Comfy?
Posted tagged ‘manicddaily’
On a More Cheerful Note – Dog in Rocking Chair
July 18, 2010Surface Soot in Kashmir – “Glacial” Doesn’t Mean Slow When It Comes To Warming
July 18, 2010
Kashmir - Sooty Glacier (With Goat)
Nicholas Kristoff writes in today’s New York Times about the decline of glaciers in the Himalayas, and the resulting damage to agriculture and waterways on the Indian plains. One factor in the deterioration (aside from a general rise in temperatures) is apparently the soot on the surface of the glaciers, caused by the exhaust systems of trucks and buses traveling the roadways there. Because the soot reduces the reflective quality of the snow and ice, it causes them to absorb more heat and melt more quickly.
Archival and new photographs illustrating Himalayan deterioration are currently on display at the Asia Society in New York, but I couldn’t resist adding my own photographic evidence. The photo above (taken June 2009) shows a slice of soot-covered Himalayan glacier; a goat travels on top of the blackened-ice, whitish buses haunt the background.
The roads–the road in that area, which travels from Srinagar, through Kargil, to Ladakh, is only open from mid-May to October. In these months, it is extremely crowded with both commercial (beautifully decorated) trucks transporting the year’s worth of supplies, and extensive army convoys. (They move about the thousands of soldiers stationed in Kashmir.)
Drass, Kashmir, India
The glaciers are beautiful, but sadly grey. As we began ascending the mountains (by car – no crampons), I thought the grey was a sign of the age of the ice (as in humans!) but closer viewing showed it to be the coating of ash and soot that Kristoff writes of. (It actually reminded me of snow in New York City — say, near the Holland Tunnel.)
You don’t need to do extensive “backwater” explorations to see an effect on lowland rivers – below is a picture taken in India’s primary tourist city, Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal, showing the riverbed of the Yamuna (part of Indus river system fed by Himalayas.) It’s my understanding that the “islands” used to be submerged.
Yamuna River, Agra
So many people rely on these waterways. This is not just a problem of dry pipes or reduced pressure – people (often children or women) actively take livestock, laundry, and their individual selves to the riverbanks.
The reduced flow seems not only to mean lesser water but, increased muck – less dilution of the zillion and one pollutants that burden these poor waterways.
Where else can the people go? They walk out further onto the caked silt of the old riverbed to get to the mirk of water that’s still there.
Kristoff hopes in the article that the BP spill will make Americans, and others, aware of the increasing degradation of the environment worldwide. I, for one, think it’s doubtful, since Americans have difficulty recognizing the degradation of their home environment. But many poorer countries – certainly not just India – which have hopped onto a developmental train of manufacturing and consumption, have no environmental safeguards, enforcement, or even disposal systems, and tragedy looms. As nature is reduced, as true rivers and glaciers “melt down”, mountains of undisintegrated plastic and pools of shinily suspicious liquids move in to fill (or deepen) the void. (I couldn’t quite make myself take pictures of those.)
Yamuna River, Agra, India
Little Sleep, Little Function, Little Sloth
July 17, 2010
Sloth (Not Elephant)
My husband and I have an ongoing argument about a universal human sleep standard. He insists that people–all people–need many many hours of sleep for even minimal efficiency; I counter with the variable sleep needs of different people (citing myself among those who need little); I talk about the efficiency of having extra time to do things in (even if that extended time is burdened with some level of fatigue.)
Sometimes, however, I find that I really do not function all that well without sleep. Some hints:
- At 1.am., folding freshly-cleaned clothes, I come across, in a laundry basket of towels and underwear, the only pair of glasses I own that do not hurt my eyes when working on the computer. These are old glasses, whose frame has one stem that had been very loose. They are now old glasses, whose frame holds one stem that is not loose. The lenses are currently very very clean, and shiny.
- It is approximately 2:15 a.m. I am wearing glasses that only hook onto one ear. I am considering downloading old drawings of donkeys to my computer, since everyone thinks I only draw elephants. Yes, I know that you have to get up at 4:45 to catch a plane, and that I have not yet packed. It feels somehow easier to think about donkeys.
- It is 2:30 a.m. I’ll figure out the packing in the morning… that is, in…uh… two hours. I begin to re-read an old Terry Pratchett novel about wizards whose heads are always up in the clouds, but who somehow manage to come out all right in the end.
