An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
I recognize that I have been complaining a lot lately. Mostly about shipping companies. So here is a good omen: “Soul Queen” arrived in near-perfect condition a couple of days ago, shipped more than five months ago, and presumed lost early in the summer. Gary wanted to calculate how many miles we’ve walked since then. He thought maybe we could have walked her here from Georgia.
I didn’t think so, and it’s not nice, and I am too lazy to go back and count up the total distance of our walks. (Do I really want to know?)
She’s here. That’s what matters. Our regular UPS driver was not even aware she’d been missing or anything. Insurance had paid. We’d all thought she was lost forever. And here she is. Good times.
It’s true that the space bar on my computer isn’t working so I have to stop and add spaces to my words and correct the Autocorrect (“to my” turned into Tony). And our property taxes . . . And one of our tenants is moving out in three weeks. And even the shipments from Finland and Estonia and Slovakia (music, music, and yarn) did not take this long. And I’d found two other paintings and paying again for “Soul Queen” was a painful pinch.
It’s also true that we both love her. Isn’t she marvelous!
So. Good omen? I am not superstitious, but I think: good omen!
Predictably made me cry in less than a minute in. Anger is not enough for me. I have to believe that we can do better and I have to want that enough to believe we can have it. So I cry in my grief and hope and love.
I read an article in The New York Times about 500+ people who gathered to discuss politics over a year ago. Before. Before covid and distancing and . . .
“Carole McGowan, a 74-year-old Democrat from Albuquerque, worries that Americans now seldom work together across different viewpoints, or prize a range of viewpoints at all.”
I hear you, Carole, and I have been hearing people ask for a multi-party system for several years. A multi-party system requires compromise and building alliances across parties, which we do not do in our country. Since before Mitch McConnell declared more than a decade ago that he would ensure NOTHING Obama wanted would get past him, most Republicans have refused to collaborate, compromise, or even discuss how to reach common ground. That so-called “Do-Nothing” Congress is now all on him. The Republican party has lost its soul.
By contrast, consider what the Democratic candidates managed to do in working through health care and global climate change and a dozen other issues, what Biden did in choosing Harris, what all those men and women did after arguing and talking talking talking and finally endorsing a man they trust. No one gets everything they want, but every single candidate got an American they could all stand behind.
Too many people have lost track of what conservatives used to be like, when even Republicans didn’t think people should die because they were too poor to afford a doctor, and Ted Kennedy fought for a national health care plan his entire public life, when we did not think that wealth and good fortune and good health and a family who could afford to support us meant we deserved every good thing while others got nothing but scorn. The time when we thought the right to life meant something beyond insisting the baby be born, but also that he got to eat and attend good schools and live in decent housing.
Gary found a poster that begins: “The America I believe in” and then leaves a blank for people to fill in.
Today on Brevity‘s blog, Lindsey DeLoach Jones illustrates “The Lost Art of Pretending: Imagining a Positive American Future” with her daughters’ play. Only by imagining what is possible, can we work toward a positive goal. Her idea of pretending focuses on our need for a “robust moral imagination.”
“We need a collective imagination like the one Martin Luther King shared at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. King insisted, “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair… Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” At his core, Dr. King was a writer. His dream speech was wishful thinking, yes, but it was backed by action, protest, force of will. One man’s private imagination had untold constructive consequences in the real world. We seem to think we have outgrown this kind of thinking, that hope is for suckers. But to abandon the project of pretending is to abandon any hope for improvement.”
Gary is beginning to say: I am going to miss this. The madness and ridiculous claims. This is what red glitter party hats and alcohol can do for our mood.
Yes, we are not entirely responsible.
The “witch hunt” has landed. We turned the baby tree lights on and the sky in the west is cherry red. It took him forty-five minutes to say “beautiful.”
It took him an hour to say “the rapist and murderers” from Mexico. I will say that my Hispanic students, regardless of nationality, were good people. Oh yes, the “most racist president,” a “dog whistle.” The treatment of drug history or incarceration—oh, my goodness, Biden admitted a mistake. Trump keeps blaming Biden for every single thing (including a lot of imaginary things) that happened in past administrations. Obama’s was never allowed to do what it needed to do. The Republican Congress explicitly and deliberately (thank Mitch) obstructed every single thing the Obama administration tried to pass.
“Many other things.”
Biden attempts to be a reasonable human being; Trump says whatever occurs to him at the time.
Biden is hope, Trump is despair.
“”He’s actually president of the Unites States. I can’t believe it!”
We are watching New Tricks and then something funny to get the taste out of our mouth. Fortunately it’s about old bands from the 69s/70s (Blind Faith and Cream, the original Fleetwood Mac and someone playing a righthand guitar upside down and backwards) and so Gary keeps commenting about the guitars.
Today would have been her 91st birthday. Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929. I just read through the story collection, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, which contains Le Guin’s earliest work and “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”
As soon as I open a document and before I begin typing, I select ‘Layout’ to indicate margins on my page. The guidelines do not show when I print, but they help me know where I am as I write.
