The poet Marianne Moore once helped to save a special tree by writing a poem about it, proving that art is more powerful than apathy.
Maria Popova writes at Brain Pickings, “In 1867, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, once an American Revolution battlefield, opened its gates to a community hungry for a peaceful respite of wilderness amid the urban bustle. So intense was public enthusiasm that local residents began donating a variety of wildlife to fill the 585-acre green expanse, from ducks to deer. But the most unusual and enduring gift turned out to be a tree, donated by a man named A.G. Burgess and planted in 1872.
“This was no ordinary tree. Ulmus glabra ‘Camperdownii,’ better-known as Camperdown Elm, is a species unlike regular trees in that it cannot reproduce from a seed. The rare elm carries its irregularity on the outside — its majestic, knobby branches grow almost parallel to the ground, ‘weeping’ down. To ameliorate its reproductive helplessness, the Camperdown Elm requires outside help — a sort of assisted grafting, be it by accident of nature or intentional human hand. …
“As excitement over the novelty of Prospect Park began dying down, the Camperdown Elm came to suffer years of neglect. …
“But then, in the 1960s, it was saved by a force even more miraculous than that by which its Scottish great-great-grandfather had been born — not by a botanist or a park commissioner or a policymaker, but by a poet fifteen years the tree’s junior.
“The poet was Marianne Moore (November 15, 1887–February 5, 1972), who had been elected president of New York’s Greensward Foundation — an advocacy group for public parks — in 1965. This brilliant and eccentric woman … created a citizen group called Friends of Prospect Park, aimed at protecting the Camperdown Elm and other endangered trees in the park.
“In 1967, eighty at the time and with a Pulitzer Prize under her belt, Moore penned ‘The Camperdown Elm’ — a beautiful ode to this unusual, dignified, yet surprisingly fragile life-form of which humans are the only bastions. …
“Moore’s poem mobilized the Friends of Prospect Park to envelop the Camperdown Elm in attentive and nurturing care, which ultimately saved it.”
Ready for another post on tiny houses? Here is a house built from scratch in Burrillville, Rhode Island, near the border of Massachusetts.
Kim Kalunian (now at WPRI) wrote about it last summer when she was still working at WPRO.
“Jessica Sullivan shares a nearly 200-square-foot tiny house with her husband in Burrillville. It’s 8 by 16 feet, but a small loft gives them extra space for a bed.
“While some tiny homes come prefabricated, the pair decided to build theirs from scratch, and started the process in 2013. They moved in full-time last summer.
“Today, they live on an organic farm, and their tiny home is completely off the grid – they use solar power and carry in their water. They don’t have an oven and instead cook on a RV-style stove top. They have a small bathroom, but there’s no shower. (Don’t worry, they haven’t abandoned personal hygiene: they go to the local gym or shower outside in the warmer months.)
“ ‘We don’t have a water bill, we don’t have an electric bill,’ said Sullivan. ‘For us it costs roughly $800 to $900 a month, that’s including our overhead in the house … our rent, our cellphone, our heat, our groceries.’ ”
Isa Cann of Tiny House Northeast, a professional tiny home design and building company, “who said it’s common for folks to put their tiny homes on wheels, said placement of tiny homes depends a lot on zoning.
“ ‘If the question is, “Where can we park a tiny house?” the first and best answer will always be, “Read the zoning requirements of the town [or towns] you’d like to live in before you get started to buy or build your own tiny house,” ‘ she said.” More here.
Kalunian also describes a tiny apartment in downtown Providence. All these adventurers in miniature living seem to cook on something like hot plates. Other than that I am a terrible pack rat and could never fit everything into a tiny house, having nothing more than a hot plate or camping stove would be a deal breaker for me.
Wherein the grandmother is too tired to talk but will describe the photos. Wreaths on the Colonial Inn, grandson with new truck, church nativity scene early Christmas morning, Christmas tree at John’s house, grandfather with two granddaughters.
So much fun to be around little kids at Christmas. Also very good for sleeping soundly the following night.
