More Madonna, Less Jesus

Places to Read in Massachusetts

Most of my vacation last month was spent in on the side of Mount Monadnock, but I spent the a few days in Massachusetts. As the weekend went on an organizing theme unfolded.

After a delicious local food called “Fish and Chips” with “Chowder” my host and I walked to downtown North Hampton and then to Smith College. We naturally gravitated to the library after our walk through picture-perfect forests of gold and red. Smith’s Library, offers students a “Learning Commons” which are a relatively recent innovation: libraries provide scholars what’s needed to collaborate around digital information: large monitors, data projectors, movable furniture, white boards. I dropped into Smith’s by accident, but then I realized that I wanted to see as many of these places as I could.

So my hosts offered to take me on a tour the next day. But later that night, we stopped in at The Raven, where I bought the collection of Emily Dickinson I posted about earlier.

The next day, we visited Mt Holyoak, and the Reading Room at the Williston Memorial Library, where we find this poem.

READING ROOM
Williston Memorial Library

The chapter ends. And when I look up
from a sunken pose in an easy chair
(half, or more than half asleep?)
the height and the heft of the room come back;
darkly, the pitched ceiling falls
forward like a book.
Even those mock Tudor stripes
have come to seen like unread lines.
Oh, what I haven’t read!

– and how the room, importunate
as a church, leans as if reading me:
the three high windows in the shape
of a bishop’s cap, and twenty girls
jutting from the walls like gargoyles
or (more kindly) guardian angels
that peer over the shoulder, straight
into the heart. Wooden girls who exist
only above the waist–

whose wings fuse thickly into poles
behind them — they hold against their breasts,
alternately, books or scrolls
turned outward, as if they mean to ask:
Have you done your Rhetoric today?
Your passage of Scripture? Your Natural
Philosophy? In their arch, archaic
silence, one can’t help but hear a
mandate from another era

and all too easy to discount
for sounding quaint. Poor
Emily Dickenson, when she was here,
had to report on the progress of
her soul toward Christ. (She said: No hope.)
Just as well no one demands
to know that any more … Yet
one attends, as to a lecture
to this stern-faced architecture –

Duty is Truth, Truth Duty — as one
doesn’t to the whitewashed, low
ceilings of our own. Despite
the air these angels have of being
knowing (which mainly comes by virtue
of their being less to know back then),
there’s modesty in how they flank
the room like twenty figureheads:
they won’t, or can’t reveal who leads

the ship you need to board. Beneath
lamps dangled from angel’s hands–
stars to steer us who knows where–
thousands of periodicals
unfurled their thin, long-winded sails;
back there, in the unlovely stacks,
the books sleep cramped as sailors.
So little time to learn what’s worth
our time! No one to climb that stair

and stop there, on the balcony
walled like a pulpit or a king’s
outlook in a fairy take,
to set three tasks, to pledge rewards.
Even the angels, after all
whose burning lamps invoke a quest
further into the future, drive
us back to assimilate the past
before we lose the words.

No, nobody in the pulpit
but for the built-in, oaken face
of a timepiece that –I check my watch –
still works. As roundly useful as
the four-armed ceiling fans that keep
even the air in circulation,
it plays by turns with hope and doubt:
hard not to read here, in the clock’s
crossed hands, the paradox

of Time that is forever running out.

Mary Jo Salter

Around the corner from the Reading Room is Mt. Holyoke’s Learning Commons. As I walked in, I realized I had read a paper about this one. This is one of the best in the country.

I interviewed the consultant, and asked her questions that you can’t get from papers, like “How many consultants do you work with? How many supervisors do you have? How are you trained? What do you do when you are helping someone in-person? What do students need help with the most? How do you and your co-workers collaborate? Who do you escalate to when you don’t know the answer?

Things I liked about this facility: the beautiful octagonal reading room, art on the walls, the group study rooms.

I also learned that people like to read near windows.

Here’s a window seat at Mt. Holyoke and a similar group study area at a popular bookstore, The Bookmill, in Montegue, about 20 minutes from Northampton.

The Bookmill offers this message to departing customers:

A tribute to Mardi Wormhout

John Laird wrote an insightful reflection on Mardi Wormhout’s leadership during the year after the quake in today’s Sentinel.

Predicting Quakes

This list appears in Sandy Lydon‘s lecture handouts this week:

Most Notable Santa Cruz County Earthquakes Since 1950
1865 (October) : estimated 7.0 on San Andreas fault, damage in Santa Cruz
1868 (October): estimated 7.0 on Hayward fault, damage throughout county
1890 (April): strongest in Pajaro Valley, chimney and brick walls
1906 (April): damage throughout county, 7 deaths in Hinckley Canyon
1926 (October): damage in Pajaro Valley
1983 (May): Coalinga, some damage in county
1984 (April): Morgan Hill, some damage in county
1989 (October): Loma Prieta, extensive damage in county, 7 confirmed deaths.

What’s with April and October?

Last night I went to an event at Cabrillo and saw a presentation by Tom Bleier who owns a company that is researching if it is possible to predict earthquakes from the very low-frequency energies produced by rock under stress.

The website of the company is http://www.quakefinder.com/ but it seem to be broken. Blieir didn’t seem like a crank, but he’s privately funded and the UCGS doesn’t have anything to do with him. He’s training students from high schools all along the San Andreas to build instruments and deploy them, thus building a network of earthquake detectors. They aren’t predicting quakes yet, they are simply gathering data to test the hypothesis.

