Terrible twos

A couple of days ago I finished reading Your Two-Year-Old: Terrible or Tender (no question mark -- I was tagging one on out of long experience in the supermarket aisles), a book from the Gessel Institute of Human Development by Louise Bates Ames. It's one of my two favorites among the many books I've read in preparation for Elena, which I was doing at least a year before she was born. (The other is What's Going on in There?, and that one does have a question mark in the title.)

Total eclipse of the moon

We got up at 3:30 to see what we could of the lunar eclipse. We could tell we'd missed the maximum -- there was already a stripe of light around the left edge of the moon -- but there was still something mysterious and wonderful about it, and about going outside in the middle of the night with Elena to see it. And Elena learned the word "eclipse" to account for her untimely waking...

Painting and work

A week of painting is tonic for my forming soul, but the only way I've been able to manage the time for that so far is take vacation for one week painting workshops, once at the S.F. Art Institute the summer before Elena was born, and now in the week just past with Eva Bovenzi at U.C. Berkeley Extension. If I were to work as a painter of paintings full-time, I imagine doing it the way I gather Germans like Gerhard Richter and Neo Rauch do, as a very clearly delineated "work time" rather than as an unstructured process that would certainly (were I to take it up tomorrow) leave me napping and reading eight hours for every one of actual painting.

Afternoon ultimatum

My sister Lisa is visiting, and made Jenny and I a wonderful gift by babysitting Elena for a couple of hours yesterday so we could go to a matinee. We went to see The Bourne Ultimatum, and quite enjoyed it. The non-linear narrative elements of film (editing and charismatic performance) overwhelm all doubts...

Soul downloads

I finished Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon over the weekend. My brother Charles had passed it on to me several years ago, but something about the Wired look of the cover design had put me off until I did some shifting on my bookshelves and it came to surface a month or so back. The packaging of cyberpunk has become pretty annoying to my tastes, and the blurb on the cover advertising the book as a combination of cyberpunk and hardboiled noir struck me as a humorous redundancy (cyberpunk being essentially a combination of science-fiction and noir in the first place), but once I got past the cover the theme of selves being uploaded and downloaded engrossed me and induced a Philip K. Dickish existential vertigo. Morgan's idea of how the up and down loading would happen involves in the first place a neural implant called the "stack" which stores one's identity in terms of memory and narrative, and is periodically archived to allow the possibility of being revived from a recent "version" of oneself. Beyond the body one is born into, the idea is that one gets "sleeved" by one's "stack" being implanted into another body, either artificially grown or belonging to someone who's lost the right to it. So there are questions of whether storage of anything can be sufficient to reconstruct a sense of self in an organism, whether the loss of continuity (experienced as death by the original organism) can possibly be replaced by the conviction of a new organism that it is the continued identity of the self, and how much or how little the body into which this self is injected can change/transform/reject that self. All raised at least tangentially in the course of a detective story narrative. I guess my prejudices are indicated by my use of the word "organism": a novelistic treatment isn't going to be enough to convince me that the death of the organism is real, irrespective of whether the "information" that somehow equals the identity of that organism survives. Isn't that after all a part of what art is about? And isn't that one of the differences between an organism and an imagined protagonist?

On Peaks

I've read Gary Snyder's poetry occasionally but with satisfaction as part of the process of what I might term living through my history, reading his first couple of books as a byproduct of encountering him through the distorting glass of Kerouac's Dharma Bums in my early teens, and out of a generalized passion for poetry basedon a then intense desire to be a poet; then reading Turtle Island in the mid 70's, the last historical moment when Snyder's world-view came closest to becoming "established," and he won the Pulitzer Prize; and now, after all the intervening decades of our retrenchment, in Danger on Peaks, a book which I guess is already a year or two old. The true north of Snyder's approach to Buddhism gives the latest work a commonality with the earliest that is not the same thing as a lack of development, philosophically or poetically.

I loved the following poem because I've driven the Grapevine in varying degrees of awareness so many times, and the poem seems to distill all of that experience, my own and that of the millions of others who travel that river:

In the Santa Clarita Valley

Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up
hexagonal "Denny's" sign
starry "Carl's"
loopy "McDonald's"
eight-petaled yellow "Shell"
blue-and-white "Mobil" with a big red "O"

growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.

The play of the apostrophes in the poem, the open-heartedness toward the trademarks as if they were phenomena in the natural world, or really the tuning to the way the nature emerges in the man-made world in spite of or even through the commercial attempt to own the world, really delight me.

