Margotlog: Final Grades and the Fiscal Cliff
'Tis the season to be taken to account. The US federal government has just averted a financial cliff of cuts and ups that would have, according to financial experts, thrown the country into a downward spiral. This is not news. During the agonizing attempts to reach some sort of compromise, I thought, "Hmm, maybe it would be better simply to fall off!" But this approach would have dragged many millions into precipitate hardship, or so we thought. Partly because, for the past sixty years, this country has been predicated on rising expectations and a rising standard of living. For a good portion of the 20th century, the promise also extended and was even realized for the working class. That is, until President Clinton's North American Trade Agreement allowed US companies to ship jobs overseas with little penality. Then the US working class suffered a significant decline in job offerings and wages.
During this past month, I've also been handing out final grades to two groups of students, one mid-level college writing class, and the other a master's level graduate class. Something happened to me during this semester: I became hard as nails. Yes, I still brought food treats to these evening classes and asked students to sign up to bring their share. I still wrote long (though hardly folksy) comments on student papers and even phoned up a few who seemed to be wandering in the wilderness of confusion or idleness. One I even reported to the "authorities" for rarely being in class and turning in assignments.
But these measures I've largely followed in the past. New this semester was my tone of insistent, direct requirement. "You MUST do such and so, if you want to pass this class." Or, "No, that is NOT right. A bibliography MUST include author's last name, title, date, etc." I squashed the notion that I should make friends with my students. That I should coddle them like tender shoots, lest they wither and die.
Over the past few years, I've read articles by child psychologists bemoaning American youths' belief in their superiority coupled with an unwillingness to work hard. Stands to reason: if you are superior by all definitions and evidence, your middling efforts should be sufficient, even praised. Everyone should earn an A. We have taught our young people entitlement. Raised them well into the age of adulthood to believe that the world/the economy/their parents owe them an easy, good time.
This is hardly the case with some of my students whose lives are so complicated and troubled--with single-parent work and childcare, with fractured families sometimes spread out across the globe, with mental health troubles that bring them up short--that they can't begin to function in a college class.
But for many others, I have come to realize that they engage in far too much partying and expenditure, neither conducive to college performance. They buy fancy expensive tennis shoes, they down so much alcohol and eat so little real food that their electrolytes take a nosedive and reduce them to a quivering mess.
This past semester, I told my mid-level writing class exactly what would happen if they pursued such ridiculous behavior. After the first paper revealed serious deficiencies in American English among some immigrant students, I took them immediately to the writing center and told them they MUST bring every single one of their papers there for help before turning it in.
So with the graduate students: I was also much more directive. I told them what was acceptable and what was not. I led them through outlining, writing opening paragraphs, using quotations in insightful ways. Of the mid-level writing students, many did outstanding work. They turned in weekly assignments, which previous classes had rarely done. They did the readings. They did a lot of research and they wrote clearly and well. Only a few faltered. These had such serious family problems that no teaching of mine could compete.
Back to this national cliff. I am a registered Democrat. I believe that government in some form (local, regional, national) MUST regulate food, water, pollution, environmental standards, traffic,building safety, GUNS, on and so on. But I also realize that we as a nation have built up an enormous debt. It is not my doing: I abhorred the wars in Iraq and Afganistan. The minute I heard MPR describe the North American Trade Agreement, I felt in my gut that it would leach jobs from this country, to the advantage of already huge corporations who hardly need the help. Yes, it would reduce the cost of clothing and other manufactured good, but it would not necessarily promise better products as a result.
As we confront the debt which we failed to manage with the recent tax measures, I, for one, will grit my teeth and urge significant belt tightening for all of us except the very very poor. Cuts to the military, cuts to some domestic programs, and yes, plans to reward companies who bring jobs back to the United States. It is the right thing to do. Let's return to a clear-headed vision of the importance of hard work and saving. Let's support our young people by helping them into college and requiring them to perform at their very best.
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Monday, December 24, 2012
Margotlog: The Slant of Memory
Margotlog: The Slant of Memory
A good poem can bequeath you one or two lines: such as these from Maxine Kumin's Feeding Time:
Time which blows on the kettle's rim
Waits to carry us off. (Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, 1992)
I stand alone in the kitchen on dark winter mornings, as the teapot's steam marks this warning in the cold air. I say the lines to myself. They come at the end of her poem about feeding animals and loved ones at this coldest time of the year when the ancient knowledge of starvation waits just beyond the glass
Premonition and death also rise through the plot of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Like all his novels I've read, this one circles back to reverberate its initial scene. A master of headlong plotting, Dickens is also a master of infusing a scene with motion. Thoughts flowing through the bars of a prison: It is the French Revolution. The novel's denouement depends on that all-important first scene.And a recurring prison.
