is intended to keep your attention from waning as it might otherwise. The effect is to lure your attention forward like a mechanical rabbit teasing a greyhound. Every time you are about to relax your attention, another technical event keeps you attached.

The luring forward never ceases for very long. If it did, you might become aware of the vacuousness of the content that can get through the inherent limitations of the medium [i.e., television]. Then you would be aware of the boredom. [...]

Mander drew the same line in 1978 that Sandy Mann did the other day: overstimulation is somehow linked to boredom.

But here’s another take on the question that I’d like to juxtapose with Mann’s and Mander’s, quoting UC Berkeley Professor of Philosophy Alva Noë from his latest book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature.

Any adequate account of what art is and of its place in our lives must address the striking fact that art has the power to bore us. [...] And art’s potential to be dull does not contradict the fact that art also moves and thrills and transforms and excites us. Indeed, it is the opposite side of the very same coin. Just as there is no encounter with love without the live risk of heartbreak, so there can be no confrontation with art that does not open up the possibility of getting lulled unconscious and bored to death. Art is valuable only in direct proportion to the degree to which it can, or might, bore us. [...]

Works of art are strange tools, after all. That is, they are tools we can’t use, they are useless. They are texts with no practical content, or pictures that don’t show us anything in particular. And so they require us to stop doing. To stop acting and to stop demanding application or even pertinence. [...] The pictures in the clothing catalog show you something you can buy; the architect’s model lays out something you can build. But the choreography on the stage? The painting on the wall? [...] They stop you dead in your tracks. That is, if you let them. If you suspend. If you interrupt. If you enter that special space and that altered state that art provides or allows. Art situations have this in common with religious spaces like churches. They are places where so much can happen but only because nothing really happens. They are spaces for self-transformation.

So is boredom a condition to be avoided at all costs? Or might it be a state we ought to cultivate??

Maybe the best answer is ‘neither.’

It’s no mystery that distraction degrades focus, and completion of directed tasks (which we sometimes think of as “productivity” -- getting stuff we want to do done). Multitasking as a valuable mode of behavior or a ‘skill’ is a myth. But continuous distraction also degrades creativity, synthesis and sharpening of new ideas, and ‘serendipitous’ discovery … because each of these tends to require the kind of mental elbow-room that Alva Noë described in Strange Tools: “They are places where so much can happen but only because nothing really happens.” Noë describes boredom as a state between distraction and engagement with transformation.

Boredom isn’t the goal. It’s a way station.

I happen to know Alva Noë: we’re both students of Tai Chi Ch’uan, and study that slow-moving, deeply attentive practice with the same teacher, in Berkeley, California. Some find a martial art built of slow, steadily-paced movements, repeated over and over and over again through many years of study and practice … well … some find it boring. Others find the state of deep attention to space, precision, movement, breath, and awareness … wait for it … a space for self-transformation.

When I go to a Tai Chi class, or practice my form on the back porch, or head over to the nearby schoolyard of an early morning to run through my sword form before too many neighbors are out and about -- I leave my electronica behind.

There’s something to be said for letting distraction go. It doesn’t have to be boring … at least, not in a bad way, and not for long.


This post first appeared on Medium.com


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Should technology shape art?
Pimped by our own devices: electronica, the cloud, and privacy piracy
You can't click your way to social change
Getting a grip on attention span

The Monkey Wrench Gang, Doug Peacock, and me

The first reader to contribute an endorsement (a.k.a. "blurb") for my forthcoming novel, Consequence, was Scoop Nisker. Scoop was a radio news anchor on the Bay Area radio stations KSAN and KFOG as I was growing up, and often reported on the politiscape of Bay Area activism. The tag line with which he closed his reports became the title of his first book: If You Don't Like The News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own. As an activist coming up in the 70s and 80s, that tag line became a kind of mantra to me.

Among other qualities ("exciting," "a great read"), Scoop found that Consequence was "reminiscent of The Monkey Wrench Gang," Edward Abbey's classic novel. Here's an excerpt from that book's description on Goodreads:

The story centers on Vietnam veteran George Washington Hayduke III, who returns to the desert to find his beloved canyons and rivers threatened by industrial development. On a rafting trip down the Colorado River, Hayduke joins forces with feminist saboteur Bonnie Abbzug, wilderness guide Seldom Seen Smith, and billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., and together they wander off to wage war on the big yellow machines, on dam builders and road builders and strip miners. [...] Moving from one improbable situation to the next, packing more adventure into the space of a few weeks than most real people do in a lifetime, the motley gang puts fear into the hearts of their enemies, laughing all the while.

I'll leave it to readers to decide how closely my novel echoes Abbey's. I will say, though, that Consequence isn't a comic novel, and its characters -- even the characters who monkeywrench -- are scaled much more closely to the sort of people you might know in real life than to George Washington Hayduke III, Abbey's grandiose, wildman protagonist. On the other hand, Scoop is on the mark: there's a prominent parallel-plot in Consequence that involves the kinds of things for which Hayduke is an iconic emblem: sabotaging diesel-burning forestry equipment, and ... how to say without revealing too much ... let's call them more ambitious acts of ecotage.

As it happens, Abbey's George Washington Hayduke III is based on a real-life person. And that real-life person is something of a wildman himself. His name is Doug Peacock, he's a writer and wilderness activist himself, and -- here's the twist -- he was a friend of my family during my teenage years.

Doug was a longtime friend of a fellow Ph.D. candidate in my dad's program at Stanford University in the early & mid-1970s, the late Jim Benson. Through Jim, Dad befriended Doug and contributed modestly to a film project Doug was working on then. Doug and Jim came by our house sometimes when Doug was in town, though mostly he was hanging out with grizzly bears in much wilder country than Palo Alto. This was maybe a year or two after The Monkey Wrench Gang was published.

In my family, Doug was famous for two things.

First, he had a rock-solid commitment to visiting grizzly country without carrying firearms to protect himself. It's their wilderness, not ours, he would insist, and he's still saying so (see Doug's Daily Beast post of this past Saturday, Do Killer Grizzlies Deserve Death?). Dad loved to repeat one of Doug's stories about getting treed by a grizzly, and being pretty far from certain whether he would live through the encounter. He nonetheless continued to visit the wilderness unarmed.

