Wallace Stevens, poet

Odilon Redon, Woman with
a Vase of Flowers

This morning on Facebook, poet Mark Doty remarked, "I don't think I ever read 'Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers' until today, and I'm thrilled to discover it. Somehow it feels perfect for this moment. Maybe because it concerns a solitary person finding a sense of connection to the world, a sense of meaningful relation between self, the physical world, and the world of ideas. It also reminds me of the complexity great artists often present. Stevens was not, in some clear ways, an admirable man, and capable of being an awful one. I know that's true, just as I know this poem is saturated with a deep sympathy for human experience, and understanding of how it is to look through this woman's eyes as she feels her way toward a—well, a sustainable relationship with reality?" I love Mark Doty—his own poetry (as here, here, and here) and his teaching wisdom. His remarks on FB this morning sent me looking for

Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers

It was as if thunder took form upon
The piano, that time: the time when the crude
And jealous grandeurs of sun and sky
Scattered themselves in the garden, like
The wind dissolving into birds,
The clouds becoming braided girls.
It was like the sea poured out again
In east wind beating the shutters at night.

Hoot, little owl within her, how
High blue became particular
In the leaf and bud and how the red,
Flicked into pieces, points of air,
Became--how the central, essential red
Escaped its large abstraction, became,
First, summer, then a lesser time,
Then the sides of peaches, of dusky pears.
Hoot how the inhuman colors fell
Into place beside her, where she was,
Like human conciliations, more like
A profounder reconciling, an act,
An affirmation free from doubt.
The crude and jealous formlessness
Became the form and the fragrance of things
Without clairvoyance, close to her.


It is not an easy poem. But it is one that I've gotten more from each time I've read it. It requires multiple readings. It gets at what it is to be alive and sentient and feeling and trying to understand what it is to be alive. It does do that. I think.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I forgot to post the Covid-19 numbers yesterday, which keep on going up up up. Today they stand (for Monterey County) at 1,642 confirmed cases—up 37 since yesterday, up 94 since Sunday; hospitalizations are at 130, up 8 and 9 respectively; and deaths have risen to 15, up 1 and 2 respectively. Dr. Fauci today said if we don't start behaving seriously about this virus, we could be seeing 100,000 infections a day. And as if coronavirus isn't bad enough, now there's a new H1N1 virus in China (similar to the 1918 influenza and the 2009 swine flu).

Stay safe.

Robert Frank, photographer

This evening while I was preparing Moroccan chicken stew with pearl couscous, sweet potato, and cauliflower, I listened—as I have recently become fond of doing—to a podcast. I tend to start with the New York Times's "The Daily." Today's episode was about police killings, but when it was done it rolled over to yesterday's offering: a reading of a 2105 profile of Swiss American photographer Robert Frank, "The Man Who Saw America" by Nicholas Dawidoff (this link includes both the print article and the read version). What a treat! He was a crusty, opinionated, uncompromising man with a careful yet emotional aesthetic sense. (Here is another summary of his legacy. And another. And yet another. He was well loved, and much discussed.)

Robert Frank inspecting
negatives, ca. 1956

I have Frank's 1958 book The Americans (somewhere in the garage). I love it. It presents a complex view of this confounded country at midcentury. As Dawidoff characterizes this body of work, "Frank hoped to express the emotional rhythms of the United States, to portray underlying realities and misgivings—how it felt to be wealthy, to be poor, to be in love, to be alone, to be young or old, to be black or white, to live along a country road or to walk a crowded sidewalk, to be overworked or sleeping in parks, to be a swaggering Southern couple or to be young and gay in New York, to be politicking or at prayer."

I was delighted to be reminded of The Americans. One day, I would love to see the prints in person—so much better than half-tone reproductions in a book. Frank died last September at the age of 94, and of course he did other work in the last few decades of his life, including filmmaking, but he will probably live on most securely in these pointed observations of his adopted country.

Here are a few of those images (as always, click to view them large on black):

"Trolley—New Orleans" 1955

"Fourth of July—Jay, New York" 1955

"Covered Car—Long Beach, California" 1955/1956

"Car Accident—U.S. 66 between
Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona" 1956

"Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey" 1955

"Indianapolis" 1956

Drive-in Movie—Detroit" 1955

"Funeral—St. Helena, South Carolina" 1955

Apparently there's a 50th-anniversary edition of The Americans with superior reproductions of the photos. I might just have to seek it out. Keeping me out of the garage for another day.

100+

My second post, short and sweet

I have maintained this blog for more years than I care to remember. At first, I didn't really maintain it at all. I started it in 2009, wrote seven entries that year, two the next, then completely forgot about it—until March 28, 2015, when I got the bright idea of writing a daily blog post for 365 days. An extension of a photo project I had carried on for four years. Why not challenge myself even more?

That first 365 project, called "True Things," got me going with regular blog posting. I did do a second 365, launched on October 30, 2016, called "Hodgepodge." And I started a third one last October, called "Noticing," but quit it (at an even one hundred entries) when I was leaving for Antarctica—because, no Internet down there. (Whew! Good excuse!). But all along, and even still, I do continue to turn to Roostmusings to write down random stuff. Just not every day. But yeah, I enjoy having a blog.