Now with the holidays I have time to read magazines several months old. A New Yorker writer, Anthony Lane offers Henry James as the greatest of all novelists, with his Portrait of an Artist. I flinch from this judgment, (and remember a BBC enactment I heard maybe five months ago). To my taste, James is deficient in chiaroscuro, the lights and darks of which Dickens is a master. Not to mention the ability to call characters out of the sod, the brick, the furnace. Dickens' scenes--from counting house to hovel, from rain-driven clod to cozy fire, from prison bars to sumptuous feast--create a full-bodied, cantankerous, ultimately satisfying world of invention.
Another set of lines recurs: A certain slant of light
on winter afternoons
oppresses like the weight
of cathedral tunes.
There is such sharply slanting light as I walk at the end of these short days. It carries terror with it. Emily Dickinson knew of what she spoke--that oppressive music.
We read to be carried out of ourselves, but also brought back: So lines from poems wend their way through odd moments, and the experience of novels so huge and insistent they envelope my life. I think I still know the difference between Dickens' Paris and mine own, though mine is now shaded, tortured by his. My London remains entirely his, since I've never been in it. But it is full of extraordinary characters and encounters. In Henry James' world, fine perceptions are spun into immense subtlety. That's that I remember: shading going from half sun to darker and darker grey until we stand in ultimate penumbra. .
A good poem can bequeath you one or two lines: such as these from Maxine Kumin's Feeding Time:
Time which blows on the kettle's rim
Waits to carry us off. (Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief, 1992)
I stand alone in the kitchen on dark winter mornings, as the teapot's steam marks this warning in the cold air. I say the lines to myself. They come at the end of her poem about feeding animals and loved ones at this coldest time of the year when the ancient knowledge of starvation waits just beyond the glass
Premonition and death also rise through the plot of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Like all his novels I've read, this one circles back to reverberate its initial scene. A master of headlong plotting, Dickens is also a master of infusing a scene with motion. Thoughts flowing through the bars of a prison: It is the French Revolution. The novel's denouement depends on that all-important first scene.And a recurring prison.
Now with the holidays I have time to read magazines several months old. A New Yorker writer, Anthony Lane offers Henry James as the greatest of all novelists, with his Portrait of an Artist. I flinch from this judgment, (and remember a BBC enactment I heard maybe five months ago). To my taste, James is deficient in chiaroscuro, the lights and darks of which Dickens is a master. Not to mention the ability to call characters out of the sod, the brick, the furnace. Dickens' scenes--from counting house to hovel, from rain-driven clod to cozy fire, from prison bars to sumptuous feast--create a full-bodied, cantankerous, ultimately satisfying world of invention.
Another set of lines recurs: A certain slant of light
on winter afternoons
oppresses like the weight
of cathedral tunes.
There is such sharply slanting light as I walk at the end of these short days. It carries terror with it. Emily Dickinson knew of what she spoke--that oppressive music.
We read to be carried out of ourselves, but also brought back: So lines from poems wend their way through odd moments, and the experience of novels so huge and insistent they envelope my life. I think I still know the difference between Dickens' Paris and mine own, though mine is now shaded, tortured by his. My London remains entirely his, since I've never been in it. But it is full of extraordinary characters and encounters. In Henry James' world, fine perceptions are spun into immense subtlety. That's that I remember: shading going from half sun to darker and darker grey until we stand in ultimate penumbra. .
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Margotlog: Thinking Things Over at Christmas
Margotlog: Thinking Things Over at Christmas
Carol Bly, one of Minnesota's finest essayists, published an essay with this title in her collection, Letters from the Country. It's probably my favorite, written when she lived in a small prairie community in the 1970s. She advised us, in that bossy way of hers, to sit in the dark and so discourage passing drivers from turning in at the driveway. Do not answer the door. Instead, think about all the subjects that can't be discussed with coffee-klatching neighbors.
