About Guerrilla Scholarship "Guerrilla Scholar" is a nominal job title of Dr. Sheldon Greaves, the author of Cogito! It is briefly defined as pursuing the life of the mind through unconventional means and methods. This web site is for the promotion and support of independent scholars, amateur scientists, artists, and all those who enjoy the life of the mind but can't, won't, or ought not to do so within the confines of academia.
Guerrillascholar.com is dedicated to the proposition that to acquire knowledge, no matter how obscure, is an essential human activity, and that using our insight to improve the world is the highest expression of the human spirit.
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As any regular reader of this blog will tell you, I am less than enchanted with the content of mainstream “news”. This is particularly true when the subject turns to some celebrity, whether they are from Hollywood, sports, the ultra-rich, or anywhere in between. Suddenly, there is this endless, annoying 24/7 saga that dominates the headlines, endlessly hyped for days or weeks until the very air seems saturated with it. Obvious examples include (in no particular order) the Tiger Woods scandal, the passing of Michael Jackson, Monica Lewinsky, the Balloon-boy Hoax, and the death of Anna-Nicole’s breasts. The sad thing is that there is often some real human pain and humiliation in these stories, but rubbing our collective faces in it for ratings or (worse) to create counterfeit political momentum in the case of Monicagate, makes it positively toxic. One could feel sorry for these people and their loved ones if their woes were not so over-sold and ultimately trivialized.
Since we dropped our cable service a couple of years ago, I have made an effort to adopt a mindset that avoids these kinds of trivialities on the assumption that I have a finite amount of life to live, and only so much bandwidth at any given moment. I read books, which are usually ad-free. I no longer follow sports, having long ago realized what total soap opera sports reporting has become. I choose my web sites carefully, and have trained myself to totally ignore all web ads. And now, so help me, it looks as if I have avoided getting hosed by one of these pointless brouhahas.
I have learned just in the last couple of days that there is some guy named “LeBron” who is apparently some sports figure. He is in the spotlight about something, probably having to do, directly or indirectly, with money. At least one large ego may be involved. Don’t know, don’t care.
From the odd headline I see, it looks like there are people who think this is a really big deal. But I haven’t clicked any of those headlines to check. As I said: don’t know, don’t care.
Here’s the rub: I have, without filtering for this particular story (because I didn’t know about it), dodged what is almost certainly yet another stupid, inane, pointless pseudo-story that would have only served to waste my time when I could be learning or doing something truly interesting. They missed me. All those gigawatts of media blather blasting away, trying to batter their way through, and they couldn’t touch me. But other stories that actually mean a damn, did.
Do you have any idea how giddy with excitement that makes me? It’s a taste of freedom from inanity. It’s a proof of concept that one can create a circumstance that avoids the distractions that shave so many IQ points off hoi polloi.
All that effort to manage my information stream has created a small, delectable taste of freedom. How sweet it is.
One of the few things everyone–and I do mean everyone–should do before they die is go to a stage production of a major opera by a world-class opera company. The San Francisco opera certainly qualifies for the latter, and Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre definitely fits the former. Last Saturday my wife and I had the pleasure of witnessing such a production. Even though we were way, way up on the second balcony, the acoustics were remarkably good. The performance was marvelous.
Wagner is sometimes viewed as something of a bombast and even a stereotype, but that stereotype is indirect evidence of what a defining presence he is in the world of opera. Die Walküre (The Valkyrie) is the second of four operas of Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Niebelungen (The Ring of the Niebelung), an extended recasting of German mythology and folklore woven into a remarkable story of power, greed, love, obligation, and consequences. Myth is powerful. It’s human, and it is something we tend to misunderstand and underestimate.
Also a huge “Thank you” to cousin Theodore for the tickets, and to all the other members of my extended family who were part of the meet-up before and during the show. Most of these people I had either never met, or hadn’t seen in at least 20-30 years. That’s way too long to have been out of touch with such great people.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I must confess that I have always had a hard time with Mahler. He tends to take his time saying whatever it is he is going to say, and woe to the listener who can’t maintain a sufficiently long attention span. At least that was my conclusion the first time I heard a piece played by Mahler by a live symphony orchestra. That was in Salem, Oregon. I was about fourteen. So maybe it’s understandable. My next exposure to Mahler was a performance of a piece I believe was called something like “In den Himmelreich” or something to that effect. This time the location was a small but lovely symphonic hall in Kortrijk, Belgium. I was twenty. I enjoyed the performance, but still didn’t feel like I was really grasping what Mahler was about.