- 6:30 a.m. Somehow, despite the repeated last minute changes of clothes, and glasses, I have gotten to the airport. Feeling extremely efficient, I take my computer out of my suitcase, rather than my little composition book, and type the original first sentence of this blog as follows: “sometimes you are all too anxious that, in fact, you don’t function very well without sleep.” I feel just amazingly efficient, though I also worry that the guy next to me is reading over my shoulder. He, on the other hand, mumbles something about Kansas City while my flight is slated for Orlando. Hmmm….
- After leaning some time on an Delta steward’s counter, I am too tired to be pleased that I’ve been bumped to first class, though I have to say this big wide seat is awfully niiiiii….zzzzz.
- Later in the day. I keep trying to think of some animal to draw, something other than an elephant. I really can’t come up with anything; I just feel too tired, too slow, too lazy….
- And where did I pack those glasses?
The Only One Engineered To Handle New York City Subway Platform
July 16, 2010
Prepared for Mid-July Subway Platform
Stay cool! And hydrated! (If you are thirsty, breathe deeply–there’s more than enough moisture in the air.)
Have a nice weekend.
Quatorze Juillet – French Burnt Peanuts, Fraternite, Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtles
July 14, 2010
Oh brother how are thou?
A lot of disparate elements to pull together on today, July 14th, Bastille Day, the French national day.
My only Bastille Day actually spent in France was in Nice at age 8. Its most memorable element was not the fireworks over the Mediterranean (although I can still picture one beautiful arc of flash) but the French burnt peanuts bought from a street vendor on the nighttime beach. It was the first time I’d ever tasted French burnt peanuts and they were like fireworks in my mouth–hot, sweet, crinkly, crunchy, touched so delicately with salt that it might have just been the taste of the sea air on my tongue. The nuts were, despite several prior days in France, my first real evidence of the deliciousness of French food–my parents, traveling on a strict budget, made us eat a lot of ham sandwiches put together by my mother in the car.
My next most important memory of Bastille Day is not actually my personal memory, but one recounted to me by members of my husband’s family—a patriotic group who’d lived through and/or fought in World War II, serving with the U.S. forces. On one July 14th, during the height of DeGaulle’s France First approach (and U.S. furor at his perceived ingratitude), my in-laws and some friends celebrated by lying down on the floor to sing the Marseillaise. This (the floor part) was deemed to show the highest disrespect, although, for my part, I was always impressed that they cared enough about France to actually know all the words. (Also reflecting a longstanding U.S. love-hate relationship with the French, a/k/a Freedom Fries!)
I personally never learned the full Marseillaise, but was taught the slogan words of the French Revolution – Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité. Liberté and egalité were expected (except for the “g”) but “fraternité” – brotherhood – always took me aback (and not only because I was a girl.) The American Revolution talked of freedom and justice for all (except for slaves), but did not (at least in my limited understanding) give the same emphasis to this kind of connection among people. (My off-the-cuff, uninformed, explanation is that the American colonies were already already somewhat united against a common “foreign” enemy, while the French Revolution, more akin to a civil war, needed to emphasize alliance.)
But I don’t want to write today about the French Revolution; what I want to write about are sea turtles. There is a very sad, if interesting, video piece in the New York Times today about forensic efforts to uncover the exact cause of the huge rise in turtle deaths in the Gulf since the BP oil spill. (Brent McDonald, Kassie Bracken, and Shaila Diwan.) The oil is an obvious culprit, but deaths also seem to result from sea turtles drowning in shrimping nets, particularly in Louisiana which apparently does not enforce Federal law regarding escape hatches in the nets for turtles. One thought is that, in addition to poisoning the turtles, the oil may drive them into areas that are inhospitable and unfamiliar; the spill may have also changed the conduct of fishermen.
Many of the turtles dying are the endangered Kemp’s Ridley turtles; their life span would otherwise go into the decades. They are beautiful, their faces seemingly embued with a thoughtful intelligence.
Which brings me back to Bastille Day—not because of Louisiana’s French roots – but because of the French Revolutionary tenet of fraternity. It seems to me increasingly unlikely that much will be done to save turtles or any non-human species, the environment, or even the planet itself, unless and until people feel a meaningful connection with creatures other than themselves. I don’t mean simply the sentimental connection of how endearing the creatures are (although that’s a start). I mean a connection that be real enough to inspire actual care and sacrifice.