Here I am with my siblings, posing before the fireplace in our Christmas Eve pajamas long ago and far away. (We used to be allowed to open one present before Christmas morning — pajamas.) I’m the kid with the ponytail. Today, the boy on the left does biomedical research, the little girl is a psychiatrist, and the boy on the right writes business books.
May all the good things about the season wrap you ’round, and may the not-so-good things roll off your back and vanish.
What I liked about this story on rescuers in Iceland was how the volunteer tradition started when “women banded together and organized a rescue crew to curtail the loss of their men at sea.” The part that wasn’t so great was about tourists endangering everyone with harebrained feats for their bucket list.
Nick Paumgarten writes at the New Yorker, “Iceland, with a population of little more than three hundred thousand, is the only NATO country with no standing Army. It has police, and a coast guard, but these, like the citizens they are paid to protect, are spread thin, so come accident or disaster, disappearance or storm, the citizens, for the most part, have always had to fend for themselves.
“[Slysavarnafélagið Landsbjörg, or, in English, the Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue] has evolved into a regimented volunteer system that serves as a peerless kind of national-emergency militia. It is not a government program, and so represents a tithing of manpower. There are close to ten thousand members in all, with four thousand of them on ‘callout’ duty, on ninety-seven teams. … They are well trained and well equipped, self-funded and self-organizing, and enjoy a near-mythical reputation among their countrymen, who, though often agnostic regarding the existence of elves and gnomes, are generally not inclined toward reverence or exaggeration. …
“Landsbjörg traces its roots back to the formation, in 1918, of a rescue team in the Westman Islands, an archipelago just off the southern coast. The women on shore banded together and organized a rescue crew to curtail the loss of their men at sea, and in time other fishing communities established similar groups and protocols. Eventually, the fishing industry, as it grew, supported these efforts with donations. On land, farmers, left to their own devices, looked after each other, as they will.” More at the New Yorker, here.
You may get a kick out of the fundraising based on selling fireworks. Setting them off is legal in Iceland once a year. “Last year, Icelanders blew up five hundred tons of fireworks.”
Photo: Benjamin Lowy / Getty Images for The New Yorker “People think of the rescue teams as the Guardians of the Galaxy,” a mountain guide said. “They forget these are normal people.”
I love experiments that garner a new audience for the work of writers and other artists. I remember one effort I tried to join: short fiction for postcards. My submissions weren’t used, but I received a postcard a month for a year, each with a tiny tale.
If you’ve traveled the subway in New York or Boston, you may also have seen posters with some very accessible, but not dumbed-down, poetry.
In France, there’s a vending machine. Alison Flood writes at the Guardian, “Readers in Grenoble can now nibble fiction instead of vending machine snacks, after publisher Short Édition introduced eight short-story dispensers around the French city. …
“Readers are able to choose one minute, three minutes or five minutes of fiction, and, just two weeks since launch, co-founder Quentin Pleplé says that more than 10,000 stories have already been printed.
“ ‘The feedback we got has been overwhelmingly positive … We are getting requests from all over the world – Australia, the US, Canada, Russia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Chile, Taiwan.’ …
“The French publisher hopes the stories will be used to fill the ‘dead time’ of a commute, ‘in a society where daily lives are moving quicker and quicker and where time is becoming precious.’
“ ‘In the bus, the tram or the metro, everyone can make the most of these moments to read short stories, poems or short comics,’ said a statement from Short Édition. ‘And they can be sure to enjoy the ending.’ …
“The stories are drawn from the more than 60,000 stories on Short Édition’s community website, with the publisher’s 142,000-strong reader community selecting the best 600 for the vending machines. Users are not able to choose what type of story – romantic, fantastical or comic – they would like to read. ‘Just the length, it’s the beauty of it,’ said Pleplé.”
I am still employed at my job of 10-plus years until January 1, but since so many people are on vacation the last fortnight of the year, I got my good-bye party last week.
Wow. Only nice things were said. Kind of like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral. Here you see my friend Lillian giving me credit for a discussion group that she was more than half responsible for.
A senior vice president surprised me by researching my online theater reviews (I used to moonlight as a critic) and reading two passages that suggested a strong social-justice interest, a theme I hadn’t realized was there. Another colleague commented that she had never met anyone that nice who was also so subversive. Then my top boss stood up to redefine “subversive” in a flattering way that related to the perceived social-justice streak.
