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Scoop

I’ve gotten to the point in my journalism career where people I once worked with are showing up in the obits. One appeared there yesterday: Malcolm Glover, late cops reporter and rewrite man for The San Francisco Examiner. Here’s the story, which made print more than a week after his death. I didn’t know Malcolm well. I was usually in the position of sweating him on deadline for a short breaking story on something or other. But he went way back and did, as his obit suggests, seem to know everyone in the Police Department (we won’t go into the mixed blessing of that). His nickname was Scoop, though I never knew anyone in the newsroom to actually use that when addressing him.

How far back did he go. Again, as the obit says, back to the days when the paper was owned by William Randolph Hearst. Part of his legend and charm was the tale, which Malcolm didn’t need a lot of prompting to repeat, that his relationship with Hearst dated back to his childhood in the Northern California mill town of McCloud. As Malcolm told it, Hearst was at a general store in town. Malcolm, then a lad of 10 or so, held the door open for him. “The Chief” was so impressed with the lad’s good manners that he asked his name and, one thing leading to another, put him to work on the Hearst’s nearby estate, Wintoon. When Malcolm wanted to try working at one of Hearst’s papers, the old man got him a job as a photographer at The Monarch of the Dailies. Later, he switched to reporting, and outlasted scores of whipper-snappers and young hotshots. Includiing me.

I’m sure some of The Examiner people who worked with him longer have some great stories about him. I’d still love to hear them sometime.

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Modern Marketing, March 2010 Edition

One of my private convictions, or delusions, is that I’d be a great marketing writer given the right outlet. The right outlet would have no rules: no house style, no retail “voice,” no lifestyle image to promote. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have merchandise except for the stuff you’re trying to get out of the house; stuff that might not be fun but that could be fun to sell. It turns out I’m talking about Craigslist. We’ve managed to sell stray household items there for years, and writing the item descriptions is always the most engaging part of the process.

Here’s the current item on offer (as posted on Craigslist):

Ikea Henrik student desk, with chair

An Ikea classic that may or may not have been named after a famous Scandinavian literary figure. This desk played a prominent role in a student’s career at Berkeley High School and may even be partly responsible for his successful completion of studies at the University of Oregon.

Features:
–Classic Ikea design: a Scandinavian thought this up. ‘Nuff said.
–Classic Ikea construction: manufacture of this item caused minimal rain forest destruction
–Conforms fully to U.S. and international safety standards, including Newton’s laws of motion

And check out these extras:
–Recently dusted
–Family friendly
–Desk chair may be comfortable for hours on end

We got three responses within an hour. Since no one commented on the brilliance of the sales pitch, I have to conclude they were moved by price ($60, with vague offer of delivery).

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Reinvigorating the Haiku Economy

Robert Hass’s introduction to “The Essential Haiku” includes a short, unfussy description of where haiku came from and a brief explanation of some of what’s going on behind the scenes in these 17-syllable miniatures. Here’s part of what he says:

“The insistence on time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. The seasonal reference was called a kigo and a haiku was thought to be incomplete without it. … For example, the phrase, ‘deep autumn’ or ‘autumn deepens,’ is traditional and accumulated references and associations from earlier poetry as well as from the Japanese way of thinking about time and change. … [In Buson’s poems] the reference to snow–yuki, which can also mean ‘snowfall’– … is always connected to a sense of exposure to the elements, for which there is also a traditional phrase, fuyuzare, which means ‘winter bareness.’ The practice was sufficiently codified and there was even a rule that the seasonal reference should always appear in the first or third unit of the three phrase poem.

“… These references were conventional and widely available. They were the first way readers of the poems had of locating themselves in the haiku. Its traditional themes–deep autumn, a sudden summer shower, the images of rice seedlings and plum blossoms, of spring and summer migrants like the mountain cuckoo and the bush warbler, of the cormorant-fishermen in summer, and the apprentices on holiday in the spring–gave a powerful sense of a human place in the ritual and cyclical movement of the world.”

Reading the several hundred poems Hass chose for the book, you intuit the importance of season and nature. Here’s just one, having opened the book at random:

Mosquito at my ear–
does it think
I’m deaf?

All of which got me thinking that what we very badly need to revivify the American haiku industry is an updated list of seasonal references–urban, rural, whatever works–that evoke season and nature and reflect the way we think about change. This would work best as a group exercise, and I’m just one would-be haiku apprentice. But anyway, I’ll go first:

Slushy shoes
Icy sidewalk
Frozen socks
Stinging snowball
Fingers numb
Grimy snowbank
Deserted luge track
Oil-drum fire
Catchers and pitchers
Spring ahead
March Madness
Smart-ass robin
Mockingbird
Ants again
Termites swarm
Yellow Peeps
Tinactin time
Prom queen pimple
Unharvested prune

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After Christmas, Calaveras Road

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A couple days after Christmas, we were driving up I-880, the Nimitz Freeway, from San Jose back to Berkeley. The Nimitz is a grind. Lots of traffic; lots of fast traffic; lots of trucks; long stretches of heavily built-up suburbs, malls, strip malls, big-box centers, and auto rows. But even from the Nimitz, you glimpse what a gorgeous piece of territory we’ve converted into a metropolis. A long line of hills runs parallel to the highway. High hills, up to about 2,500 feet. When it’s clear, they’re beautiful. They’re beautiful in the winter, when they’re green. After a storm–they’re beautiful then, too, with a backdrop of towering, dramatically lit clouds.  