The second thing Doug was famous for in my family was spilling a glass of red wine on our best Danish modern couch (okay, it wasn't much, we got it secondhand, but it was the finest thing we had to sit on in our living room). What made that incident memorable was this: Doug (who was not the type to worry about social graces) got pretty flustered about making a mess of my mom's couch, but as he apologized profusely he also taught us an unexpected lesson: that pouring salt on the spill would leach the wine stain right out of her furniture. Mom was skeptical at first, but she let Doug talk her into dumping most of a container of Morton's finest over the spill. And it worked! Not a household hint you'd necessarily expect to learn from a wildman, but there you have it.

I was surprised at first to see Scoop Nisker compare Consequence to Edward Abbey's iconic environmentalist classic, but I have to admit there's a traceable line of influence. Go figure. Life hands you the strangest coincidences...


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
It's a book! CONSEQUENCE coming in October ...
Allusion in fiction
Mental floss

Thanks to Erwin and Peggy Bauer for releasing their photo of a grizzly bear into the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Egg whites to treat moderate burns? Do the intertubes really know better?

An odd thing happened on Facebook the other day.

S--, a former colleague, posted the unhappy news that she had "just burned the F*CK out of my left index finger" while making dinner. A bunch of her Facebook friends chimed in immediately with sympathy and suggestions, led by her mom ... who offered the sensible advice that she cool the injury immediately in ice water. I didn't see the post until nearly an hour later, but thought I'd suggest -- for next time -- a folk remedy my family learned from another when I was a wee lad: after a minor to moderate burn, crack an egg over the injured area to coat it in raw egg white (it's a better idea to cool the injury under cool running water, then crack the egg).

Apparently this was novel advice to S-- and those of her friends who were weighing in on the What Is To Be Done question raised by her not-uncommon kitchen mishap. She was certain that the burn was severe enough to blister, and it was still hurting an hour later, so -- better late than never -- she tried the egg treatment, and found that the pain went away. S-- wrote that she was "happily flabbergasted."

I was flabbergasted too. Not because the egg trick had worked, I was pretty certain it would -- but because the treatment seemed to be unknown to S-- and her circle. So I turned to the hive mind to find out whether Everybody Knew that raw egg white helps to treat moderate burns, or if I had been living in an alternate universe since the 1970s.

It seems that everybody knew I'd been living in an alternate universe.

From Snopes, my favorite repository of hoax-debunking wisdom:

Akin to another Internet-spread rumor regarding the treatment of burns (which involved placing the injured extremity into a bag of flour), this seemingly helpful heads up also began making the online rounds in March 2011. In a nutshell, don't do it, because the danger of introducing salmonella into an open wound should not be toyed with.

The Internet-spread egg white remedy is somewhat more reliable in its approach to treating minor burns at home in that it outright states one should first cool the injured area completely with cold water before applying anything to the wound, yet even in regard to that exhortation, it's a bit off the mark [...]

If egg white is at all effective in treating burns (and we're not at all convinced that it is, 100+ year medical references to the contrary), it's as an occlusive dressing that would keep contamination out of a raw wound, not as a magical curative of burned flesh. Its effect on the healing process wouldn't have anything to do with its collagen content or that it's a "placenta full of vitamins," but rather that it's a thickish liquid that would form a barrier. (In other words, motor oil — which has no collagen to it at all — would work equally as well.)

As to what to do with all this confusion, even when the burn is minor and the injury is fully cooled before anything else is done to it, there is a downside to coating such an injury with egg white. Raw eggs sometimes contain or have resident on their shells salmonella, a deadly bacteria. Introducing salmonella into an open wound would be a dangerous idea. Says a physician friend of ours, "Burn-injured, denuded skin is an excellent culture medium, and a contaminated egg white applied to his burn could readily cause severe damage or death to the patient."

Oh, c'mon, I thought. Really? Salmonella? Motor oil?

But then I turned to the Journal of Emergency Nursing, and read of a study published in March 2010, First-aid Home Treatment of Burns Among Children and Some Implications at Milas, Turkey submitted by Banu Karaoz, whose abstract reads as follows:

This descriptive study was conducted among 130 families in Milas, Turkey, who have children ages 0 to 14 years. Among the 130 families, a total of 53 children (40.8%) experienced a burn event. Twenty-seven subjects (51%) had treated the burn with inappropriate remedies including yogurt, toothpaste, tomato paste, ice, raw egg whites, or sliced potato. Of the 28 subjects (52.8%) who had applied cold water to the burn site, 21 patients (39.6%) applied only cold water and 7 patients (13.2%) used another substance along with cold water. In addition, 13 subjects (24.5%) applied ice directly on the skin at the time of the burn. Excluding the subjects who had treated their burns with only cold water or with only ice, raw egg whites were the most commonly used agent, both alone (n = 3) or accompanied by cold water or ice (n = 6) in a total of 11 subjects (21%) who applied eggs. Based on these observations, it is suggested that educational programs emphasizing first-aid application of only cold water to burn injuries would be helpful in reducing morbidity and mortality rates. A nationwide educational program is needed to ensure that young burn victims receive appropriate first aid and to reduce the use of inappropriate home remedies and burn morbidity.

Burn morbidity. That sounds pretty grim.

I learned about burns and egg whites on a family car-camping trip in the mid-seventies. It was a multi-family camping trip, including mine and that of a postdoc in the Stanford University lab where my father was earning a degree in medical microbiology. The postdoc -- now a decades-long family friend -- was from Japan, and he was already, by the time he came to Stanford, a medical doctor (and therefore, going back to the Snopes screed, a physician friend of ours). He went on to become a professor and internationally respected research scientist before retiring a few years ago. But it was his wife, E--, who taught us about burns and egg whites.

At the time of this camping trip my brother was eight or so years old, plus or minus, and while our families were preparing a meal he burned his hand on a hot pan, cast iron if memory serves. Shocked, hollering bloody murder, in the middle of nowhere and hours from the Stanford Medical Center, E-- lunged for the ice chest, found a raw egg, and -- you guessed it -- cracked it over my brother's throbbing hand, slathering his injury in albumen.

It worked. The pain subsided, my brother calmed down, then my parents calmed down, and eventually we ate.

I remembered this trick when I was working in a restaurant some fifteen years later. I don't recall what I was making, but it involved a 10" All-Clad skillet and a very hot oven. Short story, I was doing five or six things at once -- S.O.P. for an on-duty cook -- and managed to forget to wrap a towel around the skillet's handle when I grabbed it and pulled the pan from the oven.

