Illustration

The Pines(detail) by Franklin Booth, via John Holbo at Crooked Timber

Booth's style nicely replicates the effects of woodcut using pen and ink. The clouded sky in the detail above is typical of the myriad of precise strokes of varying thicknesses he applied to every centimeter of his work to achieve the desired effect. There is nothing of economy in Booth's style, and still, the tree at right is pure suggestion. Composed of countless scribed lines, it's as much an impression of a tree's appearance as any Van Gogh ever drew.

Endorsement Season

Overshadowed by the Chris Christie endorsement of Donald Trump today was an endorsement over on the Democratic Party side of the contest, as Robert Reich endorsed Bernie Sanders for President. Reich has been admirable on most issues he's cared to speak on publicly following his time in Bill Clinton's Cabinet in the '90's.

Still, there was the big bully deferring to the bigger bully on the Republican side, which understandably hogged most of the day's stage.

Etymology Enacts the Plausible Yarn To Explain the Well-Known Name

Richmond Talbott was a slide guitarist and blues singer, and an old friend of Jorma Kaukonen. Talbott (then known as Steve Talbot), Jorma, Steve Mann, Tom Hobson, Perry Lederman and a few others were the acoustic blues guitarists on the scene in the early 60s who were the hottest and most sophisticated pickers, although only Kaukonen went on to success. As a private joke, they all made up “fake blues names,” and Talbott chose as his name “Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane.” A few years later, this play on the name of Blind Lemon Jefferson was later borrowed by Jorma’s new band.

—Ross Hannan and Corry Arnold, Freight And Salvage

One Way of Looking at Washington's Birthday

This Year's Peak Magnolia Came in February

Magnolias reached Peak Magnolia here in Santa Cruz earlier this week. Peak Magnolia happens when all buds that can be blossoms blossom. Usually this happens in late March, around the solstice, but after years of drought the local magnolias have responded to the wetness of the early part of this year's rainy season, over by mid January, with a quickened burst of early ripening.

Somewhere In A Future With Your Name On It

Yoooouge Improvement

Annals of Government Intrusion

Bruce Schneier on the FBI's demand that Apple hack the security of the iPhone.

Some February Camelias

The Not Necessarily Pimping a Butterfly-Style Reference of the Month Club

If Kendrick Lamar was Walt Whitman to our age, aiming his fervid poetries at the heart of what's now America, would we white ones recognize that of him?

Annals of a Dead Supreme

Instafear!

If this is indeed the case, the Senate is presently in the midst of a 10-day recess (not a pro forma session), and under Noel Canning, President Obama possesses the power to make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court until noon on February 22, when the Senate comes back in session.

—Glenn Reynolds

The Supreme Steps Out

Antonin Scalia, March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016

The Supremes Step In

The Government's Carbon Emissions Plan has been put on hold by the Supreme Court, catching everyone off guard.

This planet is so fucked.

Ash Wednesday and Ever After

Lenten  Leftover, Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, AZ

The Rude Talk of the Presidential Campaign, Part the Millionth

Back in the day, from Eliabeth Warren's perspective, Hillary Clinton's work on the bankruptcy bill amounted to little more than putting lipstick on a pig, if by pig we mean the voracious capitalist financiers behind the measure, for the bankruptcy bill as a whole gutted the very protections bankruptcy is meant to offer to specific classes of the insolvent, particularly holders of credit card debt and student loans. It was to institutionalize a condition of debt penury on vast numbers of Americans instead of offering them the clean slate bankruptcy had always ostensibly been intended to provide.

“While this amendment may have provided some political cover, it offers virtually no financial help to single mothers, since the overwhelming majority of ex-husbands don’t pay any distributions during bankruptcy,” the endnotes read. “Of far more importance was the fact that the bill would permit credit card companies to compete with women after bankruptcy for their ex-husbands’ limited income, and this provision remained unchanged in the 1998 and 2001 versions of the bill. Senator Clinton claimed that the bill improved circumstances for single mothers, but her view was not shared by any women’s groups or consumer groups,” said Warren.

It would seem Clinton was offering up an attractive yet basically meaningless amendment in exchange for support of a bill no conceivable Democrat before the time of Bill Clinton, the first post-modern Democrat, would have thought of voting for. Ever.

The Americans Begin To Elect A President

Waiting to see how the spurned narcissist takes news of his defeat tonight in Iowa.

Paul Kantner, March 17, 1941-January 28, 2016

No Parking On Moby Hedge

471 10th Avenue, Santa Cruz, Aug. 2015

Snort

1 September. Oliver Sacks dies, my first memory of whom was as an undergraduate in his digs in Keble Road in Oxford when I was with Eric Korn and possibly, over from Cambridge, Michael Frayn. Oliver said that he had fried and eaten a placenta. At that time I don't think I knew what a placenta was, except I knew it didn't come with chips.
— Alan Bennett, What I Did In 2015 (London Review Of Books, vol. 38 Jan. 2016, pg. 6.)

