Summer Books

Summer's the great time for reading, at least until those early evenings of winter which my friend Steve Cooper likes, because then you can settle into your chair by 8 or so and read. I decided it was silly to have a separate reading blog and will just note things here. Here are highlights from May and June:

Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers: The divine Mrs. W. at her most lyrical. I first saw parts of the TV adaptation, then read the book. The period is fascinating to me, as are the glimpses of society life in America and Europe, young lads and lasses on the make. Will the girl get the right guy? Will the cad win her heart? Not a dull moment here, and of course the lovely scenes of Newport and life in its summer "cottages." I went to college with Beryl Slocum, whose family owned one of the houses on Ocean Drive, and I once toured Rosecliff with Kate and Zack when they were little. Rosecliff was used for parts of the movie of The Great Gatsby, while, jarringly to a native, Long Island Sound was substituted for the lively Atlantic coast.

Daniel Pink's The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: the Last Career Guide You've Ever Need. Doug Johnson of the Blue Skunk Blog says that every high school library needs a copy of this book by Pink, the author of A Whole new Mind, a book already in my school library. So I bought it and then was delighted to find that our new academic dean was giving each of us a copy of WNM for our summer reading. i thought I'd start with johnny, as it's a quick, graphic novel study of pink's six rules. It's a little late in the game for me, but as I continue to work and think about my work and as the school and library continue to evolve in interesting ways, I'm glad to have these tools.

Salmon

In Oregon salmon are everywhere. At the Bonneville Dam and the zoo and the airport, in murals and polished granite floor mosaics, bronze fish leap and live salmon swim up ladders and rivers. Children and adults in Portland and the region are reminded in public spaces by murals, mosaics, sculpture, viewing places, friendly interpreters of the natural world in which we humans still live despite our sometime attempts to pave it all over or rush by.

Oregon seems to invest a lot more of its resources than usual to projects which connect people to nature. From the Bonneville Dam to the Oregon Zoo, in the railway station and on the waterfront you can walk on images of the rivers and trace their courses on walls and imagine the journey of the salmon from the ocean to breeding places where the eggs hatch into young salmon that then return to the ocean.

I don't know enough to know whether the balance of protection of wildlife and use of the river to generate power is an ideal one, but I liked the Bonneville Dam, where the salmon ladder and the hydroelectric generators are both on display, and where if you are lucky and go on a quiet day you might get invited into the fish counting room, to see the fish pass the window, and then you might be entertained who volunteers at the dam information desk by "MacPherson's Retreat" or Dave Mallett's "Inch by Inch [The Garden Song]" and you can sing along if you like.

Finale: Eating Salmon. Right past this counter at Pike's Place in Seattle I picked out a piece of smoked salmon for my cat-sitter, but I don't have a picture of the fish nor of the poached salmon a couple of weeks later at Jacob's Bar Mitzvah in Allentown, Pa.

Bird Cloud, Oregon Dunes

I have many images from my trip to the Pacific Northwest, but in cleaning up my library today I found a scrap of yellow paper on which I'd written this, and it will suffice for tonight:

Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.

-- R.W. Emerson

The picture doesn't quite capture the birdness of this cloud over the Oregon Dunes, but the real thing made me think of Lionel Feininger's "Bird Cloud," one of my favorite paintings when I was in college and discovering paintings.

I'm frustrated by the temporary loss of a second set of pictures and hope to find them soon, to show the prevalence of the idea of Salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

This is a shard.

The Pacific Northwest: the Confluence Project

I'm visiting Zack in Portland for a roomy two weeks, and there's so much to show and tell. Today I want to mention Maya Lin's Confluence Project, a series of installations along the Columbia River, ending at the mouth of the river, where it flows into the Pacific at Ilwaco. Lin agreed to do this project for the 200th anniversary celebration of the Lewis & Clark expedition. Her intention was to show the chosen sites not just as they are now, but in a way that makes the visitor simultaneously inhabit past, present and future. Like the work of the archaeologist or fossil hunter, who draws our attention to the life that has been in a place before us and thereby makes us aware of the continuum of time in landscape, Lin's work here recreates past eras in a living way. These sites are not at all like the "living history" exhibits we can see at the Mayflower replica in Plymouth, Mass., nor even at Washington and Cape Disappointment State Park.Plimouth Plantation, nor the recreations at Old Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg. Those places have their use in giving us an image of human life in a particular landscape and try as best they can to show what life was like back then. But Lin's goal is more subtle: to show the continuity of human life in a specific location. In preparation for the work at the Cape Disappointment site, work was dune on reclaiming some of the dunes and natural features, and Lin's projects, created out of natural materials simply and subtly show that continuity. Her fish-cleaning table, above, was made out of a slab of basalt, which abounds here, and both reminds us of the Chinook's reliance on fish and provides a working space for fishermen now.
This is what we saw in the bay right off the end of the table.

Here's the site where you can read about the project and see a video of Lin talking about it:
http://www.confluenceproject.org.
Note: The Chinooks, like so many tribes, were nearly decimated by the arrival of the whites, and were about to gain recognition once more as a tribe at the end of Clinton's presidency. But when Bush came in he denied them this courtesy. I hope that the thinking of the people who commissioned this project and others like it and who encourage similar projects in the schools will prevail in the years to come.

So much depends upon...

... a giant spider
passing over the city of Paris,
egg sac hanging below *

Giant spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, in the Jardin des Tuileries, in a photo of a picture torn from the New York Times and hanging on my fridge

Like the giant polar bear that used to grace my daily commute, this spider delights my soul. I hope she will come to the US. I might go to see her if she does. She's been to London, so maybe D.C.? Unless the President is an arachnophobe...

* in case you expected a wheelbarrow and a chicken, just wait -- they're coming soon.