Spent all day at the Seattle Folklife Festival.
Took the bus and arrived home at 10:30.
Today I would like to talk about garbage cans.
Tycho says his philosophy professor thinks that it is because people have souls that you must have human rights. I very much admire the Jesuit committment to the papally tattered remnants of liberation theology, but, not being Catholic, I think he's off the subject.
Tycho takes issue with the existence of a soul. I don't. Not because I think that people have one in the way that we have lungs. People have brains, they are born with personalities (ask any mom), they develop those personalities into character with their life choices. The urge to develop the character, together with the character itself, I think of as the soul. I call it divine because that's how I experience it, using the holiness sensor that everyone has built-in to their brains. I don't call souls divine because I think God handed them out to us because he wanted to make us different and more special than the rest of his creation. I think of my soul, not as being granted by heavenly fiat, but as an emergent phenomenon that comes from a certain number of neural connections.
It is not that hard to drift towards what I understand of Shintoism. Everything that stands out to us; moss-covered rills of water, and majestic trees, and items of clothing in which we have had intense experiences, and enemy countries; they all have spirits. You can sort of tell who they are, although they have their own path that may not always be accessible to you.
To make the leap from finding character/soul in ourselves and other things, towards deciding that they are immortal or separate from our physicality strikes me as unwarranted. I'm content with accepting that my life choices have shaped my soul in the same way that Scrabble tiles, rules, and players will give a particular flavor to a game.
Now we come to the part that I find very skewed from my view. I do not think that people have human rights because they have souls. Maybe I don't agree with this because I don't think of God as an external bureaucrat who grants souls along with rights to one group, and withholds them from another group that maybe didn't fill out its application forms right. Snails, or horses, say.
My theory draws on The Spink's theory of the garbage can in our minds. If we do things that impede our soul's growth, our garbage can fills up with slimy smelly crumbled-up junk. My garbage can starts to fill up when I'm not compassionate.
Human rights, then, are important to me because I respect myself.
And not just human rights, either. Imagine how clogged your mental garbage can would be if you pulled wings off of dragonflies, or kicked dogs, or built condominiums on beaver habitat. Every action that harms other beings is disturbing to your soul. Ignoring your compassionate urges takes work that's not good for you.
It strikes me as controlling and arrogant when (just as a random example) religious leaders say what everyone should be like, or even say that everyone has rights because they have souls. The only thing you have indisputable responsibility for is your own self (I think I'm equating "self" with "soul.") Any philosophy of conduct should be based on what you yourself should/can do to make yourself stronger and more mature. In my own case, that includes social activism. What other people should do or be is my business insofar as I prefer living in a world where I can trust that everyone is making the best choice that they see for themselves, unimpeded by gratuitous restrictions.
So, people have human rights because it is not good for my soul to live in a world where they don't have them. Your poverty is bad for me. Your tyrrany is bad for me. And, although I think centipedes and oak trees don't have the same complexity of soul that I do, I don't damage them or their habitat either without serious consideration.
It's all to keep my inner garbage can as empty as possible.
Spent all day at the Seattle Folklife Festival.
Took the bus and arrived home at 10:30.
In the morning, I made pancakes and bacon for our kiwi houseguests. A Bob came by yesterday, and a different one came by this morning for a taste of the bacon. He said that for his birthday tomorrow, he got genuine Lopez Island organic bacon. And, seeing that this needed to be explained to the New Zealand people, he told them, "One of the nicest things about the islands is that we have a mobile slaughterhouse."
Snatched The Spink away from play practice at the school to make the journey to the mainland: truck to the dock, David's boat to Deer Harbor, van to the ferry landing, Washington State Ferry to the mainland. And then, of course, to Costco where we bought the DK book Human for its stunning pictures and a jug of Vitamin C because we're both coming down with a cold.
Around 9:30 we found The Santa Fe Cafe at Phinney Ridge and had the most chili-soaked food we could find. The sky was exactly the color of those aqua refrigerators we had in the 60's. I told The Spink that the sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll of the '60's was nothing compared to the refrigerator colors. She said that back in those days, nobody had good taste.