I do not, however, have followers. Well, a few that I know of—friends who check in from time to time, even one who comments. Blogger doesn't have the Wordpress feature of allowing people to sign up for notifications when a new post is published. So sometimes I will mention on Facebook that I've got posts up, but mostly I just let it be what it is. Me blabbing to the universe, without much feedback. It's fine. I'm used to it.

My stats for this last month

Blogger does, however, have a rather lame statistics feature. And a few months ago I noticed that I was getting a lot of traffic from, of all places, Turkmeni-stan, which seemed to be focused on a particular post of mine from November 2015, titled "Helping." It was about the Syrian refugee crisis, but also about, oh, humanity. Fraught, fraught humanity.

As of today, that post has gotten 543 views—ten just today.

I happen to have a sort-of friend who is currently living in Turkmenistan—she works in the U.S. State Department—but I can't see that she would have anything to do with the sudden currency of that post. It baffles me. It will continue to baffle me, I'm sure: a mystery for the ages.

I also find it kind of delightful. The mere fact that random individuals from all over somehow stumble onto my blog and read my random stuff. That is an example of the beauty of humanity: curiosity, connection, enthusiasm.

Anyway, today I decided to go through the Blogger records and see which of my posts have gotten more than 100 views. (At least, as recorded. I know, for example, that my husband's views don't get recorded, so the recording feature is another of Blogger's lame services. Whatever! It's all just for fun. One of these days I really will move to Wordpress, which is serious. For the ages. Right?)

Here's what I found:

Bucket (list of birds), 5/16/15 (253 views)
Work (VWA) (how I became a Wilderness Ranger), 5/30/15 (142)
Other (othering, plus Dr. Seuss's Sneetches), 6/5/15 (169)
Exercise (quitting my gym . . . again), 6/10/15 (210)
Bats (25 percent of all mammals!), 10/2/15 (145)
Gophers (vs. prairie dogs—guess who wins), 10/24/15 (198)
Helping, 11/6/15 (544: see that, it's up one since fifteen minutes ago)
Condors, 12/19/15 (135)
Fitness Tracking (Walking), 11/10/16 (226)
Crosscut Saw (a training), 6/10/17 (132)
Book Report (The Hate U Give), 8/28/17 (121)
Two Years of Posts (a list of my two 365 projects), 10/30/17 (139)
Glasgow Murals, 11/9/17 (112)
Japanese Ghosts, 11/29/17 (140)
Anti-racism Reading, 12/6/17 (139)
Chanukah Poems (just poems; not about Chanukah), 12/14/17 (143)
Maori Portraits (a show at the DeYoung Museum, SF), 1/31/18 (135)
Giorgio Morandi, Artist, 12/4/19 (114)

And there we are. I do wonder how people happened upon these specific posts in such numbers. And how they found me in the first place. The Internet. It's something else.

And as I sign off, "Helping" is up to 545 views. So strange!

Book Report: The Snowy Day

17. Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day (1962) (6/28/2020)

"One winter morning Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see." So begins this simple, and simply lovely, picture book, one that I'm amazed I've never read—indeed, hadn't even heard of until very recently, when I saw it mentioned in an article about diversity in children's books. It is, it turns out, the most checked-out book at the New York Public Library.

Two or three things make this book so special. First and foremost, it features an African American protagonist—and it was the first such book to win the coveted Caldecott Medal. (Here is Keats's acceptance speech.) Second, the story is utterly accessible, whether or not you even know what snow is (or being black is): it's simply about joy and anticipation and delight, things we should all celebrate. Third, the collage illustrations are exquisite. Here's another article on the making of the story and art.

Keats circa 1980

The author/illustrator, Keats, was the son of Polish immigrants, born in 1916. Following a career as a commercial illustrator, he illustrated 85+ children's books, and wrote and illustrated more than 20 of his own. The Snowy Day was his second book, and he wrote six more that featured Peter. The idea came in part from his noticing the dearth of children's books with African American heroes. More specifically, Peter is modeled on a child undergoing a blood test, whom Keats saw and cut out of a 1940 issue of Life magazine:

Maria Popova, of BrainPickings, devoted a page to Keats and The Snowy Day, in part to introduce a book about Keats and his award-winning book, A Poem for Peter. See? Beloved. Peter even became a postage stamp in 2017. I'm so glad I finally made his acquaintance.

I will end with a few of the beautiful illustrations from The Snowy Day:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Covid-19 numbers for Monterey County: 1,548 total cases as of today, up 104 in the last few days and up 151 since last I posted on the 24th; hospitalizations now stand at 121, up 9 since Wednesday; and sadly, there has been a 13th death.

Stay well.

Operation Uplift III

I continue to enjoy, and participate in, Luis Alberto Urrea's FB project of spreading cheer and inspiration far and wide. (My first two posts on it are here and here.) I keep expecting him to call it a day, but he perseveres! As, actually, do we all, through this strange time. We've got no choice. He does, but he chooses to keep the flame lit. It's a lovely little tradition. Today was chapter 93.

