Screenshot from the January 13, 2011, “10 O’Clock News” (a.k.a, “The Used-to-Be Really Good Bay Area News Show”). By way of explanation, whoever was in charge of doing this graphic left the placeholder label in place for all the audience to see. How does stuff like this happen? Staff cuts, mostly. I’ve heard that many of the artists and producers who used to make and oversee graphics like this have been reassigned or let go and that writers have been given this job–in addition to continuing to write the news and find, pull, and edit videotape. The unfortunate on-air result notwithstanding, cutting these corners makes the station owner’s bottom line look great.
Books: The Holiday Haul
I have at my left elbow a small but imposing stack of books–a half-dozen of them, my haul from Christmas morning. I read thoroughly, not fast; I have a lot of incidental reading that I do as part of my work; and I need to spend ever so many hours noodling online. So this stack of books may be my reading list for 2011.
I’d love to list the titles, but won’t just yet. Instead, I’ll quote a representative opening passage from each book. The titles will appear below the jump, if you want to play.
1. “The idea of selling spring water came to Eric Carlson in 1997, when he observed trucks filled with water traveling up and down Maine highways. To Carlson, it was an epiphany: ‘I was like, “Wow! Water is valuable enough to truck around?” ‘ “
2. “Once it was a far different place. Aboriginal California, with 275,000 to 300,000 residents by current reckoning, was among the most densely populated areas in North America at the time of European contact, but the native peoples left scarcely an imprint on the waterscape or the landscape.”
3. “It is through Jack O’Brien, the Arbiter Elegantiarum Philadelphiae, that I trace my rapport with the historic past through the laying on of hands. He hit me, for pedagogical example, and he had been hit by the great Bob Fitzsimmons, from whom he won the light-heavyweight title in 1906. Jack had a scar to show for it. Fitzsimmons had been hit by Corbett, Corbett by John L. Sullivan, he by Paddy Ryan, with the bare knuckles, and Ryan by Joe Goss, his predecessor, who as a young man had felt the fist of the great Jem Mace. It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose.”
4. “They met at his request on at least six separate occasions, beginning in February 1869. With everyone present, there were just nine in all–the seven distinguished he had selected; his oldest son, Colonel Washington Roebling; and himself. …”
5. “One late night in November 1980 I was flying over the state of Utah on my way back to California. I had an aisle seat, and since I believe that anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money, I walked back to the rear door of the plane and stood for a long time at the door’s tiny aperture, squinting out at Utah.”
6. “There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And never will be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”
The 2011 Project
As another blue-eyed one never quite said, “Resolutions, I’ve had a few.” (It may interest you to know that language statisticians say the use of the word “resolution” peaks during the last week of December each year and tails off to nearly nothing by mid-January). But this year, we’re leaving resolutions behind and simply projecting the year ahead based on observed phenomena during a given period of time. In this case, the period is January 1, the first day of the year. Based on what happened yesterday, in 2011 I will:
- Watch all or part of 2,190 college football classics and see the Big 10 lose 1,825 times.
- Eat homemade pasta with Eamon and Sakura 365 times.
- Have 1,460 cups of strong coffee and 365 cups of tea.
- Drink alcoholic beverages zero times.
- Comment on the beverage name “Pocari Sweat” 3,650 times.
- Consume 35 million calories from various snacks and holiday sweets.
- Take The Dog for 1,460 walks and pick up 1,460 holiday leavings from said Dog.
- Step in a pile of waste left by the neighbor’s cat 365 times.
- Lose track of The Dog while doing an outdoor chore, look for him up and down the block, get irritated with very nice neighbor who let The Dog in to hang out with her family, apologize for getting irritated: 365 times.
- Weigh myself 365 times and think “that’s not too bad, is it?” about 5,000 times.
- Conceive 131,400 brilliant ideas (20 for each waking hour) and 13,400 inspired projects (two every waking hour) based on same.
- Play 2,190 games of Fruit Ninja on my daughter-in-law’s iPad (hi, Sakura!) and lose every one.
- Look at work email on my day off 1,040 times.
- Check personal email, Facebook, and Twitter 3,650 times.
- Check on delivery status of items ordered online 730 times.
- Shop at the Shattuck Avenue Andronico’s 365 times.
- Complain about a stuffed-up sinus 3,650 times.
