CURRENT EVENTS

ART STUDENT

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The Brahma Teapot with the lid off and tipped back to show the bull. I made an entire teaset (the goldsmith who commissioned it did not want anything representational) and dozens of mugs in this style back in the day. The clay looks like porcelain, but is only a low-fire white clay. The patterns are underglaze and protected by clear fired glaze.

Back when I was an art student, I thought I might earn money, if not actually a living, from my art. I envisioned a dramatic difference in my life compared to how I was raised.

I was first a Ceramic Art major at the University of Washington. In the clay side of the Fire Arts Building, we were divided into throwers and handbuilders. I was a handbuilder and our work was primarily sculptural art. It was gallery stuff and I did eventually exhibit in galleries and museums (Bellevue Art Museum and Tacoma Art Museum), but selling was what throwers did because they were in to “production.” That is, they made many of a single shape and sold bowls and mugs and so forth. The year of the first University Street Fair in 1970, I had still been in high school, but I sold handbuilt work. I did that again after I had studio space in the Fire Arts Building, in 1972 perhaps. I took over firing the Skutt kilns with everyone’s work, and completed dozens of handbuilt mugs for sale. A year or so later I juried in to the Bellevue Art Fair. I handbuilt entirely different mugs, dozens of mugs in the style above, and I was disappointment when a friend came along with her ceramic-handled flatware and sold more than I did. I mean: crushed with envy, destroyed. Of course, she is still making a living with her art, so she had the better instincts even then.

Long story short? Selling my work became a painful experience. I gave work away. I traded a teaset for a stunning 8″ gold stickpin. I completed two other pieces on commission and was shafted one of those times. I should focus on success, but I wanted then (and still today) to be the best or not at all. Selling, despite my day job in retail, remained a frustrating and unsuccessful experience, a reflection of failure, inadequacy, foolish hope.

But here I am, weaving shawls for sale. A stack of three quilts, unpriced but intended for sale. And my stories too.

I was still almost young when I began writing seriously. I had a fantasy of selling my first novel and making enough money to create that coveted dramatic change in my fortunes. I would quit teaching and write full time. I would pay off my mortgage. I had the same fantasy about the second (also unpublished) novel.

The first time I made actual money from a story was just a couple of years ago with “If It Were True Owls Dream” which was a fantasy story. My first fantasy and first cents-per-word payment. It made me laugh. I did not need the money as I felt I had and no longer had delusions about fame and fortune. By then I was beginning to wonder about how to construct a story where (nearly?) all sources of conflict were absent. And I thought that perhaps I could make some money selling SF/fantasy. Maybe. Or not. Did it matter?

But then Trump and covid19 and rejection from publishers. I send essays off to Dinty Moore and he is kind enough to publish them in the Brevity blog. Mostly recently I wrote an essay about the creativity we will find after much of what we assumed was true about the world, how things work, and ourselves is unraveled. That essay goes live next month. Does anyone think this will be over next month? Convince me.

And then I decided to serialize some of the story that has consumed my writerly imagination for a long time, years. That is why bits of “Butterfly Fontanelle” showed up here. A little at a time goes up as I work through the only draft I could find on this computer. There is a 37k word version someplace, I think. I am working from the fourteen thousand word version. It’s growing a bit. Each day I work on it, I am a little bit surprised at what is happening. I am trusting that by the time I put up the 15th or 18th installment, it will end properly, that it will have gone someplace. I honestly cannot recall how this one ends. Not for sure. Maybe. We’ll all find out together.

And I have retired from teaching. The mortgage is paid. And here is a dramatic change to my life.

SHUT DOWN

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

Gary and I were awake at three this morning. I am trying not to read the news, not to compulsively check statistics for an entire day. I deleted unread all the news in my mailbox right away this morning without even reading headlines. Instead, I worked on the story, revising what will go live today. Gary has brought me coffee, and then drank it himself. Coffee allows him to go back to sleep. (which we did.)

I think today I will finish the second shawl of this warp. I was still weaving yesterday past seven in the evening so there is not so much left of that dreamy ocean-colored shawl. (The photo shows just the start of that piece.) I usually take a risk with the third length of weaving, choosing unexpected colors for the weft. I am not decided how the last will go, will I use the odd multicolored skeins with violet that I have laid out or something entirely different?

