Kalamazoo 2013 - Marginalia

There are several advantages in attending Kazoo, which you might view as a kind of Comicon for medievalists. First and foremost you are placed in the immediate proximity of a couple thousand often very smart people who frequently have similar or related interests to your own. A professional conviviality arises that is unobtainable elsewhere, since at home you are likely regarded as an eccentric or a social deviant, and there are probably not enough medievalists resident at your institution to even form a committee. 

An ongoing concern with medieval studies is the relentless quest for sources, and here you have a chance to examine the presenters to see if they’re on to something you’ve overlooked or haven’t yet discovered. I do this constantly, and sometimes it really pays off. The luminaries in the profession often show up here, the people you’re always quoting in your footnotes. It’s fun to see and hear them, and even talk to them as much as the objective circumstances permit. 

Of the 250 sessions—it's the biggest academic conference in the U.S.— about two dozen are scheduled simultaneously, meaning that no matter how much you hustle, you will never attend more than ten per cent. You spend most of your free time trying to make up your mind from the catalog which sessions to visit. Nonetheless there inevitably comes the moment when you’ve exhausted your own interests, so you show up at a session concerning something about which you know absolutely nothing. And it’s exactly these encounters that open new doors, point to new directions. 

In contrast with much of academia, the study of the Middle Ages is not so much hard-wired as it is endlessly diffuse. Almost everything that humans get interested in, almost every sphere of human activity you can imagine—from numismatics and bee-keeping to interstellar travel— has some kind of medieval correspondence, in some cases also its point of origin. And that’s the advantage of Kalamazoo, where one really gets close to this vast ocean of strangeness and alterity. It's like a distant planet situated both behind and before us, one which recedes from view the closer we get to it, as we marvel at its blurry, colorful enormity. It is truly a wonderment. 

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FAVORITE PAPER TITLES

 “Runes and Gold Bracteates: The Futhark Sequences as Mythic Mnemonic.”

“Doing It Doggy Style on Medieval Seals” 

“A Typology of Pre-Tailored Men’s Garments Based on Key Measurements and Proportions, or, How Tall Was Saint Louis and Who Wore His Shirt?” 

COMPLAINTS 

The almost non-existent shuttle bus service between the buildings completely sucks, compared with previous years when the bus ran every ten or fifteen minutes. 

The soft ice-cream machine in the cafeteria was down on Day Two. This must never happen again. 

There should be introduced a bus service that goes to the Kazoo train station at 1pm on Sunday to meet the Wolverine back to Chicago. 

Kalamazoo 2013 - 4/4

DAY THREE

Up betimes to prepare my presentation entitled “The Gargoyles of Yerba Buena: Medievalist Architectural Innovation in San Francisco 1900-1940” at the morning session. Unfortunately it coincided with the one event I really wanted to attend this year: a roundtable entitled “The Future We Want,” presided by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, whom I’ve corresponded with but not yet met.

The purpose of my own paper was to show what was distinctive about the profusion of medieval buildings that went up in San Francisco after the fire in 1906, and to argue more generally that medievalist architecture of the 20th century—because of the innovation of cast concrete as a construction technology and the new kinds of buildings in which it was employed—e.g. office buildings, high schools, Laguna Honda Hospital, SF Art Institute, etc.—deserves to be studied separately from either its Gothic Revival (1840-1860) or its Victorian Gothic (1870-1890) predecessors. In other words, medievalism in the 20th century had different things to offer than in the 19th.

Trinity Episcopal Church at Bush and Gough is the best example of castellated church architecture in San Francisco. Surely the ghost of Hamlet's father would feel at home on these lonely battlements, which may have been erected for defense against raids by the Unitarian-Universalists, who are located in a likewise medievalist church building just two blocks away.

The fact that one had to present this in a twenty-minute time slot, the norm for most academic conferences I’ve attended, is completely ridiculous. Still I thought it important to make my complete argument, which seemed to go over pretty good, and I was asked interesting questions. I am grateful to SF State Univ for sending me to spread word of the glory of medieval San Francisco.