So, it was with some sense of nervous anticipation that I accepted a complimentary pair of tickets for a performance this last Saturday (12 June) for the Redwood Symphony’s performance of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony at the Main Theater at Cañada College in Redwood City.
Alma Mahler, who started it all. |
One cannot help but admire a local, volunteer symphony taking on such an ambitious work. The task becomes more impressive when one learns that Mahler never finished his tenth symphony. Only the first movement and about thirty measures of the third movement were complete when he died. There were also some sketches, some of which did not come to light until many years after Mahler’s death.
Then there are the circumstances surrounding this storied work. Mahler and his beloved wife, Alma, were on the outs. In 1910 she had an affair with architect Walter Gropius (whom she married after Mahler’s death). Mahler had sowed some of the seeds of estrangement earlier by demanding that Alma, herself a composer of some talent, give up composing on the rationale that there could be only one composer in the family.
Then there was the “cursed” nature of composing more than nine symphonies; Beethoven and Bruckner had both expired between symphonies nine and ten. It is said that after composing his ninth symphony Mahler wrote his symphony “Das Lied von der Erde” without numeration in order to dodge the deadly double digit. As one of Mahler’s contemporaries, Arnold Schoenberg famously remarked in 1912:
“It seems that the Ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if that something might be imparted to us in the Tenth, which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not yet ready. Those who have written a Ninth have stood too near to the hereafter. Perhaps the riddle of the world would be solved if one of those who knew them were to write the Tenth, and that is probably not to take place.”
As a side note, Schoenberg’s comment is interesting in light of the 41 symphonies of Mozart or Haydn’s 104. Perhaps it is because even among the musical titans of the day, these two composers had long since passed into legend, seemingly immune from the boundaries that constrained later artistic minds.
But if this numerological peril meant anything to Mahler, there is little evidence of hesitation on his part. He plunged into the task of composition shortly after completing his ninth symphony, but died in May of 1911 before the work was completed. The incomplete manuscript was kept secret by Alma for years. When it was finally released it was found to contain tortured notes and exclamations by Mahler, most of them to his beloved and increasingly distant Alma. Several famous composers were approached about completing the symphony, and they wisely refused. Others, such as Alma’s son-in-law Ernst Krenek, reconstructed parts of the symphony but were never quite comfortable with the daunting task of reconstructing the artistic mind of Mahler. Over the years several versions have been published, each one providing ingenious solutions to this massive musical puzzle.
The version performed by the Redwood Symphony was reconstructed and orchestrated by Rudolf Barshai in 2000. Barshai is both a musicologist and a conductor, which is the most appropriate perspective from which to undertake this intimidating exercise in musical necromancy. I was told that this version was selected because it is one of the livelier and more vibrant of the versions, and the performance brought this out.
The first movement (Adagio) started with some disagreement among the violas as to the pitch in the opening bars. But the group quickly found its voice and what followed was well played with an excellent sense of ensemble and dynamics. Several quiet sections were played with skill and sensitivity. This movement closed with a blaze of dissonance, resolving to a quiet, sublime finish.
The Scherzo was for me (and quite a few others) the highlight of the performance. This movement starts out with a kind of meandering melodic voice, slowly building as it progressed. I found myself thinking of a river, growing as it was fed by its tributaries, to a bold and striking conclusion, which elicited a smattering of well-deserved applause.
The third movement (Purgetorio: Allegretto moderato) theme at times reminded me distantly of a sort of danse macabre. The movement seemed to alternate between playful and stern, even intimidating.
The fourth movement is designated “Allegro pesante. With greatest vehemence”, and in this performance it sounded vehement. This did not, however, overpower some very poetic, lithe, even whimsical interludes as the piece built its way forward. The movement found its anger in time to make its point before a nearly seamless transition into the Finale (”Slow, but not dragging”). This transition is marked by the punctuation of a single drum beat, inspired by a funeral procession that passed the hotel where the Mahlers where staying in New York in 1908. The Finale started slow, but grew to a beautiful, lyrical texture, eventually soaring to a climax before fading like a warm sunset.