Continue reading →

DREAMING

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IMG_5660.jpegLast night, just before sunset, a deer appeared on the shore. Not a good thing in daylight. She was wet and confused and kept to the surf line. We see deer tracks frequently in the sand on our morning walks, but never the two deer themselves. This one moved along just fine, though she did not look happy, and the tourists with their dogs had all gone home. Local dog-owners came out on the beach, saw the doe, and leashed their dogs. Perhaps she had been separated from her companion, which I assumed from its smaller tracks was a yearling fawn? She stood right in front of our house, trotted north and then back south. And then the sun went down.

This morning, I dreamt we were living in our first house in Seattle again. Our dog Volant Sequoyah (“Bowzer”) had jumped the fence into the neighbor’s fenced yard and I’d left him there for a day and a half to teach him a lesson. Ian and Kerris showed up with packages of ground beef and hamburger buns just as I brought Bowzer home, and we didn’t want it because we’re vegetarian, but I thought about feeding Bowzer the meat. He was hungry. There was also a sequence of visiting the local school, which had been temporarily housed in an upper floor of a fancy office complex.

Well. Dreams are like that sometimes, a mixture of what we know and wish and experience muddled with places we have been, people we care about. Alan commented on the phone that the house yesterday that the house he and his wife first bought was up for sale and that set me thinking about our old house in Seattle. Online it is valued at nearly a million dollars. We paid less than twenty thousand for it in 1975.

At the beginning of 1978, Gary had left the zoo job and was tutoring American Indian students in the Edmonds School District. He had just been accepted to a grad program at the University of Washington’s School of Education for the fall. He planned to teach elementary school. I think he would have been wonderful at that job, he enjoys goofy humor and his impulse toward soothing and calming others would have served his students well. I was teaching art classes at Forest Ridge, an elite girls’ prep school on the other side of Lake Washington. We had six Afghan Hounds then, including Bowzer and his sister, and were active in showing and lure trials. I was a licensed field trial judge and we traveled often across the PNW and to Canada for shows and field trials. Instead, Gary’s father was dying of cancer, his family was falling apart and he quit school to support them. My grandfather’s third wife died and Genevieve left me the family house at the urging of her second husband. We thought we might buy land outside the city.

Instead we decided to have a family. We moved to my grandfather’s beach house in Oregon, the state where I was born. Gary took a job in a farmers’ co-op because he had worked in the Woodland Park Zoo commissary before he started back to school. we had our children, and I became an English teacher.

All in all, the dream seems more likely than that doe in the waves.

 

IMG_5656I should note that I took the photo above with a zoom from our deck. We are careful to avoid approaching wild animals. It is distressing for the animal and can make a bad situation deadly. Locals understand it is best not to “help” a wild thing.

Oh! I should have put up Assignment #3, only because I said I would do five. No one seems to be writing them, but I will post “The Idyllic Place” tomorrow.

 

PEACEFUL DAY

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We each have our favorite colors of sea glass. Gary almost never finds the dark orange “brown” glass. Cobalt blue (the piece above is more than 50mm across and 6mm thick) is cause for celebration.

Today I will bake rolls and roast green beans. My mother would have made lamb, but we are vegetarian and I have a casserole of mac&cheese already made and ready to go in the oven. I found fresh blueberries on our weekly grocery run, so there will be a pie. No ice cream, but blueberry pie. We will sit at table and remind ourselves of our good fortune. Continue reading →

TEACHERS & other essentials

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

Nurses, doctors, firefighters, the EMTs who answer calls, ambulance drivers, therapists, technicians, and pharmacists.

A local hospital administrator must leave her infant son to ensure medical care is available for the rest of us.

Like other essential services, children need education and local teachers are still at work, striving to accomplish what they can without actually having students in front of them. It is a challenge. One teacher, working from home in her basement, commented, “As you can imagine, it is not best practices just to put your assignments online and think they will be able to do them.” She has always done so very much more than that. And every day.

A local trucker friend who delivers fuel is also working, often with people who do not think any of this is a big deal. He worries about his mother, in her 90s.