The daughter of our hostess told us that she took 60 digital photos of her goldfish, Dum-Dum, who was several days dying. The photos are taped around her bed, but she turned them upside-down so that Dum-Dum would look right-side-up.
Check out the house addition photos. I'll add to them as things develop.
Lesson 5 of my music class is on the blues, which I've always avoided on the theory that I'm blue already and don't need help. But I'm nothing if not sincere. I took the class in order to sneak around my musical prejudices. A neighbor reviews blues CD's and donated three two-foot stacks to the library, which I'm working my way through. "That southern can is mine." "If my baby beats me, ain't nobody's business if I do." "I got me a woman for every day of the week, I'm a happy man." "Don't go giving it away to nobody else." Yeesh. There's actually quite a bit of it that I'm enjoying, but aggressive territoriality of men over women is a sore spot with me.
My high school was just north of Hollywood Boulevard, on the edge of one of the sex districts of Los Angeles. Dressed in a Catholic school uniform, I waited for the bus home in front of a sign that said, "LIVE GIRLS LIVE GIRLS LIVE GIRLS." It took me a long time to figure out that "girls" meant "women," and that "live" wasn't "viva!" but "alive." (I was very young when I started standing at that bus stop, just the age that The Spink is now. At twelve, I was academically advanced but emotionally retarded.) The customers sometimes thought I was one of the live girls, or ought to have been. Once a car stopped in front of me and one of the guys in it opened the door and made a friendly grab for me. Many times men found it interesting to sit next to me on the bus and make a grab for crotch or breast. I never, ever spoke to one of those guys. I developed the urban shield glare, never pointed at a face but aimed at the universe in general.
I was a sullen child, with just about zero sense of humor when it came to the mysterious topic of sex. The thing I refused to understand was that my mere existence could ignite somebody else's fantasy world without my participation. I adamantly refused to be frightened by these frightening encounters, no way. Instead, I tensed up and began to have revenge fantasies. Nothing in the culture of the times was available to lighten things up. That was the era when it was debated whether holding hands in public was decent or not (it was not), when divorce was for immoral people, when the sexual revolution was linked to the fall of civilization itself, when menstruation was disgusting. A girl was either chaste or a whore, and if she was a whore, she deserved whatever befell her.
That's why I enjoyed the movie Tank Girl so much. It's basically one of my old revenge fantasies, but sassy. Man, if I had been Rebecca in high school, I would have kicked butt! And there were some great lines, too. My favorite? Delivered by a geeky soldier kangaroo (natch), "It's a little invention that I invented myself, I might add. Actually."
After having watched kids as a profession for almost three decades, it seems to me that younger kids have an automatic attitude against those of the opposite sex that protects them from too-early sex. Of course there are occasional transcendant friendships, but the general situation is that boys jeer at girls and girls think boys are disgusting. When things begin to change around puberty, the first ventures into having a boy- or girl-friend are pretty short-lived and awkward. Like, the first time I was courted, I was fifteen, and the guy hung around where I was likely to be in his maroon t-shirt and flexed his muscles. With the searing cruelty of adolescence, I ignored him pointedly. I still remember his name because I was at once flattered and eye-rollingly disgusted with his technique, and because I knew that I was being cruel but that I didn't have the social skills myself to cheer him on in a general way but have him find some other chick to be manly at. A geek-ette myself, I was well aware that, while I had fully functioning plumbing, I wasn't ready for the emotional stuff that comes with dating. It's seemed to me since, that kids seem to have a limited amount of energy. Maybe they experiment with their sexuality or maybe they immerse themselves in academics but usually it's only older adolesents that seem to be able to do both at once.
My worrisome encounters with the adult sexual animal came when I was too young to handle them gracefully. It took a very long time to deal with my anger. Considering that sexuality is a must-have, and that deviants from the norm are mathematically guaranteed, I'm not really sure how to deal with this as a caring citizen. Fortunately, most kids aren't as excruciatingly sensitive as I was, and even more fortunately, the mainstream atmosphere surrounding sex nowadays seems to be, on the whole, less twisted and hypocritical than it used to be.