He posted this photo, with the prompt:
"the green floor of the world that so
makes us want to live." Linda Hogan

I offered up these four photos, searching Flickr for "green":

Merced River, Yosemite NP

Wrangell, Alaska

Folldal, Norway

Cat Tien NP, Vietnam

I am so very fortunate to have been able to travel so much, to have seen so much of this beautiful, beautiful world.

I am also fortunate to live right where I do—because in these times of Covid-19, I sure am not traveling, nor do I plan to (except perhaps a . . . camping road trip!?!?!?) anytime soon. But there are so many exquisite and varied and inviting places hereabouts to get out for a hike.

Asilomar Beach

Garrapata State Park

Where the Big Sur River meets the sea

In the Silver Peak Wilderness looking out over the Pacific

Garrapata State Beach

Garland Ranch Regional Park

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Current numbers for the virus are 1,397 infections and 112 hospitalizations—up 67 and 4 since I posted . . . was it just yesterday? Yikes. Deaths remain steady at 12.

Stay well. This virus is not done with us, not by a long shot.

Book Report: All That I Have

16. Castle Freeman Jr., All That I Have (2009) (6/23/2020)

Here's another book that I'm not sure why I have it—and another book that I'm now glad I've read. Set in rural Vermont, it's not quite a thriller—it's too quiet and spare for that. I suppose it's really a character study, of a small-town sheriff and the people in his life. But there are some bad guys (Russians), a ne'er-do-well, a rival, and some allies. There is a break-in and a theft, and the victims (the bad guys) wanting their stolen property back. Some people get beat up. Mostly, there's wry, wise humor as Sheriff Lucian Wing exercises his own brand of law enforcement—which is mainly a hands-off approach. As he explains it:

So: Deputy Keen says I'm not doing my job, that I'm giving Sean a get-out-of-jail-free card. Am I? I guess I am. Is that because of what Addison [Lucian's father-in-law, a lawyer] said back then? Am I making Sean a special case? Am I going easy on him because I think he's one of my own? Never. Sean ain't mine. I don't want him; he don't want me. If I'm giving him some extra rope—and I am—it's because that's my method. That's sheriffing. In sheriffing you don't stop things from happening. You know you can't do that, mostly, so you don't try. People are going to do what they're going to do. You let things happen. "Let them come to you," said Wingate [Lucian's mentor, now retired].
 Your bad boys, he was talking about. Let your bad boys come to you. The idea is that you give them a little cover, a little time to figure things out and come around. What you're aiming for is a taxpayer with a few good stories, a few memories that today make him shake his head, and not a convict sitting in a jail cell somewhere. . . .
 Sure, there are bad boys who test Wingate's method, who won't come to you, who will not shape up, not ever. Sean may be one of them. But you don't assume that. You try to use the method with Sean, too. At least you try until you get done trying. Then you come down onto the hard bottom of the law, the bedrock, the place where Deputy Keen wants to do business. Then you say that your job is to make the law work, to make it real, and in the end what makes the law real can only be one thing. If you're a trooper, you carry it on your hip; if you're a sheriff like Wingate, like me, you keep it locked up in your sock drawer. But you've got it, you know where it is, you know how to use it, you know you're allowed to use it, and so does everybody else.
 Would Sean make us all come down onto that hard place? I didn't think he would. And this time, anyhow, I was right. Because as it happened, I didn't catch up with Sean. Sean caught up with me.

Freeman is very good with spare, laconic dialogue as well. Here's an example, where Lucian recalls the conversation he had with Wingate early in his career, as the sheriff sought to persuade Lucian to shift from being a state trooper to being one of Wingate's deputies (which, coincidentally, would mean a big cut in pay):

"Well, . . . you think it over," said Wingate. "You ain't got to make up your mind now."
 "I will. I will think it over."
 "Sure," said Wingate. "You think it over. Think it over good. The sheriff ain't the [trooper] barracks, you know. It's like, it's like the difference between going fishing with a cane pole and taking off all your clothes and jumping into the pond and swimming around with the fish all day and maybe grabbing one from time to time."
 "Which is which, Sheriff?"
 "Sheriff's swimming around with the fish," said Wingate.
 "I'll get back to you," I said.
 "It's like the difference between being the fellow who puts the doors and windows in a big house and being the fellow who builds a little house, but he builds the whole thing," said Wingate.
 "I'll think it over."
 "Sheriff's the one builds the whole house," said Wingate.
 "I thought so," I said. . . .
 I was on patrol that morning, supposed to be, so I left Wingate, promising to think about his deputy job. I thought about it for two minutes. No, I didn't. I didn't think about it that long. I didn't think about it at all; I didn't have to.
 The next day I turned in my flat hat.

I very much enjoyed Lucian's voice and his go-slow, take-it-all-in manner. No hothead he; quite the opposite. Nor does he need to know everything. He's a bit like one of those fish slipping through the shadows along the river bank, taking advantage of his surroundings but not forcing anything. Path of least resistance. And in the case of this particular story, it ends up working.