So, a couple days after Christmas. We were driving north, and little gray shreds of cloud were hanging onto the top of the ridge to the east. It was late in the afternoon. I asked Kate whether she’d ever been up in those hills. No, she hadn’t. There’s a road up there I’ve cycled on long rides–Calaveras Road. Among other times: some other riders and I ended up out there, going from Berkeley down to the edge of San Jose, then back up to Fremont to catch BART home. I asked Kate whether she’d like to see the place if I could find it. She was game, so we got off at the Montague Expressway in Milpitas, then headed east, toward the hills, until we couldn’t go any farther, the intersection of Piedmont Road. Then we went left, north, until we hit Calaveras, then went right and up hill for a long time. Eventually we hit a steep uphill left into a steep, narrow ravine–still on Calaveras–and shortly popped up on the east side of a ridge above Calaveras Reservoir.

The light was fading, but we found a place to get out and walk. Oaks were silhouetted on the hillsides, and cold-looking gray clouds were starting to slide down the ridge across the lake.

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Sunday Morning Walk: Hats

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The Sunday morning walk consists of a stroll from our place, across a corner Ohlone Park, over to University Avenue, and down to a restaurant called Fellini. The place does pretty good, pretty cheap dinners. In the morning, it’s winning because it has a walk-up cafe window and the coffee there is pretty good, too. As a plus, they give The Dog a treat. He knows that and begins getting enthused about the impending visit when we’re two or three blocks away. This morning’s walk featured these two hats, and people, who were in line ahead of us. I tend to think most of the hipster headgear in our current Hat Renaissance is a sign of a New Meathead Age. These two chapeaux–is that the plural?–did nothing to change my mind, though I will allow it’s an interesting pairing.  

After we got our coffee, we headed down to the old Santa Fe Railroad right-of-way. On our way back home from there, we encountered a mockingbird in full virtuoso voice. Wish I’d brought a sound recorder.

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California Water: ‘The Way of Seizure and Exploitation’

A snippet from “American Places,” a 1981 book of essays by Wallace Stegner, novelist and chronicler of the West, and his like-styled son, Page. This is from a chapter Page Stegner wrote called “Here It Is: Take It.” It describes how Los Angeles siphoned off a rich, remote supply of water from the Owens Valley and details the valley’s ongoing disputes with the city. (The chapter title is taken from the words spoken in 1913 by William Mulholland, the principal architect of the Los Angeles water system, when he opened the valve that brought the first Owens Valley water to the L.A.) I can’t help but think of the current court and legislative disputes over California water when I read this. s

“…The American Way of seizure and exploitation has a long history but a dubious future. It has produced ghost towns before this when the resource ran out and the frenzy cooled and the fortune-hunters drifted away. Without suggesting that Los Angeles will become a ghost town, one knows that in the arid West there are many communities whose growth is strictly limited by the available water. To promote the growth of any community beyond its legitimate and predictable water resources is to risk one of two things: eventual slowdown or collapse and retrenchment to more realistic levels, or a continuing and often piratical engrossment of the water of other communities, at the expense of their prosperity and perhaps life.

Man, the great creator and destroyer of environments, is also part of what he creates or destroys, and rises and falls with it. In the West, water is life. From the very beginning, when people killed each other with shovels over the flow of a primitive ditch, down to the present, when cities kill each other for precisely the same reasons and with the same self-justification, water is the basis for western growth, western industry, western communities, Eventually, some larger authority, state or federal will have to play Solomon in these disputes. …”

We’ve got a Solomon of sorts–at least one of them–working on the problem now: U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger of Fresno. But more on that later.

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California Water: The Judge’s Questions

The judge’s questions: Last Friday, federal Judge Oliver W. Wanger issued questions to a panel of experts he appointed to consider the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s biological opinion on endangered smelt in the Delta. To really make sense of the list, which focuses on a narrow range of issues concerning the service’s scientific conclusions about smelt migrations and the effect of Delta pumping on the fish, you’ll need to go and wade through the evidence presented in the trial so far (when you get done with all the motions, declarations, statements, and supporting research, you might be looking at tens of thousands of pages). But the list is interesting even without that file trek, because it sheds some light on what subjects Wanger sees as central to the case. (Here’s the order, in PDF form: Judge Wanger’s Questions).

Who are the “706 Experts” he refers to therein? They’re a group of scientists Wanger chose last November after nominations from the water contractor plaintiffs who are challenging the smelt biological opinion and from the federal agencies who are defending it. “706” is a reference to Federal Rule of Evidence 706, which provides for court appointment of expert witnesses. The panel is: Paul Fujitani, an employee of the Bureau of Reclamation, as an expert on Central Valley Project operations (the bureau is a defendant in the case); Thomas P. Quinn, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington; Andre Punt, another UW professor, an expert in fish population dynamics and statistics; and, “if necessary,” John Lehigh, an employee of the state Department of Water Resources, as an expert on State Water Project operations.

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The Long Plunge to Greatness

Oakland Mayor
Ron Dellums gave his State of the City talk last night. He says he's confident that his term–regarded by many spectators as an era of continuing police department scandals, continuing economic problems, continuing high crime rates, and continuing malfeasance among some high-paid public officials–will be remembered "as the period when Oakland laid the 
foundation for success." He further opined, "We're on the
precipice of the greatest period in Oakland's history." Mr. Mayor: might want to look up "precipice" again.

Help (Thanks to my KQED compatriot Nina for the image idea.)

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California Water: ‘The Master Condition’

“The master condition not only of any future developments in the West but of the maintenance and safeguarding of what exists there now, is the development and conservation of water production. Water, which is rigidly limited by the geography and climate, is incomparably more important than all other natural resources in the West put together.”

–Bernard de Voto, quoted in “American Places,” by Wallace Stegner

As elegant a statement as you can find to explain what all the ruckus is about.