Man, now I have to live up to all that. I should say that I have worked at about 10 places since starting as a camp counsellor, and I have never had affirmation like this. A number of those places were glad to see me go. I guess I have learned to tone down the subversive side so it sounds nice.
Good news for scavengers who collect fruit they see going to waste in cities.
A new study reveals that, unlike urban root vegetables or leafy vegetables that grow close to the ground, fruit is not in danger of contamination by lead and, mysteriously, contains more nutrients than most grocery-store fruit.
Bella English writes at the Boston Globe that Amy Jarvis, of Boston’s League of Urban Canners [LUrC], was concerned about fellow forager Matthew Schreiner, who had tested positive for high levels of lead. She “went online and found [Wellesley College geoscience professor Dan] Brabander, who since 2003 has been working with the nonprofit Food Project, monitoring lead in urban soil.
“In the past year, LUrC members have given Brabander and his students 197 foraged food samples to analyze, including berries, cherries, apples, plum, peaches, and pears. Both groups believe it is the only such ‘citizen-scientist’ collaboration in the country.
“ ‘It’s an example of a successful approach to doing applied science that matters,’ says Brabander. So far, he and his students, including Wellesley juniors Ciaran Gallagher and Hannah Oettgen, have analyzed 40 samples for trace elements, both toxins and nutritents.
“Their results startled many, including themselves. Urban fruit not only doesn’t absorb high levels of lead, it has more than twice the amount of calcium concentrations as commercially grown fruit. The results were the same for washed and peeled fruit as they were for unwashed and unpeeled samples.
“The primary source of lead in an urban environment is the soil, and leafy vegetables and root vegetables, which grow close to the ground, take up lead in more significant amounts than fruit. ‘If most of the fruit is high up [on trees], that minimizes the likelihood that re-suspended soil, or soil with lead in it, will reach up there,’ Brabander says.” More here.
Photo: Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff Wellesley College student Ciaran Gallagher checks the lead content in an apple tree in Cambridge.
Not sure who put me on to this story — maybe Asakiyume, who has an interest in different cultures. It’s about languages in which a slight change in tone can change the meaning of a word.
John McWhorter writes at the Atlantic, “People don’t generally speak in a monotone. Even someone who couldn’t carry a tune if it had a handle on it uses a different melody to ask a question than to make a statement, and in a sentence like ‘It was the first time I had even been there,’ says ‘been’ on a higher pitch than the rest of the words.
“Still, if someone speaks in a monotone in English, other English-speakers can easily understand. But in many languages, pitch is as important as consonants and vowels for distinguishing one word from another. In English, ‘pay’ and ‘bay’ are different because they have different starting sounds. But imagine if ‘pay’ said on a high pitch meant ‘to give money,’ while ‘pay’ said on a low pitch meant ‘a broad inlet of the sea where the land curves inward.’
“That’s what it feels like to speak what linguists call a tonal language. At least a billion and a half people worldwide do it their entire lives and think nothing of it. …
“There are certain advantages to speaking tone languages. Speakers of some African languages can communicate across long distances playing the tones on drums, and Mazatec-speakers in Mexico use whistling for the same purpose.
“You know those people who can hear a stray note and instantly identify its pitch, for instance recognizing that a certain car horn is an A flat? They have ‘absolute pitch,’ and there is evidence that speakers of tone languages are more likely to have it. In one experiment, for instance, Mandarin-speaking musicians were better at identifying musical pitches than English-speaking ones. The same has been found for speakers of Cantonese—which has six or even nine tones, depending on how you count—relative to English- and French-speakers.” More here.
I used to be quite good at Mom Tonal Language. A change in tone pronouncing a kid’s name can convey anger or amusement or affection. I don’t use the subtleties much now that I’m a grandmother. It’s mostly the affection tone.
You have until Jan. 3 to see beloved Boston landmarks in the form of gingerbread, gumdrops, frosting, and pretzels. The annual competition is put on at the Boston Society of Architects, which has a public exhibit area on Congress Street between Atlantic and Dorchester avenues.
