Sculpin

I’m slowly working my way through the Ken Perlman beginner clawhammer guide. A lot of banjo stuff is (knowingly or not) written for guitarists who are picking up their next instrument, and this looks like no exception. But I’m not one of those; my deal is that I played the cello for eight-odd years as a kid and know next to nothing about guitars except that they have a lot of strings and are tuned all funny.

Earlier I was dealing with chords that Perlman seemed to think would be second nature, and they were all but making me sweat blood. Much GRAR. Much muttering about “too many fingers”. But now later on I’m finding things that Perlman seems to think are hard and I whip ‘em into shape in twenty seconds flat. There’s a series of tied eighth-notes of which he says, “Part B Measure 5 is analyzed in the description accompanying figure 13-6. If, after an honest effort, you just can’t get the feel of it, feel free to substitute part B measure 1.” It’s easy, though. It goes “ba-DAA-DAA-be di-da”.

Maybe I should be working through this book from back to front.

Did you know that there are herons nesting at the south end of campus? Occasionally you can see them from the bus stop near the medicinal herb gardens. My camera phone didn’t capture them well, but there’s a gorgeous slideshow that Bruce Hemingway put together of one of the nests last year.

Last time I posted, I was hitting the treadmill. Unfortunately, shortly after hitting the treadmill I found out that I’d wildly overestimated my treadmill-hitting abilities; I walked myself right into a great big flare-up. So back to PT I went. It’s all very three steps forward, two steps back.

I’ve joined something called “Health Month” with some buddies from Metafilter, and so far it’s been good. The deal is this: you make up a bunch of rules that you want to follow for a month. (You can put up with just about anything for a month, right?) You start with ten “life points”. If you meet your goals, you get rewarded with “fruit”. If you don’t, you lose a life point. You can heal yourself or your friends with the fruit. It is astonishing how motivated a person can be by imaginary fruit.

After feeling like I’d crashed and burned with a walking-related goal in May — plus feeling pretty dragged down by that historically crummy spring weather — I decided that June was the month of doing things that are fun. Some of my rules were “play the banjo four times a week”, “study contact juggling twice a week”, and “spend twenty minutes twice a week making something”. This is one of the better ideas I’ve had in a while.

I’d put my banjo aside for a few weeks when I’d become busy, and when the busyness was over I’d fallen out of the habit of practicing. Truth is, I was intimidated at the prospect of having to face up to how crummy I sounded when I hadn’t been practicing. (See also: “I don’t know if that thing in the fridge has gone bad yet, so let’s keep it there until there’s no question.”) It took about a week and a half to scrape most of the rust off of my feeble clawhammering skills. That’s a lot less time than I was expecting. I still make a lot of mistakes, but today I ripped out a version of “Cripple Creek” that actually sounded pretty good to me. Hot damn. Now that I’m entering a two-month Low Sculpin Availability Period*, I’m counting on Health Month to remind me to make time to keep playing.

* hat tip to Siderea

–

One of the many reasons I’m glad to have married Josh is that it is lovely to live with someone who has some musical experience and understands what the process sounds like. You know, when you’re working on a skill or putting together a song, it sounds like a hot mess for a while. Attention is a limiting factor. Maybe you get the left hand mostly down and then start working on the right hand but now the left hand goes all to hell. There’s often a point at which you have to sound worse before you can get better. It’s pretty disheartening. If you’re less lucky than I am now, this is when some non-musician in the house pops his head through the doorframe and volunteers that you totally stink. I’m not completely without sympathy for that position; there’s a reason why I usually close all the windows when I’m practicing. But I’m glad to live without any more of those godawful heartsink moments. It’s not easy to forget those.

Cam: “Am I bugging the hell out of you?”
Josh: “You’re fine.”
Cam: “You’ll tell me if I start bugging you?”
Josh: “Yep. You’re fine.”

Josh is notably laid-back, it’s true, but I do chalk this one up to his having experience with playing and learning music. I’m not notably laid-back, but Josh can play his bass as much as he likes without bothering me a bit. I like it.

I’m still recovering from getting squashed last June. Apparently, it takes a lot longer to heal a herniated disc that’s been re-injured than it does to heal it the first time.