Trying to provide an interesting presentation in twenty minutes is like trying to fly with one’s wings clipped, and it has the annoying effect of causing speakers to rattle off their learned discourse at breakneck speed, for fear of exceeding the time limit. This makes it often hard to understand what they’re talking about. I think there ought to be two thirty-minute presenters, followed by a brief pause to allow the disenchanted to escape, and then thirty minutes of discussion for enthusiasts.

In the afternoon I attended two BABEL sessions about “Plunder” and “Blunder” organized by Eileen Joy. We began with a talk about the motion and the vectors (travel paths) of “things,” such as the relics of  San Marco during the Venetian Republic, and then we looked at hordes of “things” that that possess auras and signify lost utopias, ranging from the dragon’s hoard at the end of Beowulf to the objects collected in a Masonic Temple museum somewhere in Massachusetts that houses—quite uselessly, since nobody ever comes to visit—a host of “things” that functioned as symbolic ritual objects during the golden age of male fraternal organizations in America.

A dozen or more short presentations followed on a variety of topics that concerned other things besides “things,” and the afternoon concluded with a lengthy and animated audience discussion about what to do about the process of peer review in journal submissions, which in its present condition seems to upset everyone (myself included, don’t get me started).

Eileen Joy made the altogether sensible, if unlikely suggestion that we should aim to construct publishing as a means of conducting a free and open conversation amongst ourselves wherever we are located as humanities students, and that the criticism from or among reviewers and editors should follow this goal.

But one could argue I think that a male-oriented, adversarial sensibility is at the historical core of the academic process, just as it operates in the Anglo-Saxon judicial trial system and in parliamentary party politics. Just think of the tradition of university debates and medieval disputation—going back to Peter Abelard, who wandered the streets of Paris like a lone samurai questing for philosophical combat.

In general I thought the BABEL workgroup folk obviously enjoy projecting their self-image of something resembling a Parisian street mob during the French Revolution, intent upon demolishing academic hierarchies and traditional shibboleths* such as certain traditional vectors of peer review in the publication process.

But being a Sixties radical myself, their position, if the Babelites collectively may be said to have one, seems far too conservative. After all, when I first went to grad school in America, there weren’t even any women present, and because of the existing institutional censorship there were all sorts of things you couldn’t even begin to talk about in class—including for example why there weren’t any women or minorities present.

My hat is off to the Babelites anyway. Incidentally, if you're involved with Critical Theory in medieval studies, these are the people to hang out with. It seems pretty much absent elsewhere at Kalamazoo.



*Hebrew shibbōleth: literally, freshet, a word used by the Gileadites as a test to detect the fleeing Ephraimites, who could not pronounce the sound sh  (Judges 12:4–6).

  

Kalamazoo 2013 - 3/4

DAY TWO

This was probably the most productive day for me, due to a small epiphany I experienced at a talk given by Jonathan Couser concerning emotionality (or evidently more often the lack of it) in the letters of St Boniface. He spoke of Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities,” and asked if one might be able to contemplate a “history of the emotions” for the Middle Ages. Patrick Geary mentioned separate rhetorics involved with modes of emotional expression—for a rough example: one might choose a different vocabulary when one talks with teachers or priests. I had an interesting conversation with Jonathan at lunchtime the next day to refine the matter a bit.

I had written and also presented (at a Medieval Association of the Pacific conference in Santa Clara last year) about the “poems of male friendship” and the homoerotic imagery richly, indeed outrageously present in the letters of Carolingian churchmen. It occurred to me that I could revisit this whole topic conceptually in terms of an existing emotional community, which from my perspective is doubtless the most blatantly emotional within the entire E.M.A.

In the afternoon on to Fred Astren’s paper on the activities of rabbis in the medieval Mediterranean, followed by a whole bunch of other interesting stuff. 