Hot? Let me tell you ... the whole palm of my hand and the inside of all my fingers went instantly bright, angry red, and I hurt like I'd never imagined.

It was a kitchen, probably not fundamentally different from yours at home, so a sink, ice, and a big metal bowl were mere steps away. I ran water over my right hand before plunging it in ice water, then did my best to get on with pumping out my station's dishes, one-handed. After a few minutes, in a moment between plating antipasti, I cracked a couple of eggs over still throbbing hand, wrapped it in a clean towel, and finished my shift. Miraculously, the burn didn't blister and the pain had subsided altogether by the time the kitchen closed. I was back behind the stove the next night.

I posted a letter to Japan shortly afterward, thanking E-- for saving me from a second degree burn over a distance of 5,000 miles and a fair few years.

So what's a person to do when folk wisdom -- verified by repeated, first-person, empirical experience -- contradicts medical authority?

I'm not going to try to give a general answer to that question.

But in the case of egg whites and kitchen burns? I'm thinking that if "only one in every 10,000 to 30,000 supermarket eggs is typically infected with salmonella enteritidis" (without clear evidence that free range organic chickens lay fewer infected eggs, so don't get cocky, as it were, if your fridge is stocked with the good stuff) -- even so, it's got to be way safer than crossing the street to go with the egg white treatment, unless a burn injury involves broken skin.

But caveat lector: I'm not a doctor, and I don't even play one on the intertubes.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Amateur food porn from Austria and Italy
One hundred trillion bacteria: the microbiome within you and without you
Broken food chains
Eating insects

Thanks to Samuel M. Livingston for the photo of a cracked egg, via Flickr.

Embiggen and other go-figure puzzles in English

Click to embiggen

You see it all the time: a smallish image posted on a web page, and an instruction telling visitors how to view it at higher-resolution. Maybe: "Click to enlarge." Or: "Click for a larger image."

Ho hum.

But Tom Tomorrow (a.k.a. Dan Perkins) doesn't leave memos-to-readers that are as pedestrian as those. Nope. Not only is Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World consistently in my top tier of Best Progressive Political Comic Strips, but when his material appears on Daily Kos (which is where I look for his work nowadays), a visitor is instructed that to see a larger image of the comic, s/he should:

Click to embiggen.

This warms my heart.

I've met plenty of neologisms I loathe: to Facebook or to friend, for example. Or to calendar, as in "Let's calendar a meeting with the marketing people. Dick, can you PowerPoint the product positives by next week?"

OTOH, there are as many others that I've adopted whole hog, like zillions of other English speakers: to Google, for one. Or internet, for that matter. Or grok, my personal favorite among neologisms of the '60s (though "Bogart" was pretty good too, as in Don't Bogart that joint, my friend).

But embiggen? There's something about embiggen that feels so right I want to grin every time I see the word in action.

You may already be familiar with the origin of "embiggen" ... but I wasn't until I decided recently to suss out where Tom Tomorrow found it. There's nothing secret about the word: it came from The Simpsons. Not originally, exactly, but epidemiologically speaking. Sort of.

Here's how the word's origin is described on Wikipedia, in an entry about the episode of The Simpsons in which "embiggen" occurs:

"Lisa the Iconoclast" is the sixteenth episode of The Simpsons' seventh season. [...]

The episode features two neologisms: embiggen and cromulent. [...] The Springfield town motto is "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." Schoolteacher Edna Krabappel comments that she never heard the word embiggens until she moved to Springfield. Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, "I don't know why; it’s a perfectly cromulent word." [...]

Embiggen—in the context it is used in the episode—is a verb that was coined by Dan Greaney in 1996. The verb previously occurred in an 1884 edition of the British journal Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. by C. A. Ward, in the sentence "but the people magnified them, to make great or embiggen, if we may invent an English parallel as ugly. After all, use is nearly everything." The literal meaning of embiggen is to make something larger. The word has made its way to common use [...]

Here's the relevant excerpt from the show itself:





So I was thinking about how much I lurve the word "embiggen" on my way to work the other day, and when I got there I found the usual daily e-mail from the Chronicle of Higher Education (I work for a university). In that e-missive I found a link to an article by a linguistics professor at the University of Edinburgh, Geoffrey Pullum. The article is titled Coming and Going and it appeared in the CHE on 19 Feb 2014. It's about how English doesn't behave. And how there's not a ding-dang thing to be done about it.

The article started me considering the probability that, for people who speak English as a second or third or fourth language, words like "embiggen" must be crazymaking. Not even a teensy-weensy bit heartwarming.

Excerpting from Pullum's piece:

I heard a Brazilian iron-ore magnate speaking on a BBC news program about how he had become so rich, and he said that at one point "the price of iron ore came from $10 a ton to $180 a ton." I realized that there was a subtle mistake in English usage here: Even if the price is still $180 now, we do not say that the price came from $10 to $180; we say the price went from $10 to $180. But why?

Come is standardly used for motion (including metaphorical motion) toward the notional location providing the utterer’s reference point: We talk about going away but coming back. It would be quite reasonable to imagine talking about a price starting at some remote point in past time and climbing up the metaphorical price curve, while proceeding along the time axis, toward its present point on the graph. Visualizing ourselves as located at the current price point, we could see the price as climbing up toward where we are now.

But we don’t. In fact we never seem to do anything like that. It is the future that comes; the past goes away.

The future comes and the past goes away? That's not what Creedence Clearwater Revival sang.

But more to the question of price movements, does the matter of iron ore prices going from $10 to $180/ton make more sense to me than coming from $10 to $180/ton because, having had my consciousness shaped in the United States, I understand that the coming and going of prices has nothing to do with my own superfluous presence at the location of a price point, but with movement that occurs from the price's own point of view. Here in 'Merica, corporations are people. Why shouldn't prices themselves have consciousness, and even agency? Perhaps even souls, by gum!

Anyway.

The word "embiggen" seems so cozy to me, so on the mark, so that's not a word, but boy is it cute! because ...

• Embiggen is a little bit "enlarge" and a little bit "enlighten."
• It's a monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon word bracketed by a Latinate prefix and an Old English suffix; so it's kind of awkward, but in a funkalicious way.
• It's a word that you can easily imagine being spoken by a wide-eyed, ebullient four year old who just watched a blimp inflate.