I was just reading about teaching evolution in the classroom, which is becoming increasingly difficult in the USA.
Hey guys, I can help you out. You say that evolution is godless? Nope, it doesn't have to be. Just because an evolutionary biologist can tell you what the mechanism for species differentiation is, doesn't mean that it can't have been set up by God. Knowing about something doesn't make it less marvelous.
Okay, so the Bible is the literal word of God and it doesn't mention evolution or any kind of physics. Of course it doesn't. God couldn't write out the stuff he did in so many words because people didn't have the education to understand it back then. Biochemistry couldn't have survived the oral history tradition. In the same way that you tell children stories that are good enough for their age, and then add facts and change the emphases as they get older, so the Bible stories were good enough back then, but can be added to now.
If God is indeed in control of everything, wouldn't you think that he'd be proud of all those scientists scurrying around inspecting and honoring his creation? And don't you think he's larger than what you can fit into a book you can tuck into a motel room drawer? And don't you think that Creation is ever-changing instead of static, and that as new things unfold, there is new stuff to learn about?
Obviously, I could be wrong. The Universe could be static. The Bible could hold all knowledge. The clues that consistently give the universe an age of about 15 billion years and Earth about 4 billion years, with dinosaurs 250 million years ago and apes our cousins; all those clues could have been planted by god in order to test to see whether we would believe the evidence of data and analysis over a 3,000 year old oral history given to us in translation.
"Believe what you're told, as opposed to what you see or have figured out." Why do you suppose God would want a planet full of people who were supposed to do that?
I've never really recovered from the trip to Norway this winter. After a month of heavy food and little exercise, my body kicked into a sort of middle-America mode where even thinking about exercise exhausts me. I keep resolving to do something about it, and every week or so do something tentative like yoga that I used to do daily but now is a big fat effort.
Today however, may have been a watershed day. For one thing, it's invitingly green out there, and the weather, while rainy, was balmy. For another thing, this business with the carpenter is beginning to seem as though it might happen. So, today we set up one of those clever Costco shelters by the woodshed and I moved wood and evened up dirt floors and broke up cement pieces and generally flung myself about. I'll spend at least part of tomorrow consolidating piles of supplies. I'm looking forward to retrieving my tough, resilient body from this doughy one.
The assignment for my music class is to write some blues. Luckily, I'm a natural depressive, and the lyrics came easy. I have a bit more intellectualizing to do about the tune and then I'll stand back and see what comes. A lot of artists I know do their best work when they have free rein. But I do best when I'm working against an assignment. There are so many possibilities of what I could do, so many media. If someone outside of me does the work of narrowing it down a bit, great. My Germanic sense of duty ensures that I'll complete the project, and my otherwise chaotic creative sense has a channel through which to rush.
I dreamed that I was on a bus taking me from behind the iron curtain through Hungary towards the border. Dangerous giants owed me a house and were setting me up in one at the shores of the ocean. To the north of the house, seven rainbows curved almost straight up from the snow.
Have you noticed that most of the photos for this month kind of match the scarey green background color? This was not intentional, just an artifact of how scarey green May is turning out to be.
A squall in the evening. The Spink and I went out in The Banana of the Sea, our yellow double kayak. We scudded along under careening eagles and got bracingly wet.
Our hostess at the beach house invited us to a game of Skip-bo, a version of Patience for several people. You build up from one to twelve, trying to get rid of all the cards in your stack. There's a bit of strategy involved, just enough to disguise the fact that it's mostly a game of chance. I won almost at once through a string of lucky draws. It made me extremely uncomfortable. It is bad manners to win by so much, even if you can't help it. And in fact, I could have helped it if I'd managed to change gears early enough. It was certainly possible to hold back a few useful cards. But that kind of flexibility is not easy for me. Now that I've thought of it, it's a strategy that I'll be able to use if it comes up before my mid-range memory dies down. Thinking on my feet gets harder and harder as I age, but I have a larger repertoire of things I've already tried.