This week, though, I’ve been hitting the treadmill with a vengeance. I bought new walking shoes a month ago, and they’re still giving me that new-shoes I-can-do-anything feeling. Remember being a kid and getting new tennis shoes for the first day of school? And how you felt like you could fly? Like that.

Major props to the woman at Greenlake’s Super Jock ‘n’ Jill who sold me these things. The thing is, because my nervous system sort of sputters in and out of adequacy, my gait changes every day and sometimes every hour. Sometimes I pronate; sometimes I supinate; sometimes I flomp around like an animated sack of wet laundry. Occasionally the stars align and I walk with something approaching my old gait, and it fills me with nostalgia. So I’m some kind of hell customer, I’m sure, but they know their stuff there at Super Jock ‘n’ Jill. The shoe saleswoman there found me a pair of Asics that are stable every which way I might tip. They’re super.

There are a fair number of bicyclists who use our street, and your usual number of crows. I’ve been noticing over the last six months or so that at least one of our crow neighbors has picked up the trick of matching speeds with bicyclists as they go up or down our hill. They fly low, roughly in line with the bicyclists’ shoulders, in a parallel course about six or eight feet away from the bike. It doesn’t look easy to manage; bikes can be awkwardly slow going up the hill, and in any case the crow is constantly turning its head to check on the bike’s position.

Why do that? Because that’s what being a crow is all about, I guess. Crows, man. They get ideas.

I promised you wombats. That was long enough ago that I can’t quite remember how I stumbled over the whole Rossetti wombat business. At first I thought it was just a silly, inexplicable in-joke among Rossetti scholars. But there really were Rossetti wombats, two of them.

Rossetti was reportedly mad about wombats, and the rest of his crowd was swept up in his wombat excitement. His assistant Val Prinsep said, “Rossetti was the planet around which we revolved, we copied his way of speaking. All beautiful women were ‘stunners’ with us. Wombats were the most beautiful of God’s creatures.” Edward Burne-Jones did a sketch of a wombat zipping across the Egyptian desert. Something like a wombat “prowled obtuse and furry” through Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”, and this alarming little animal in Max Beerbohm’s Rossetti and His Circle may be supposed to be a wombat.

A long-time devotee of the Wombat’s Lair at the zoo, Rossetti was beside himself to get a wombat of his very own. His first and most famous wombat was named Top, after William “Topsy” Morris, husband of model Jane Morris. (You’d probably recognize her from Proserpine.) Rossetti declared of Top, “The wombat is a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness.”

Here’s an angelic Jane leading fubsy Top, with matching halo, on a leash.

What a juicy mess that Rossetti-Jane-William situation was. After his wife Lizzie Siddal killed herself (some say over Rossetti’s affair with yet another pre-Raphaelite model), Rossetti threw his only copy of the love poems he’d written to her into her coffin. A few years later, he had her dug up so that he could retrieve the poems and publish them with a dedication to the new object of his obsession, Jane Morris. And whom do you think he hit up for a flattering review of those poems? William Morris.

Top may have been all kinds of magnificent, at least as far as Rossetti was concerned, but he wasn’t all that sturdy. It was only a few weeks before poor Top got some sort of mange and died, inspiring Rossetti’s “Death of a Wombat”. The lines below read:

I never reared a young Wombat
To glad me with his pin-hole eye,
But when he most was sweet & fat
And tail-less; he was sure to die!

I looked up the poem Lalla Rookh that those lines are parodying. It is rough going. “No poetical reader of the present day is the poorer for knowing absolutely nothing of Lalla Rookh,” wrote William Rossetti, and I see no reason to disagree with him now.

Reportedly, upon his death, Top the wombat was stuffed and displayed in the entry hall. But at some point, the famous wombat disappeared. Perhaps he was removed to spare the feelings of the next wombat. I haven’t come across much written about this Wombat #2. This sweet pencil sketch has been thought to be a portrait of him, but Rossetti wombatologist Angus Trumble has a point: it does have a very woodchucky sort of look. Apparently those pre-Raphaelites were always getting the woodchucks and the wombats mixed up. Too busy having love affairs and sliding naked down the banisters to learn the finer points of woodchuck-wombat distinction, I guess.