- Take 1,095 ibuprofen tablets.
- Take 365 showers.
- Shave zero times.
- Change my underwear 365 times.
- Go into the office zero times.
- Wear shorts outside on a cold, rainy day 365 times and have 365 conversations about it with a total stranger.
- Research federal and state laws and regulations about indoor lighting 365 hours.
- Take zero naps.
- Consult the weather forecast and/or Doppler radar 1,825 times.
- Watch the movie “Inception” 365 times.
- Take 10,950 pictures, of which 365 turn out.
- Put on and take off shoes or slippers 7,300 times.
- Think about getting in touch with family and friends 3,650 times. Make call or write email to same zero times.
- Think about writing a blog post 3,650 times. Write a blog post zero times.
Distraction, Forgetting, and the Year Ahead
These are the days of distraction and forgetting. Of too-short days. Of wet weather that's good for us and the world around us, which is everything; but that can also be gray, soggy, and, ungrateful as it is to say, depressing. Dark end of December. The year's finale.
Anyway. We made it through 2010, and we're ready to give 2011 a go. For all of you who have happened this way and continue to do so, thanks, and I hope you all have a great year. And to conclude the scheduled programming, here's a poem that someone share with me earlier today. It's by Paul Hostovsky, a poet I knew not before today. It's posted here with a total lack of permission, but if you like it, here's a link the poet's website, where you can buy the book in which this appears ("Dusk Outside the Braille Press").
Be Mine
I love mankind most
when no one’s around.
On New Year’s Day for instance,
when everything’s closed
and I’m driving home on the highway alone
for hours in the narrating rain,
with no exact change,
the collector’s booth glowing ahead
in the tumbling dark
like a little lit temple
with an angel inside and a radio
which as I open my window,
a little embarrassed by
my need for change
(until the silence says
it needs no explanation),
is suddenly playing a music more lovely
than any I’ve ever heard.
And the hand—
so open, so hopeful,
that I feel an urge to kiss it—
lowers the little life-boat of itself
and takes the moist and crumpled prayer
of my dollar bill from me.
Then the tap, tap,
tinkling spill of the roll of coins
broken against the register drawer,
and the hand returning two coins, and a voice
sweeter than the radio’s music,
saying, “Have a good one, man.”
I would answer that voice if I could—
which of course I can’t—
that I’ve loved it ever since it was born
and probably longer than that.
Though “You too,”
is all I can manage,
I say it with great emotion
in a voice that doesn’t sound like me,
though it must be
mine.
Longest Nights
With a dry day and an early shift at work, and inspired by seeing our across-the-street neighbors hanging lights in their big front-yard oak, the pieces fell into place for me to put up our Christmas lights late this afternoon and this evening. Yes, the job was stretched by having to run to the store to replace a couple of strands of dead or mostly dead lights.
After dark, another neighbor was stringing lights along her porch. And some friends across the street had their full holiday show on. And just in time for the first nights of winter and the longest nights of the year.
Vanishing Moon
It’s been cloudy most of the day here, creating some minor suspense about whether tonight’s eclipse will be visible.
Well, at least the start of it is–despite appearances, the shot above is through some high clouds. No telling when the thicker cloud cover will return. The shot immediately below: a few minutes later, as the clouds got a little thicker. And the last, about an hour after the first, and just a few minutes before the eclipse was supposed to enter it’s “total” stage. Thing is–down here in the Berkeley flatlands, anyway, that’s when the clouds really moved in. I have to be up early, so no late-night moongazing to see if it re-emerges.
‘Standing Live Carbon’ (Formerly Known as ‘Trees’)
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
And surely there's no harm in
Calling a tree "live standing carbon."
Yea, verily we are far from the world of Joyce Kilmer, the only man I've ever heard of named Joyce, a poet whose career was cut short by a sniper's bullet during the waning months of World War I. Back in his day, one might rhapsodize unironically about trees and not be called a tree-hugger. Back in his day, whole forests could be brought crashing to the ground and few in the wider world would doubt it was the sound of progress.
We're wiser now. Look at California. We've got a law on the books that mandates that we cut our greenhouse gas emissions. We're about to embark on a new carbon "cap and trade" system that recognizes the value of forests. So it is that later this week, when the California Air Resources Board meets to consider adopting the cap and trade protocols, trees will turn into "standing live carbon" and forests will become places where the market stores carbon. I'll hardly think of those big wood things the same way.
