Breather

Casting for Herring

JP doing the work.

Reflections on Autonomy and Literary Experience

1.   "Toward" or "towards":
I always figured that if I could get through 13.5 years of Berkeley higher ed without knowing the exact rule, then there must not be an exact rule and I would let euphony be my guide.

2.  Trying to teach the mix of discipline and independence -- necessary and resolute discipline in thought and knowledge, boneheaded and clear-eyed independence of thought and knowledge -- that I absorbed before, during, and after my years at UCB . . . that's hard.  I've modeled it as much as possible, but I still have not quite found a way.

I don't always live up to my model either, though I do try.

I sometimes think crucial key components include a repressive childhood, strong individualistic modeling (thanks, mom & dad), and lucky genetics (the boneheadedness, for example).  At other times, I think a devotion to the idea (and ideal) of literary apprenticeship is necessary.

Of course, in my main teaching duties, my focus is on awakening and honing the skills of critical reading, critical writing, and critical thinking, which is a different path than the literary one I referred to above.  Such awakening and honing is a joyous thing, too, by the way.

3.  What depressed me the most during my long years of graduate study was what seemed to me to be the suppression of the original text and, more so, the actual literary experience in favor of something decidedly secondary.  Ideally, and practically, such study enhances the ability to experience literature in the fullest sense -- and I give credit and thanks to certain professors and colleagues to this day for their part in the true way (or ways, for there are different paths to explore) -- but I also watched other professors and other colleagues who turned away from literary truth toward something -- or some things -- not so worthy . . . .

Kraken

Old art:
Octopus --
sculpture mix;
sea foam, dark blue, shiny black, and other glazes.

Sea Lions Casting About For Herring Too

A Day at the Beach

Photo courtesy of JP.

The Herring Are Running

Soul / Gear

Gear:
Neoprene and rubber
In the back of the truck.

Rodeo Beach

Translation

I'm working on a story about a dead diver (from the POV of the surviving dive partner), and so I made these images today.  

Perhaps, that survivor's the one lacking a state of grace.

I call the shot above "Translation" -- 

     Rodeo Beach; 

     clay mask (Triton); 

     vintage diving mask (used continuously 1960s-70s).

Translation #3:
A visual poem, I hope.

Bedside Reading

I think I had Byron's Don Juan in my hand.

Annotation From The Back Page

Rereading the last section of David Corbett's The Mercy of the Night helped me to realize -- to remember -- the integrity of the reader and of independent / literary thought -- and how THAT was salvation, was refuge, whatever, in the chaos of my home life while growing up.

You have to --you get to -- you must -- figure it all out for yourself, like everyone else, and those absolutes set you free.

Reading properly sets you free. You have to earn it, but who expects freedom to come cheaply?

--Thoughts on finishing The Mercy of the Night -- 1/5/16

Reading Properly: All In Play and At Play

Ideally, reading properly
is much like living properly:

moment by moment,
responsively;
attuned to everything
but also with due consideration for weight and strength and flow patterns;
aware of the past without being chained by it;
aware of the future without being dismayed by it;
and with heart and mind and soul
all in play and at play.

Reprise: Face in the Water

Asilomar tidepool: clay mask.

April 13th, 2014.

Clay Figures: Dancers, Echoes, Dreams

Clay figures:
exercises in 20 - 30-minute increments.

That's Chloe: The Dancer in front
(sculpture mix; copper cobalt oxide; copper wire);
I can't recall the name of the pit-fired dancer behind her.
Maybe I didn't feel I could give her a name, for she has one of her own that she may not have shared with anyone, frankly.

I do recall the exact session at the ASUC Berkeley Art Studio with the art teacher having us work on with a specific model, and then we had to turn and put the head of the person to our left on top of the figure.  Funky exercise.

Such exercises always reminded me of Charles de Lint's stories about Jilly Coppercorn, but specifically about that story in which she's painting from a "pochade box" outside to remind herself about perspective, to remind herself not to get too immersed in the details.  De Lint offers up -- through the character of Jilly Coppercorn -- a quotation from Monet that I've never tracked down (in terms of authenticity, for I trust de Lint) but that I hold dear, allegedly from Monet to Clemenceau at Giverny:

"Your mistake is to want to reduce the world to your measure, whereas by enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged."

And isn't that such a common mistake?

But -- if we want to shift to beauty -- what are those lines from Elvis Costello's "Ghost Train"?

"Look at the way she dances --
One foot speaks,
The other answers."

Lyricism of a different sort than wry puns and such.
______________

Myself: unsettled, or itching to get some work done.
Something like that.
______________

"Hampered by the clothes she wore,
By the dirty looks they kept in store"
--old song circling in my head.

Ocean Cove: 1978

Thanks, Dad, for having my back.

My first ocean dive at Ocean Cove, Sonoma County, CA.

Ring: "Waves"

A good-luck ring, I'm hoping.

Classic artistry from the Irish metal-workers on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, CA.
You can find their fine work here.

For me, the wave-ring is also a wyrd-ring, the pattern of becoming, of winding and unwinding, that marks the Old English idea and practice of fate, of the world's workings, of past/present/future.

Check the rings and lines of age on my hand too.  I'm reminded of how trees show their life-lines.  Knotwork.  Or, there's a Bruce Sterling novel that I never liked much of a future dystopian universe in which wealthy people could live long, long lives in young and younger bodies, but their hands would give them away -- the signs of aging in the wrinkles and lines of their hands being resistant to the otherwise miraculous drugs to offset mere age -- would give them away, and as an older reader now, as an older man now, I see what he was getting at.

That's cool.  Slipping over the cusp of 2015 into 2016, I think about something the great surfer Fred van Dyke said --in an excellent documentary, David L. Brown's Surfing for Life -- "I'm getting older, and I gotta dig it."

Something like that.  And I am digging it.

(Talk to the hand, if you don't dig it too.)