Kalamazoo 2013 - 2/4

DAY ONE

A morning session featured a discussion of relations between the French and the papacy in the 11th century, and a presentation about Bonifatius (St Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon who converted many Germans, and founded monasteries and helped organize the German church in the early 8th c.). This scholar seemed knowledgeable about every single contemporary clerical comment written down about the indigenous heathens, worshipers of Odin/Wotan.

I asked if one could identify some kind of turning point following the Reform Movement after the Concordat of 1122 when the popes, having deposed the German emperors from leadership of the church, decided to mix it up with French. There clearly are plenty of good reasons why the popes would want to, but what exactly triggered their interventions in French affairs?

Then I asked what the condition and organization of the German church was at the time of Boniface and if anyone had found out when the first German monastery was founded, following Clovis’ conversion  ca. 500. (They used not to call them the Dark Ages for nothing.) As I  anticipated, the answer in both cases was no, but this is the kind of question one can profitably ask at Kalamazoo, just to confirm one’s own perceptions while ignoring the taint of public humiliation over one’s putative ignorance.

In the afternoon I heard Richard Matthew Pollard, Univ British Columbia: “Identifying the Men behind the Popes in Early Medieval Rome: An Exercise in Methodology,” which I found really brilliant. I can’t recapitulate the argument here, but the idea is roughly that through analysis of Latin prose rhythms we can determine (for example) which letters Pope Gregory I. wrote himself, and which he assigned to his chancery, and this is turn may inform us about which matters he held most important.

Having come to medieval studies only six years ago after a long career teaching English and German, I have lacked any real opportunity for manuscript studies, and I am full of envy for Richard’s experience and expertise. I spoke with him afterwards, and I was surprised that he remembered me from our brief conversation at Kazoo in 2009, when he was still a doctoral student at Cambridge with Rosamond McKitterick, the great genetrix of modern Carolingian studies. Richard totally made my day when he mentioned that he had used my Walafrid Strabo translations in a class he taught.

An evening session devoted to Walter Gofford’s one-hour contemplation of Charlemagne’s conscription policies conducted me also into the physical presence of early medieval military historians Bernie Bachrach and Kelly DeVries, hitherto known to me only from the printed page.
 

Dr Gofford impressed me as more than a little snarky, which I suppose at his advanced age is understandable. He spent a full five minutes castigating Timothy Reuter for writing that Charlemagne’s armies were conscripted from “magnates and their followings,” when (if I understood correctly) Reuter might have more accurately written “magnates and allodial landowners,” so as to include the participation of the liberi (freemen).

Kalamazoo 2013 - 1/4

48TH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES AT KALAMAZOO MICHIGAN
MAY 9-12, 2013

                                                                                              

GETTING THERE

The flight to O’Hare proceeded without incident, and I had the satisfaction of riding the marvelously anachronistic Chicago Elevated Railway for 50 minutes into the city in order to transfer at Union Station (ticket =$5). Unhappily both the elevator and escalator at Clinton were out of service, compelling me to schlepp my impedimenta four flights of stairs skywards, an unwelcome challenge since I banged up my knee a couple  years ago in the SFSU parking lot and have been hobbling around with a cane ever since.

I collapsed into my seat on the Amtrak Wolverine and prepared for the two-hour journey to Kalamazoo. Compared with the California Coast Starlight, it was a remarkably fast and smooth ride, comparable almost to the better European trains. We passed through the industrial ruin that Gary, Indiana, has become—Hephaestus’ forge is apparently extinguished in these precincts forever—and, after a few tantalizing glimpses of Lake Michigan in the distant twilight, we pressed on to my complete surprise past one of the most adorable Richardsonian Romanesque railroad stations I have ever laid eyes on, in the town of Niles, MI.

Niles Michigan Station. Photo: Poul Thor Hansen. Clicking embiggens.

In a mad moment I was severely tempted to pull the emergency brake and run out to photograph it, but according to a loudspeaker announcement we had achieved our maximum speed of 110 mph—beat that California Coast Starlight!—and I feared that at this dazzling tempo the train would never be able to come to a stop before we had come half-way to Kalamazoo.