According to some who have studied the Air Resources Board's plan (131-page PDF) for using forests as an offset opportunity for we who pollute elsewhere, the plan appears to reward the timber industry for clear-cutting forests and "improving" them with species that store more carbon. A single company that might benefit from this arrangement: Sierra Pacific Industries, which has long been the bete noir of those who believe that chainsaws, bulldozers, tree plantations, and biodiversity don't mix.
But apparently, the head of the air board, Mary Nichols, thinks they can co-exist profitably. A story on KQED's California Report today quoted her as saying the board's plan seizes on "an opportunity to actually improve the management of forested land and to make a contribution to the health of the forests and the atmosphere." (Speaking of the atmosphere, the board's "Improved Forest Management" protocol appears to exclude the effect of running heavy machinery as part of the overall emissions cost of "improvement" projects.)
Mark Schapiro, a reporter with the Center for Investigative Journalism in Berkeley, is publishing a new story on the board's forest plans this week. On The California Report today, he summarized the controversy over the air board's work this way: "What the protocol does not do is take further measures to preserve forests, and that's where you have the central tension right now: having as a goal purely the storage of more carbon in trees versus the idea of preserving the biodiversity and the larger ecological function of forests."
Blogger for a Day
The public radio station where I work–its call letters begin with a K and end with D and also include an E and a Q, though not necessarily in that order–is blogging. Our Sacramento bureau chief has a blog. We have a project called Climate Watch that has a blog. Over the summer, we started a daily general news blog. As part of a nationwide NPR effort called Project Argo, we’ve launched a blog on education technology. I’ve written occasionally for most of them; in fact, on a day I was standing in for our regular news blogger, I got a chance to post something on odd developments in California’s high-speed rail project (“High-Speed Rail’s Central Valley Section: Build It and Who Will Come?“).
Yesterday, I was the designated blogger for another project: producing a “live” (i.e., continuously updated) account of the proceedings in the federal appeals court hearing on California’s Proposition 8 (that’s the 2008 initiative that essentially overrode an earlier state Supreme Court decision and banned same-sex marriage).
I live-blogged a couple of baseball games (here, here, and here) during the Giants playoff run. It’s fun, a way to play sportscaster and mine one’s rich store of deeply internalized sports idioms. Live-blogging a court hearing during a case that rests on some highly technical issues and lots of people care about? It’s not exactly second nature.
But here’s the result: Proposition 8 Appeals Hearing: Live Blog. The hearing was two and a half hours, and it went by in a blur. While it was going on, I felt like I was battling to keep up. Reading it now–not bad. I did better than the lawyer for the deputy clerk of Imperial County, anyway (see the top part of this post).
Sheep Thick Soup
A colleague just returned to the office from a trip to Beijing. Before he embarked on his flight home, he did what most vacationers did: he thoughtfully bought a choice sample or two of the local confections for his coworkers; then, upon arrival in the workplace, he put the delicious candies out on a conference table so one and all could partake.
He says that in his haste to make a purchase to bring back home, he thought he might be buying some caramels or chocolates or something nutty. “Nutty” might be suggested by the packaging above. What he got instead was a species of the dense, sweet, bland, textureless red bean confection that I’ve encountered in Japan. It’s a taste I haven’t yet acquired, so I steered clear.
Still, it’s the thought that counts, and our colleague brought something that might be better than Violet Crumble, foreign-made dark-chocolate KitKats or Coffee Time bars, or 77 percent French chcocolate: a fun product label. Perusal of the packaging turned up an English-language ingredient list). What drew immediate attention:
Commodity name: Sheep thick soup
And then the ingredients:
White sugar, small red bean, malt dust, chestnut, food additive, agar
Malt dust. It’s my favorite. Most ‘specially with chestnut and melamine.
Now, in the spirit of research, I do find several references on Baidu, the Chinese-language search engine, to “sheep thick soup.” So my guess is that there’s a literal translation involved in the phrase “sheep thick soup” and that the characters actually might hold within them a zesty, clever name for this candy (“sweet mud ball,” maybe).
Anyone? (The Beijing company that makes sheep thick soup, Yushiyuan, has a sort of arty if opaque home page. Enjoy the English “About Us” page, which probably goes best with some nice thick soup of sheep.)