Without the tortured marginalia found in the fragmentary manuscript of this work, it is hard to imagine that such beauty could have come from a mind as tormented as Mahler’s was at this time of this life. But we have seen this before; Beethoven could not have been happy at not hearing a single note of his “Ode to Joy”, but it did not stop him from producing a benchmark for symphonic rapture. The Redwood Symphony and Conductor/Director Eric Kujawsky are to be congratulated for taking on such a challenging and remarkable work and delivering a polished, moving performance.
The question remains open whether I can now say that I truly “get” Mahler. I will not recklessly say that the aesthetic scales fell from my eyes due to this one performance. But I have far more insight into this musical giant than I did before, and I look forward to other opportunities to explore his life and work. In the meantime, I encourage you to the Redwood Symphony and other examples of local artistic excellence.
References:
In preparing for this review, I consulted several items which I am pleased to recommend to the reader seeking further information:
Michael Steinberg, “Symphony No. 10 by Gustav Mahler”. A downloadable version of this article is available at: http://www.mahlerarchives.net/archives/steinberg.pdf
Teng-Leong Chew. “Performing Versions of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. Naturlaut vol. 1, no. 2, 2002, pp. 7-10. A downloadable .pdf version of this article is available at: http://mahlerarchives.net/archives/chewM10.pdf
No, the latest offering by Bay Choral Guild was not program of favorites from Woodstock. The title of last Friday’s concert, “Peace and Love” alludes to the works that made up the program. The concert we attended was the first of three over this last weekend in Campbell, Palo Alto, and San Francisco.
The “Peace” part of the program was an original composition by BCG Artistic Director and Conductor Sanford Dole, “The Fabric of Peace.” This in turn is composed of five smaller pieces based on a wide variety of texts, from the Rig Veda to the poetry of Bay Area poet Elisabeth Eliassen. Personally, I love to see texts from wildly divergent sources juxtaposed in order to heighten their commonalities. In this case it was an effective way to treat a topic like “peace” which has (let’s be honest) been so heavily schmaltzed, sugar-coated, and trivialized that it can be hard to take seriously as a subject of art.
However, there are apparetly still some bold souls out there, because this piece was commissioned by the Oakland Symphony Chorus to be performed at their 50th anniversary gala concert. The musical style is quite contemporary, almost jazzy in places. And yet each piece was distinct in form, theme, and execution. With one exception, the theme leaned heavily toward unity, which for me was a refreshing change from other treatments of this topic I have seen in the past. My only quibble with this particular performance is that some of the denser, tighter contemporary harmonies used in many of the pieces made it difficult to pick out lyrics. This is especially hard when you have a large group. That said, allowances must be made for the acoustics of the Campbell United Methodist Church chapel, where the performance took place. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the acoustics are adequate, but not ideal for choral music.
There is one piece, however, that deserves special mention, and that is “The Exercise of Singing” based on a text by William Byrd and even borrows a line or two from the music of Byrd’s Mass in Four Voices. This delightful text describes the benefits and virtues of teaching people how to sing. While not strictly in keeping with the theme of “The Fabric of Peace”, it was still a delightful diversion and would do well performed as a separate work in its own right.
The “Love” part of the concert comes courtesy of Johannes Brahms’ “Liebeslieder” (Opus 52), a collection of eighteen short songs whose texts reflect the range of love’s fancies, follies, and frustrations. The program ended by another Brahms work, “Neue Liebeslieder”, Opus 65.
As with all Bay Choral Guild performances, this one was a fun program ably performed. The printed program distributed to concert-goers gives a list of upcoming concerts, and this season promises to be as enjoyable as those of previous years. This is a group that deserves your generous support. I noted that the 2009-2010 season was made possible in part by a generous donation by choir member Stephen Kispersky in honor of his parents. Mr. Kispersky was featured as a soloist during the Brahms Liebeslieder “Nicht wandle, mein Licht” which says well of someone who is willing to put his mouth where his money is.
