Pinnochio as an Old Man

Mask: Old Pinnochio.

Sculpture mix; terra sigillata.

I made this piece back in 2001 or 2002, I believe.

"You Can Call Me Ray"

Bat Ray: stoneware; green and sea foam glazing.

Seferis and Sophocles: Character is Fate

TWO POEMS FROM GEORGE SEFERIS, Translated from the Greek by Rex Warner:

EURIPIDES THE ATHENIAN

He lived and grew old between the burning of Troy

And the hard labour in Sicilian quarries.

He was fond of rocky caves along the beach;

Liked pictures of the sea;

The veins of man he saw as it were a net

Made by the Gods for trapping us like beasts.

This net he tried to pierce.

He was difficult in every way. His friends were few.

The time arrived and he was torn to pieces by dogs.

--George Seferis
PENTHEUS

Asleep he was filled with dreams of fruits and leaves;

Awake he was not permitted to pick one berry.

Sleep and wakefulness shared out his limbs to the Bacchae.

--George Seferis

My favorite lines from Sophocles' Oedipus the King, spoken by Oedipus himself, translated by Meineck & Woodruff:

But I see myself as a child of good-giving

Fortune, and I will not be demeaned.

She is my mother, the seasons my kin,

And I rise and fall like the phases of the moon.

That is my nature, and I will never play the part

Of someone else, nor fail to learn what I was born to be.

--Sophocles

Context, as usual, being everything.

The photos: Woad, Under--

Sculpture mix clay, blue and green glazing.

Ferry Point, Richmond, CA

Fish To Fry: Postscript

We had a real English fish and chip shop near my house while I was growing up, run by an actual English family: Rhodes Fish and Chips. The English part amazed me, and I preferred the food from this shop over, say, the H. Salt, Esquire down the road in the other direction, run by locals, not immigrants from England. (I was an early Anglophile in books and fish.)

We often wondered how the Rhodes family ended up in our small town alongside San Francisco Bay. While I was growing up, San Pablo was only known for its murder rate and its proximity to Richmond, with the refinery and formerly the shipyards. I was too polite to ask about the family background, but now I wonder if they didn't come from a small town on the edge of urban and suburban sprawl back in England. I had a friend who moved out to sunny California from Detroit, and he ended up feeling at home in industrial Oakland. I recall my first trip to Portland, Oregon, and feeling at home because it was a scruffy working town/city and it had Powell's Books.

Throughout my childhood, my family often ordered take-out from this fish and chip shop, and as an adult I was saddened when the family gave up the business and the building was bulldozed to make way for an auto parts emporium. (On the other hand, that family must have operated that shop over 20 or 25 years, so I get that the day was done.)

Now, if I want good fish and chips, I head to Bodega and the Boat House Cafe.

Tonight, I baked the cod in wine with garlic and thyme, which proved quite tasty, but the fish market guy's words have awakened a craving: a greasy, salty craving.

I'm planning to hit Rodeo Beach in Marin for some surf action and photography tomorrow, but maybe I should aim a bit further north.

Fish To Fry

I asked the fish market guy how he likes to cook true cod, and he first gave me a handful of good healthy ideas.

Then, he confessed, "I like to bread it and fry it. I like fish and chips. Not that you can say that in Berkeley."

Me: "You can say that to me. I'm from San Pablo."

More Stones with Robert Graves

THE JUDGES

Crouched on wet shingle at the cove

In day-long search for treasure-trove--

Meaning the loveliest-patterned pebble,

Of any colour imaginable,

Ground and smoothed by a gentle sea--

How seldom, Julia, we agree

On our day's find: the perfect one

To fetch back home when day is done,

Splendid enough to stupefy

The fiercest, most fastidious eye--

Tossing which back we tell the sea:

'Work on it one more century!'

--Robert Graves

Byron: "Between Two Worlds Life Hovers . . ."

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

'Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge,

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar

Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge,

Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves

Of empires heave but like some passing waves.

--Lord Byron's last stanza to Canto XV of his incomparable Don Juan