‘Cloudsplitter,’ John Brown, Our Madness
A major project of late 2008 and early 2009 was reading Russell Banks’s “Cloudsplitter.” The duration of the task–I carried the book around with me long enough so that the dust jacket is shot–says more about my overall fecklessness and willingness to spend hours online or in front of “The Wire” than it says about the novel. 
The books’ subject is John Brown, the abolitionist, activist and finally anti-slavery terrorist. Despite the national romance with the Civil War, not much about John Brown sinks in these days. To most, he is a fringe character. If you know him at all, you know him as the author of pointlessly bloody and tragically ill-conceived acts of violence that he imagined might further the anti-slavery cause. He was hanged, or martyred, for his trouble.
The novelist, Russell Banks, tries here to suggest the larger-than-life place Brown held in the national consciousness immediately before the war and for decades after. John Brown’s story is told in the voice of one of his sons, Owen. As an old man, he is speaking to a researcher for a writer working on a new biography of John Brown on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the raid on Harper’s Ferry. The researcher, Kathleen Mayo, the historian, Oswald Garrison Villard, and the book, “John Brown, 1800-1859: A Biography 50 Years After,” are all real (in fact, 99 years after publication, the 700-some-page biography is available online for free).
But this is a novel, and Banks conjures all of these characters to confront what Owen Brown says is the only question that matters about his father’s life: was he mad?
“Since they first heard his name, men and women have been asking it. They asked it continuously during his lifetime, even before he became famous. Strangers, loyal followers, enemies, friends, and family alike. It was then and is now no merely academic question. And how you and the professor answer it will determine to a considerable degree how you and whoever reads your book will come to view the long, savage war between the white race and the black race on this continent. If the book that your good professor is presently composing, though it contain all the known and previously unrecorded facts of my father’s life, cannot show and declare once and for all that Old Brown either was or was not mad, then it will be a useless addition to the head-high pile of useless books already written about him. More than the facts of my father’s hectic life, people do need to know if he was was sane or not. For if he was sane, then terrible things about race and human nature, especially here in North America, are true. If he was insane, then other, quite different, and perhaps not so terrible things about race and human nature are true.”
Having declared that as the central issue, Owen never raises it again in so many words, and never again in the context of a war between the races. Instead, we watch his family wracked by financial disaster, privation and death. The constant is the father’s domination of his family, his austere religiosity, the purity of his rage against slavery, and his determination to thwart it, then kill it. John Brown, his sons and acolytes wind up in Kansas, hacking slavery sympathizers to pieces with broadswords. Soon, he leads his men into the fastness of Harpers Ferry to launch a slave revolt he believes will sweep the South.
Just before the last act, Owen tells the unseen Miss Mayo that “Father’s progression from activist to martyr, his slow march to willed disaster, can be viewed, not as a descent into madness, but as a reasonable progression–especially if one considers the political strength of those who in those days meant to keep chattel slavery the law of the land.” And later: “… my father’s gradual progression from anti-slavery agitator all the way to terrorist, guerrilla captain, and martyr … seemed … a reasonable and moral response to the times.”
The times are the point. John Brown seemed a madman; he shocked and repelled many. It was convenient and desirable for many to label him insane.
But he had lots of company. The very nature of the conflict drove everyone to some degree of madness. Slavery was based on a mad conception of humanity and rights. Those who insisted on its continuation as a matter of right were mad. Those who manufactured defenses for it out of scripture were mad. The reign of terror that kept slavery in place was mad.
And the madness–what Banks calls the war between the races–didn’t die with John Brown or the Civil War. It lived on through a century of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and segregation. It survived the Civil Rights era and into the age when the same United States that just a few generations ago enslaved African Americans as a matter of course elected a black man president. (You don’t think this race madness continues? Ha. What do you think the immigration “debate” is about?)
I read another Brown book this year: “John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.” It’s by David S. Reynolds, a cultural historian from New York. As his book’s subtitle suggests, he makes lots of claims for Brown and his legacy. Many, especially the arguments for his overarching importance in sparking the war and in somehow “seeding” the civil rights movement, are a stretch. But one premise I will readily buy: John Brown was sane. And yes, as Banks’s Owen Brown says, “terrible things about race and human nature, especially here in North America, are true.”