And so on.

In an early post to One Finger Typing, I paraphrased my ninth-grade English teacher, Miss Barbara Ballou, who scolded the whelps in her charge if we dared claim a stylistic right to break the rules of grammar in essays on Billy Shakespeare, say, or Nate Hawthorne: You have no right to break the rules until you know what they are and how to apply them, she informed us.

I admired Miss Ballou a great deal. She was one of the best teachers I ever had, and I've had some doozies. But here's what Geoffrey Pullum has to say about rules, logic, common sense, and speaking English:

The important lesson, to me, is that it isn't logic or common sense that prevents us from saying that [the iron-ore price came from $10 to $180]. It just isn't how we use the language, that’s all.

Don’t ask me why. I genuinely don't know. What I do know is that English lexical semantics (and, I assume, the lexical semantics of any other language) is extraordinarily complex. It continues to astonish me that I learned the meanings of the words I know. Even simple words like come and go. [...]

[T]here is no guarantee that English will or ever could be logical. English is the way it is: Its rules, some of them quite strict, evolved the way they did over the past millennium without being under any constraint of a directly logical nature.

The user of the language is constrained only by the hundreds of millions of their fellow speakers, who unwittingly negotiate every day about how to set the conventions of usage that define them too as English speakers. Railing against the decision of a few tens of millions of our fellow speakers who have adopted or abandoned some expression is, to put it in terms of the old joke, like trying to teach a pig to sing: It not only wastes your time, it also annoys the pig.

Professor Pullum has a cromulent point.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
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Linguistics, semantics, pragmatics: words, meaning, and wacky translations
Are computer languages really languages?
Raising a glass to Miss Ballou



Thanks to wordle.net for the word cloud of Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky," from Through the Looking-glass.

A cloud for California's silver lining weather

Talking about the weather used to be small-talk, right? Nowadays there's something more sinister in the topic, at least from this observer's frame of reference. The sun is shining in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it creeps me out.

I wrote on the 25th of last month that:

If you were strolling around Berkeley, California between eleven and noonish on Christmas Day 2013 it wouldn't have been a stretch to imagine yourself in the southern hemisphere. The sky was blue, the sun shone, the Campanille sounded across the city, the thermometer read in the high sixties. South of the nearly-deserted campus, magnolias were beginning to bloom.

Since then, a bitter cold and billions and billions on snowflakes have descended on the midwest and east coast. If you live in these regions, you don't need me to tell you this. If you live where I do, there's nothing in the air to suggest how nasty a turn this winter has taken on the other side of the Rockies. Here's what the National Weather Service had to say as of yesterday evening:

The coldest weather in years will be making its presence known from the Upper Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic region for the beginning of the work week. The polar vortex, a mid-upper level cyclonic feature normally present over northern Canada, will be displaced unusually far to the south over the northern Great Lakes and southern Ontario. Owing to the deep layer of the cold air mass, this will provide for an incredibly strong surge of bitterly cold Arctic Air along with gusty winds. The Upper Midwest will be affected first by Saturday night, and the brutal conditions will continue pushing southeastward to the Ohio Valley and Mid-South by Monday, and to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic by Tuesday. Particularly noteworthy will be the extreme wind chills and nearly unheard-of daytime highs that are forecast. A huge expanse of wind chill warnings are in effect from Montana all the way to the central Appalachians, with wind chills on the order of -20 to -50 degrees expected! Afternoon highs on Monday for parts of the Midwest states and the Ohio Valley will fail to reach zero degrees!

Here in Northern California? Mild. Clear. Dry. A cousin in Orange County reported seventy-seven degrees where she lives on Sunday. The photo at left is sunset on Saturday evening at Half Moon Bay (higher res on Tumblr, at One Finger Clicking). I drove along a stretch of about ninety miles of Highway 1 on Friday, and back again on Saturday. Both days there were surfers in the water from Pacifica to Santa Cruz.

I'm not gloating, mind you. Like I said: there's something sinister about the weather this winter, whether it's bitterly cold and snowy on the east side of the continent or summery and dry on the lower stretch of the Pacific side of the country.

A diarist who goes by FishOutOfWater posted an analysis on Daily Kos on Friday, titled Extraordinary Jet Stream Track to Alaska Led to Record Dryness in California in 2013 [thanks to LK for the link]. The meteorological graphics taken from the NOAA go a bit over my head, but this table (also from the NOAA, image copied from FishOutOfWater's post) is pretty clear when it comes to the debt California is incurring for our shirtsleeves-in-winter weather:

And it ain't just California that will suffer for that deficit. The Golden State, with a population of nearly 12% of the entire U.S., produces nearly half of U.S.-grown fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

As the Daily Kos diarist put it:

California water supplies were in good shape entering 2013 but they are rapidly deteriorating now. Snowpack levels are just 20% of normal on January 3, 2014 according to automated measurements.

There's no end to the west coast drought in sight. The Climate Prediction Center outlook for California is for worsening drought for the next 90 days. The January outlook is very disappointing because January is frequently California's wettest month.

And as long as I'm quoting, here's another DKer whose handle is ontheleftcoast, summing it all up in a comment to the above-linked post:

We really don't have models for how this is going to play out. There's just no way we can predict what's going to happen at this point. Climate Chaos is here and we're going to have to deal with it. Draught one year, massive floods the next, who knows what in the following year. And the severity will be like nothing we've seen. Every couple of years will see "1000 year floods" or "once in a life time events". W[e] didn't just break the sky, we annihilated it.

That's what I'm afraid of.


Related posts on One Finger Typing:
A quiet Christmas in Berkeley
Living with drought
Weather? Climate? Change?
Pacific coast watersheds

How we go on: for Dad

My father died a year ago today. No surprise, then, that he has been on my mind quite a lot since last November. Absence sharpens loss is at least as true as time dulls edges.

I've found my way to more than a few books about fathers and sons this year, some of them recommended by thoughtful friends (My Father's Books by Luan Starova, about which I wrote in The lives of books in late January); some of them found by chance, if you believe in such things (Paul Harding's Tinkers, about which I wrote in July: Tinkering: on bookstore serendipity ...).

But as I approached the end of my first year without a living parent, poems that treat themes of persistent effect in the world, beyond death -- all is not lost poems, if you will -- kept returning to mind.