The nearest grocery is five miles from us and having trouble keeping supplies in stock. Their employees are gloved and masked, but they are still open.

Our favorite bakery in Tolovana delivers bread at their door.

No one wants to take cash, but we are not spending much either. We stay close to home and do not sleep well the night before we must go out. But there are invisible people still plugging way and keeping things moving, people who still go to work each day, people who log on to their computers and do the job, people who are old themselves but still taking care of older relatives, people who fill my yarn and book and CD orders, people who gather to sing virtually.

Thank you. Thank you every one.

HOW LONG? 2 charts

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

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“How long the coronavirus can survive on surfaces

“The researchers behind the new study tested the virus’ life span in a 71-degree-Fahrenheit room at 65% relative humidity. After three hours, the virus had disappeared from printing and tissue paper. It took two days for it to leave wood and cloth fabric. After four days, it was no longer detectable on glass or paper money. It lasted the longest, seven days, on stainless steel and plastic.*

“Strikingly, the authors wrote, the coronavirus was still present on the outward-facing side of a surgical mask on day seven of the investigation. That’s the longest duration of all the materials they tested.”

NOTE: It lasts longer on cooler rather than warm surfaces. Some research has also suggested that increases in relative humidity reduce how readily the virus can spread between people. Your mail is most likely safe on delivery according the the article.

Gary wiped down a wine bottle with alcohol wipes, but we’re mostly avoiding bleach. Mostly, we allow things to sit for days. We wish freezing or refrigeration made a difference (no). We wish vinegar killed it (acidic—wouldn’t that be nice? but no). We wish we didn’t have to think about this at all.

from Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-lifespan-on-surfaces-graphic-2020-3?utm_source=DI20B8U3&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20_feb_corona&utm_term=04_06

STATS

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

Explain this, as of 4 6 April:

219,564 residents in Jackson County; 2133 2269 tests; 33 confirmed cases, still no dead

346,868 residents in Marion County; 1567 1716 tests; 188 198 confirmed cases, 5 dead

In Jackson county, as of 4 April, Oregon had managed to complete 1 test for each 102 residents.

In Marion county, Oregon had tested 1 in 221 people. Yet Marion has many more cases and five people have died.

In our most populous county, Multnomah, as of 6 April there have been 4209 4603 people tested with 209 233 confirmed cases and six seven dead. There are 811,880 people in Multnomah County, which means Oregon had tested only 1 on 193 176 people in our most densely populated county, but six seven have already died.

There are 3,831,074 people in Oregon, 18,925 19,556 have been tested (one person in 202 195), and 999 1068 are confirmed positive, 27 have died.

What’s the deal with Jackson County? And while I’m at it, what’s the deal with that person with Marin County, California plates shopping at the local grocery?

Yeah, I should be nicer, but Gary says my mother would be proud of me: “Going through everything, trying too make sense of the puzzle. That’s what your mother did.” It’s true, Mom cared about numbers and fairness.

 

SCHEDULE

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The first few times a juvenile eagle lands on shore they stand around for several minutes (up to an hour). I always assume they are unhappy to be wet and to be forced to launch from flat sand.

Today, a walk creek to creek, a juvenile eagle, meditation on the value of lies, and a little brainstorming to prepare for Monday’s writing assignment. The best one is above, the lies below. So brainstorming.

Monday’s nonfiction writing assignment was a great favorite with my students, the assignment they completed early in the year and which they still loved by the end. It will be satirical and more than a little silly. It concerns a trivial annoyance.

Continue reading →

update on BLUETONGUE

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The photo has nothing to do with any disease. This is a beaching of many thousands of tiny Velella vellella. They can grow to be a few inches long, but these are as small as the head of a pin.

I posted a few days ago about my friend who, years ago, was accidentally infected by bluetongue, a disease she was studying in sheep. She insisted that she could not possibly have the disease, but that she certainly had the antibodies in her blood. The disease of cloven-hoofed mammals, was not supposed to infect humans at all. But it did.