To learn more about Bay Choral Guild and their upcoming concers, or to make a donation, visit their web site at http://www.baychoralguild.org/.
Not too long ago in a fit of the blues, I got the urge to do something really horrible to myself. So, I’m sitting at the local Denny’s and I notice something different from the last time I was there. Large televisions, mounted on the walls and hanging from the ceilings, all blabbering away with specially made Denny’s programming, blippy little short bits about sports, movies, upcoming television shows and so forth.
It appears that some genius at the Denny’s Central Command decided that my dining experience would somehow be enhanced by a steady stream of television commercials. I have two answers to this. The first is that when I have some extra cash, I’m going to buy myself a TV-Be-Gone. Everyone with an IQ higher than the body temperature of road kill should own one of these babies and use them regularly.
The second answer is something along the lines of, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Is there any place one can go anymore and not find the local atmosphere saturated with some form of advertising? And not just a sign or a poster, but in the case cited the output of a whole studio’s worth of moving, talking, amplified content. This stuff is going all the time. Yes, there is a lot of repetition, but they have to keep adding more material. Wouldn’t it be cheaper for Denny’s to just drop this nonsense and allow their patrons to enjoy their food in peace?
If you look at old ads, in print or broadcast, they appear quaint. Even innocent. The hooks are obvious, deployed in a way that seems almost demure. Over the years the marketing business has become more sophisticated, but so also has a large fraction of the intended audience. I see it as a kind of selection pressure that more and more (but not nearly enough) people seem to understand the explicit dishonesty and almost combative manipulation that goes on. This is especially true of political advertising (Thanks, Lee Atwater!).
Full disclosure: I understand that marketing is the lubricant that keeps business moving. It helps get the word out, and sells stuff. I will also acknowledge that while I understand intellectually how marketing works, for the life of me I totally suck at self-promotion, or promoting what modest business ventures I’ve tried to undertake. So you could chalk up my absinthian vehemence to plain jealousy.
But I also have lately begun wondering if part of the epidemic of mental depression that we see in the modern world is not at least partly the result of a multi-billion dollar industry whose sole purpose is to create industrial quantities of discontent. Make someone unhappy, or touch that particular nerve, and then sell them the “solution” which they know in their heart of hearts won’t do a damned thing. And when you are of limited means, as I am at the moment, the negative effect is multiplied all the more.
While I’m on the subject, I’ve also notice that advertising, especially on the web, tends to dilute, obscure, or drown actual information. If you go looking for information on a topic that draws a lot of advertising, you will find that there is a tremendous quantity of bullshit out there masquerading as information, and much of that is advertising or supporting an ad campaign of one kind or another. So it actually can make it harder to sift out the information you want from all the chaff. By the way, you’re unlikely to see that when you research something in a public library.
So let me propose an idea: Create an “ad-free zone” somewhere in your life. In that zone, you have no electronic media that carries advertising. No magazines with flashy ad spreads. No windows looking out over billboards or the like. TiVo is your friend. So is canceling your cable subscription all together. Make your space quiet, if you like, or loaded with boisterous music–but no advertising. If you try to create an ad-free zone, you will find that it can be (a) surprisingly difficult to do and (b) well worth the effort. It’s not good to let someone tell you what to think when their salary depends on them succeeding.
Now, spend time there. Read (ad-free) books, listen to music (your own or some ad-free alternative like public radio or satellite radio), or watch a DVD (you’ll have to decide whether product placement in a movie counts as an ad). Make it an older movie if you want to be sure.
The fact is, as far as the advertising world and their paymasters are concerned, you are just a little cash container to be squeezed until there is nothing left. The ad man is not concerned for your health, wealth, or sanity. They will say whatever they think will sell, as loudly as they think they need to, until you cry uncle and fork over your dough. So make yourself a space of freedom from their yammering. Then make another, and expand them. Seriously, consciously cutting one’s exposure to advertising can be one of the mentally healthiest things one can do in this world.
For a long time I have been watching the movement known as Creationism as they have attempted to push aside the teaching of evolution in the schools. In its place, they would teach something called “creationism” which started out once upon a time as the creation story found in the book of Genesis.