There are two more Lucian Wing books, Old Number Five and Children of the Valley. I will certainly be reading them. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monterey County's numbers today: 1,341 confirmed cases, 108 hospitalizations, and (still) 12 deaths. For the first two numbers, that's up 185 and 10 since Friday, when I last posted. I'm not going out to any restaurants or touristed areas anytime soon.

Stay safe.

More anti-racism resources

I added a few references to my post from May 30, but they're buried there, so I'm going to pull them out and repost them, plus a few more, here. Because this is all so important. Plus, Juneteenth.

So, here: more resources, in no particular order—just as I've bumped into them. I'll keep emending this list until it's time to create a new one.

• An NPR list of books, films, and podcasts about racism
• A long-form BBC program(me) on race in America, The Documentary
• Another list of various kinds of resources, including resources for photographers, the 1619 podcast on slavery, diverse books for children, and much more
• Resources for all ages, curated by Dr. Nicole A. Cooke (aka NicoletheLibrarian) at the University of South Carolina
• Five Ways to Show Up for Racial Justice Today
• Nic Stone, "Don't Just Read about Racism—Read about Black People Living"
• George Yancy, "Dear White America" (from 2015)
• "Interview with George Yancy, African-American philosopher of critical philosophy of race"
• "Reimagining Justice: A Primer on Defunding the Police and Prison Abolition"
• Vann R. Newkirk II, "The Quintessential Americanness of Juneteenth" (from 2017)
• "Why Juneteenth Matters More Than Ever"
• The original anti-racist reading list
• "When Black People Are in Pain, White People Just Join Book Clubs" 

I didn't actually get much myself from the last-cited article, but other, younger friends of mine did—so I include it. Me, I am donating monthly to on-the-ground groups doing important, life-saving work: the ACLU Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Equal Justice Initiative. It may not be much, compared to protesting in the streets, but it's something, and it's important.

Here is Trevor Noah talking to ten Black authors we all should read:

And Trevor Noah interviewing ten Black people making history:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Current number of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Monterey County is 1,156, up 35 since yesterday and up 291 since I last posted statistics on 6/12; hospitalizations stand at 98, up 3 since yesterday and up 17 since a week ago. Deaths, thankfully, remain steady at 12. But seriously, the numbers have really been rising this last week or two. Mostly in Salinas Valley still. But as things open up and flights and tourists return, that could change.

Stay safe. Stay engaged. Be kind and caring.

Book Report: The Nickel Boys

15. Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (2020) (6/16/2020)

This year, Colson Whitehead joined just three other (white) authors (Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike) in being awarded a second Pulitzer Prize for a work of fiction. The first was for The Underground Railroad, a tour-de-force about the post–Civil War era. The Nickel Boys is set mainly in 1963 Florida, though it creeps forward into the early twentieth century and New York, thereby laying bare another horrific phase of anti–civil rights America.

The protagonist is sixteen-year-old Elwood Curtis, an African-American boy who lives with his cleaning-lady grandmother in Tallahassee. He is smart, a straight-A student, and gains a chance to attend a college south of town. But to get there, he has to hitchhike—and the first ride he catches happens to be in a "brilliant-green '61 Plymouth Fury . . . , low and finned like a giant catfish." The problem is, it's stolen. And that earns him arrest, and a stay in the Nickel Academy for Boys, a.k.a. "reform school." Only it's much, much more evil than "reform" and not nearly as uplifting as "school."

The book is told in three parts—loosely, pre-Nickel, Nickel, and post-Nickel, but with some jumping around in time in parts two and three—plus prologue and epilogue. In the prologue, we hear about some excavations at the now-closed Nickel Academy—the year is unspecified, but it's decades since 1963—and a recently discovered unmarked graveyard. And we meet an older Elwood Curtis, who, on hearing of the finds, knows he has to return to the place. To testify.

And thus is Elwood's story launched. It's a moving story, for so many reasons: the trajectories, of both strength and weakness, perseverance and flight, of his family members; the fierce love of his grandmother Harriet and the promise he had to become something, if only he hadn't been in the wrong place at the wrong time—and the mere fact that his skin color was enough to win him no clemency; the soulless, even gleeful cruelty of the "caretakers" at Nickel; Elwood's friendship with another Nickel Boy, Turner; his eventual climb into self-respect as a moving company business owner in New York City, married to a woman, Millie, who is "the whole free world" for him. Yet he remains haunted.

Late in the book, in New York, Elwood runs into a Nickel Boy, Chickie Pete, who is down on his luck. After they part, Elwood reflects:

Chickie Pete and his trumpet. He might have played professionally, why not? A session man in a funk band, or an orchestra. If things had been different. The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cure diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.

At least Elwood figured out how to be normal. Or, close enough.