Vruba and I talked about the effects of aging recently. He said he'd been reading The Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge in which extremely long-lived people have continued to mature. They have long-range goals which they're willing to set up for and wait for. Indeed, my personality is quite different in some ways than it used to be before menopause, and it's not just that I now frequently find myself standing in the middle of the room in complete puzzlement about what I was heading for. Sometimes I do feel wiser, in patches.
On the other hand, the most recent New Yorker has a disturbing article about the connection between AIDS, crystal meth, and using the Internet to arrange for sex. One of the things the article says is that it is the more mature men and not the adolescents that seem to be the ones who don't use condoms. There are several reasons given, but you have to wonder what the point is to getting older if you haven't, to take one example, learned about delayed gratification in favor of meatier goals. To coin a phrase.
The bread seed poppies are about a foot high in the garden. I love their voluptuous blue-gray foliage. They spread enthusiastically and in a few weeks we'll have a matte carpet of them. And then bud heads will lift on their drooping fragile stems and erupt in impossible pink and red fluff. They're opium poppies.
I read this thing once that said that if you know they're opium poppies, then they're illegal, but if you bought them from the seed company as bread seed poppies (which I did), then they're not.
I have this almost fanatical devotion to letting people know stuff. I realize that information is not the same as wisdom, but I do believe that people are more likely to make good decisions if they have good facts. It should never be illegal to know something.
One of my neighbors, a surgeon, gives me knowing remarks about the kind of poppies I have. He can't let up about it. I find it a little wearying, as though anyone with access to a drug would then have to use it. My personal drug is chocolate. I've tried some other drugs such as alcohol, prozac, coffee, and aspirin, but am not really that impressed. Sure, they act as advertised, but so what. I don't like brain shifts. It's not exactly that I don't like losing control. It's that I don't like having something outside of myself making me lose control. Unless I painfully lost a spleen or something, opium is definitely out.
The topic, however, is more about access to information. I think that knowing how to make an atom bomb, for example, isn't the same as making one. Growing poppies isn't the same as becoming a dope fiend. Forbidding me to do the first on the off-chance that I might do the second is overkill. Better to punish any crime that occurs once it does rather than before it does. And even better to live in a culture where the crime rate is low, not because people are suppressed or dull, but because they are too engaged in living well to waste their time on hurting other people.
The rest of the school went on a field trip, and I ended up with two students. We went to Sandy Point, ate salmonberries, collected crabshells for egg tempera pigment, and built a very small bonfire.
"Don't let go too soon, but don't hang on too long." Morrie Schwartz.
Watched Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns to celebrate the end of our anatomy and Spanish units. I was tickled to watch some of the kids be completely sucked in, gasping at the surprises, giggling at the jokes, and squirming in terror at the suspenseful parts. I enjoyed the movie, but wanted a bit more crispness in the message. Believe in yourself, sure. I fail to see how refusing to marry a cat means that you believe in yourself. The kids, however, were satisfied, and one even shouted near the end of the movie, "Her adventure worked! She really did change!"
After prawning and discussing house plans, watched Zorro, the Gay Blade, in which George Hamilton plays Diego de la Vega and his brother, Bunny Wigglesworth. "I will help the helpless! I will befriend the friendless! I will defeat the ... the feetless!"
When I teach, there are always things that I think could have been done better. For example, today we had a Spanish lesson in which we took the words most missed on yesterday's vocabulary test, and made up a story using those words (Vampire bunny rabbits climbed a ladder to the sun, sucked all the light out, and fell burnt to the earth, where they landed in chocolate flan and were eaten by people who then vomited). The pace was not quite right for everyone. Three students got perfect or near-perfect on that vocabulary test, two students got less than 40%. One student was rolling around on the floor during the test and missed it altogether. The others did okay. From this, I gather than my technique works for some but not for others. Or that taking tests is easier for some than for others (I think it's the same groupings in this case). I made sure to include the under-40% crowd today (although the floor child today was a run back and forth across the room child, and missed Spanish again), but in consequence bored the top students. Who were very nice about it.
Of course, one can always get better. But I think that there's also an assumption that the universe is set up in such a way that there's always a solution to life problems. If you don't find a solution, it's because you missed it.