On the bus from the train station to the Western Michigan University campus I fell into conversation with a young archaeologist from Ireland named Fiona who had come a long way to present about a dig she was undertaking somewhere in an Irish county whose name was unfamiliar to me. It happened also that Fiona was not only cheerfully conversant but also drop-dead gorgeous. Crazed from the stress of travel and falling victim to a sudden attack of courtly love, I felt like throwing myself to her feet and saying: “Take me, Fiona, I am yours forever, do me with me as you will, I will serve and obey you in all things and never desert you, etc., now explain to me every little detail about your marvelous Celtic excavations.”

Figuring that given my current age group—ridiculously, I have now become 73— not much might arise from my abruptly conceived infatuation, I wearily trudged off to my assigned accommodation. This year I decided to play the disability card with my house assignment and was given what must be considered an executive suite compared to the jail cells they stash the unfortunate undergrads and the other conference visitors in at this place. The cafeteria is just downstairs, and I don’t have to share the bath with anyone, all for the same thirty clams per day they charge everyone.

A willing servitude

It's true I suppose that blog writing has been gradually going out of fashion. I suppose also that we are all owned in one way or another by Google, a willing servitude in my case since I have been making use of their Blogger product free of charge for a few years now.

Last Fall however Google "monetized" my blog by inserting ads into it, without any warning or endorsement from me, which in no case would have been forthcoming since for starters I'd not buy any of the ridiculous junk they were advertising.

Unwilling to yield to corporate fascism as I've been compelled in so many other areas of my life, and not knowing what else to do about it, I simply stopped writing. I left the blog intact, because I get about a hundred hits a day whether I write or not, mostly Googlers I suppose who are searching the topics I've written about. And I do still receive comments, one from a woman in Stockholm who had never been to San Francisco but had seen the movie Vertigo and enjoyed my post about it.

Now I notice that the ads have disappeared—Google must have thought I died or something—so I am going to start blogging again, and we'll see what happens next.

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Earthships

We drove out one day across the mesa at Taos, crossing the high bridge over the Rio Grande gorge to arrive at the Earthships visitor center. Here we were given a tour of an earthship demonstration home, watched some instructional videos and took a few photos of some houses under construction.

Detail of wall construction.

Earthships are made (actually sculpted) from recycled materials, notably soda cans and used rubber tires mixed in with adobe (mud and straw) for stability and insulation. Through an ingenious system of solar panels, water recycling methods and heat-regulating thermal columns bored into the ground, earthships are practically self-sustaining and self-insulating in all climates.

The Earthships website provides relevant details and much technical information.

Taos Pueblo

I spent most of last month visiting friends in Albuquerque and Taos. The most memorable event was a visit to the Taos Pueblo, which has been in existence for about a thousand years, making it perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States.

Taos Pueblo with Red Willow Creek in foreground.

Most New Mexico Indians are Catholics since the Spanish occupation.

Doors and windows were introduced after the Spanish intervention. Originally the rooms were entered via a system of ladders on the rooftops dropping into holes in the ceiling. The entire complex thus functioned as a fortress against raids from other tribes. Today the pueblo is, as we were told, inhabited mainly by young men who must spend a year of residence there in the interest of tribal solidarity.

Taos Pueblo lies at the base of a holy mountain entered by the cleft in the center of this picture. Red Willow Creek flows through it down to the Pueblo.


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Thunder from Beneath

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I cast my New Year's hexagram in the I Ching for 2012 and received #16, Yü, Enthusiasm. The commentary in the edition that I like to use seems remarkably auspicious:

There is a rhythmic force, a world music, that lives deep in the Unconscious of each of us. It's a primitive drumbeat, a shaking rattle, a tribal chant that invokes the primal self to rise up and join the dance. This is the enthusiasm that is generated now. Not rhetorical persuasion, not a play on the emotions, but a charismatic, irresistible Call of the Wild. Confucius said that the person who could comprehend this could 'rule the world as though it were spinning in his hand.' This is a time for instinct, not intellect—the Thunder from Beneath.