When Elwood is first deposited at Nickel, a bunkmate is assigned to "show him the ropes," but he soon disappears and Elwood is left at mealtime without guidance. After being informed that "big kids aren't allowed at a little-kids table," he

sat down quickly at the next free spot he saw and to head off rebuke didn't make eye contact, just ate. The oatmeal had a bunch of cinnamon dumped into it to hide a lousy taste. Elwood gobbled it down. He finished peeling his orange before he finally looked up at the boy across the table who had been staring at him.
 The first thing Elwood noticed was the notch in the boy's left ear, like on an alley cat that had been in scrapes. The boy said, "You eat that oatmeal like your mama made it."
 Who was this, talking about his mother. "What?"
 He said, "I didn't mean it like that, I meant I ain't never seen someone eat this food like that—like they liked it."
 The second thing Elwood noticed was the boy's eerie sense of self. The mess hall was loud with the rumble and roil of juvenile activity, but this boy bobbed in his own pocket of calm. Over time, Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn't have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Like a tree trunk that falls across a creek—it doesn't belong and then it's never not been there, generating its own ripples in the larger current.
 He said his name was Turner. 

That relationship, that friendship, the instruction and the warnings about the awful place that is Nickel Academy, is the heart around which this story revolves. It is masterfully executed, both in terms of plot and in the beautiful, evocative, eloquent language in which it is told.

I won't say (or quote, though I could go on!) any more. Suffice it to say, I found this book wrenchingly stunning. I need to read more of Colson Whitehead, that is clear.

I also was very struck by the cover of the hardbound book. You can see the design above—that blood-red rectangle, the linked shadows of the two young men, the elegant typeface. But it's also the feel of the book: the white background is like sandpaper, like sharkskin, rough to the touch, while that red is varnished, so slick a body could slide off it. Really beautiful.

Here is an interview between Dave Davies of Fresh Air and Colson Whitehead on the true story of The Nickel Boys—because yes, of course, there was an actual "reform school" run by monsters, for decades, in Florida that Whitehead learned about only in 2014 and that inspired this book.

Book Report: The Los Angeles Diaries

14. James Brown, The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir (2003) (6/11/2020)

I don't know how I stumbled on this book, which is not the sort I usually read—a memoir, and more specifically, an "addiction memoir." But I'm glad I did. It is gorgeous, and honest, and painful, and sometimes funny, and altogether it feels very true.

The book consists of dated essays that jump around in time, starting in 1994, then going back to 1961 when the author was five and waits in the car while his mother goes to . . . set fire to an apartment building—and on like that, back and forth between his childhood and his twenties and thirties when he is a moderately successful author, unsuccessful screenwriter, floundering husband and father, and wholly committed addict to drink and drugs.

What makes the book especially remarkable and moving is the lack of self-pity, the lucidity, the undercurrent of pain tempered by love and, perhaps, hope—and the language, spare and unflinching. Along the way there are suicides, broken marriages, prison terms, drunkenness, but it's all explored in something like wonder, a desire to understand what life is all about. There is a sort of melancholy to the book, but not despair.

Here's a passage by way of example:

A few years back I wrote a novel that uses this memory [of dancing, at six or seven years of age, to Patsy Cline's "Crazy" with his father in the kitchen] as its heart. I've mined the territory before, if not this particular moment then something like it, and I've done it so often that I find myself confusing what actually happened with how I imagine it. In trying to sort between autobiography and fiction, or invention, and then trying to put the pieces together so that they make some kind of sense, I've come to think that the truth as it occurs isn't of much use to me other than, say, as a catalyst for a story. While I'm figuring this out, I lose a couple of years writing a bad novel. I don't get through it and that's a good thing, because if I hadn't given up I would have lost more time. And I worry about time.
 The problem, at least one of them, what that I was being dishonest with myself in the worst, most shameful way. I was writing about people and events and places that I didn't fully understand, and I wasn't good enough at it for it not to show. So I start another book, one that makes me see past what I think actually occurred, to what hasn't but should have according to that thing I imagine called plot. And the writer's obsession, as I also come to understand, suggests something other than limitation or theme, that as storytellers we basically spend our lives telling the same story over and over, only we do it from different angles.
 The trick is disguising it, so it doesn't seem the same.
 The trick is how well you can keep doing it, not once or twice, but hundreds of times, page after page, with one real detail after another. The hardest part is to make it appear seamless and vivid in the end as if it all came naturally.
 Like magic.
 Like you don't have to think. Like it really couldn't have happened any other way.

In a later essay, he writes about going to live with his father for a few short years, when he was fourteen:

We live in a rented house on the east side, the poor side of San Jose, and for the first month after I arrive, until we can afford another bed, I sleep with my father. At night he tells me stories about when he was growing up in the backwoods of Oregon and how he used to hunt for deer and fish for salmon. He tells me about the years he worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad and laid tracks through mountainous terrain that up until then no white man had ever seen. He tells me about the Cherokee, how he admired and respected their love of nature, and he teaches me to count to ten in their language. . . . My father has a talent for detail, and as he describes the Chetco River, the salmon leaping out of the water, the sun glinting off their backs, as he describes the mountains of his youth and the beauty of a grazing deer, I am there with him. It is real to me. It is a fine place, and I live in his stories as I will someday live in my own.
 At seventeen I will leave for college. A few years after I graduate he will die. Looking back, I see myself at fourteen in bed beside him. The room is still and dark. The kid who shoots heroin, robs and steals is getting drowsy, his father's voice slowly fading, and when I fall asleep and wake up thirty years later as a middle-aged man, I realize that this brief time I spent with my father has much to do with why I am still here and my brother and sister are not.