Jokes at the expense of placentas are so beyond the fringe.

Catching Up

Happy New Year!

A Note on the Calendar Year

The ball dropping in Times Square is meant to signal the moment 2016 officially begins in America, though those of us on the West Coast remain unconvinced. We're partial to a later midnight unqualified by the ghost of Dick Clark. That midnight, the one going on in New York when the ball drops, the one sanctified by Dick Clark's ghost for the benefit of a grateful nation, is a fine midnight, having now passed, and cause for a certain kind of person to celebrate, I warrant, but fundamentally unpersuasive. We have it down as still to come at this point around here.

War On Xmas

The Heathen Christmas Penguin Itself, Edging Ever Closer to the Middle of Things

Jostling In The Age of Trump

George Will becomes incensed by the characterization of Ronald Reagan in Bill O'Reilly's book, it says here.

Now, George Will has been an odious presence on the American scene for decades longer than Bill O'Reilly, such that as the tarnish of many a long-past episode involving him and ratifying his assholery fades from current memory, as tarnish so often will, we are yet left with him choking out new affronts from behind that bowtie year after year producing his rendition of the most scrupulous wording for it that Republican money can buy.

With regard to the politics of it all, if the premise is addle-pated nonsense, then rational human beings are best suited to advance such nonsense to its full potential, being that crazy people, who are quite capable of entertaining a host of crazy ideas and often enough even creating a marvelously crazy premise or two of their very own, are more often than not at a loss over what to do about it all beyond that, to carry it on. To advance the given premise, you need a platoon of chaps with skills like Will, smart tendentious sorts who can write to deadline on any premise.

[Whether or not O'Reilly is right that Reagan's brain was mush during any portion of his presidency is beside the point. Historically, Reagan's Central American policy was based on savage, deadly, senile nonsense of the sort entertained by George Will, who was there to applaud the politics of it all in real time.]

Still Life With Foot-Long Foot

Most of the photographs that surface at the Quotidian these days are shot during Dog Walk, that two hour period immediately after waking devoted exclusively to rambling about with the dog. The photos have what a snapshot can have, immediacy. There it is, Santa Cruz Harbor, at such and such a time on such and such a date, as given through the auspices of the iPhone 6. Very little "post-processing," using any of the clever tools available to fiddle with the look, just the processing inherent in the combination of software and camera required to make a file of what the iPhone's pointed at when the shutter's pressed.

Let's say every snapshot is an instance of discovery. The snapshot discovers a fact about the apparent world, and presents that discovery straightforwardly to the observer. The iPhone is a fine tool for just that.

So, yes, Dog Walk, iPhone 6, sidewalk, foot-long foot:

I've never taken a photo that so cried for a narrative plausibly tying the discovered fact to what went before.

I mean, there it is in all its harvested glory, dried clumps of buds still attached to the eight main stems of the thing, the Hanukka Bush Itself, ready to burn for eight days if started right in on, is what I'm saying.

I do not have the story, and do not want to make up a story or choose from among all the plausible alternatives to attach this bush to its previous condition, however much the usual urges insist.

Five-Oh

Today, December 4, marks the 50th anniversary of the first appearance of the newly-named Grateful Dead music band. They had been the Warlocks, notionally, for awhile, but, rebranded, went on to a nicely achieved career in music.

Grateful Dead Blues For Allah, Stained Glass, installed in the Grateful Dead Archive exhibit space, McHenry Library, UC Santa Cruz

Thanksgiving

Nearly two decades later, in March of 2015, I sat in a soundproof booth and recorded the audiobook for my first memoir, about the years when I drank and smoked too much. If the play had given me the ability to hide backstage, or behind an actress who was taller and prettier than me, performing the audiobook was the inverse: just me, unadorned, seated on a wooden stool with a microphone in front of me and a bottle of water at my side. The only audience I had in that tiny studio was a bearded engineer named Gary. I tried to pretend he wasn’t on the other side of the glass as I read aloud lines I had certainly written but never intended to perform. The opening scene of the book also takes place in a hotel room, strangely enough, although the episode is not a stylized fiction but an incident that took place in Paris when I was 31, where I came out of a blackout in the middle of having sex with a guy I couldn’t remember meeting. “Who are you, and why are we fucking?” is one of the early lines, and I tried to keep my voice calm and honeyed as I read it, even as I was dying inside. — Sarah Hepola at The Morining News

And yet in the back of her mind, a note in a small, ineradicable voice: herself saying, "Whoah, this shit is memiorable!"

Sundown Behind Santa Cruz, CA

West, September 2015