First, and perhaps best-known in this vein, here's a passage from William Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality:

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now forever taken from my sight,
            Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
            We will grieve not, rather find
            Strength in what remains behind;
            In the primal sympathy
            Which having been must ever be;
            In the soothing thoughts that spring
            Out of human suffering;
            In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

Or this one, from East Coker, a passage from the second of Eliot's Four Quartets whose evocation of earthy circularity might have appealed to my biologist father:

                                    In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

But, as keenly as Wordsworth and Eliot each, in their own keys, see and give voice to the cycles through which all our lives turn -- and even though the Four Quartets remains the slimmest volume I can imagine taking on a desert island exile to read over and over and over again, in saecula saeculorum -- no poem struck me quite so deeply in these months as Gary Snyder's Axe Handles.

It's an odd thing, though not so surprising, that losing a parent shines an insistent light on aspects of one's own self -- from physical to gestural to the intricacies of personality -- bequeathed by a father or mother. That light illuminates Axe Handles as well.

Snyder builds his poem, and the eponymous collection in which it appears, on a passage from the Doctrine of the Mean, written some 2500 years ago and attributed to Kong Ji, the only grandson of Confucius.

James Legge translated that passage, from Chapter XIII,  in 1861, as follows:

In the book of poetry, it is said, 'In hewing an axe handle, in hewing an axe-handle, the pattern is not far off.' We grasp one axe-handle to hew the other, and yet, if we look askance from the one to the other, we may consider them as apart. Therefore the superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops.

In Ezra Pound's translation of Confucius, the twentieth century poet interprets the same passage:

In cutting an axe-handle the model is not far off, in this sense: one holds one axe-handle while chopping the other. Thus one uses men in governing men.

Snyder's poem tells of teaching his son Kai to throw a hatchet into a tree stump, whereupon Kai decides he wants one of his own. The boy remembers an old hatchet-head he has seen in his father's shop. Snyder shows his son how to reshape a broken axe handle to fit the hatchet-head, and in doing so remembers centuries-old wisdom he learned by reading Pound.

From Axe Handles:

"In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shi-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

A week ago today, the same friend who gave me a copy of My Father's Books brought her first child into the world, a strapping, beautiful boy, graced by his parents with a middle name drawn from another link in the great chain of human culture: Voltaire.

How we go on.


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Books everyone should read

Tinkering: on bookstore serendipity and novels that show what it is to be alive

I came late to the party (Paul Harding's TINKERS won the Pulitzer in 2010), but that's the way bookstore serendipity goes:

You're skimming the shelving carts -- at Moe's Books in Berkeley, for example -- and a skinny little white-spined book catches your eye, who knows how or why. You pick it up, and it has one of those gold "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" seals on the simple white cover. A tiny figure stands alone in a snowscape printed in blues and greys across the bottom quarter of the paperback. Marilynne Robinson contributed a front-cover blurb pullout and a back-cover blurb.  (You deduce from the back-cover bio that Robinson first taught and then taught alongside the author at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.) The first sentence of the novel hooks you, and the second sentence sets the hook, then the rest of the paragraph that fills the first page reels you in with its clean, spare specificity:

George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects running in and out of imaginary cracks in the ceiling plaster. The panes in the windows, once snugly pointed and glazed, stood loose in their sashes. The next stiff breeze would topple them all and they would flop onto the heads of his family, who sat on the couch and the love seat and the kitchen chairs his wife had brought in to accommodate everyone. The torrent of panes would drive everyone from the room, his grandchildren in from Kansas and Atlanta and Seattle, his sister in from Florida, and he would be marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass. Pollen and sparrows, rain and the intrepid squirrels he had spent half of his life keeping out of the bird feeders would breach the house.

I bought the novel in June, and read it twice through in five weeks.

TINKERS is about a man, a dying old man, whose last days are spent inhabiting, as in a fantastically vivid dream, the life and mind of his odd, eccentric, impoverished, epileptic father, whose life forked away from his own when George Washington Crosby was an eleven year old boy, or perhaps just twelve.

It's also about how clocks work, because fixing old clocks is what George did for the last thirty years of his life, after retiring from a teaching job. It's about building bird nests, in imitation of birds' techniques, with false beaks cut from tinkers' tin tied onto one's fingertips. It's about winters in New England. It's about George's father Howard selling bits and pieces of manufactured goods out of a cart fitted with wooden drawers with a brass pull-ring on each, a cart pulled by a mule named Prince Edward down "dirt tracks that ran into the deep woods to hidden clearing where a log cabin sat among sawdust and tree stumps..." It's about what epilepsy feels like from inside.

Why did this short, quiet novel, its author's first, shoulder its way to the front of my reading queue? And demand a second read so soon after the first?

I was wide open to it, I know that now, having read it: my own father passed in late November of last year. His brother, the last of his siblings, died in June. I've been anticipating the wedding of a dear cousin, granddaughter of my father's late sister, who was married this past weekend. A relative whose precise connection -- through my paternal grandfather -- isn't fully clear yet had recently been in touch from Barcelona, where she was traveling, all afire with the dim inference we share that some five centuries ago our family was shown the Spanish border after working for generations prior to the expulsion of 1492 as farm foremen (an occupation called "Masover" in Catalan, pronounced maj-o-vay, or something close to that).

All of which is to say: I've had family, generations, and the occasions of families' lives, on my mind.

So a novel treating a son seeking his long-lost father -- known only through dim memories, old diaries, the deductions made from what a son finds in his own body, heart, and mind, deeply structural artifacts that can only have lodged in him as bequeathed character -- well, a story like that had no choice but to lure me in. How do we know our fathers? Through what narrow slices of their lives do we learn of them? What do we discover about our fathers when we come around to understanding ourselves?

TINKERS is one of those novels that is less about plot and more about revelation of character through incident. Intricately interweaving glimpses of his father's life that may be imagined or inferred or drawn from the deepest well of himself, and memories of his own life, both the years lived with his father and over the many decades of their separation, Harding's George Washington Crosby opens a view, vertiginously deep, of what it means to find, and have, and lose a seemingly-autonomous identity (but, in Harding's vision, only seemingly).

It's a Pulitzer Prize winner that's well worth reading, however belatedly. It's worth reading twice. Thanks, Moe, gone but certainly not forgotten;  and thanks to every other intrepid, independent bookstore owner ... for keeping bookstore serendipity alive.