Ursula K. Le Guin helps me know where I am.
She is not gone.
from Brevity
The obituaries are respectful. They list her more obvious accomplishments—the awards, the publications, her activism and generosity to other writers. They want to label her a “popular fantasy” writer, though these are not terms she would have chosen. “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” she asked in 1974. We dismiss what we consider “unrealistic” in our country, but that is a mistake. In the hands of a philosopher with substantial anthropological credentials, essays and poems, novels and stories are not escapism but challenges to our imagination.
For more than twenty years, I began my Junior English classes with Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” (1982) from Buffalo Gals. I read the five pages aloud, and then we talked about the nature of betrayal until the bell rang.
That most famous story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), provokes questions: Would readers walk away or stay in paradise. Are we willing to allow another pay for our perfection? They are troubling questions, but contain another, underlying moral assumption: Must someone pay? In our superstitious faith in balance, do we demand another’s pain for our pleasure?
She gives us the suffering child in the basement because we insist that child exist.
“If you cannot or will not imagine the results of your actions, there’s no way you can act morally or responsibly,” Le Guin said in 2005.
My husband was standing at an information desk in Powell’s Book Store, a couple of years ago, when he recognized Ursula coming up the wide stairs and duck around into the Purple Room.
“There goes Ursula Le Guin,” he said to the millennial behind the counter.
“Who?”
We laughed about this again just the other day. Young sales clerks being what they are, they will learn.
Imagination is not mere child’s play, it is the only way we pursue what is possible, what is grand and just and beautiful.
She should have had the Nobel. She should have lasted longer because we need her here. We should have appreciated her more while we had her. My deepest sympathy to her family, her closest friends, and to all the rest of us. ___
Jan Priddy took classes from Ursula K. Le Guin, took tea in her Cannon Beach kitchen, ferried her to readings, and attended Jane Todd’s writers’ book club where Molly Gloss sat on her right, Ursula next, and Cheryl Strayed on her left. She read her books. They both had two years of Latin in high school and loved the beach.
My husband ordered a pair of shoes identical to the pair he’s worn out and plans to use for gardening, replacing the identical pair before that, which has holes. In one day this order of shoes traveled via FedEx from Knoxville, Tennessee to Nashville. Three days later they made it to Troutdale, Oregon outside Portland, Oregon and more or less 100 miles east of our home. Three days after arriving in Troutdale, they had traveled further away, 167 miles north to Kent, Washington. I predicted that.
If a used paperback book purchased from a charity shop had gone USPS from the beginning, I would have found it in my box the last time I went to the post office. Instead it was shipped via a USPS “partner,” One Stop Mailing. That book’s journey started in Portland, Oregon, then it went to Illinois. It’s in Las Vegas today.
You can’t make this silliness up.
The painting shipped via UPS from the other side of the country is lost forever. Now, every time we see a shipment arrive in Hodgkins, Illinois, we hold our breath till it leaves that hub.
The hand sewn doll from Russia took months to get here. I suspect U.S. customs took her apart because she wasn’t put back together quite right. But at least she arrived.
The US Postal Service does not deliver to our physical residence. This is true for several communities in our county. The thing is, they do almost always deliver.
A FedEx delivery person walked into our garage unmasked a couple of weeks ago, and because of that I tried very hard to find a shipper of the popover pan that would deliver to our post office box. The shipper accepted our P.O. Box address but then could not deliver to the P.O. Box. “We never deliver to Post Office boxes,” I was told by FedEx, the shipper I had been trying to avoid. Well, then why accept the package and ship it across country . . . ? That led to a series of desperate measures on my part and eventual delivery of the popover pan to a drop-off station fifteen miles north, after a replacement popover pan arrived our Post Office box, and eventually yet another popover pan via FedEx. Gary is afraid we have been charged for all three; I am certain we have been billed for just one. I even contacted the company to ask how to pay for the excess, but they don’t want me to pay anything more. The pans are made in America and if I am right about what we’ve been billed, I will go order more stuff from them. (If they promise not to ship FedEx.) They really did go overboard making it right.
We order used CDs and books, fabric and handspun yarn, and the part Gary needed to repair the phantom flush of the toilet. He tried to buy that one locally, but the store was so crowded he decided it was safer just to order online.
Since we try not to pick up the mail more than once (or twice) a week, we pay close attention to tracking. The local drop-off station for private shippers (who eventually received and delivered two of the popover pans) says the rush of shipments has already exceeded what he would normally expect around Christmas. He’s a little concerned about how everyone will manage in a couple of months.
For a few weeks in midsummer, I ordered nothing except food. But yesterday I ordered a skein of yarn and then another skein from the same hand spinner in Texas. The vendor messaged me, suggesting that she refund the purchases so that I could reorder them together and earn free shipping. That was just so sweet! I look forward to yarn arriving though it does mean I will have to get the next warp on my loom sometime soon.
All of this fuss about shipping is trivial, we know. There are more important, life-altering events heading our way.