If I were running a role-playing game based on some imagined occultism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or writing a pastiche of Charlie Stross’s Laundry novels, I am sure there would be a role for a wombat.

You can put this on the list of things I mean to read more about someday, right next to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wombat. (Yes, wombat. His name was Topsy. I’ll post about that later this week when I have a little time to sort through my links.) I was looking for something entirely different when I ran across this passage in Ostentation, or critical remarks on “Quakerism, or, the story of my life;” by Mrs. Greer; in which that lady’s parvenu attempts at aristocracy are ridiculed, and fiction exposed (1853).

Many persons will, I am well aware, censure me for resorting to ridicule, sarcasm, and irony, in the following pages, instead of sober, convincing argument. To such objectors I would say that many assertions are unworthy of other notice. When Dr. Paul Cullen asserted that the sun was but six feet in diameter, did the Professor of Astronomy, Sir William R. Hamilton, publish any learned work to prove that the doctor had rather underrated its dimensions?

Doesn’t Archbishop Cullen sound like quite a specimen? He also shows up in The Christian World and in volume 19 of Punch:

You silly Paddy… Don’t you know that we are English Protestants, hating you by nature, and that our wish is to tyrannise over you and keep you under? If your young men come to college with our young men, don’t you see, you idiot, that in the course of a few score years, your lads, being born to the full as clever as ours and six times more numerous, may win the prizes and scholarships, get the government-places and snug berths… and turn us out of what at present we hold. Of course we vote for John of Tuam and Paul Cullen… Believe, with Paul Cullen, that the sun is six feet in circumference, accommodate your mathematics to his Grace’s (God bless his most Reverend Lordship), and see how you’ll get on as an Engineer, my boy.

And here is likely the man himself quoted in The United Presbyterian:

“There was no lack of historians, philosophers, and writers of every sect, in imputing fanaticism to the Inquisition for not closing its ears to the petulant imprudence of Galileo when he obstinately sought to conciliate the phraseology of the Bible with the Copernican system. But now a new plan of astronomy is given to the public, by means of which it is evidently proved that the systems both of Ptolemy and Copernicus are equally false; that the sun is but one meter (six feet) in breadth; that the earth is in size six times larger than all the heavenly bodies united; that it has but one motion, the diurnal; that it occupies the centre of the planetary system, and of all space; with other similar propositions repugnant to the prevailing theory of the globe and stars… What may not turn out if in more tranquil times the learned, resuming their usual contemplations, begin to find that they must go back, not indeed to Ptolemy, but most certainly to Moses and the son of Sirach? The thing will always belong to the domain of uncertainty. .. It well becomes them to explain away the Word of God without even knowing the degree of credit due to human inquiries, and to open their mouths against Heaven without knowing anything of the earth they tread!”

When I’ve worked hard in the garden and accomplished something — even when I haven’t gone and injured myself — a fair number of people have gotten a kick out of announcing, “You need a big strong guy for that!” I’ve nodded and smiled with gritted teeth.

But it could be worse. Since Josh actually is a big strong guy, it turns out that what people say to him is, “You need a Mexican!”

Seriously. I used to think it was just the one unfortunate person I know who’s talked about Mexicans as if they were a set of mass-produced garden appliances, but not even. It happens often enough to be noticeable. I marvel at the what-the-hellitude of it all.

I would like to know what’d happen if Josh were to point out that he is, in fact, half Mexican. But he’s too well behaved to do that. I’m certainly not, but it almost never happens when I’m around. If I were there, they’d probably switch to teasing him about not fulfilling his Manly Burly Man duties. At least, I like to think these are generally the same people.

“Some of them are full of black water. Others have become graveyards for old lawn furniture and rodent carcasses. They are shaped like jelly beans and manufactured by companies named Sunny Side and Champagne. Once upon a time, Fresno was the California Dream. Own a car. Own a house. Own a pool. Everyone wanted it and the wonderful world of credit made it all possible. But now, with the foreclosure monster running wild, the dream is dry. Thousands of pools are festering in the hot Central Valley sun. For most people this is tragic. But for some, it’s an opportunity.”

Cannonball from California is a place. on Vimeo.

ETA: a bit of synchronicity at Cute Overload:

It’s not really a word puzzle, though that’s the title. More of a word meditation. Via Radiolab.