There are two more books in Brown's trilogy of memoirs, This River and Apology to the Young Addict, the latter recently published. I have both of them. I will be reading them. But not right away. I want to keep savoring The L.A. Diaries for a little while longer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's Covid-19 numbers for Monterey County: confirmed cases, 865, up 51 since yesterday, 74 since I last posted; hospitalizations, 81, up 2; fatalities remain at 11.

Stay safe. Be well.

Myra Greene: My White Friends

I have been working on a jigsaw puzzle (see post from 5/27—but I am almost done! so close now!), and while I do that, I listen to podcasts. Today I listened to Scene on Radio, from Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies: one episode in an exploration of whiteness (and hence racist thought) in America, another on just who the Founding Fathers were anyway. Let's just say, democracy was not at the forefront of their thinking (the first episode of season 4, The Land That Never Has Been Yet, is titled "Rich Man's Revolt" . . . yeah, that's what American independence was about . . . maybe things haven't changed all that much).

The Seeing White (season 2) episode I listened to, "My White Friends," featured a Black photographer and artist, Myra Greene, making photos of—you guessed it—some of her white friends, of which she has many. The project (2007–2013) was a teasing out of stereotypes, of racial identity, of perceptions and assumptions. I really enjoyed listening to her, and wanted to share her work and ideas here. Here are some of the photos in the project:

Here is Myra's artist statement on the series of fifty photos: "My White Friends extends Myra Greene’s 10-year exploration into photography’s description of race. Images initially read as benign portraits of a cross section of white American life, yet the impetus for their creation lies in an undercurrent of racial description. By photographing friends, peers, and mentors, Greene visually ponders if photography can capture and describe the nuances of whiteness. Do gesture and environment allude to a lived truth, a performance by the sitter, or stereotype implored by the photographer herself? These photographs offer descriptions instead of resolutions. Readers charged with dissecting coded information, are confronted with their own notions of race."

Here is a New York Times "Lens" blog post about her project.

Another project is called "Character Recognition" (2006–2007). Here are some shots from that one.

Her statement on her web page: "Confronted with an upswell of bigotry both personal and public, I was forced to ask myself, what do people see when they look at me. Am I nothing but black? Is that skin tone enough to describe my nature and expectation in life? Do my strong teeth make me a strong worker? Does my character resonate louder than my skin tone? Using a photographic process linked to the times of ethnographic classification, I repeatedly explore my ethnic features in Character Recognition. The lessons learned are haunting and frightening in these modern times."

And here she is giving an artist talk at the Center for Documentary Studies on these projects. It's worth watching. (The photo in the frame is not Myra.)

Her website brings us up to date on her artistic endeavors. It's a nice place to hang out.

The more I listen to these podcasts and learn about our cursèd history, the more engaged I feel with this country. Christopher Columbus was beheaded and tossed into the sea today, several times over! Bravo! Slave traders are being toppled, Confederate soldiers and generals brought down! Though of course, I wouldn't be here without Christopher Columbus—or someone like him. Learning about history and then thinking about what's going on today is mind-blowing. Literally. I am very happy to see the changes that are being wrought. I just hope they continue. Five months (until the hoped-for bring-down of "President" Trump) is a long time . . .

And finally, just as I was about to publish this, I spotted the following Bestseller list on the New York Times: 

 
Not a single book on weight loss, time management, or self-improvement—unless you consider becoming more woke self-improvement. Which I sure do.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's numbers for Covid-19 in Monterey County: 791 confirmed cases (up 29 since yesterday, 40 since I last posted two days ago); 79 hospitalizations (up 4 and 5, respectively); and 11 deaths (up 1, sadly).

Stay healthy. Keep learning. This is the only life you've got.

Covid-19/BLM: Freethinker

B. heterophylla flowers

We took a drive up to Watsonville today to seek out some Australian plants to plant in our raised beds. Unfortunately, the banksias that I hoped to find were nonexistent, but I did find a sweet Boronia heterophylla. And then I moved over to the native section and found a couple of Mimulus (monkey-flowers), a Penstemon, and an Eriogonum (buckwheat). So we're set to plant tomorrow. Our water company would be so happy, except these are drought-tolerant plants! Yay!

On the way, we, as always, listened to the radio—meaning, NPR. It was All Things Considered, and one of the stories was about an Afro-Caribbean street artist who recently painted a portrait of George Floyd on the Berlin Wall. His name is Eme Freethinker. Here are some of his creations, starting with the one in question:

I really love graffiti art. Especially when there's a point.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's confirmed cases in the county are up 19, to 751; hospitalizations remain at 74, and deaths at 10.

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Stay well.

Book Report: Look Both Ways

13. Jason Reynolds, Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks (2019) (6/7/2020)

This is a book about middle schoolers, written for middle schoolers perhaps—but we all went through that awkward age of figuring life out, of growing into who we were to become, so it's a book that an adult, too, can find pleasure in. Very much so.