Squirreling backwards along the lines of logic, you see that one path this assumption leads you is to the idea that there must be an external, intentional god, otherwise what would be arranging the universe in such a way that solutions to personal problems always exist?
I'm not ready to drop the assumption. Everything in my experience tells me that, in situations that are more or less under my control, things can be improved.
The squirrel can follow a path that leads to a godless mathematical argument as well. There are a zillion things I could do differently during class, at each moment. If I had no judgemental abilities, it would be unlikely that I'd pick an effective set of teaching strategies. I do have judgemental abilities, but they're based on intuition, education, and temperament, all of which are subject to variation. It's highly unlikely that anything I do would be the very best thing to do, therefore there's always room for improvement. This argument doesn't need God, except in the fuzzy abstract sense of arriving at "good."
We're creatures that are evolutionarily selected to find patterns. It's a short reach from finding a pattern to finding a meaning. And life is multifaceted enough so that we can usually find a meaning that fits our personal world-view in whatever pattern we perceive. I think that God is an emergent phenomenon that comes at the boundaries between events and finding their meaning.
This was going somewhere. Maybe tomorrow.
David brought home a mortar and pestle, so during Scrabble with Bob (626 total points! We were very impressed with each other!), I ground up some of the pigments.
COASST walk in the afternoon. The sun was brilliant, the clouds puffy, the water baby-bottom smooth. I collected blue mussels, red crab shells, charcoal, and gray and yellow clays for egg tempera pigments. We arranged them on saucers on the dinner table and ate our boiled prawns around the edges.
I've been painting a series of flower vases on my windowsill. I like flowers, sure, but I never thought I'd paint them. Pretty is not exactly what I'm after. Luckily, pretty is not usually what I get.
I've been deliberately trying to stay with one subject. I get those ADD urges, to suddenly switch to some completely different medium, but I tell myself that there's time. I have time to keep working at this one thing and trust that it will shift to the next thing by itself. Things do seem to be moving despite my uncharacteristic desire to stay in one place. The one on the left is one of the first, and the one on the right was finished today.
Here's another thought on jazz. It's associated with Black America. While mainstream America isn't white (just as jazz isn't "black"), I would say that most people who think of "American values" visualize white men, or maybe white families, having those vastly vaunted values.
I think that as individuals, we recognize parts of ourselves but that there is more to us than just what we acknowledge. The parts that we don't acknowledge are unconscious. Our dreams (which I regard as windows into the unconsious) are peopled by figures from our daily lives that represent something to us. If there's nobody we can "borrow" from life, our dreams meld people with representative characteristics together, or make them up. As I understand it, for many whites, the deeper from the unconscious a dream messenger comes, the darker-skinned he or she is. This, in my opinion, tidily explains why our race relations have been so highly charged - as a white culture we are dealing with unacknowledged parts of ourselves when we encounter Blacks. (And, I suspect, vice-versa.)
My own unconscious is a bit skewed towards Europe, possibly because of being the daughter of Central European immigrants. (Although I do hang out with Blacks in dreams. Just not as frequently as with Russians or Germans.) In general, the dream messengers I encounter come from Central Europe if they are relatively close to the surface of my unconscious, and from further and further East if they are deeper down. This is partly because I'm so verbal. I mostly understand German, and the further east people's languages are, the more primitive my conversations with them are; a perfect metaphor for a text-driven person. And, not coincidentally, I think, I am greatly attracted to klezmer, gypsy, and Balkan music, which come from areas that, in my dream-mind, lurk just at the edge of consciousness.
I wonder if one reason that so many white people I know seem to worship jazz, as opposed to merely enjoying it at lot, has to do with this. I struggle to open new territory within myself through Central and East European music (or at least, that's what I suspect I'm doing). Friends who seem to me to worship rather than just enjoy jazz might be doing the same, only with a different internal landscape that's at least partly concerned with skin color rather than language.
Jazz night. I have been puzzling over my dislike of jazz for some time. After tonight's session I told the bass player that it sounds like a wall of sound to me. It was a tactless remark, as I know there are a lot of styles and ours is partly dictated by the fact that we have a drummer and an electric guitar player as well as people who play instruments whose sound I enjoy more. Mostly, I know that the "wall of sound" sensation has to do with not understanding the music
But, I'm told, it's not about intellectualization, it's about feeling the music.
