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Blackberries

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on August 4, 2011| 3 Comments »

Took an early walk. The grass was still wet and decorated with white Queen Anne’s Lace, green thistles, blue Ragged Sailor, pink clover, and yellow Black-eyed Susans. Catbirds, sparrows, and warblers were busy busy in the wild grape vines and the blackberry brambles.

My neighbor’s car was parked on the side of the road near a house that for decades was covered in brambles and vines like Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Today it’s a nice little rental property overlooking a pond. My neighbor was berrying in one of his secret, not-so-secret spots while the owners were away. (It was either him or the birds after all.) His wife makes great jams and jellies with the blackberries — and with the beach plums that ripen later in the season. Perhaps he will leave a jar on the absentee owner’s doorstep.

It was not yet 7 a.m., and the landmark Painted Rock said “Sarah + Christian Engaged.” I hope Sarah and Christian get to see it before a new message gets painted on top. Smart painters take photos. Something I learned the hard way when I painted the rock for Suzanne’s 16th and John’s 21st birthdays during a past Birthday Week.

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Detectives in Exotic Places

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 3, 2011| Leave a Comment »

We read a lot of mysteries in our house. We especially like stories set in places we don’t know much about, although my husband enjoyed the Qiu Xiaolong books because he had lived in Shanghai himself.

I just finished a mystery by James Church (pseudonym for an author who is a “former Western intelligence officer”). He writes about North Korea. Since hardly anyone ever goes there, I tend to accept Church’s descriptions as better informed than your average Joe’s. And I find that whenever there’s a news story about that isolated country, it seems to mesh with the murder mysteries. The series starts with The Corpse in the Koryo.

Eliot Pattison’s Tibetan series, starting with The Skull Mantra, was a great hit with me — son John, too, until he got tired of exotic locales and started reading business books (snore). Pattison now alternates writing Tibetan mysteries with writing mysteries about pre-Revolution America and Indians. I heard him say at a book reading in Porter Square that he finds similarities in the spiritual beliefs and practices of Tibetan Buddhists and American Indians.

The wacky Colin Cotterill writes a series set in Laos, stating with The Coroner’s Lunch. We love his style and his unique characters. I’m just starting his new series, set in Thailand and featuring a malapropism of George W. Bush at the start of each chapter.

S.J. Rozan’s detective Lydia Chin operates mostly in New York’s Chinatown, but she does get to Hong Kong, and you can pick up a lot of Chinese culture from her. That series starts with China Trade.

Good novelists do a lot of research. You can get the flavor of a culture without going anywhere.

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Playwriting, 4

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 2, 2011| 1 Comment »

Only two more sessions now. After a class on a meltingly hot day when we discussed the play “Mud,” by Maria Irene Fornes, my teacher’s longtime mentor, we were sent out into the world to write down conversations overheard in public places.

Some class members got great conversations down on paper in spite of noisy air conditioning and music. My scene, which featured three tourists (a mother, father, and 14-ish son) was beyond boring. Instructive, though. People really do not converse the way we think they do. Lots of broken-off and garbled lines. Nonsequitors. Chitchat to fill dead air. Often about food. And to cover real thoughts.

I’m really interested in how people use language to not communicate. Not just when the chitchat covers what they are consciously thinking, but even more, when the words cover thoughts that are too deep for the speaker to be aware of. Like some political or religious discussions. For example, one Right to Life person getting red in the face shouting at a clinic could be feeling on a deep level that being the 10th child, his mother might have thought twice about having him. I’m oversimplifying. But I do know a couple folks whose political arguments are closely tied to how they felt about their fathers.

An art professor Suzanne had at Pomona used to paint over an under story. He believed one could sense the completely invisible picture. That interests me.

This week, members of the playwriting class are to take our overheard scenes and develop them more. I am mainly adding what the people are consciously thinking. Someday I’ll write about what people don’t even recognize they’re thinking.

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Battery Invented 1,000 Years Before Volta

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

A couple weeks ago, I wrote that I was reading Jason Elliot’s book on Iran. That was my post about the rediscovery of the “extinct” Caspian horse.

Elliot slams through millenia of history in that part of the world kind of like the comedy troupe that purports to perform “The Complete Works of Shakespeare” in 90 minutes. He is very good at it, I think. But maybe that’s because I know so little about the endlessly shifting borders of Central Asia and the Middle East.

Among other interesting tidbits in the book is this one on the Baghdad Battery. In Mirrors of the Unseen, Elliot writes that this ancient form of battery was “constructed of an earthenware shell containing an iron rod insulated by an asphalt plug from an outer copper sleeve. A modest electric current is produced when the housing is filled with an electrolytic solution such as lemon juice.”