The public is invited to a reception on Monday.
“Please join the Community Design Resource Center (CDRC) for the Gingerbread Reception, where we will view more than 20 gingerbread designs from teams of architecture and landscape architecture firms on exhibit, enjoy light refreshments, announce the winners, celebrate the incredible bakers, and launch CDRC’s first Open Call for Projects.
“At the Gingerbread Reception we will launch our first Open Call for Projects — an open invitation to neighborhood groups and community nonprofits in the greater Boston area to apply for a design assistance grant. Underserved audiences are especially encouraged to apply, as well as projects that otherwise fall between traditional funding cracks but that somehow serve to make communities better. …
“While challenging designers to explore a new medium, this sweet event also raises funds for the CDRC. A special thank you to the Boston Society of Landscape Architects and the BSLA ‘gingerscapes’ for joining us this year!” More here.
The BSA’s photos are on instagram. Look for bsaaia. It’s fun to guess what you are seeing.
Imaginative storm drains are delivering a friendly message about protecting a river to residents who might like to enjoy more recreational river activities. The effort is one of many to improve water quality in Rhode Island.
Frank Carini of EcoRI has the story. “The health of southern New England’s coastal waters and its various, and vital, watersheds is improving, but major challenges remain, most notably stormwater runoff from urbanized areas. …
“Janet Coit, director of the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), recently told ecoRI News that stormwater runoff is one of the greatest challenges when it comes to protecting the region’s waters.
“ ‘It’s going to require a lot of small actions,’ she said. ‘We can’t deal with stormwater with just big tunnels.’ …
“Urban development has led to increased flooding, beach closures and limited access to waterways, with climate change serving to exacerbate these impacts, including those affecting marine life in Narragansett Bay, Buzzards Bay and Long Island Sound.
“In many urban areas, however, site-specific efforts to address stormwater runoff are marking progress, according to the fifth annual Watershed Counts Report.
“ ‘The urban projects featured in this yearly report can and should help drive more, broader and integrated initiatives,’ said Tom Borden, program director of the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program, which coordinates the annual report along with the Coastal Institute at the University of Rhode Island. ‘The benefits are not only environmental and societal, but have a direct link to enhancing the region’s economy.’ ”
By the way, if you live near Rhode Island and are interested in doing part-time work as an investigative environmental journalist, they have an open position. See http://www.ecori.org/job-listings.
Photo: Brent Bachelder The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council is working with artist and educator Brent Bachelder and The Met School to create storm-drain murals, such as this one in front of Donigian Park on Valley Street, along the Fred Lippitt Woonasquatucket River Greenway in Providence.
Heifer Project is a charity founded by Dan West, “a farmer from the American Midwest and member of the Church of the Brethren who went to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War as an aid worker. His mission was to provide relief, but he soon discovered the meager single cup of milk rationed to the weary refugees once a day was not enough. And then he had a thought: What if they had not a cup, but a cow?”
Recipients of Heifer Project’s cows, chickens, pigs, and other assistance commit to giving the offspring of the donated animals to others in need. That way the giving grows and spreads.
Recently, Heifer Project has been helping poor farmers in Guatemala make enough from their cardamon crops to live on.
Editor Jason Woods, has the story in the nonprofit’s magazine, World Ark.
“Miguel Xo Pop farms his own plot of land. Everyone in the Sierra de las Minas depends on two crops, cardamom and coffee, to survive. Xo and his family are no different. Traditionally, the cloud forest’s climate helps the two plants thrive, but in the past few years a pair of plagues cut cardamom prices in half and reduced coffee income to nothing.
“Recently, Xo joined a Heifer International Guatemala project that will help him keep the pests away from his cardamom while adding more crops to his farm, but the project is still in its initial stages, gaining momentum. So for now, Xo spends a quarter of a year away from his wife and five kids to earn money.”
The reporter also describes how an altruistic businessman moved to a “double bottom line,” one that includes charity.
“A couple of years ago, McKinley Thomason was searching for a way to use his Nashville-based spice business to make a positive impact. After hearing about Heifer International’s burgeoning work with cardamom, he knew he had found his organization.