In order to receive the bespoken Call of the Wild I shall need to spend less time at the computer next year, which I happily make my New Year’s resolution. 

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My neighborhood — The McKittrick Hotel — 3/3

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The Portman Mansion, 1007 Gough Street

Vertigo, the finest Hollywood movie ever filmed in San Francisco, must have encouraged many people to move here. This wasn’t true in my case, but after I first saw it in Boston in 1958, the portrayal of San Francisco as a misty, color-saturated, Vista-Visioned enchantment lying somewhere far to the west on the Pacific coast haunted me in its mythic unreality as it still does even to this day.

Other impressions from the movie remain unforgotten—the genially conceived long stroll across Ernie’s Restaurant in the famous green velvet dress, of course, and the leap into the Bay under the Bridge at Fort Point, the tète-à-tète among misty redwoods in Muir Woods, the fall from the (totally non-existent) bell tower at Mission San Juan Bautista in Hollister.

Equally impressive for me and my male buddies in those days was Kim Novak’s appearance at the Empire Hotel at 940 Sutter. Her Playtex Maidenform bra seemed to stretch her green knit sweater to the point of structural unsustainability.

Another great moment occurs when Madeleine enters the McKittrick Hotel to regenerate her delusional possession by Carlotta Valdes. Certainly nowhere in Boston could you encounter an architecture that looked anything like like this.

The "McKittrick Hotel" was in fact the twenty-room Portman mansion dating from the 1880’s at Gough and Eddy Streets. It was torn down in 1959 to make room for an athletic practice field belonging to Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School.

Jimmy Stewart pulls up in his 1956 DeSoto FireFlite.

St Paulus Church is behind him, and my apartment under the arrow.

And he goes looking for Madeleine.

An opportunity for a quick bath is ignored.

The derelict mansion was pulled down in 1959.

Time is elastic, you have to become an older person to really understand that. As much time has elapsed between the filming of the Hitchock movie and the present as between then and when the mansion at 1007 Gough Street was still in its prime. Who knows, perhaps Carlotta Valdes really existed. Every city has its own ghosts, and God knows this town is loaded with them.

A few times each week I sit waiting at the bus stop at Gough and Eddy for the 31-Balboa to come lumbering up the hill. Sometimes, when the neighborhood is wrapped in fog, the McKittrick Hotel rises up spectrally across the street in front of me beyond the schoolyard, and I see Jimmy Stewart stalking Madeleine up the steps. It occurs to me that I too have trailed after one beautiful woman or another, only to see her disappear before my eyes.




The black-and-white photos of the Portman Mansion are taken from the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

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My neighborhood — Jefferson Square Park — 2/3

San Francisco is blessed with a number of fine parks bejewelling the city like so many sparkling florets of emerald green, even though their public reputation diminishes in comparison with the massively gorgeous Golden Gate Park, arguably the best urban park anywhere.

Who among us has not basked under the Spring sun in the green pastures of Dolores Park, enjoyed the folksy sociability of Washington Park in North Beach, or felt awed before the majesty of the Bridge and the Golden Gate while walking along the Bay at Crissy Field. These are pleasures found nowhere else in this country, and they don’t cost you a penny.

My own neighborhood features a recreational area called Jefferson Square Park, only a minute from my door. Regrettably, compared with the other parks available for public enjoyment in this city, this one is a total loser, and it’s a mystery to me why it exists to begin with. Building a park on the side of a steep hill seems counter-intuitive, but with application it can be reasonably accomplished, as exemplified by the not-distant and altogether amenable Lafayette Park .

But Jefferson Square Park fails completely. It is striated with three lateral black asphalt walkways, punctuated by crumbling stone stair cases that elevate one about ten feet. The ground is damp, and due to lack of discipline, the grass has gone clumpy. It is generally cold and windy. Nobody uses the park except dog-owners on the one end of it and societal desperates requiring a place to sleep in the afternoons on the other.