Wikipedia has more. “The Baghdad Battery, sometimes referred to as the Parthian Battery, is the common name for a number of artifacts created in Mesopotamia, during the dynasties of Parthian or Sassanid period (the early centuries AD), and probably discovered in 1936 in the village of Khuyut Rabbou’a, near Baghdad, Iraq. These artifacts came to wider attention in 1938 when Wilhelm  König, the German director of the National Museum of Iraq, found the
objects in the museum’s collections. In 1940, König published a paper speculating that they may have been galvanic cells, perhaps used for electroplating gold and silver objects … This interpretation continues to be considered as at least a hypothetical possibility. If correct, the artifacts would predate Alessandro Volta’s 1800 invention of the electrochemical cell by more than a millennium.”

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Creative Funding for the Arts

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2011| 1 Comment »

A week or so ago, I wrote about CSA, community-supported arts, a concept that borrows from the community-supported agriculture movement. In case you missed it, here’s the post.

Another creative idea for supporting the arts is crowd funding. I learned about it from the Backstage blog by way of ArtsJournal.com.

” ‘I saw people believing in themselves enough to try and make money for their projects,’ said Monica Mirabile, a co-founder of the Copycat Theatre. Earlier this year, Mirabile was applying for grants for her Baltimore-based theater troupe when a friend suggested she look into Kickstarter, a ‘crowd-funding’ website that promotes artistic projects through social media and allows donors to
support fundraising campaigns with any amount of money they desire. Crowd-funding sites have grown in popularity over the last few years and continue to attract artists and benefactors. …

” ‘This is not the newest idea on the block. It’s very traditional. But we’ve become very used to the idea of someone in a boardroom giving us a check and we hand them a piece of art and cross our fingers. The longer history of art is actually one of patronage that involves the artist’s audience. …

” Users of crowd funding must summarize their projects and goals for potential donors, a process that can help artists sharpen the skills needed to pitch or develop those projects in the future. ‘I learned how to better articulate why I’m doing the project and my artwork and what we’re trying to gain,’ said Mirabile. ‘I made friends because, by promoting, I got to talk to different
people in my community and made connections.’ ”

Read more here. And if you try an approach like Kickstarter, would you let me know how it worked for you? Leave a comment.

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More on Poetry

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 31, 2011| Leave a Comment »

An island neighbor has just published Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts (Modernist Literature and Culture). Ellen has been studying poets Marianne Moore and John Ashbery, and artist Joseph Cornell for some years — first as a member of the faculty at Vanderbilt and now at Pratt. I don’t know much about Joseph Cornell, but I did hear novelist Jonathan Safran Foer give a lecture about how Cornell’s work inspired him to cut up Bruno Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles” every which way from Sunday and make a kind of art book out of it.

A few poets read this blog from time to time, so you might want to take a look at Ellen’s book. If you read it, could you send me a short review to post?

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After Foster Care

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 30, 2011| 2 Comments »

Not long ago, I talked to Suzanne’s friend Liz about her long and deep support for a girl who was struggling through the foster-care system in California. She expressed the view that kids who “age out” of foster care still need support. Maybe they reject anything that smacks of the government programs at first, but the possibility of more advice and assistance should be revisited after a year or so, Liz said. That’s because the young people are mostly without the networks and connections that their peers can turn to as they move into adulthood.

So I was interested to read in the Boston Globe last week that there is at least one small support program for a few graduates of foster care. It’s an internship program on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

About a decade ago a staffer working on Capitol Hill took note of a particular group of interns. “The interns, all former foster children, had aged out of the system and made their way through college. Now they were in Washington, on Capitol Hill, working at the seat of power and, Lindsay Ellenbogen noticed, not always having the resources to succeed.

“They had a willingness to learn — often they arrived early, stayed late, and were eager to take on any task, even if it was just making copies or answering phones. But many had never been far from their homes. Few had ever spent time around politics or politicians. And when they asked questions about how to write a news release or listen in on a committee meeting, staffers were often too busy to show them the ropes.

“ ‘When you’re on Capitol Hill, you’re living three days before noon, so you can’t really stop and help somebody,’ said Ellenbogen, who worked as a Capitol Hill staffer alongside the former foster youth.

“Now, nine years later, Ellenbogen is supervising another group of former foster children and making sure they have an easier transition into the world of a Washington intern. Last year, Ellenbogen, who had worked as a Capitol Hill staffer for 10 years, joined the advisory board of the
Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute’s Foster Youth Internship program.”