I don’t mean to diminish people’s concerns about their jobs, what they eat and the temperature at which they keep their dwellings. But at the moment, there is another kind of love/hate relationship going on here (more serious than the one with the French.) We love the idea of saving wildlife, the environment; we hate to actually do anything about it, to change our lives. Some kind of better balance needs to be reached between short-term, individual concerns, and longer-term, world-wide needs, an understanding that humans may not do very well in a world in which sea turtles are dying in droves, that these creatures deserve lives free from molestation and torture, that the death of a sea turtle is a death in the family.
Body-Mind Dichotomy – Who’s the Daddy? (With Elephants on a Napkin….)
July 13, 2010
On the napkin at the restaurant while thinking these things through
Increasingly I realize that I really don’t own my body; if anything, my body owns me.
I don’t use the word “ownership” to refer to title, so much as in the Pedro Martinez sense of “who’s your daddy?” i.e. who dominates.
I use the word “me” in the sense of personality/soul/ what makes me lively, gloomy, manic, depressed, loving; what makes up my understanding of myself. I suppose a philosophical type would think of “me” as the “watcher”; that part of my brain which observes everything, including, sometimes, itself.
My first conscious memory of my body’s overriding vote in matters of self-image is from my childhood, hearing my voice on audio tape. Back then, it came in big brown reels; it was slick, difficult to manage. (The old tape recorders remind me of slippery sewing machines, except that they used brown tape instead of thread and tried to stitch a past moment into the present one.)
Agh! My voice sounded like a baby’s. A baby’s. When it came on, I was mortified, crushed, had to leave the room. I had imagined myself to sound sophisticated, an echo of Julie Andrews. That babyfied voice could not be me, and yet I knew that it was.
These older days, I have the surprise that my body is not “me” every single time I look in the mirror, every time I hear my voice on an answering machine. There’s always a small second of surprise, sometimes even shock, absolute non-self-recognition. Worst of all, every time I get familiar (which does not happen much), it changes; the body refuses to stay put, pat, in place. (It droops, it sags, it grows, it bags.)
My surprise at my body is one way in that it continually tells me that I’m not its daddy (or mommy). This doesn’t even begin to address the problem of what the body feels like:the lungs that are suddenly winded, the hips that want to sit down, the eyes that just won’t focus properly.
All that complaining! And I’m not even someone who actually suffers physical pain. In that case, the body would really take up the reins.
The good news, I guess, is that when Pedro Martinez taunted the Yankees with the question of who their Daddy was, he went on to lose badly and to be taunted right back.
My body is not really Pedro. (Somehow I know I should bring up George Steinbrenner here, but just can’t.) And I don’t truly want to taunt it, or to cause it to lose anything (except perhaps a few pounds.) Still, it would be nice to see the taunted sometimes come out on top; for the “me” in this case to suddenly feel some identification with itself.
It only happens every once in a while, sometimes even when you hardly think about it, when, for example, you are just walking, simply walking along.
Soccer-Soothsayer Paul (The Octopus) Confronts the Competition (Squawk!)
July 12, 2010
Paul Confronts the Competition
I was one of the few people lucky (or unlucky) enough not to need to actually watch the World Cup Final soccer in order to know that Spain would win.
This was not because of my confidence in the wonderful Spanish team’s ability to maintain elegant possession of the ball despite the relative shortness of their players (my not-tall husband’s pre-game desire), or because of any particular hope that the day would be saved by the extremely good looks of several members of the Spanish team (my daughter’s post-game view, most notably with regard to Jesus Naves and team captain and goalkeeper,Iker Casillas), or some wish, of my own, to see that the players that weren’t kicked in the chest would triumph.
No, my certainty of Spain’s victory resulted completely from my confidence in octopi, particularly the soothsaying Octopus Paul, a/k/a the “Oracle of Oberhausen” (named for the town in Germany in which his aquarium is located.) A day or so before the game, Paul once again (for the eighth recorded time) exercised his psychic mussel errr…muscle to successfully pick Spain as the winner of the final match. (What makes Paul’s foresight especially unusual among predictors of the future is that he picked the winners BEFORE the games occurred, and didn’t simply tell us about how right he was after the fact.)
The Dutch, on first hearing of Paul’s prediction, were justifiably downcast until some enterprising Dutch reporter found a competing soothsayer—a parakeet in Singapore.
But I, for one, knew that wouldn’t fly.