Look Both Ways, as the subtitle explains, consists of ten stories, each told from a different perspective or set of perspectives as the young subjects walk home from school one afternoon. A schoolbus falling from the sky appears ever so briefly in each tale, as a trope of magical realism that ties these varying experiences together. In one story in the middle of the book, a character asks, "How you gon' change the world?"; that phrase is also written large on the back cover. It's a good question, and the answer that I see the book providing is, through love and witness, generosity and caring. Because another thing that ties these stories together is just that: the students' own solidarity and love—for one another, for parents with cancer, for a grandfather with Alzheimer's, for a best friend; a janitor's crafting of a "broom dog" for a boy suffering from panic attacks; a boy turning his back on bullying; tender, humorous steps toward romantic love.

Jason Reynolds seems to be a phenom who has carved himself a secure place in YA fiction. His writing is masterful, able to provide a strong sense of individuals through very few strokes and to flip a story from one direction into another with ease. He is African American, and although the race of the children is rarely specified—and then only via physical description, such as a hair style or a comment about skin—I imagined all of them, students and teachers alike, to be people of color. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, race isn't the issue; the experiences that these kids have are experiences that any kid could have. There is plenty of happiness and laughter, and when a home situation is difficult it is because of illness or a parent who works too hard, not because of racism, poverty, or abuse. This is a decent neighborhood where everyone is striving to lead a decent life.

It's a little hard to find passages to quote, but here—this one works to give a sense of the mosaic of emotions that Reynolds manages to convey:

Ty tried to convince his parents Call of Duty was educational. That it was basically like interactive social studies class. That there was no better way to learn about that particular war then to jump right into it.
 "There is no way you can know war, son," Ty's mother scolded. "Not unless you've fought in one. And you haven't. You're talking about Nazis. That's a lot more than some video game."
 Ty understood that he didn't know the kind of war he was simulating in the game. That his controller wasn't a rifle and his raggedy family-reunion T-shirt wasn't a flak jacket. His headset wasn't a helmet, and the sounds in his ears were, in fact, just sounds in his ears. But Ty also knew that there was some kind of war he was in. Some kind of battle he did not know but couldn't make sense of. That the other sounds in his head were more than just sounds, that they made his heart do weird things, made his stomach tighten. Ty knew the anxiety of a kind of war. He knew the adrenaline and the confusion of it all.
 Because yesterday. Because yesterday. Because yesterday.
 Ty had been kissed. By a boy. Slim.
 At the water fountain after first period. PE.
 On his cheek.
 But close enough to his mouth to count.
 They were fighting over the water.
 We were fighting over the water, right?
 It was weird.
 He was surprised. But not mad. Which was more surprising.
 It was so weird.
 It wasn't that weird. 
 It was a little weird. But not a whole lot weird.
 It was seen. By someone no one saw see it.
 And that someone told everyone. Everyone.
 And by lunch, Slim—whose real name was Salem—had twisted the story, told everyone Ty kissed him. So, when Ty walked into the cafeteria, he walked into a minefield. A war zone. Everyone locked and loaded, firing at him.

The book ends with a quote from Garnette Cadogan's essay "Walking while Black": "A foot leaves, a foot lands, and our longing gives it momentum from rest to rest." The thought ends thus: "We long to look, to think, to talk, to get away. But more than anything else, we long to be free."

I also have Reynolds's book in verse Long Way Down. I won't read it right away, but I do look forward to reading it before too long. I might become a fan.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I last posted five days ago, when the Monterey County stats stood at 571 confirmed cases of Covid-19, 65 hospitalizations, and 10 deaths. Today's stats are 732, 74, and 10. The numbers keep going up—though thankfully, the deaths have not been rising. And that is true of California overall as well. This is what the graph looks like as of today, for the state:

We will not be out of the woods for months. I think that's pretty certain.

Book Report: Signs Preceding the End of the World

12. Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, translated by Lisa Dillman (2009/2015) (6/2/2020)

My friend Lynn dropped this book off for me, I don't really know why. Maybe because I'd mentioned that I especially enjoy short books these days, because there's a chance I might finish them in less than forever? This book is short—only 107 spare pages—but it is dense with life.

The story is of Makina, a multilingual switchboard operator in a remote silver-mining village in Mexico, whose mother sends her north, across the border, to find her missing brother. Her journey is told in nine short chapters with mythic titles—The Earth, The Water Crossing, The Place Where the Hills Meet, The Obsidian Mound, The Place Where the Wind Cuts Like a Knife, The Place Where Flags Wave, The Place Where People's Hearts Are Eaten, The Snake That Lies in Wait, and The Obsidian Place with No Windows or Holes for the Smoke. Herrera explained in an interview that

the structure of the novel—and its heroine’s journey—is bor-rowed from the Mexica world of the dead, Mictlan, a layered sequence of levels and challenges through which the dead must progress if they are to be cleansed and reborn. For the conquer-ing Spanish and their priests, who did so much to bury Mexica culture and history, Mictlan was simply a pagan hell. But the Mexica had neither hell nor heaven: for them the afterworld was neither final nor peaceful. Mictlan is where the dead are pre-pared for re-creation, a gauntlet across which—as they cross a series of nine underworlds with nine challenges and nine guardians—the deceased are purged of every element that made them who they were in life. Through this purgation, Herrera explained, they are prepared for rebirth. [this quote is actually from here]

