Featured Creature: UC Berkeley

Loch Ness has a creature, Nessie.

There's a creature that haunts the waters of the Berkeley campus too, that lurks in and lunges from the flowing stream of Strawberry Creek:

Stressie!

Anyone who spent time in the graduate programs with me in the late 80's and early 90's can tell you the same.

And I hear that nothing much has changed.

Beware.

Cal colors. I hear if you get close enough, you can see blue and gold.

Rumors, anyway.

Water-Fox, Sleeping

Midstream

Self-portrait #50.

Pit-Fired

Don Quixote?

Figure from model: two 20-minute gestural sessions.

The instructor often pointed out how I tend to make everybody taller, longer, thinner; some of the models appreciated that tendency . . . but she felt I needed to rein in my stretching of the truth. Though, less often, she'd also tell me to run with this style, if it served my goals, if it felt right. (The latter phrase would come forth in response to my gasp: "Goals?")

I see a bit of the Don Q here, bound, hampered from pursuing his passion, his ideals, and appropriately, perhaps lugubriously pensive. Yeah, that's reading a lot into the figure. Too much?

Sculpture mix; copper wire; misc. chemicals and kelp.

Pit-fired on Ocean Beach, CA, years and years ago.

From The Toolshed: Dan Duane's "Caught Inside"

You can tell I've been using this book for a while.

I think Caught Inside is an excellent choice for English 1A, especially if you want to work the local angle and model an encyclopedic approach to a subject. Also, Duane attempts to convey his passions here--passions for the sport or pursuit of surfing, yes, but also the Santa Cruz coast, for nature in general, for knowledge, for history, for story-telling, for awareness and engagement--and all such should always deserve respect.

Why wouldn't we want to model "passionate scholarship" (his phrase) to our students, to ourselves?

By the way, I've quoted my favorite Duane bit before here. Since I've been teaching his book for some years now, I should interview the author; some time back, he was willing, but circumstances got in my way. I should try his number again.

Time-Travel: Play That Funky Music

Cleaning out the garage can lead to strange discoveries. Just the other day, I found something I typed up in 1996 based on lyrics I wrote in 1984. This may be odd enough to be fun.

(Slightly edited today.)

A B-Side Production

"Like a Glove" was inspired by an earlier lyric --"Kid Glove" in 1984 --that I never developed to my satisfaction. I like the satire. Influences? Still Elvis Costello and company, but also harder rock than "The Armor of Your Virtue" or "Different View." A nod to Sting's "Set Them Free" (that revision of "Every Breath You Take") for clues to how I revised the original ending. Value? Meaning? I have my ideas. Another twisted riff on frustrated love and psychology. (I mean, the speaker almost gets it. You'll see.) Sing "Different View" if you want a finer reflection than this funhouse mirror.

LIKE A GLOVE

I've got a coatrack for a conscience

Cat-of-nine-tails on my back

No, I'm not a closet fascist

No, not a clothes horse jockey off the track

Oh, the loose and limber subtleties of love, love, love

I want to fit you like a glove, like a glove

Like a glove I'll fit your hand

Like a lamp I'll light your life

Like a glove, like a glove

Love, love, love

Too many people beating me unconscious

With the bruising boredom of their tongues

What I desire is hardly so atrocious

I want to fly where I've been flung

Oh, the loose and limber subtleties of love, love, love

I want to fit you like a glove, like a glove

Like a glove I'll fit your hand

Like a lamp I'll light your life

You don't wear gloves? --I'll understand

How can my light just blind your eyes?

Oh, the loose and limber subtleties of love, love, love

I want to fit you like --what you want

I want to be the house that you haunt

I want to be your tongue when you taunt

I want to --fit you like a glove

Oh, the loose and limber subtleties of love, love, love

I want to fit you like a glove, like a glove

Like a glove, like a glove

Love, love, love

P.S. I wish that I could recall the tune. I do recall singing this to myself all the time for a while there.

Cheers!

I Call Her Lavinia

Perhaps, that's Lavinius? Yard-pal by any other name too.

Kiln-Ready: Mateo

Mateo is headed into the kiln this Wednesday. I can count at least fifty flaws, but I'm going to bake him, if nothing else than as a glaze test.

After he comes through the fire, I'll have to consider the specific glazing. Not sure, yet.

Glazing: Bits and Pieces

Alien Wolf-Eel

Clay: B-mix w/ grog; glazes: shiny black underneath layers of denim and something else. (I didn't take proper notes this time; not happy about that.)

Surf Zone: Pacifica

Hemingway's Show-and-Tell

Here's a favorite passage from Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I like what the young Hemingway is learning about the Russian writers in general and about reading and writing in particular. I like how he recognizes the mixing of elements and the finding of treasure. He celebrates these great authors and celebrates Paris and the way of life that always moves me with a touch of envy. As the passage finishes I like how Hemingway presents this moment of conflict between mentor and mentee. He explains how he felt about Russian literature and how he admired Ezra Pound, but when Pound's advice doesn't match with what he feels . . . we get this moment of defensiveness and disappointment. Hemingway is scrupulous about pointing out the integrity of the "straight answer" and yet . . . . We can see the student leaving the teacher behind here, not very happily, and how conflicted Hemingway was in that moment. He tells us the "facts," you could say, but the drama beneath the telling is the real heart of the last paragraph.

Hemingway recounts how his world expanded, and expanded again.

Well, that's plenty of telling, so now I'll turn the show over to Hemingway himself. From "Evan Shipman at the Lilas" in A Moveable Feast . . . .

In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; there there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.

"To tell you the truth, Hem," Ezra said, "I've never read the Rooshians."

It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste --the one and only correct word to use-- the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.

"Keep to the French," Ezra said. "You've plenty to learn there."

"I know it," I said. "I've plenty to learn everywhere."

Toothy Rocks: South of Pacifica

They Went That Way

Fish hunters.

Sky Shot

Taken while swimming in and about the surf zone today. I do keep my eye on the incoming waves and the surfers, but I also like to check the cloud cover too.

Instead of seeing shapes in the clouds, today I kept seeing shapes behind the clouds, in the blue.

Coat of Many Colors

This lovely scavenger came looking for crumbs.

When I didn't pony up, she checked the view. And a great view it is: Taco Bell, Pacifica, CA.

Big Brother gave my table a try next.

I hadn't noticed all the colors until I downloaded the shot. In my defense, there were various distractions: the birds' antics, the glorious view, assorted minor wipeouts, and the sunglasses I was wearing.

First, I admire all those colors here.

Then, I attempt to resist the captions crowding my mind. "Surf check!"

Or, "In another life, I'd be shredding."

Or even, "Why aren't they doing airs? Kooks!"

With A Feather In His Cap

Bookduck.

Bird Island Hurly-Burly

Just an excuse to run this shot of Rodeo Beach surfers that I like.

Tomorrow or the day after I'll aim for better shots still--and water shots too.

Wish me luck.

(Oh, and "hurly-burly" is a bit of an overstatement, I'll admit, but I liked the sound.)

Bookfish, With Chaser

Clay: B-mix w/ grog, I believe; glazing: Denim, in layers. This blue glaze "breaks" well.

The lighting really makes a difference in the blues that you can see here or there.