The park does have a few old-growth eucalyptus trees, and the view south from its northern periphery provides a welcome chance to stretch one’s eyes. But it’s clearly not a place where people choose to hang out or recreate themselves, and its single advantage is that the space isn’t covered with residential buildings and parking lots like everywhere else in the vicinity.

And yet for one brief period, probably the only time in the Park’s history, incompetent city planning produced an unexpected advantage when refugees from the Fire erected a tent city here in 1906.

Underneath my bed I keep a small one-person tent and a rolled up sleeping bag and air mattress. I am not expecting my own building to collapse when the Big One comes, but it could burn down. So I have at the ready a stash of canned food, three gallon-bottles of Crystal Mountain water, and a small aluminum briefcase containing my external, back-up hard drive, along with some emergency weed. You will find me among the first to have established residence in Jefferson Square Park.


Photos: San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.


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My neighborhood — 1/3

I’ve lived in the 900 block of Eddy Street for some years now, and have really quite enjoyed being here. Despite the fact that it lacks the defining characteristics of a more authentic San Francisco neighborhood—it’s one of those streets you walk down to get somewhere else: two blocks east to Van Ness, two blocks west to the Fillmore, two blocks north to St Mary’s Cathedral—its central location also enables me to walk to the Main Library, BART and Muni Metro in a quarter hour or less.

It’s also situated on the 31-Balboa bus line, one of the more felicitous routes in the city. The vehicles hustle along efficiently and noiselessly every twenty minutes or so along mostly empty streets. In fifteen minutes you can get to Powell and Market going east, and in thirty you’re at Ocean Beach to the west, perfect for a stroll on hot days. And there’s almost always a place to sit.

My apartment is quiet, comfy and suffers only from being overloaded with books and plants, which would however doubtless characterize whatever living space I chose to inhabit. And it has the inestimable advantage of  facing south with an unobstructed view to the sun, enhancing and nurturing my window garden, the light crisply sutured or softened at various times of the day through the judicious deployment of wooden Venetian blinds purchased at IKEA.

But if the neighborhood is nondescript today, it was not always so. I live one door down from what was once one of the city’s most remarkable architectural assets. The Saint Paulus German Lutheran Church profiled itself so prominently against the skyline of the city that you could see it from miles away, from Noe Valley, Bernal Hill or Twin Peaks. It seemed visible from almost anywhere, and you could orient yourself spatially by observing it on the horizon. That steeple you're looking at sodomized the sky at a height of about eight stories.

Built in 1893, the church disappeared overnight in a terrible fire in 1995.

The razed property remained deserted for years, surrounded by a tall chicken-wire fence, home on occasion to a small number of the city’s homeless, whose encampments got periodically annihilated by the police. Its dismal appearance even qualified it in my feverish imagination as an official entrance to hell, described elsewhere on this blog.

All this changed last year when the plot suddenly exploded into prominence as a community garden, now verdant with  flowers and vegetables, complete with proprietary beehives ensuring rapid fertilization, and described in considerable detail at the sponsoring organization’s website.

What the Free Farm has meant for local residents is inestimable, not exactly in terms of forging us into a viable community, but serving rather as a constant source of intense curiosity. Walking past to and from the bus stop, or marching down the hill to the Safeway, one can’t help pausing for a few minutes to observe what-all is going on in the new community garden.

Thanks flickr user dluck for the fire picture.

disclaimer

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Independence Day 2011

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Thanks to an online July 4th promotional event  at ancestry.com and the good offices of my distant cousin Howard Mitchell in Illinois, a far more assiduous genealogist than I shall ever be, I received from him this weekend a document concerning my original American ancestor, Rudolph Hines.

The document below shows that Rudolph emigrated from Prussia in 1733 and ultimately wound up on a frontier settlement in the Ohio Territory, where he died in 1823. He had a daughter named Mary Hines, who married John Mitchell, the son of my patrilinear ancestor from Scotland,  who appeared on these shores in 1782.