Then the following, with further awareness of the motorized world as a kind of anonymous nature, but this time a death-dealing nature -- also a perfect Buddhist obituary:

For Anthea Corinne Snyder Lowry

1932-2002

She was on the Marin County Grand Jury, heading to a meeting,
south of Petaluma on the 101. The pickup ahaead of her lost a grass-
mower off the back. She pulled onto the shoulder, and walked right
out into the lane to take it off. That had always been her way. Struck
by a speedy car, an instant death.




White egrets standing there
always standing there
there at the crossing

on the Petaluma River

North San Juan

We spent Sunday evening (after a wrong turn that cost us an hour), Monday, and Tuesday morning in North San Juan, where my brother Charles, sister-and-law Laura, and nephew Randy live on the most expansive of the Svoboda properties. It was a family reunion: Susie, Stephane and Luca were visiting from France, and Stevie just made it over after returning from two weeks in Bali. Others stayed in tents in the front yard, but Jenny, Elena and I stayed at a very pleasant bed and breakfast, Milano's Inn, run by Frank and Jeanie Milano, built from the ground up by the two of them. North San Juan is a part of the world where people do things like that by themselves; fortunately for me, I didn't have to compare myself with them all day, and we returned to Oakland in time for the National Night Out Ice Cream Social at the local toddler's park, where Elena ran herself to exhaustion while we met our neighbors and discussed preschools with them.

Consciousness and identity

This week's Nature has a story about restoration of consciousness to a person in a "minimally conscious state". What I understand of the approach is that it involves stimulating portions of the brain that enable a rebuilding of consciousness. The story raises a lot of exciting and troubling ethical questions for me, on both sides of what one might call the Terri Schiavo Fissure in popular thinking about medical ethics. Obviously one implication of the story is that people who would previously have been allowed (or encouraged) to die are actually candidates for recovery of a sort (and it's easy for a naive reader like me to extend that hope to the next category of unconsciousness on the way to total nonexistence, the "persistent vegetative state" that was actually Terri Schiavo's, though I should stress that the authors of the Nature paper, or rather the popular review of the paper that precedes the paper itself, and which I actually read, are emphatic in stating that nothing discovered in this therapeutic method would extend to the persistently vegetative), making it more difficult to decide when to pull the plug on someone, or to plan to pull the plug on oneself (and by the way, I join Richard Poussette-Dart in the category of people who do want extraordinary measures taken to keep me alive if it should come to that). But there's also the question that should circle around scorpion-like to bite the fundamentalists, which is whether the consciousness restored is the same identity that was previously lost, even at this stage in the development of therapies, and whether if there is no common identity there can be said to be a common soul before and after the loss and recovery. I don't know whether any personal memory accompanies the restoration of consciousness from the near zero state of minimal consciousness, but what if there is none? Would the nexus of relationships with people whom one finds waiting for one's recovery be enough of a system of memory to qualify as a persistent identity? It's as easy to construe the Nature story as an argument against the existence of the soul as it is to construe it as one in favor...

Big Hands

I did my second docent tour of the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition at the DeYoung yesterday. Something I had never noticed was pointed out by two different women who'd looked at the Wax Museum portraits of Henry VIII's six wives: their hands look, as the first woman put it, "like man's hands," meaning they are disproportionately large. The question was whether the disproportion was the result of Sugimoto's chosen photographic point of view (for example, a question of focus), the craft of the wax museum figure-makers (who might have made the hands out-size to clarify their getures), or as a result of faithful translation of the original drawings/paintings by Hans Holbein (on the supposition that portraits commonly do the hands larger because it looks more correct, at least on first view).

Belgian Danish Tsotsi

At the Grand Lake Farmer's Market, we (Elena and I) bought a Belgian Danish for Elena because Panorama Bakery wasn't present, so we had to find an alternative source of sweet baked goods -- we'd have bought a Panorama chocolate chip cookie otherwise. The Belgian Danish wasn't a complete success, although Elena enjoyed picking out the raisins. No repeated requests for "more." We also bought a couple of fresh ears of white corn, which Elena eats raw, a cantaloupe which Jenny says was good, and a saucisson sec from the French charcuterie booth. Then we went to the DeYoung Museum and gave an informal tour to Maria and her relatives of the contemporary collections, the Art of the Americas, and the current Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition. The general favorites were Deborah Oropallo's temporary exhibition of gender superimpositions on paper and in tapestry, and the Sugimoto. Vanessa, a friend of Maria's niece Melanie and newly graduated like her from high school, asked me how Jess got the oil paint so thick in his paintings and then scratched the titles of books out in the paint -- I didn't know.