That didn’t work, and so the they have re-cast and repackaged the idea in different guise. The current form is known as “Intelligent Design,” but it has met the same fate as previous incarnations, mostly because it was just another form of creationism and therefore, a form of religion rather than science.
The Creation of the World. Giusto de Menabuoi (14th century), c. 1376. Fresco. Baptistery of the Cathedral, Padua, Italy. |
The landmark ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (download the decision here), established that ID is a form of religion and therefore violates the Constitutional separation clause. But ID continues to pop up, most recently in the Texas textbook massacre fiasco, where a small group of conservatives have sought to insert creationism into school textbooks, which would then find their way to many schools outside of Texas, since the Texas market is so big is tends to drag the textbook market of other states along with it. It is just the latest in a long, bitter struggle that goes all the way back to the Scopes Trial, and some ways prior to that.
But the more I observe the creationism/ID debate, the more curious I find it. Allow me an extended tangent to try and explain what I mean.
In the ancient Near East, creation stories or cosmogonies served a very particular purpose. That function was to establish political legitimacy. So in ancient Mesopotamia, you have these great annual rites, called the Akitu festival, where the cosmos was symbolically renewed and a cosmogony was read or performed as part of the celebration. But the Akitu was also about reaffirming the political power of the king and those who supported him. The Babylonian Epic of Creation, the Enuma Elish, also elevated the god (in this case, Marduk) or gods associated with a particular ruling cadre, lending them legitimacy.
Likewise, a very short cosmogonic opening in the Epic of Atrahasis establishes the place of humankind in the greater scheme of things: humans were made by the gods to do the hard, dirty work of keeping the canals clear, making mud brick, and so on that the gods had grown tired of doing. Humans were little more than worker drones.
You get the same thing in ancient Egypt, where the three major priestly centers of Memphis, Hermopolis, and Heliopolis, each had their own cosmogony by which they vied with each other for religious and political supremacy.
The Ancient of Days, by William Blake. Watercolor etching, 1794. |
If we take a look at Genesis, we see similar hints but only if you get back to the original language. Scholars have long known that the cosmogony in Genesis 1 and 2 is laced with references, wordplay, and so forth that assumes knowledge of Babylonian language and religion. For instance, when God creates Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs, this employs a rather complex pun on the name Eve (”Life”), the Babylonian cuneiform sign for “Life” which also happens to mean “rib” and “woman.” In other words, this creation story is in tension with Babylonian cosmogony and is asserting a different vision. Another example is when Genesis asserts in highly forceful language that God created humanity in the divine image, this is, I believe a direct rebuke to the Babylonian vision of humans as made only for drudgery.
This goes some ways toward explaining why the Torah–a book of law, not science according to Judaism (and it is their book, after all)–starts with an account of the creation of the world. Most biblical scholars agree that Genesis took its final form during and shortly after the Babylonian Captivity, and as such it had to assert itself from that influence. In short, it had to establish itself politically before it could rightly be considered legitimate law.
To summarize, the ancient cosmogony was a political statement, designed to establish political legitimacy.
And now we have the creationists, who have fixated on the story of creation from Genesis, albeit buried under ever-deeper layers of prevarication, euphemism, and an increasing reluctance to actually invoke Genesis directly. This particular flavor of Christianity has been struggling against the march of modernity for a long time, which at the end of the day is a political struggle, and they know this.
What I find so curious is that of all the positions they could use to assert themselves, they could embrace deliverance from sin, making the world better, fear of the eternal torment of hellfire, Jesus Christ as Savior of the World, and so on. But in their effort to wrest back what they see as declining political influence, they turn to a creation story.
I am not certain why this is the case. It could be driven by an intense fear and hatred of Darwin and evolution, but this answer does not quite satisfy me. I suspect that something more, something deeper is going on. I am relatively certain that they would disagree with the idea that the ancient function of a cosmogony was political. If I were fluent in Jungian psychology, I might wonder if they were tapping into some kind of archetypal image. Some of the great scholars of cosmogony such as Mircea Eliade would probably think so.
I simply offer this as an observation that frankly fascinates the hell out of me.
For some time I’ve been working off and on with my old friends at Iron Crown Enterprises on a new online game written for Facebook users.