Of enduring importance is the fact that Rudolph Hines, born Rudolf Heintz, fought in the Brandywine-Germantown campaigns of 1777,  rendering him not only obnoxious to British forces similarly engaged, but significant also to a number of his own descendants (who by this time number in the hundreds: families were of course huge in those days), and especially to those seeking admission to the exclusive “Sons of the American  Revolution” organization. Thus for example an application from a distant relative named Sherman Strong, who applied for entry on July 12, 1880:

Clicking embiggens.

All of this quite delights me. Even though I share I think only 1/128th of Rudolph’s genetic material, I am convinced that this documentary evidence explains why I majored in German at Boston University, and subsequently spent a total of 13 years living in Germany, preferring Berlin above all other places and Prussia’s Glory above other German military marches.

But despite my demonstrable eligibility, I shall not seek acceptance in the Sons of the American Revolution, which I suppose is as close as we get to hereditary aristocracy in this country. Perhaps such attitudes may have induced Rudolph to leave Germany and fight for American independence in the first place. Anyway, the circumstances of my life require that I view myself as the son of a thoroughly different revolution than the one envisioned and eternally memorialized by the Sons or the Daughters of the American Revolution.

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The vanilla bean pod story

I went to the Whole Foods at California and Franklin on Saturday in quest of a vanilla bean pod. Not knowing where to begin, I inquired of three store employees where such an item might be located. Three times I had to explain what a vanilla bean pod is, since none of the workers had a clue. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that although everyone is familiar with the flavor, no one seems to be aware of its botanical origin.

I loaded some other stuff and headed for the cashier, a young woman to whom I explained my problem. Success: she knew exactly what I required, disappeared for three or four minutes and eventually returned with a little glass jar containing a single vanilla bean pod doubled over inside it.

At $9.99 it was a total rip-off, and I've meanwhile learned you can buy the bean pods en masse for a couple bucks on eBay, but at least I went home happy.

Why was I looking for a vanilla bean pod? Because I'm making my own ice cream and have been advised that beans taste better than extract (which can be made cheaply by soaking the beans in vodka).

How did I get started making ice cream? I was standing in line recently at the Safeway complaining vigorously to an older African American lady behind me about how packaged ice cream is full of candy for kids and you can't get the real stuff any more, etc, etc. She said, listen, if you want good ice cream, the only solution is to make it yourself.

Something clicked in the back of my head. I bought a Cuisinart ice-cream maker at Amazon.com for $40 and was soon on the path to perfect ice-cream. I will never return to the pathetic commercial junk again. Substituting Splenda for sugar, I have with patience created the perfect vanilla, to go on top of the currently fresh organic California strawberries. Soon I will master the perfect chocolate. In July, when the black cherries are in, I will commence production of my favorite flavor, Cherry Garcia. In the fall I shall move on to beer ice cream (add Guinness Stout in place of milk), and the next holiday season will find me luxuriating in exceptionally  high-proof home-made rum raisin. With golden raisins and first-rate booze.



THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM


Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem*
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


from Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream, 1922.


* Let appearances become reality

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In the cave of forgotten dreams

Chauvet Caves:  Four horses with fighting rhinos

Acting on an enthusiastic recommendation from Francesca Rosa I went with Bruce Boone to see the excellent Werner Herzog film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a remarkable excursion through the Chauvet Caves in Southern France, which contain the oldest pictures in human history. The 3-D presentation was flawless and in fact completely necessary to show how the rock art images merged plastically into the shifting planes of the limestone walls of the cave. Herzog also left plenty of time for the viewer to simply gaze at the works themselves without acoustic intervention, returning to the same images from time to time seen from different perspectives.

The film was in every sense of the word an anabasis into the collective unconscious of humankind, down to the ancient-most layer of our own species-memory that we can access. Why did these cave artists portray animals and not trees and flowers, or geographical features like mountains and rivers, or other humans? Were they interested only in imaging the food supply in motion, or did they understand themselves as part of an animal spirit-world, and the creatures as fellow beings in the commonly-shared ancestral environment?