Now she has time to answer the interns’ questions and help them find the resources they need. Read more here.

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Esperantists in the Subway

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 29, 2011| 8 Comments »

When you have a doctor’s appointment in the morning and go to work late, you see a whole different crowd riding the subway. In the summer after rush hour, there are a lot of families on outings. A woman and a boy of about 11 got on and sat near me. The boy began to tell his mother that he had been reading about a made-up language called Esperanto. She said she had heard of it and thought it had been popular a long time ago but hadn’t worked out. An older kid they didn’t know chimed in to confirm the woman’s view. Esperanto was intended to be used as an international language, but nobody spoke it anymore.

That was too much for me. “Well,” I said, “hundreds of thousands of people speak it. I speak it.” If I may say so, the boy and his mother were delighted. Could I speak a few words, they asked?

“Mi parolas Esperanto,” I said. The boy repeated the “I Speak Esperanto” phrase several times. He then wanted to know “hello.” “Saluton,” I said. I told him and his mother why Ludwig Zamenhoff had felt a need for such a language more than 100 years ago in a war-torn part of Eastern Europe.

When the woman and the boy were leaving the train, they asked how to say “good-bye” and told me good-bye in Esperanto.

Now get this. Here is William Shatner, long before “Star Trek,” in a spooky black and white movie called “Incubus” — filmed in Esperanto!

That is so bizarre, I thought at first it must be a hoax. Maybe some Esperantists dubbed it for a joke on YouTube, I thought. But Wikipedia is very careful about such things, and it confirms that William Shatner performed in a movie in Esperanto that was thought to be lost. The recently rediscovered print had subtitles in French, which have now been converted to English. Read Wikipedia here. (Read my previous post on invented languages here.)

And just in case you are now inspired to learn the language, this little clip offers a pretty good lesson.

I hope the boy on the subway finds it. A terrifically curious and open-minded young man.

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All You Need in Minsk

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on July 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

This YouTube video would have you believe that all you need in Minsk is love.

The video appears to be one of a couple Belarus entries into the “All You Need is Love” AIDS fund-raising effort that got Starbucks into Guinness World Records for the most nations in an online sing-along.

Personally, I think Starbucks would have done Minsk a bigger favor by setting up shop in town (with wi-fi and air conditioning).

That’s because, according to my son’s employees in that fair city, it is difficult to get office air conditioning. They did look into it as they were sweltering in the recent heat wave. But they soon discovered that another business in their building already had an air conditioner, and the local utility could not support more than one air conditioner at a time in that building.

So until the other business moves out, it would be nice if John’s employees could work in a cool web-connected Starbucks. But there is no Starbucks in Minsk.

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Sailing in Sweden

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on July 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

To recap, I started this project in May, having been asked by Suzanne and Erik to write a blog affiliated with Suzanne’s birthstone jewelry company, Luna & Stella. This first post explains.

Folks who have been reading know that Erik is from Sweden. He and Suzanne often go sailing when they vacation there in summer. Erik’s mother recently sent along this photo, writing, “Suzanne, Erik and Jimmy leaving Veddö hamn [harbor]. Sailing along the Västkusten shore in beautiful weather.”

Soon they will be sailing for the honor of Sweden.

OK. Maybe not right away. I like Jimmy’s boat better anyway.

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Food Deserts (“deserts,” not “desserts”)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 26, 2011| 1 Comment »

I have been reading about Michelle Obama’s latest efforts to encourage good nutrition in childhood.

“Executives from Wal-Mart, Walgreens, SuperValu and other stores joined Michelle Obama at the White House on [July 21] to announce a pledge to open or expand a combined 1,500 stores in communities that have limited access to nutritious food and are designated as ‘food deserts.’

“With the pledges, secured by the Partnership for a Healthier America, which is part of Mrs. Obama’s campaign to reduce childhood obesity, the stores aim to reach 9.5 million of the 23.5 million Americans who live in areas where finding affordable healthy foods can be difficult. In those areas, many people turn to fast food restaurants or convenience stores.” Read the New York Times article here.

On a related note, John sent me a really interesting link from photographer Mark Menjivar, who documents the insides of people’s refrigerators. He includes a one-line insight into the person whose food he is photographing. Unsurprisingly, the fridge with the least food in it belongs to a “street advertiser” who lives on a $432 fixed monthly income.

See the fascinating photo essay here.

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Urban Kids Interning with Nature Conservancy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on July 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I was reading about the latest enthusiastic group of LEAF interns in the Block Island Times tonight and decided to look up more information on the program.