After encounters with all manner of characters—including drug lords, a young punk on a bus in Mexico (who proves useful later on, over the border), an attentive hired thug (he ferries her across the Rio Grande), a woman in a restaurant (she points Makina to a house where her brother went to work), a policeman (whom Makina bests through her literacy)—she does finally find her brother . . . but he is lost to her, not through dissolution but through assimilation. And so she starts to make her way home, only to be stopped short and, as the myth goes, reborn (presumably).

The language is beautiful: poetic, each word important. Here are a few samples.

When she reached the top of the saddle between the two mountains it began to snow. Makina had never seen snow before and the first thing that struck her as she stopped to watch the weightless crystals raining down was that something was burning. One came to perch on her eyelashes; it looked like a stack of crosses or the map of a palace, a solid and intricate marvel at any rate, and when it dissolved a few seconds later she wondered how it was that some things in the world—some countries, some people—could seem eternal when everything was actually like that miniature ice palace: one-of-a-kind, precious, fragile.

*

They are homegrown and they are anglo and both things with rabid intensity; with restrained fervor they can be the meekest and at the same time the most querulous of citizens, albeit grumbling under their breath. Their gestures and tastes reveal both ancient memory and the wonderment of a new people. And then they speak. They speak an intermediary tongue that Makina instantly warms to because it's like her: malleable, erasable, permeable; a hinge pivoting between two like but distant souls, and then two more, and then two more, never exactly the same ones; something that serves as a link.
 More than the midpoint between homegrown and anglo their tongue is a nebulous territory between what is dying out and what is not yet born. But not a hecatomb. Makina senses in their tongue not a sudden absence but a shrewd metamorphosis, a self-defensive shift. They might be talking in perfect latin tongue and without warning begin to talk in perfect anglo tongue and keep it up like that, alternating between a thing that believes itself to be perfect and a thing that believes itself to be perfect, morphing back and forth, between two beasts until out of carelessness or clear intent they suddenly stop switching tongues and start speaking that other one. In it brims nostalgia for the land they left or never knew when they use the words with which they name objects; while actions are alluded to with an anglo verb conjugated latin-style, pinning on a sonorous tail from back there.
 Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It's not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. Who knows if they'll last, who knows if these names will be adopted by all, she thinks, but there they are, doing their damnedest.

*

Her brother had sent two or three messages back with assorted migrants on their way home. Two or three and not two, or three; Makina couldn't say for sure because after the first one the one that followed and maybe one more were the same old story.
 The first one said:
 I haven't found the land [supposedly left by his father] yet, but it won't be long now, you'll see.
 Everything's so stiff here, it's all numbered and people look you in the eye but they don't say anything when they do.
 They celebrate here, too, but they don't dance or pray, it's not in honor of anyone. The only real big celebration is the turkey feast, which is a good one because all you do is eat and eat.
  It's really lonely here, but there's lots of stuff. I'm going to bring you some when I come. I just have to take care of this and then I'll be back, you'll see.
 The second one didn't mention the country or the land or his plans. It said:
 I'm fine. I have a job now.
 And the third, if it existed, might've made the same claim, this way:
 I said I was fine so stop asking.

And finally, here is what Makina writes when the anglo policeman is harassing a group of Mexicans he's rounded up:

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don't speak your tongue and don't know how to keep quiet either. We who didn't come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you'd never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians.
 The cop had started off [reading aloud] in a mock-portentous voice but gradually abandoned the histrionics as he neared the last line, which he read almost in a whisper. After that he went on staring at the paper as if he'd gotten stuck on the final period. When he finally looked up, his rage, or his interest in his captives, seemed to have dissolved. He crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it behind him. The he looked away, turned his back, spoke over the radio to someone and took off.

No, one final final—the best description of baseball I've ever read:

The stadium loomed before them. So, what do they use that for?
 They play, said the old man. Every week the anglos play a game to celebrate who they are. He stopped, raised his cane and fanned the air. One of them whacks it, then sets off like it was a trip around the world, to every one of the bases out there, you know the anglos have bases all over the world, right? Well the one who whacked it runs from one to the next while the others keep taking swings to distract their enemies, and if he doesn't get caught he makes it home and his people welcome him with open arms and cheering.
 Do you like it?
 Tsk, me, I'm just passing through.
 How long you been here?
 Going on fifty years . . . Here we are.

It's a beautiful book, full of understated emotion and insightful observation. I'm glad Lynn dropped it by, for whatever reason.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cases in Monterey County as of yesterday, June 1: 571 (up 64 since I posted on Saturday); hospitalizations, 65 (up 6); deaths holding steady at 10. Hispanics and Latinos account for 77.6 percent of cases.

Stay healthy. Exercise compassion. Not everyone is just like you. And that's a good thing.