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Thanks to Matthew Felix Sun for the photo of The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, taken during our recent visit.

Consider the ratchet spring of a retractable ballpoint pen

It started in high school, this incredulous wonder I feel every time the ink runs dry in one of my retractable ball point pens.

How often is that, you ask, in this Age of the Touchscreen? Often enough, I answer. I still keep a journal: sometimes for journalish scribbling, oftentimes for brainstorming my way into whatever bit of fiction on which I happen to be focused. I write in my journal with retractable ball point pens.

I favor the Zebra F-402 these days, and have for several years. Black ink. 0.7 mm fine point.

For a while I had a fetish for a pen I got as a gift from family friends in Japan. Boy, was that a problem. Not the pen. I loved the pen. I didn't want to write anything in any way significant with any other instrument. But. I couldn't find refills to save my life. I had to ration my use of the thing. Naturally, therefore, when my late father and his wife traveled to Tokyo I gave them the relevant info and begged them to search for refills there. Family legend, of the How I Spent My Overseas Vacation variety, was born:  repeated tellings of how a different, bewildered family friend drove the two of them across town in Tokyo traffic to some Costco-sized office supply store, in order to buy a half-dozen pen refills for yours truly.

I weaned myself from that fetish-pen with the Zebra F-402, which is considerably easier to refurbish, replicate, and replace. Local stores here in Berkeley carry them. You can buy the Zebra F-402 by the dozen on Amazon. Refills too.

But that's not what I meant to write about. What I mean to write about was ratchet springs. There are ratchet springs in a Zebra F-402, in that Japanese pen for which my father and his wife played refill courier, and in pretty much any other retractable ball point.

What's a ratchet spring, you ask? From eHow's How a Retractable Ballpoint Pen Works, by Thomas McNish:

On the inside of the pen, there are a couple springs that allow the pen to retract. The first spring (ratchet spring) is located inside the bottom half of the barrel (where the tip comes out). The reservoir is put through this spring before it's put through the open end of the barrel. On the other side of the reservoir, there's a spring that's located inside the upper half of the barrel. This spring (the button spring) is connected to a screw and a clip, which are then connected to the button at the end of the pen. When you press this button, it presses down on the button spring, which then forces the reservoir out through the pen. A locking mechanism consisting of tiny pits and teeth interlock with each other to keep the reservoir out of the pen when it's needed for writing, and when it's retracted back into the barrel, they unlock and the reservoir is sprung back inside by the ratchet spring.

A ratchet spring, then, is the spring that comes speared onto the business end of just about every retractable ballpoint pen refill for sale in the United States of 'Merica. When the ink reservoir goes dry, you need only replace it with a refill, discarding the empty innards of the pen. Including the ratchet spring.

This ritual filled and fills me with incredulous wonder and no little dismay each time I perform it (as I did last week, matter of fact, when my Zebra F-402 ran dry in mid-journal-entry). What in this ritual, particularly, filled and fills me with incredulous wonder? Why, the marvel of engineering that is the spiral of springy steel known as a ratchet spring, natch ... a marvel I am, as a compliant consumer of consumer products in these United States of 'Merica, meant to pack off to the local landfill without a second thought.

To landfill?

That's wrong. That is gravely wrong. And I have known in my heart of hearts that it is wrong for the better part of four decades, since I was a wee lad: hormonal, yes, but morally certain. Hence the collection (partial) of ratchet springs pictured above, springs I've harvested over the years from empty ink reservoirs of retractable ballpoint pens.

I can't bear to throw the things away, see. Not that I have any clear idea how to reuse these wiry marvels of engineering. I'm not a hoarder. Really, I'm not. But ...

Imagine yourself living in the forest, wearing animal skins you scraped clean with a flint blade, rubbing sticks together when you need to start a fire. If, in such a state, you were to discover an urgent need for a well-tempered, evenly wound, durably flexible steel spring ... how the heck would you go about making one?

Answer: fughedaboutit.

Q.E.D. How could anyone carelessly throw away such an elegant artifact of advanced technology? To that question, I have no answer.

When I first described to my partner the reluctance I feel at the prospect of discarding ratchet springs when I reload a retractable ballpoint pen, he stared at me like I was crazy.

"People throw them away?" he asked.

Not in China, from whence Matthew hails. No siree Bob. In China, I now understand, at least in the China of the 1980s when Matthew was growing up there, one saved the ratchet spring from a retractable ballpoint pen and reused it when inserting a new retractable ballpoint pen refill. New retractable ballpoint pen refills did NOT come with a new spring. You had no choice, really. In China, you saved and reused the ratchet spring, or your retractable ballpoint pen would no longer retract.

Come to think of it, those refills my father and his wife brought back, triumphantly, from the Far East sometime before the turn of this century -- to augment the few Pentel XBXS7-A refills our friends supplied with their original gift, which are now available, like every other purchasable thing, from Japan via Amazon -- they didn't come with springs either. See photos, above and at left.

There are, according to the CIA World Factbook, 1,476,838,913 people who live in China and Japan (combined population, July 2013 estimate). That's almost one and a half billion people who, if they use retractable ballpoint pens, and refill them when they go dry, save and reuse ratchet springs. A billion and a half individuals who reuse 'em ... or lose 'em.

Knowing that, I'll never again feel alone when I refill a Zebra F-402 and carefully, nay, lovingly warehouse its marvelous wiry spiral of a ratchet spring in a box I keep in the drawer of my desk.



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Three of the four photos included in this post are the first three photos I captured with my brand new iPad Mini. That proves I'm not a Luddite, right?

The lives of books

Just before the holidays a friend and colleague who knows a great deal more than I do about the Balkans -- historically, linguistically, and in literary dimensions -- gave me a book I don't believe I would ever have found or picked-up otherwise.

She thus added to my personal store of proof that people find and read books that are recommended by people they know and/or trust (a widely-held belief); and more so when those books take a while to show their value (i.e., when it's not the first pages read in a bookstore that 'make the sale').

But it also happened that reading My Father's Books by Luan Starova crossed currents in a curious way with a chapbook of Glenn Ingersoll's poetry that I happened to obtain from the author himself on the same day I finished reading Starova's volume.