The Leaders in Environmental Action for the Future (LEAF) program is an initiative started by the Nature Conservancy (TNC) 17 years ago. According to the TNC website, it “provides paid summer internships for high school students and helps educators from environmental high schools share best practices and scientific resources. The long-term goal of LEAF is to support more than 30 environmental high schools across the country, ultimately serving over 20,000 students.”

The Block Island Times notes that this is the third year of the island’s participation. The three girls who are currently interning have come with their mentor come from Atlanta. Intern Niniola Mark tells the newspaper, “This is my first time in New England, and I also saw the ocean for the very first time.” The article doesn’t say what high school the girls attend, but the only one in Georgia that I see on the TNC site is the Arabia Mountain High School.

What fun to go to an environmental high school!

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Playwriting Class, 3

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 24, 2011| 3 Comments »

The next assignment is to listen in on a conversation somewhere and try to write it down word for word without adding any of your own details or dramatizing it.

In the age of Murdoch telephone hacking, is that kosher?

I do sometimes hear conversations I want to write down. Yesterday, for example, I was in a small grocery store, and a woman dripping with perspiration blew in and accosted the butcher. “I’m Christine! I’m from Burnin’ Love. I’m so sorry. I got all turned around.”

Pretty good, huh?

Another time I was out walking on a breathtakingly beautiful summer morning — clear blue sky, goldfinches flying everywhere — and two men on bicycles passed by discussing credit default swaps.

And one day last fall, I overheard a conversation as I dashed from my office building to the subway. A young woman was saying to a friend, “What I’d like to be doing is studying. But I’ll be grocery shopping and doing laundry, and he’ll be watching football and playing video games.”

This morning, I ventured some timid eavesdropping. I thought I better buy something in my chosen venues. In the first coffee shop, where I hovered near a biking couple, I bought coffee and the Sunday Globe. But the air conditioning was loud and drowned out their words. In the second coffee shop, I bought a decaf cappuccino and wandered around testing conversations, but the music was too loud. In the third coffee shop, I bought waffles with toppings (blueberries, strawberries, granola), but that place had both loud air conditioning and loud music.

In the afternoon, I tried the book shop without luck and ended up back at the first coffee shop, which had opened its screened porch for lunch. I bought lemonade. I can probably use a few snatches of the conversation among three fed-up-looking tourists.  Pretty bland, I must say.

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Database for Sleuths

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Not sure if, as a fan of detective mysteries, I should be disppointed or delighted about a new police database in Florida.

I learned about the database from an e-mail listserv I receive at the office. It’s called Innovators Insights. Sign up here to tell the Ash Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School what sorts of public policy topics interested you, and they will e-mail Innovators Insights to you weekly with short descriptions of relevant articles from around the nation — and links to the full story.

Here’s the Florida gumshoe story (to coin a phrase).

“In Cape Coral, Florida, the police department is employing a sophisticated shoe-print database that helps investigators quickly identify what type of shoe a suspect was wearing. While shoeprints are often important in identifying a perpetrator, the traditional process of manually casting a shoeprint and searching the Internet and catalogs for the matching type of shoe can be time-consuming when expedience is of the essence. By contrast, the software houses over 24,000 shoe types and allows information like side-shots of the shoes, their manufacturer, and their color schemes to be immediately forwarded to detectives. If investigators have a suspect’s shoe, they can also compare a digital image of its sole with a shoeprint from other crime scenes and look for a match. Cape Coral police have already used the technology to arrest one offender.”

Read all about it. And no matter how many exotic and unfamiliar shoes you buy in places around the world, you better behave yourself in Coral Gables.

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Burnt Food Museum

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on July 23, 2011| 2 Comments »

The Hip Harpist I wrote about before has a lot of interests, about which she both tweets and blogs extensively. An especially kooky interest is her Burnt Food Museum.

She explains: “The museum was founded in the late 1980’s one night when Deborah put on a small pot of Hot Apple Cider to heat, then received an unexpected . . . fascinating . . . and very long phone call. By the time Deborah returned to the kitchen, the Cider had become a Cinder and thus the first, and perhaps still the most impressive, exhibit: Free Standing Hot Apple Cider was born.

“Since then, countless other works have entered the museum, such as Thrice Baked Potato, ‘Why Sure, You Can Bake Quiche in the Microwave,’ the indestructible ‘Mmmm……Soy Pups,’ and the lovely matching set of Pizza Toast.”

Like the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA, the world’s only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms), the Burnt Food Museum gets a lot of press in the mainstream media for sheer kookiness. These cultural institutions are both in the Greater Boston area.

Don’t let anyone tell you Boston is staid.

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