Parakeets simply don’t have the grasp of octopi, the breadth, the reach, the slithery coordination—
And let’s just suppose this isn’t all a statistical anomaly, a lucky guess—(could Paul have some tentacular hooks in ensuring the outcomes he predicts? Could there be something fishy, as it were, going on in FIFAland?)
All I can say is eight for eight!
(And thank goodness the game wasn’t decided on penalty kicks! A deciding factor that can seem almost as arbitrary as, well, the choice of a cephalopod.)
Blocking Writer’s Block – Love Your Elephant
July 11, 2010
Love Your Elephant!
Readers of this blog may not realize it but I love Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, Dostoyevsky, the plays and poetry of Shakespeare (who doesn’t?), Rilke, Wallace Stevens, John Donne, Sharon Olds.
But what comes out half the time when I sit down to write this blog is…Robert Pattinson….
And when I write my non-blog work (aside from legal memos and poems), I often end up with children’s novels about talking dogs, teen novels about oversized noses, young adult fantasies about Royal beauty and magical gifts. (Yes, I’ve written grown-up types of things too, but the number of pages devoted to the talking dogs and magical gifts is undoubtedly higher.)
I love Goya, Velasquez. Matisse and Giotto. Fra Angelico, Francesco Clemente, Kandinsky, Anselm Kiefer, Alfred Jensen; I have a great deal of respect for Tintoretto. (The Scuolo di San Rocco is not exactly my style but absolutely amazing.)
But what (more than half the time) comes out when I put my own pencil to the page? Elephants.
The curves of trunk, humped back, toe nails, seem to just form. I long ago stopped fighting against it.
I’m not saying that it’s not good to rail against one’s natural tendencies; to stretch one’s self. But it also can be both skillful and liberating to just accept where your energies take you; especially if you are suffering, or have a tendency to suffer, from writer’s or artist’s blocks.
I would be the first to admit that it can be very embarrassing to hieroglyph in pachyderm. If you have any pretense of sophistication, you may hate that all your cuneiforms are cutieforms.
You may feel disdainful of your talking dog. (His name is Seemore by the way; as in see—more, since he’s so very observant. He has taught himself to read and is an amazing speller.)
You may give up re-writing your novel about the beautiful princesses with magical gifts, not because it’s derivative (it really isn’t), but because it’s feels just sort of… silly.
Don’t. At least don’t give up on these things because of embarrassment.
If your voice or vision tends towards another direction—science fiction, prose poetry–camels!—check it out! (I don’t mean here to try a lot of different things—I mean if you happen not to be interested in children’s book or elephants, but in something equally unhip—check it out!)
What you are ultimately looking for is authenticity, a channel for energy, a bunson burner to create energy (which really is difficult to sustain if you are not genuinely caught by your material. ) Don’t be put off if what is authentic to you takes an odd, or unexpected, form. The fact is that your own voice is by its nature somewhat unique (and, if you are anything like me, it may also be kind of odd.)
For more on writer’s block, check out the category from the ManicDDaily home page, and for more on elephants, check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson on Amazon.
Pushing/Falling Along
July 10, 2010
Crazy time. I have a dear dear friend arranging for her hospice care in the city, and am up in the country drawing elephants with young kids. So much to grieve, so much to joy in. One of those statements that’s a cliché because it’s so true.
A [ridiculous] clock in the hall coos in the hour with varying bird song. My mother-in-law, now gone, a true naturalist, really loved that clock, especially as hearing true bird song became difficult for her.
I suppose the deepest approach to the inevitable losses in life, the prospect of the loss of life itself, is to let go of regret, to learn to find contentment in what is before you, to stop wasting time worrying about what’s beyond recall (not of memory but of re-doing). But that’s so hard, for me at least (a master of discontent). For me, the more effective protocol is to make a concerted effort to remember regret, to remember, in advance, how it will feel when loss is in front of you, to remember, in advance, that this is a feeling that you don’t want to feel, and to focus, to the extent possible, on what you can possibly do to avoid the having to feel that feeling.
To imagine, in other words, that you are at a place with extremely few choices, and to think, from that position, of the choices that you wish that you had made when you had them.
I understand that it sounds Escheresque. Perhaps this type of forward/backward thinking only works when you have dear friends who are very sick, when you want to plead with them not to go but know that you really can’t do that to them, that their life is beyond their wish and yours.
They have lived their lives well—you have no question of that–but what about you? You feel pushed along by life, by rapids, gravity, momentum, but is that push really irresistible? Really?
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