In the mean time, tracking provides much-appreciated comic relief.
“I look at the ocean every day, for hours at a time. Perhaps [Homer’s] wine reference refers not to hue, but purely to darkness, richness. The ocean’s surface is various, it glisters and gleams, lies flat and dull, is blue or green or gray or purple. I have seen the water’s surface appear both dark and the color of wine.”
Allison K Williams recommended I listen to a Radiolab podcast about color. For people interested in color, this is a good podcast. (This is where I admit how much I do not enjoy podcasts. It was a challenge for me to listen even though color is a fascinating topic to me.) And Gladstone’s observations about color in Homer’s work . . . this led to the absurd theory that no one could see blue or most color until recently. sigh It’s “ridiculous,” as the presenters in the podcast say, but some people did take him seriously and on some level it’s sort of true. And here we go with them insisting “blue is actually very rare in nature.” Not true, but even though I had not read this theory, I suspect they are right that you “don’t need a name for a color until you can create it.” I had hypothesized that myself, but blue is the last and red is the first color name in nearly all cultures. Blood. You have to notice a color as a color to name it, and apparently to “see” it. Red is at least as difficult to create as blue in fabric and even more difficult in glass or glaze. Yet we notice blood more emphatically and emotionally than blue.
The UK had plant dyes of madder for red and woad for blue until they found access to cochineal (an insect that dyes red) and indigo (a plant with the same chemical found in woad that dyes blue). In the mean time, yellows and greens are easily achieved with all sorts of plant sources. Purple comes from over-dying red with blue or vice versa but in ancient times, a rich purple came from a particular Mediterranean shellfish. I got it from purple iris flowers, though it was a fugitive color. Cobalt blue, derived from cobalt carbonate, is also fugitive in fabric but one of the most stabile colors in glazes.
In my public high school, I used cobalt carbonate to make blue glazes and radioactive “vanadium stain” to create a brilliant yellow glaze when I was 15 years old, but I only got a lovely pale violet (using nickel as best I can recall). Red was impossible to achieve at the temperatures I was firing—the chemicals (such as cadmium) vanished into the air in an oxidizing environment. Copper gave me only green glazes, and a blue-green when a tiny amount of cobalt was added. In a reduction kiln (where a fuel burns away the oxygen) copper can produce red-copper glazes. In making glass, red is created with gold. That might work in glazes too, I do not know. It would have been an expensive experiment. Today I would not be allowed to do any of this as the chemicals are all toxic. I used asbestos gloves to unload the kilns too.
I first studied color theory in my freshman year of college as an Art major at the University of Washington. A boy in my Design class who thought he knew everything began arguing with what we were learning about color mixing. (Yellow and blue make green etc.) Hazel Koenig patiently explained that the colors of pigment and light mix quite differently. The perception of light through three color receptors (red blue green) is not at all how we interact with colors in the physical world of pigment or paint.
Demi Lovato, performing “Commander In Chief” during the Billboard Music Awards, broadcast on Oct. 14, 2020 from the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Well. I cried.
If you can’t see this video here with many people seeming to sing, maybe go find it on YouTube. I did my best. It’s wonderful.
“NBC reportedly edited from broadcast the word ‘VOTE’ in large letters behind her during Lovato’s pre-recorded performance. The network published the original edit of Lovato’s performance on their website, with the large backdrop appearing at the end, but this version was not aired during the Billboard Music Awards telecast. Instead, Lovato’s performance ended with a closeup of the singer looking down at her piano, sans ‘VOTE’ visual. Before the telecast ended, the NBC Entertainment account tweeted out a photo of Lovato’s performance with “VOTE” being a dominant aspect. Even though this image did not air, Lovato retweeted it without comment.”
Lovato’s tweet.
A reminder to us all, those of us who went to Sunday School or Temple or had parents who sat us down and reminded us to think how the other person feels, those of us who refused to accept the cynical message that winning is the only thing. You are not alone. We are not alone. America is better than this.
By facing the president head-on when other artists have been oblique, and confronting him on a human level, the US pop star’s song Commander in Chief has intense potency.
Responding to the scolding of a Republican fan on Instagram yesterday, Lovato wrote: “I literally don’t care if this ruins my career. This isn’t about that … I made a piece of art that stands for something I believe in.”
“I’m urging you to look out for one another, to support your loved ones, your neighbors, & those you may not have met yet in your community.”
—Demi Lovato on Instagram
•
I cannot discover who is signing on this video, but I break down every time she’s up. Anyone know who she is?
Despite nearby forest fires and smoke and helicopters, power outage, impossible travel and seclusion due to covid, and an earthquake for Heaven’s sake—despite these trivial challenges, a former student and friend managed to marry today in a beautiful backyard garden. Her father was the officiant, her mother spoke, a neighbor added heartfelt wishes, the couple said their vows and danced, and two people who love one another are married.
Something wonderful happened.
[I won’t identify the couple as I do not have permission. Gary and I attended virtually.]
&PRIDE Press 