Assuming that the human population in the Upper Paleolithic in Europe was tiny, and the variety and number of animals running around as dense apparently as on the plains of Africa, the engagement with them must have been extremely intense. Perhaps the fact that the animals are almost always pictured in profile from their sides, in the way we would photograph grazing animals today, demonstrates the angle at which they were also able to be hunted—you don’t see their faces shown head-on, which would permit you to make eye-contact and get personal with them.

A brief excursus was made into the well-known, chubby Paleolithic female figures categorized as “Venuses” and given the common interpretation that these symbolize fecundity. I remain skeptical, remembering that Hawaiian and Polynesian royalty were once esteemed according to their body-weight, and that obesity functioned socially as a Schönheitsideal. Perhaps when food is scarce or difficult to obtain, body fat becomes desirable.

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More pictures of the Chauvet caves at the Bradford Foundation website. 

East Bay Hills

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I've been house-sitting for a friend in El Sobrante who lives close to the east ridge of Tilden Park. The weather has been excellent for hiking the East Bay hills this Spring, although the wildflowers seemed less profuse than usual, I suppose because there was so little rainfall in April. Here are a couple pictures along the trail.

Tamalpais from Wildcat Canyon ridge trail

Old Briones Road

Black Oak Trail, Kennedy Grove

Ancient plants

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May Day

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          Hooray, hooray,
          The First of May.
          Outdoor sex
          Begins today.

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Bostonia and Jeffrey J. Cohen

I was pleased with the exchange of comments I had with Jeffrey Cohen on In the Middle this weekend, in which we briefly marinated in nostalgia about the defection of Brigham's ice cream from Harvard Square. I don't know why I wax Proustian about Boston at this time of year, but after all April is the cruelest month, comme on dit, I suppose because of the start of a new Red Sox season.
Prof Cohen (George Washington University) is in my view the most innovative medievalist of the past decade.

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Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

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Here we have moi about 1974, standing in front of my apartment at 226 Rose Street, located just a minute's walk from San Franciso Zen Center. I lived here nine years, being involved with music, meditation and periodic employment at the SF welfare department. Today I miss having long hair, but I must admit that the moustache and sideburns, a concession to a fashion of the times, now seem a bit silly. The hand-painted sign above the front door was the logo of the small press I operated in those years.

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Signs and wonders

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I’ve been homebound for the past five weeks, recuperating from a badly sprained knee. The constant ingestion of pain-killers, as I discovered, makes it hard to focus on reading and writing, but happily I was able to make good progress with my guitar-playing and with copy-editing two more books queued for publication later this year.

The long hours of  convalescence made me much more aware of current events, culminating with last week’s parade of horrors. In the space of only six days,

1.         Wisconsin Republicans revoked collective bargaining for public employees—especially infuriating to me personally, since I  worked as an AFSCME shop steward for three years.

2.         By midweek it appeared that Colonel Shitface Qaddafi had gained control over the rebels in Libya, while the so-called international community continued to dither about intervening, in the usual manner of Rwanda, Darfur and Somalia.

3.         McCarthy-style Congressional hearings began with much publicity to investigate the risk of attack by domestic Islamic radicals, thus likely creating many more of them and ignoring the more cogent issue of how our own homegrown, non-Islamic paranoid schizophrenics like McVeigh or Gestedner are able to obtain explosives and automatic rifles as easily as they do.

4.         By the end of the week Japan had been devastated by a horrendous tsunami and by a row of incipient nuclear meltdowns, while just yesterday

5.         A ten-car train derailed near the Concord BART Station, because, as it was first reported, three or four wheels had fallen off one of the coaches.

In short this was one of the worst weeks in recent history, making one acutely aware how good we have it living our comfy, computer-driven lives here in San Francisco.

I’ve also decided to add a couple more gallons of bottled water to my earthquake emergency supply kit.

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