The game is called Hot Money and it is “a challenging game of corporate and political intrigue and the pursuit of fame, riches and glory.” It is also highly satirical and perhaps a bit cynical, since it sort of assumes that once you get past a certain threshold of wealth, power, and fame, no matter what outrages you commit, the worst that is likely to happen is a bit of bad press.
Screen Capture of a page from Hot Money. |
Facebook users can play the game by going to http://apps.facebook.com/hotmoney/
Back during the Great Depression (the first one), a board game called Monopoly took the country by storm when it let ordinary people play the part of ruthless landlords and financiers seeking to dominate their markets. Perhaps Hot Money will tap into a similar zeitgeist.
Putting this game together was a lot of fun. My job was to come up with “actions” (things you do in order to accumulate points), perks, and lackeys (things you acquire to improve your game character’s ability to advance and fight with other players). Material was easy to find; just a glance at the headlines provided all kinds of grist to work with. In fact, there were quite a few times when our cynicism just couldn’t keep up with reality (as some are pleased to call it).
Anyway, if you have a Facebook account, I invite you to give Hot Money a try. I offer it to you as an anodyne to these ridiculous, maddening times.
So, I’m driving home on Friday (the 16th) after mowing a friend’s lawn. My cell phone rings and I tap my earpiece to take the call. It was Denise, sounding worried. She was at her current favorite pond near Penitencia Creek doing nature photography and had noticed a young pied-billed grebe (Podilymbus podiceps) that had become partially entangled in some plastic mesh. She’d been working for about an hour to try to capture it and take it to the nearby wildlife rescue center, but the bird could still swim well enough to elude capture. Could I come by, she asked, and lend a hand?
I swung by and Denise pointed out the bird in question. It had strands of plastic across the corners of it’s beak, preventing it from closing all the way. It also couldn’t eat, drink, or groom itself. Mesh also had gotten wrapped around the body so that its wings were pinioned, and one leg was somewhat restricted in its range of motion. But, it could still swim faster than Denise and I could wade or even swim (and we tried both, repeatedly) fast enough to get close enough to capture it. We didn’t have a net or anything like that, just a damp towel.
Figure 1: A young pied-billed grebe with a serious problem. Photo by Denise Greaves. |
Now this was not just any youngling. Denise had photographed this bird before when it was just a fuzzy hatchling, and had documented its growth over the last few weeks. That made it personal, and we were determined that it should not succumb to something as infernally stupid and pointless as dying a slow, painful death because of a scrap of litter. You can see some of this from the photo in Figure 1. Frankly, that picture is hard for me to look at.
But as I watched the bird, examining it from a distance as best I could I was able to see that it was frustrated, tired, and scared. Its feathers were bedraggled and wet. So we waded out into the pond, at times up to the armpits, trying to coax it back to shore where one of us might be able to grab it. One problem was a fence that goes all the way around the pond, right at the water’s edge. It’s a needed safety precaution, but in this case it kept us from getting close enough quickly enough to catch it.
Another problem came from its fellow grebes. It seems that when a young one shows signs of distress, the others of its species go all Darwinian and turn on it. We saw other grebes chasing it, and at times even trying to drag it underwater. So this bird was having a very, very bad day.
So, we waited, and waded, and wallowed, and followed, and schemed, and swam, and watched our young friend for the next three hours, looking for an opportunity. Finally around 6:00 PM we got a break. The grebe was swimming very close to shore near where I was crouched down, watching. One of the other grebes got very aggressive and chased it out of the pond and, it an effort to escape, our grebe squeezed under the fence–the very fence that had caused so much trouble for us. It hobbled a few inches further away from the fence, and I knew this was going to be my best shot at catching it.
Luckily, I still had the wet towel. Wadding it lightly, I pitched it from about eight feet away. Every toss of wadded paper towards a wastebasket across the room, every pick-up game of “horse” in the driveway was, I feel, focused on that moment. The towel landed in precisely the right spot: partially covering the bird, and also partly blocking the exit hole back through the fence.