No.
There are indeed different personality types. Fortunately, reality is bigger than our personalities. It is people who give a lot of weight to their feelings that tell me that you can only access music through feelings. I give more weight to analysis. Not because I'm cold and defective in some way (Okay. Maybe I am cold and defective, but not for that reason), but because everyone has their own way of wending their way through life, and thinking is mine.
I'm perfectly capable of emoting over music, but it only seems to happen if I "get" it. If at some level I can imagine playing music like that, or dancing to it, or somewhow owning it through something more than passive listening.
Serendipitously, Edgar Coker's very intellectual book on Improvising Jazz has recently fallen into my hands. If I give it some serious attention, my guess is that I'll come to love the music it intellectualizes about. I'll let you know.
Today began my final two weeks of teaching this year, except for all those extra things that seem to come up. We're supposed to put out the yearbook in that time, which is a tad unrealistic but hey. We read the first page of Charlie y la Fabrica de Chocolate, and everyone picked a body system such as skeletal or respiratory to do a report on. Mine is the lymphatic system, assigned to me by a student because none of us is really sure what it is.
The Special Education meeting afterwards included all five of the staff members plus a parent, to talk for two hours about one kid. I wonder if kids have any idea about how much we microanalyze their behavior. But we may have a workable plan of action, so it was probably worth it.
Then home to a game of Abalone, dinner, and refencing the sheep. Klezmer night! Another game of Abalone! Bath! I could do with a couple of months of unscheduled time!
Happy Mothers' Day to everyone who's taken on the Mom archetype at one time or another. Vruba, for example, who mothered The Spink so very nicely. And the rest of you, you know who you are. Thanks!
I never did have much of a memory for people and events. Being an introvert, the world Out There of course is inevitable but not particularly noteworthy, except as it feeds my interior life. And so things slip rather suddenly down and gone, like a sinking ship.
I remember Kitty Mau-Mau sitting on Dad's brown woolen suit pants, and the smell of pipe tobacco. I remember Grandmommy's silken wrinkles. I remember the hash mark pattern on the curtains in the room I shared with my little sisters. But very little of daily events, from anywhen. Sometimes The Spink asks me if she did anything amusing when she was little, and I tell her that she very likely did.
I'm considering writing a book about what people remember about the natural history here from years ago. Vruba and I wrote a book about our natural history, seven years ago, and while I remember most of what is in the book, I cannot rely on my memories of what we saw to generate the essays. I think bird flocks are far less numerous than then, but maybe not.
I asked a neighbor if she'd be willing to be interviewed. She said she has no written records, but she has a good memory and can answer questions about any year I care to ask her about; shellfish especially.
I cannot think what it would be like to be able to remember oysters (except that I do remember one oyster event. It was in Mexico, and I was feeling daring. They came in a brine-filled sundae glass, and tasted like the tide line smells on a hot summer day. I have seldom been sicker).
Bob said that he used to have some antique Chinese ink pots. One day his elderly mother asked to see them. She took them outside and smashed them against a rock. Fred said that when his father came to visit, he tidied up whenever they turned their backs. Half a year later, they found their missing tools and utensils at the bottom of the rain barrel.
I understand that.
We went to the Friday Harbor Labs open house today. I wandered around looking through microscopes at sea squirt sperm and taking pictures of ling cod waiting to get their stomachs pumped. The best presentation was by a mathematician, Gary Odell, from University of Washington's zoology department. He's written 800 pages of code, which needs a basement filled with air-conditioned computers, to simulate what happens when cell tubules grab sperm and egg nuclei and shove them together. That was cool, but what was really cool was his explanation of the parameters he gave the algorithm. They don't have good data for how much of various proteins and thingies are needed, but it turns out that the process is robust. A huge variation in input still gives cell division. That's borne out in experiments. The process itself is a network of things that produce proteins and then have to be erased by other things when the proper moment is reached. It's really messy, except that it works.