Not that it matters all that much to most of us just now where covid19 originated, but it seems that deliberate release has been ruled out, but an accidental one has not. Pangolins apparently have little to no part in this disease—it’s bats. Covid19 is derived from a coronavirus infecting bats. Here’s the catch: there were no bats in the seafood market where the disease supposedly first appeared. A wild bat might have infected someone in the market, of course, but more troubling is that nearby was a lab studying coronavirus in bats. Again, there is absolutely no one (outside of the wackjob conspiracy theorists) who believes it was released deliberately on human populations. It’s more likely someone was either very unlucky or simply careless.

“Richard Ebright, a Rutgers microbiologist and biosafety expert, told me in an email that ‘the first human infection could have occurred as a natural accident,’ with the virus passing from bat to human, possibly through another animal. But Ebright cautioned that it ‘also could have occurred as a laboratory accident, with, for example, an accidental infection of a laboratory worker.’ He noted that bat coronaviruses were studied in Wuhan at Biosafety Level 2, ‘which provides only minimal protection,’ compared with the top BSL-4.” —The Washington Post, 2 April 2020

With over a quarter of a million Americans already diagnosed with covid19, having a look at how this started is going to matter in the future if we have any hope of surviving a repeat. (A reminder the the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19, the so-called “Spanish Flu,” was not from Spain and may have started in Kansas. Troop movements spread it all over the world. According to the CDC: “It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.”)

 

source: “How Did Covid-19 Begin? Its Initial Origin Story Is Suspect” by David Ignatius

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/how-did-covid-19-begin-its-initial-origin-story-is-shaky/2020/04/02/1475d488-7521-11ea-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html?

POWELL’s

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I love Powell’s Book Store, well, of course I do! What’s not to love about a book store that shelves used and new books, the largest book store in the United States. (Perhaps still the largest in the world?) May the store continue to thrive.

Founded in the 70s, the store was relatively good to employees until the owner claimed betrayal when workers tried to organize. That happened years ago, and the fight was bitter but the store is unionized. Later, when Michael Powell’s daughter took over the business, the corporation fought against raising what remains among the lowest corporate tax rates in the nation. Reviewing their Mission statement and list of seven “Values” the closest they come to valuing their employees is “We’re conversation starters. We’re an eclectic team of readers with broad interests and strong feelings about the books on our shelves. And we’re committed to sharing our knowledge and enthusiasm with our customers every day.”

Sadly, employees are not always as well-informed as you would hope. Gary was in the checkout line when Ursula K. Le Guin walked through the store. Gary turned to the young checker, and gestured. “That’s Ursula Le Guin.”

“Who?”

The most famous author in Oregon.

Anyway, qualified help is often an issue. Here’s the latest from Publishers’ Weekly:

“Powell’s Books announced that they have rehired some of the employees they fired earlier in the month due to strong online orders. It was widely misreported that the store has rehired over 100 people—whereas what ceo and owner Emily Powell wrote on Facebook was that ‘over 100’ people are working at the store again. The union representing many Powell’s workers clarified to the Oregonian ‘that the bookstore has only recalled 49 union workers, and said that the rest of the people now working are managers who are doing the frontline selling, shelving and shipping jobs that used to done by union workers.’ (In mid-March the store laid off roughly 85 percent of its 400 employees.)

“Note, too, that Powell wrote they will not pay vendors ‘for the time being,’ while acknowledging ‘we can’t do that forever.’ The statement goes on, ‘Our focus is on keeping Powell’s moving, keeping our community healthy, taking care of our wonderful customers, and having as many folks working with health insurance as our sales can support.’ “

Recently we have sold several hundred dollars of books back to Powell’s. Gary is the one who manages this and each time the buyer comments on the perfect condition of the books. If I have read them, they still look brand new. My family was always meticulous in our care of books. And we still have thousands shelved in our home. (Yes, you can have too many books.) There is no “free public library” that we can access. The nearest one is useless, and I have to pay to use the one fifteen miles away. And they are all closed now anyway. If I love the book, I keep it, and if not, it’s sold. I thought very highly of My Dark Vanessa, but I passed it along and Powell’s bought it, even though the cover says it cannot be sold.

Both my husband and I have ordered books from Powell’s this month. At least three books are waiting for us to pick them up during our next run to the post office.

I’m guessing that Powell’s can afford to pay their bills.