I pounced, and managed to get both hands and most of the towel around the grebe. At this point, Denise gave a cry of triumph mingled with relief, and ran over to help. While I kept the patient from squirming too much, Denise fumbled through the blades on my Swiss Army knife until she got the scissors unfolded, and then proceeded to clip anywhere she saw plastic strands. Gradually the bird started to unfold itself from its bonds, which made it a little harder to hold onto until Denise draped a flap of towel over its head.
We made our way towards the Wildlife Center, hoping against hope that we could get some help there. To our immense relief, someone was there even though it was after hours, and they took our bird in for treatment.
We spend an anxious weekend wondering how things were going, but a call on Monday confirmed that the bird had not only survived, it had responded to treatment so well that it had been released. Naturally, Denise went straight up to the pond to get a picture.
Figure 2: Our young grebe on Monday the 18th after being released: happy, healthy, and back home. Photo by Denise Greaves. |
As you can see, it’s doing well and is back to enjoying being a young pied-billed grebe.
A couple of thoughts have come out of this. First of all, we want to thank the Wildlife Center of Silicon Valley. This wonderful organization rehabilitates and releases injured wildlife, and does excellent educational work. They deserve your generous support, and I urge you to visit their web site (http://www.wcsv.org/) and make a donation. We have taken other wildlife in distress there, and they do a fantastic job of healing and returning our injured wild neighbors to their homes.
Another thought was the level of focus both of us felt about this project. There seemed to be a unspoken understanding that we were going to rescue that bird no matter what. So when we finally succeeded, the sense of relief was almost overpowering.
I also found myself filled with feelings of utter disgust, both at myself and my fellow humans for using the kind of plastic products that can so easily entrap an animal, condemning it to slow, agonizing death. If you don’t already, make sure that any plastic materials that could do this are rendered incapable of doing so before you throw them out.
The human propensity for caring about the welfare of animals made much of our civilization possible. It was a necessary trait for domesticating animals. It is still necessary, perhaps more than ever. Caring for nature is perhaps one of the best ways I know of to experience some the better sense of what it means to be human. Listen to the “tree-huggers”; they are on the right track.
Update: 22 April 2010
Since receiving the good news about the grebe’s recovery and looking more closely at the photos Denise took, it’s possible to see some of the damage left by the plastic netting. The two photos below bear this out. The photo on the left was taken before the incident, on 09 April. The bird had been feeding and it’s head was wet, but compare the corner of its mouth with the photo of the same bird on 19 April, shortly after its release:
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| Pictures of “our” pied-billed grebe, before and after being entangled in some discarded plastic mesh. The “after” photo on the right shows injuries at the corner of the mouth. Photos by Denise Greaves. Click to enlarge. |
The marks left by the plastic strands that were caught in the corner of the bird’s mouth are still visible, especially if you enlarge the photo. When we caught the bird, we also noticed a rather ugly cut on its tongue, but apparently that injury looked worse than it was.
In any case, we’re glad to see our friend back in its accustomed haunts.
On the twentieth of this month I quietly marked the one-year anniversary of my layoff. I have been, since then, living the life of the un- and under-employed. I’ve watched the national debate on the economy and jobs, education, health care, and many other subjects become suddenly personal. I have felt fear, hope, displacement, dejection, disorientation, righteous anger and unspeakable rage.
On the whole, the experience of long-term joblessness is no picnic. It messes with your mind. Makes you question yourself at every level, keeps you second-guessing everything you do or consider doing. The appetite for risk dries up, boldness quails. The buffer between having enough and to spare and living under a bridge grows thin. You can see how it might actually happen, with just a little more bad luck. The less you have, the more you have to lose. Incidentally, if you really, really want to understand the corrosive effect of long-term joblessness both on individuals, families, and society, read the outstanding piece in the March Atlantic by Don Peck, “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America.” Read this and you will understand far more about what we have done and continue to do to ourselves than most TV pundits, although arguably that isn’t saying much.
The experience has given me a lot to think about, not the least of which is the trap of defining ourselves by our jobs. I do not say “vocation” because that is, literally something to which one feels called, so in that instance self-definition makes sense. But if you do some job just to keep food in the fridge and the lights on, is that really you?