Here’s a news story:

http://www.youtube.com/user/quakefinder#p/a

He seemed to be claiming that his research shows that someday we could know that an earthquake was to occur 14 to 15 days ahead of time. How would that change things? It would change everything. We could all lay in water and soup, and prepare to camp out for a week or so. We could prepare businesses, we would keep our families together instead of leaving the kids off at day care. We could make sure that our pets had food and water and weren’t left alone. We could take care of ourselves, and not need public “shelters.” There was a time when hurricanes weren’t predictable too.

Signs Prostitution is on the Rise in my Neighborhood

1. A woman standing on a corner with a cell phone saying “But I’m ON Broadway!” She asks me “Is this Broadway?” I point to the sign above her head. “No, it’s Barson.”
2. Men alone in their cars slow down and nearly stop, trying to catch my eye. I’m standing in my front yard in my robe letting my dog pee. No, I’m not who you think I am.
3. Lots of men alone in their cars, slowing down, slowing down, talking on their their phones, speeding up.
4. A woman gets out of a car that stops in the middle of the street, walks down half a block to get into another car that has stopped in the middle of the street.
5. The Sentinel reports prostitution stings in the neighborhood.
6. It’s not raining yet.

The Five Elements of A Good Story

For about a year now I’ve been trying to remember what Garrison Keillor said were the five elements of a good story. I should have just googled it, because of course, there they were, on snopes:

During is November 8, 1997 broadcast, Garrison Keillor was heard to expound on the five required elements of humor (religion, money, family relationships, sex, and mystery) saying there was one twelve-word joke that contained all these elements: “God,” said the Banker’s daughter, “I’m pregnant. I wonder who it was?”

Apollo and Dionysus in Pacific Avenue

The last remaining writer at the Sentinel, Wallace Baine, has written a brilliant article about the significance of the Pacific Garden Mall; its birth, death, and legacy.

Drugs, Decisions and Values

This must have been sixth grade.

On the first page, we find this mimeographed page of questions. I’m not sure if my answers were supposed to record comprehension of the material presented in class or my own opinions.

Why do you think young people and adults use drugs? Name some:

kicks
excape from reality
couriosity

Do drugs have good uses? Name some:

headaches
curing disease
lose weight

I remember lots of “don’t smoke cigarettes” messages, like this one. I remember the creepy feeling of knowing that “Hamilton Burger” was already dead of lung cancer by the time I watched it.

But where this came from, I have no idea.

Private Fire Insurance

Another scary article in Harpers about AIG and its private “fire fighters” that run around ritzy neighborhoods spraying their customers’ homes with retardant. It also includes a history of fire insurance.

Before Barbon there was Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon and originator of the first forms of insurance. Hammurabi’s Code was harsh in places. But its edicts an on insurance captured all that was communal and good about the idea. In 1700 B.C. Babylon, if a man was robbed, the community reimbursed him. If a man himself was stolen, the community paid his relatives one mina of silver. If he “owed a debt for aloan, and a strom prostrates the grain, or the harvest fail, or the grain does not grow for lack of water; in that year he need not give his creditor any grain, he wases in debt-tablet in water, and pays no rent for this year.”

Tis is what our concept of insurance became-we understand it as a way to reduce risk, to improve life–but this is not all that insurance became. When it turned private and for-profit, part of the free market, insurance was combined with something else: the need for growth. And a system meant to reduce risk soon began to crave more of it.

Looking Backward

The 30th High School Reunion is coming up, and inspired by a classmate who posted the 9th grade photo on facebook, I dug out a box of memorabilia from those years. I don’t seem to have much from high school, but I do have the junior high yearbooks.

8th grade wasn’t all that great.

9th grade was better. I was an editor on a literary magazine and started writing.

All Together Now

We all have seen the statistic that it costs more to keep a drug offender in a California prison than it does to send him/her to college. I think about this as I read new reports of how many people won’t be able to attend the University of California, or teach there, or do their research there, or work there. Then I read about how the prison guard’s union is so powerful in California politics. Here’s an article from one of the many research organizations of UC that the state can’t want to fund anymore, the UCB Institute for Governmental Studies.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) is the California prison guards’ union. In recent years the CCPOA has become a major player in California politics. Its political influence has grown to the point that it is widely considered to be one of the most powerful political forces in Sacramento. Its lobbying efforts and campaign contributions have greatly facilitated the passage of legislation favorable to union members.

And, I may add, favorable to the institutions of prisons themselves.

So why can’t the UC employee unions be a powerful force in California politics? They represent around 200,000 people. Why aren’t the UC unions out there lobbying for UC to be a vital part of California economy and social justice? Because UC has spent the last 25 years spending their state-funded money to break the employee unions. UC’s employees are a natural voice for the importance of UC –as opposed to more and larger prisons. But that voice was suppressed, that partnership was rebuffed. Now UC is asking us to individually lobby our legislators and write stories about how UC changed our lives. That’s all very nice, but our political system responds to collective action. Now the unions are fighting for their members alone, pointing out that we’re all getting paycuts while executive positions continue to be created. Too bad the unions can’t be in cahoots with management in Sacramento, like the prison guards and the prison industry.