After putting Elena to bed last night, Jenny and I finally watched Tsotsi, on DVD -- we've had it out from Netflix for weeks. The story element of the very small baby being cared for ignorantly by the young thug protagonist was really hard for Jenny to take, but I thought the movie presented the desperation and emotional stuntedness of a world built by orphans of AIDS better than any fictional depiction of children gone savage (e.g., Lord of the Flies which we all read in high school), and thought the central performance was terrific even if most of the accompanying roles weren't so perfect and tended toward melodrama.

Wireless transmission of power

There was an article in Science News (I think it was this week, though the way I read it I just pick up whatever's sitting on the kitchen table when it happens to catch my eye) about developments in the wireless transmission of power, via a magnetic field over a short distance that isn't harmful to humans and other living things (assuming you don't believe the whole anecdotal argument about how unnatural magnetic fields harm the organism). The experiment described managed to power a light bulb remotely, and the immediate direction of development is for powering wireless devices, but the practical possibility of such a thing also hearkens back to the proposals of Nicolai Tesla for sending pulses of large amounts of power over great distances, which for some reason I translated into my dream imagination as fireballs conveyed by catapult from mountain top to mountain top... When I first came to PG&E I worked with a Portuguese electrical engineer named Luis Ferreira who thought Tesla had been taken down in a criminal way by my namesake, Thomas Alva Edison, and loved describing his proposals as if they were in fact good solutions to the distribution of electrical energy (as the Science News report mentions, corporate support of Tesla's work was pulled when the investors realized Tesla had no way of billing for the energy he wanted to send abroad...)

Meanwhile, my last dream of the night was about giants, one-eyed giants like the ones in the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe movie from Disney (I still want to delve into Matthew Barney's role in the imagery of that film) rampaging around in houses, people including myself cowering and unable to do anything about them. I woke up when it looked as though the giant was going to go after Elena, who was with me -- the first time I think that I've seen her in my dreams.

Vitamins

I start my day with juice and vitamins purportedly for "medical" reasons, because of a book I read a couple of years ago on "improving one's memory" (really, preventing Alzheimer's) by an author claiming to be a doctor. Given that any internal sense of mental clarity that I derive from this (mostly) daily procedure could almost certainly be equally well produced by taking placebo pills, I have to regard my ritual as a kind of superstition, a desire for "effects at a distance" without a need for definitive scientific truth. So then why do I make fun of Jenny's interest in homeopathic medicines? Only because I read a story in Science News indicating no measurable effects of same, while I haven't read the comparable story on "Neuro-Optimizer" pills or Acetyl L-Carnitine in that journal...

Old New York

I'm reading Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, originally recommended by my friend David, whose father had had a copy. Feature journalism in Mitchell's mode was meant to combine studies of the human condition with the preservation of the world he circulated in. His profiles of eccentrics can have the parabolic heft of Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories, about which I want to write more; and at the same time they are redolent of the New York City I got a glimpse of in the Sixties when I went to visit my grandmother, who lived on East 86th Street in an area known as "Yorkville."

Back from Monterey

We took a two-day trip to Monterey with David and Kim and their daughter Gabriella, which Elena pronounces "Gabella" or "Lalalalella" depending on the occasion. I hadn't been to the Aquarium before. Jenny and Elena visited the last time we were in Monterey, a month ago (in the meantime, I attended a conference on energy regulation put on by Rutgers). The big tanks, especially the Kelp Forest and the Outer Bay, possess a sculptural vitality. The ceaseless rounds of the fish, subtly illuminated, overwhelm or at least counteract the soporific muzak which I have to believe is intended as much for crowd control as to serve as aural backdrop. The deep clarity of the water and the varieties of fish coexisting but not interacting (meaning the sharks and tunas don't eat the other fish but are fed by the aquarium keepers) induce a mental state of exhilaration and awe that reminds me of my reaction to the work of Bill Viola at SFMOMA a few years ago.

We ate at a really excellent Mexican restaurant called the Mexcal where the staff were endlessly tolerant of our not-quite-two-year-olds and served superb margaritas and food with a variety of influences from Oaxaca to Acapulco, all excellent (I would particularly recommend the Nachos Azadas).

The other great highlight of the trip was drifting in the Casa Munras' blood-warm swimming pool as the cold fog of the Monterey afternoon rolled in...