Still, there are some positives that came out of this. Among other things,
- I got my ham radio license (KI6YPF)
- I advanced my studies of Calculus and Modern Greek considerably
- I got to make some headway on my “books I want to read” list
- I became deeply informed on matters of economics and health care
- I developed an unhealthy appetite for political blogs
Okay, four out of five’s not bad. I also managed to write a couple of articles, do some lecturing, participate in some excellent musical projects, and spend a lot of time thinking and rethinking about what life is about and what it means when you’ve stripped it down to the essentials.
Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, although we got close to the brink, we never quite fell off. I am very aware of people who have it much, much worse then we have (so far), but part of our good fortune is due to some important preparations I made against the coming of hard times. Those precautions stood me in good stead, although some of them would be much harder to accomplish in the current climate.
I’ve learned a few things as well during the period of enforced leisure:
- Be there for your friends, and they will be there for you. In most cases, community is the key to surviving a personal or family crisis.
- Knowing how to do a lot of different things can save you when things get really, really tight.
- What you are is not necessarily what you do.
- Don’t trust the market. If you’re near the bottom of the food chain, the “invisible hand” is usually giving you the finger.
- Our economy is a mess, and is likely to get messier. The better alternatives lie in local, small- to medium-scale enterprises that don’t depend on the whims of megabusiness.
- One of the best things you can do with your “free time” is to raise hell with the political and corporate entities that are working directly, indirectly, or indifferently against your interests.
- You can learn to put aside the existential angst; it’s fiendishly hard, but worth the effort.
- Never, never, never, never give up, but don’t buy the boostrap myth. Get help if you need it.
That’s enough for now. More thoughts will certainly follow. Recent developments have produced the very real possibility that I might actually have some regular income in a few weeks, although it won’t be a “done deal” until the first check clears.
Stay tuned…
One of my favorite Bay Area cultural institutions performed last night (o5 March) at the Campbell United Methodist Church. The Bay Choral Guild presented a wonderful program of some of the essential masterworks of Renaissance and later sacred choral music. The program was billed as a selection of Lenten Devotions Through the Ages, although a few sub rosa “alleluias” managed to slip through (Note for non-geeks in Christian liturgy: this performance took place during Lent, and in some Christian liturgical traditions is it customary to forgo music that includes “Alleluia” or similar non-Lenten sentiments. But since this wasn’t a church service, I suspect that BCG won’t be getting any tickets from the Lent Police).
In carrying off this performance, the singers had to overcome a minor obstacle; the hall itself. Churches through the ages have had to strike a balance between a lively, sustained acoustic, which favors much of the sacred choral repertoire, and a less reverberant environment that lets you understand what the preacher is saying. Electronic amplification can bridge much of this gap in either direction, but my sense is that sustained reverb is not a priority in most modern church spaces. Pity. Because the music presented last night was of the kind that just cries out to be heard in bright, resonant spaces that sing.
That said, the choir compensated, I’m told, with some adjustments to their arrangement which took advantage of the characteristics of the church. The result was an outstanding performance. The blend was excellent with a good sense of ensemble. Lyrics were sharp and pronounced with distinction. The dynamic variation, particularly in the later pieces that make more use of that kind of thing, was carried off with confidence and emotional content. In particular, the performance of John Tavener’s Funeral Ikos was thrilling, raising Richter-scale goosebumps.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The first piece on the program, Duarte Lôbo’s Requiem was special because I have some history with it. Years ago my wife and I were living with someone one who, coincidentally, is currently a member of BCG. One evening he brought home a CD titled “Portuguese Polyphony” that contained a superb recording of this mass. It quickly became a favorite of all of us. It was a real treat to hear this marvelous music performed so well. This was followed by an equally inspired performance of three motets by Christobal de Morales.
The second half of the program began with Tenebrae Responses by Carlo Gesualdo, followed by a short Motet for Passion Sunday by Frank Ferko. We were then treated to the Tavener I mentioned earlier. The program ended with four beautiful motets by Josef Rheinberger.
Bay Choral Guild has recorded several excellent CDs of their music. I am not usually one to be pushy about such things, but I do hope that they strongly consider making a CD of this particular program. It was one of the most enjoyable BCG concerts I’ve yet heard.
To learn more about Bay Choral Guild and to make a contribution, visit their web site at http://www.baychoralguild.org/.
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