First, here's what I wrote about My Father's Books on Goodreads:

I had a hard time finding my way into this volume, slim as it is. The author's abstractions eluded me, as if they were written in code that could only be deciphered by those who knew in their own blood what "his Balkan fate" -- referring to the author's father -- means. Only in Part Two, as Luan Starova's four years in Constantinople on the cusp of the Ottoman Empire's collapse are described, did I begin to unlock the quiet, dogged stoicism of a protagonist bound to a thankless and likely futile task of charting a path through decades of foreseen and bitterly-experienced pain of a subject nation as the empire that held it in thrall for centuries dissolves. As My Father's Books finally opened to me, I found in the volume a mystery in meticulousness I first encountered in Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, crossed with the melancholy inherent in the ending of great historical movement that Joseph Roth evokes in The Radetsky March and The Emperor's Tomb. [...]

My Father's Books is organized around the core characteristic of Starova's father, who (unless I missed it) is never named in the text: that he lived the richest aspects of his life in books he collected; studied; carried from place to place through a lifetime of exiles, one after the next; and considered deeply in relation to questions of identity, nation, and (collapsing) empire over the course of his adult life. It unfolds as a series of briefly sketched episodes, one or two pages, occasionally one or two more than that. From the book's blurb on the U. Wisconsin Press website:

Weaving a story from the threads of his parents’ lives from 1926 to 1976, [the author] offers a child’s-eye view of personal relationships in shifting political landscapes and an elegiac reminder of the enduring power of books to sustain a literate culture.

And here is a passage from the penultimate section of the novel, titled Time Discovered:

Those books would follow my father through the collapse of several kingdoms and empires. The books outlived eras; they outlived my father as well. I remained powerless to interpret them; I followed a different route through other languages and cultures. Yet, I know very well that much of my father remains in them -- his spirit, his unspoken admonitions and advice. The books contain streams of time not yet past. With these books one could collect the currents of past times. These books enchant because they stand outside of time. They revived within me my father's illusions and his powerlessness to build from them the truth. I do not know where these books will end. When our life ends, what of us remains in the books that we have read? ...

So on Saturday I was a couple of dozen pages from finishing My Father's Books when I stopped by the Elmwood branch of the Berkeley Public Library, where Glenn Ingersoll happened to be working that day. I know Glenn from quite a few years back, when we were both a part of the East Bay chapter of the political group/movement Queer Nation and Glenn worked in Doe Library, on the UC Berkeley campus, where I often retreated to work on a novel project after my work for a living was done for the day. On Saturday, I congratulated Glenn on recent completion of his years-long endeavor Thousand, a "long piece" built of one hundred words written each day for a thousand days and published on his blog, Love Settlement.

We talked about our various projects, past and present, and he ducked into the back of the library to fetch a copy of his chapbook Fact, published last year by Avantacular Press. I bought Fact, and read it, interleaving a run of Glenn's short poems with a few pages from Starova's novel. Many of the poems in Fact are self-referential. Others are written in the voice of the poem itself.

The correspondences were startling within the coincidental frame of my reading, alternating as I was between these books. Contrast the end of passage from My Father's Books excerpted above:

I do not know where these books will end. When our life ends, what of us remains in the books that we have read? ...

with this short poem a few pages from the end of Glenn's chapbook:

The poem is sleeping.
You are one of its dreams.

See what I mean? ...


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Living small

Andy Newman blogged in the NY Times today about the winner of a competition to design a building full of much-smaller-than-you-might-expect housing to be built on E. 27th St. between 1st and 2nd Avenue: City Unveils Winner of Tiny-Apartment Competition. The "micro-units" will measure 250 to 370 square feet each.

The article reports that 40% of the apartments will be "priced to be affordable" (from which one must suppose that 60% will be unaffordable?).

As one early commenter pointed out already there's an awful lot of space devoted to hallway. And as another has noticed, there's not much room for owning anything, like clothes. I'd add kitchen equipment beyond the very basics to that. And, looking around my own apartment, and imagining myself living in a space this size, I'd have to add books too, and a desk that has more surface than the minimum required for a laptop.

On the other hand, if I can imagine trading in ~140 shelf-feet of books for an e-reader that contains only the ones that have been digitized ... and if I can imagine divesting myself of too many shirts and a ridiculous number of fileboxes full of redlined drafts of fiction-in-progress ... and if I can imagine cooking less complex meals for fewer friends, and only occasionally ... and if I can imagine dumping several decades' collection of CDs and -- yes, it's true -- vinyl in favor of crappier-quality iThing recordings ... and if I were to imagine living alone (no, M--, I'm not really imagining that) .......... well ... maybe I could make a micro-unit work for me.

I'm thinking these micro-units would work pretty seamlessly for someone just starting out, someone who hasn't acquired much s/he wants to keep. A micro-unit would certainly work for me as a pied-à-terre (and who wouldn't want a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, perhaps not perfectly located, but, hey, only 4 blocks from the 6 Lexington, and two more from Madison Square Park and the Flatiron Building?).

Imagining all that divestiture of stuff is not such a hard thing to do. It's not nearly so hard, say, as imagining being homeless, and living out of one's car or a shopping cart or a backpack and a sleeping bag ... and you only need to look around Berkeley (where I live now) to be able to imagine that, vividly.

Can you see yourself living in a micro-unit? What would be the hardest thing(s) for you to give up?


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Everywhere that I'm not

On Thursday evening I was listening to the radio while making dinner, like most everybody has, for hundreds or thousands of dinner times each. Then a song came on, like they do. You know, the song you haven't heard in thirty years, and haven't thought of either, but that just nails a particular time in your life.

On Thursday evening that song was Translator's Everywhere That I'm Not. I swear it's been running on continuous loop in my head ever since it came on at 7:24 p.m.

Never heard of Translator? Have a listen.

'Cause you're in New York, but I'm not
You're in Tokyo, but I'm not
You're in Nova Scotia, but I'm not
Yeah, you're everywhere that I'm not
Yeah, you're everywhere that I'm not

It's your basic longing-for-lost-lover tune, you've heard the trope before, you'll hear it again: everybody's been there, everybody imagines nobody's ever been there the way they have.

The video? It's so early MTV (the channel launched the year before the song's release), so band-that-barely-made-it-past-College-radio ... but for me it perfectly evokes a time when I spent every weekend night at San Francisco's legendary Stud -- the old Stud, pre-1987, on Folsom Street. I can smell the cheap gin-and-tonics well before the first refrain ends.