“Shortly after contacting Heifer, Thomason’s company, The Doug Jeffords Co., started donating 10 cents to Heifer Guatemala for every seasoning blend sold from their J.M. Thomason line. But Thomason’s passion for Heifer’s work in Guatemala moved him to do even more.
“Thomason has been acting as a project adviser to Guatemalan farmers, sharing his market knowledge and technical expertise in the world of cardamom. He is also making connections and introducing Heifer Guatemala to other like-minded spice companies that could support this or other projects.”
If you were a toy, would you want to be in the toy hall of fame, or would you be afraid success would go to your head? I remember seeing room after room after room of dolls at the Strong Museum in Rochester, New York, so perhaps a toy just feels like one of many there.
In November, James Barron of the NY Times wrote about a big hall of fame event at the Strong. “The museum announced that just three toys — the puppet, another generic finalist; the Super Soaker squirt gun; and the game Twister — will join past inductees like the Barbie doll (1998), Mr. Potato Head (2000), Silly Putty (2001) and Lionel electric trains (2006). …
“Christopher Bensch, the museum’s vice president for collections and its chief curator, said the three new inductees easily met the basic criteria for admission. All three long ago achieved ‘icon status’ as playthings that are ‘recognized, respected and remembered.’ They also ‘profoundly changed play or toy design.’ …
“Mr. Bensch said that among the judges, the puppet was the big winner this year. ‘It was one of those “why hasn’t it happened before?” ones, which was like the ball,’ he said, ‘and Jon Stewart gave us hell for that.’ Mr. Stewart, in a segment on ‘The Daily Show’ in 2009, complained that not inducting the ball sooner was like having a ‘heat source hall of fame’ and not inducting fire. …
“[Curator Patricia] Hogan, who specializes in toys and dolls, said she had lobbied for the puppet. After all, she said, ‘Howdy Doody had his own show.’
“But what about Buffalo Bob Smith, the human host who bantered with the puppet that was the namesake of that 1950s children’s program?
“ ‘It was called “Howdy Doody,” ‘ she said. ‘Get over it, Bob. You’re just a puppet to Howdy.’ ” More here.
Photo: Heather Ainsworth/The New York Times John Neidrauer, left, and Andrea Whitmarsh used Kinect motion control to play with classic toys at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester.
Until January 24, you can see at the ICA in Boston an exhibition on the artistic legacy of one of the most interesting colleges ever. It couldn’t last, but while it did, it burned with a bright flame.
Let me drop a few names of people who worked and studied there: Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly, Jacob Lawrence, Willem de Koonig (painters); Buckminster Fuller (architect); Merce Cunningham (choreographer); John Cage (music); and Robert Creeley (poetry). I am leaving out too many, including the women, whose names are not as well known.
I went on my lunch hour and so swept through the exhibition too fast. I confess I am not crazy about much of the art from this period. My favorites here are Motherwell, Lawrence, Cunningham, and Creeley. But how amazing that they all gathered North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, energizing one another across disciplines and making the school their life for a while, even pitching in with the chores.
Surprisingly, the things I took away with me were two ideas I’d like to apply to art with grandchildren.
I’ve done photographic paper before (you put objects like leaves or shells on the paper, leave it in the sun a few minutes, then run in the house and rinse it in water), but someone in the show did a full body. I might try a hand or a face. I also loved the textures of one piece of art I saw. Not quite a collage, it used string and bumpy surfaces in imaginative ways that reminded me of a project I watched Earl Gordon do when I was a child. He sliced the seed pod of a flower and used it as a stamp. Got to try more of that.
You can read about the school and the exhibit here.
Photo: Craig F. Walker/Globe
I liked “Female Figure” on sun-exposed photographic paper, by Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg, left.
These photos are from my rambles in downtown Boston, which I will be leaving at the end of the year for a new commute to Providence.
The first picture shows strange reflections on an iconic piece of local architecture. Then we have musicians in South Station, an octopus sculpture at the convention center, a lovely floral display by the landscape genius where I currently work, fall color in the Greenway, and more color along Fort Point Channel in front of the Children’s Museum.
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