I was reminded of larger systems like culture. You have this complex meme with individual components that don't really make any sense, but the thing as a whole is resistant to insult. Maybe there's some kind of system of seeing this, as we use fractals to explain visual patterns.
In the afternoon, the school fired the objects we made from local clay. Here's the entire process:
You can find clay at old beach or lake sites. Here, it's in the sand cliffs on the beach. If you get chunks of dry clay, pound it up with mortar and pestle and run it through a fine sieve to make powder. Add water until it's like play-do in texture. If you get chunks of damp clay, you can break the pieces apart with your fingers and discard any rocks you encounter. Someone had our clay assayed and was told that it needed aluminum to make it flexible enough to work. Raw clay that you find often cracks as it dries. Ours does too, but that's solvable by adding about 1 part in 10 of sand. The sand discourages any cracks from getting bigger. So, you don't need the aluminum for simple stuff.
Since our clay isn't as workable as the stuff you buy, we made fairly simple shapes by pressing the clay into wooden bowls or around oiled beach rocks. One guy made a pot but he had to make the base one day and the enclosed part the next day so it wouldn't collapse.
After the dishes dried overnight, we used knives and then steel wool to take the roughness off. Then we made slip, a soupy clay, out of either the same clay or other clays that we found on the beach. We spread the slip thinly over parts of our dishes that we wanted to be smooth, sometimes using several colors of slip in the hopes that they would fire up to be different colors. After a few moments of drying, we used the back of a spoon or a smooth pebble to burnish the slip into a sheen.
We put the pots over the heater overnight to make sure they were super dry. The camp fire was the final step. We built it on the beach, putting our dishes nearby to heat up. When the fire was down to coals, we tossed the pots on top. We put more wood on top of one area, and smothered another area with sawdust. Dishes from the first area oxidized and turned reddish, and from the second reduced and turned black. It only took about four hours before everything had died down and the finished dishes were ready. We let them sit for a bit so they wouldn't crack as they cooled.
Aside from being intrinsically cool, the idea was that we would see how you could make serviceable clayware entirely from local material.
In the afternoon, the school collected mineral pigments for egg tempera. To make egg tempera:
Separate an egg by cracking it and cupping the yolk in one of the shells while the white runs off into a bowl. Keep blooping the yolk from one shell to the other until most of the white is gone. Then roll it around on your palm to absorb the remainder of the white. Finally, hold the yolk by its membrane over a jar and poke the bottom. The runny yellow fat falls in, and the membrane stays disgustingly between your fingers. Mix a bit of water into the yolk until it is creamy in texture.
To make pigments, collect stuff like charcoal, crab shells, a brick, and colored dirt. Grind each color up with a mortar and pestle, and run it through a very fine sieve. The resulting powder can be mixed with the egg yolk to make paint.
My list for tomorrow:
Refence sheep
Weedwhack old sheep pasture.
Collect mineral pigments for clay workshop (soot, rust, chalk).
iDVD doesn't work from iMovie. Try via QuickTime.
Contact Starband regarding lack of success of their last advice, cancellation of contract.
Start the painting of the four rooms.
1/2 hour Spanish homework.
1/2 hour music homework.
Practice improvisation on pentatonic scale.
Cut out liner fabric for graduation skit costumes, adjust sewing machine tension.
Re-attach fender to bike.
Mail COASST bird survey, paycheck, letter to Mom.
Update calendar; Mitch 10 Thurs, Wayne afternoon Weds, Romeo & Juliet boat leaves 5 Thurs, jazz Sat 7:30, special ed meeting Mon 3:15.
Weigh & bag red wool skeins.
Return "Fellowship of the Ring."
The Spink has been exercised all week, trying to figure out what kind of flower goes best with the pony's coat. She finally settled on lilacs. She rode Chocolate bareback in the May Day parade.
In the meantime, I was fussing around at the school. We'd backed up the pickup truck to the porch (another inch and the porch would've been taken out), and four of us hauled the piano out of the school, rolled it up a couple of boards and into the truck bed. Then we collected a bunch of music stands and bulldog clips and set up next to the May Pole.
I'm not claiming that this was the first klezmer Maypole dance. But it was probably one of the few.
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