Bragging rights: My daughter

I sit miles away.  I can't see her face.  I can't touch her, or lend her a hand with her new projects, but I can be proud, and I am of her work in Pittsburgh and the life she has made for herself and her family (Reid, Anya Bean and Ruby Slippers).

Marijke Hecht, via Pittsburgh Magazine ©

Yesterday, she was interviewed on the telly, and an article appeared in the Post Gazette about the work she is doing with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy to rebuild an educational center in Frick Park.

Preen, preen, preen!

Amazing fodder for thought: Charles Dickens

The Law-Writer

“On the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say, more particularly in Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street, Mr. Snagsby, law-stationier, pursues his lawful calling. In the shade of Cook’s Court, at most times a shady place, Mr. Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and rolls of parchment; in paper – foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink, India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in red tape and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacs, diaries, and law-lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands – glass and leaden – pen-knives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office-cutlery; in short, in articles too numerous to mention, ever since he was out of his time and went into partnership with Peffer.”

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1852-1853

Found at Palimpsest, and clarified at Orange Crate Art, I thought this worth repeating.

Colonialism in Africa and HIV/AIDS

This headline glared out at me and startled me out my somnambulist state on this day. The article is an excerpt from an as yet to be published book, "Tinderbox" by Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin.

Nothing about it surprises me, but everything about it frightens me.

Having worked first with tropical diseases, primarily malaria, and later HIV and AIDS, I can only say that if the authors are even 50% accurate in their assessment of the transmission of the HIV virus from Colonial days to the pandemic of the 20th century, we haven't learned much about how fragile the eco-system is and moreover how easy it is to disrupt the balance of nature or that which is natural.

Plundering rubber and ivory in Africa is no different than the destruction of the Amazon region and its resources today, turning the indigenous people into pariah, and homeless refugees in their own land.  Not to mention the native non-human primates, bird and flora.

In Africa we got the HIV virus.  In the Amazon the natives never contracted malaria, but as soon as the builders of Empire took charge, their natural immunity dissolved.

Soon no one will be safe.

Rabbit Girl and Emily

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

The Honey Bee and Sennelier Watercolour

Someone else remembers Fowles' Magus

As a follower of Jung, the notion of synchronicity is always present in my mind so it comes as no surprise that NPR has this short piece on "remembering Fowles' Magus."

Selling stuff: 1st up Cameras

Long overdue, I am offering some photographic equipment for sale on pages.  

Make an offer if you are interested in any.

Authors: The Authenic Voice: Saul Bellow and Me

The New York Review of Books published, in two parts, an interview with Nobel Prize laureate, Saul Bellow. A most provocative, evocative piece for anyone but perhaps most especially those of the Jewish faith, born and raised in the United States before and immediately after those chilling World Wars and often until today.

It is written in his authentic voice, and raises so many questions for me, born more than three decades after him, but also the child of an immigrant Eastern European Jewish mother.  And this piece, written nearly two decades ago, could and should be written today, and it is perhaps for that reason the Review is publishing it.

My own experiences do not differ widely from Mr. Bellows, with several exceptions.  Those exceptions are my nearly perfect assimilation into the fabric of this country and beyond, so much so that my own immigrant Mother called me a "WASP."   This handle was given to me because I can and do get the table set, and all the fixings to the table in such a way that I can join rather serve my guests.  I did not laugh or scoff at my Mother, but rather preened at the thought that I could not be distinguished from my fellow citizens by religion, or occasionally locale.

So the second largest, but perhaps not only other difference between Saul Bellow and me is my failure to stay identified as Jewish, but rather strove to lessen rather than enlarge my heritage.

In the second part of the interview, Bellows moves into a philosophic tone and departs greatly from the personal and somehow this section was less engaging.

But perhaps reading the two combined convinced me to take a page from Bellow's playbill and not exaggerate, or offer up my background, but rather just embrace it as me.

Drawing to keep myself sane

The Book of Alfred Kantor is new to me, and regardless of how much and with what penetrating degree of research I've explored World War II, with an emphasis on the holocaust, new material springs up that reignites my exploratory path and sets me thinking.

Art Spiegelman's piece in the New York Review of Books got me thinking about my own feverish drawings, mostly at night, and even occasionally in the dark, with only a flicker of light, and wondering why, these last few months I've felt that same feeling Mr. Kantor had with his post-internment drawings--keeping myself sane with a pen or pencil in my hand.