Here's a guidebook-style description of the dance bar, but only because I found it in Google Books, taken from San Francisco Bizarro: A Guide to Notorious Sights, Lusty Pursuits, and Downright Freakiness in the City by the Bay, by Jack Boulware:

If not the oldest continuous gay bar in the city, The Stud is right up there, opening in the late 1960s at 1535 Folsom between 11th and 12th [...]. A popular gay stoner hangout, The Stud gained a reputation as San Francisco's quintessential alternative gay bar. Patrons o f the era speak of it with almost spiritual reverence, and with good reason. The business operated for a time as an ordained chapel of the Universal Life Church, holding "services" after the 2 a.m. closing time so that the bar could remain open into the early morning hours.

The other song that does that for me, evokes that same bar in the same era, is The Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go, a song of the same vintage, but one that made it into the Canon: anybody who has listened to more than a miniscule corner of late 20th century British music has listened to The Clash.

If you're under 30 in 2013, and knew Translator's Everywhere that I'm not before you pointed a web browser my way, please leave a comment. I salute you.



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Mayan apocalypse spoofs were funny, but Weather Underground was right

No, not the Weather Underground, as in Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and Bernardine Dohrn.

I mean the Weather Underground you do need to know which way the wind blows.

On the morning of 21 December 2012, yesterday -- the day some said the world would end because they had some whack take on an allegedly-implicit prophecy in a Mayan calender -- Weather Underground (as in meteorology) had something to say about San Francisco.

I had an errand in San Francisco yesterday morning. I wondered if it would be raining as I walked from BART to California Street.

Here's a screenshot of yesterday's actual weather report (no, not Weather Report as in I Sing the Body Electric ... this could recurse forever but maybe I should stop).

The screenshot is of the actual weather report for San Francisco. Actual, I mean, as opposed to the gone-viral spoof depicted above.

'What to cue up on the soundtrack?' I asked myself as I decided whether to bring an umbrella along to the city (answer to the umbrella question: yes).

Candidates for the soundtrack: REM, Simon and Garfunkle





If this blog post goes live as planned, on the morning of 22 December 2012, either I can gather all the news I need on the weather report or Google's servers are very well-protected.


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Déjà vu at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

My trip to Austria and Italy in October included fodder for more blog posts than I'll likely ever write. I'll start, belatedly, with one of the first among our many museum visits in Vienna, Graz, Venice, Padova, Bologna, and Ferrara: a visit to Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Back up for just a moment...

Late last year, between Christmas and New Year's Day, I visited San Francisco's deYoung Museum (across the bay from where I live in Berkeley), to see an exhibit of paintings by masters of the Venetian school on loan from the selfsame Kunsthistorisches Museum. I wrote about that visit in Portraiture and history: Masters of Venice at the de Young Museum.

Among the many treasures on view in early October at the Kunsthistorisches were the very portraits that had been on loan to the de Young a little more than nine months before. These included both paintings I mentioned in my blog post of 2 January: Tintoretto's Portrait of Sebastiano Venier (and the Battle of Lepanto) and Bernardino Licinio's Portrait of Ottaviano Grimani.

For recidivist museumgoers it's not unusual to find a work of art in Museum X that one saw previously in Museum Y. The proximity in time, though, between the Venetian Masters' visit to San Francisco, and when we encountered these paintings again at their long-term home in Vienna, imbued last month's re-viewing with a strong sense of déjà vu. This sense was heightened by the fact that we were en route to Venice -- whose rulers, landscapes, and history were the subject of these paintings.

But there was more.

As I explained in that prior blog post, I visited the de Young museum in San Francisco with my partner and an old and dear friend.

We visited the de Young on the 27th of December last year. The old and dear friend was Susan Poff, whose life -- along with the life of her partner, Bob Kamin -- was taken suddenly and brutally less than a month later. Our museum visit was the second-to-last time I would see Susan alive; she was like a sister to me over the course of our thirty year friendship, much of which we spent living in a collective household.

Some sixteen years after our household scattered across the Bay Area and beyond, we didn't often get a chance to enjoy Susan's company unencumbered by the many demands on her life and time and attention: motherhood especially; her relationship with Bob; an intellectually and emotionally demanding career providing medical and social care for the deepest down and furthest out in San Francisco's Tenderloin. Most often we saw Susan at reading group meetings, where we talked about fiction in the company of six or eight others of our close community.

That de Young Museum Tuesday in December, Susan was giddy to have the better part of a day as 'adult time' to do as she wished: time to be with a couple of close friends and take in an exhibition well beyond the usual orbits of love and commitment that filled her life. Matthew and I were buoyed by our outing with Susan, even during the serious bits of our conversation over lunch.

In Vienna we immersed ourselves, for the second time in ten months, in works by Giorgione, Licinio, Mantegna, Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese. The echoes that reverberated that day were certainly echoes of the people and histories they depicted; and echoes of thought and feeling inspired when we saw the same cavanses in San Francisco late last year; but, beyond these expected resonances, also the echoes of a penultimate, glad, and -- especially in retrospect -- precious day with Susan.

As we moved through the rooms of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, I reflected on the layers and dimensions of culture carried by paintings, sculpture, architecture, and artifacts preserved there.

After our visit to the de Young I focused on the human history directly depicted and deliberately enshrined in portraits painted by the Venetian Masters whose work was on loan to that museum.

Like any regular museumgoer, the manner and technique of representing (or abstracting) the sensed and conceptualized world -- forever evolving as artists push the boundaries of representational media, and seek their own voices and the voice of their time and place -- is another dimension I mull over most every time I step into an exhibition, whether fresh or familiar.

And this time around, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum galleries that host the great portraitists of sixteenth century Venice, I was keenly aware of the way that repeatedly viewed and considered artworks can become  personal touchstones, imbued with meaning idiosyncratic to the viewer over the long and winding paths of life and friendship.

That's a lot of weight to load onto a canvas. The master painters of Venice were up to the task.

Susan and Bob, rest in peace.





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Thanks once again to Wikimedia Commons for the image of Bernardino Licinio's portrait of Ottaviano Grimani. Thanks to Matthew Felix Sun for the image of Susan in front of El Anatsui's installation Hovor II, photographed at the de Young Museum on 27 December 2011.