It is a quiet night at my house, and I am drawing up a ledger of sorts, musings about this most cantankerous of years. I'm thinking about the shooting of 20 children in a Connecticut school and where to lay the blame. It's not possible simply to stand aloof. We in the middle class have become more and more in love with roughness and violence, and less and less aware of what it means to be truly desperate. This divergence between real suffering and the noise and menace we manipulate for enjoyment frightens me.
Item: After President Obama "saved" the Detroit automakers, instead of instituting guidelines for smaller cars with higher fuel efficiency, we porked out on bigger SUVs and 4X4s--souped up trucks so big they roar down residential streets like tanks. Flamboyant displays of power going nowhere!
Item: Sitting in a movie theater as far from home as you can get and not tread on Asia, we waited for a showing of "The Life of Pi." The previews were for shows you're supposed to see with kids. The screaming sound tracks nearly broke my eardrums. The images of mayhem and destruction were so huge and menacing, so "in your face" that I had to hide mine in my lap.Yet all around me, wriggling, jumpy kids kept eating their candy and popcorn, taking it all in.
Item: We know nothing, not really, about the 20-year-old who broke into the elementary school in Connecticut with enough ammunition to kill everyone in the school. We do know that his mother bought the assault-style weapons and the ponderous bullet cases he used. Is it possible that she, who never let anyone close to her house, was engaged in full-fledged terrorizing of her son? Is it possible that his horrendous act went twenty-eight shots beyond what he was experiencing at home?
I've just talked to educators who work with protection against, and prevention of school violence. About lock-downs, one said, "We practice what to do--lock classroom doors, never let anyone in during a class. But within days, all the doors stand open and anyone can appear at a classroom door and get the teacher's attention." The other one said, "Prevention is even more important than protection--talk to students who seem depressed. Ferret out the suicidal and get them help. It's often the suicidal who kills others, then himself."
Item: When I was in high school, we practiced what to do if someone dropped "the bomb." We filed out into the halls and hunkered down, our arms draped over our heads. Then on Saturday night we danced ourselves silly to loud rock 'n' roll. But there was only one shooting in my small South Carolina high school--it was an accident. A brother cleaning a shotgun killed a younger sibling at close range. He was a pariah afterwards, always walking alone, his head down. No one had ever heard of assault-style rifles. Television was silly comedy shows, boring new commentaries and Saturday morning cartoons on our small screen.
Item: My father drove like a maniac, arguing with my mother, lifting his hands off the wheel. In the back seat, I was terrified and furious. Even as a girl, I knew that he was using the car as a weapon to intimidate her.
There is only one conclusion and many corollaries: Humans will be violent, loud and bullying.
Corollaries: Arms control doesn't mean only a detente over the bomb. It also means removing the most dangerous weapons from civil society. Assault weapons and huge magazines of bullets should not be available to anyone except the military. Period.
Violence needs to be channeled to do the least harm: sports and challenging outdoor activities are the best. Children (and that includes teenagers and young adults) are particularly vulnerable to huge, loud, repeated images of aggression. Fed such junk long enough, they will be unable to distinguish between what is playful and what is harmful. The two will become melded. Fear will curdle in their chests and they will spew it on others.
Instead of such a diet, they (and the rest of us) need gentle, quiet, thoughtful activities. We as humans need to learn how to protect and care for living things smaller than and bigger than we are. We need to learn empathy for those around us. Otherwise, we all grow an exaggerated sense of our own power and place in the world, which is an awful set-up for dealing with the biggest challenge we face: repairing the planet in hopes of saving life as we know it before it's too late.
Carol Bly, one of Minnesota's finest essayists, published an essay with this title in her collection, Letters from the Country. It's probably my favorite, written when she lived in a small prairie community in the 1970s. She advised us, in that bossy way of hers, to sit in the dark and so discourage passing drivers from turning in at the driveway. Do not answer the door. Instead, think about all the subjects that can't be discussed with coffee-klatching neighbors.
It is a quiet night at my house, and I am drawing up a ledger of sorts, musings about this most cantankerous of years. I'm thinking about the shooting of 20 children in a Connecticut school and where to lay the blame. It's not possible simply to stand aloof. We in the middle class have become more and more in love with roughness and violence, and less and less aware of what it means to be truly desperate. This divergence between real suffering and the noise and menace we manipulate for enjoyment frightens me.
Item: After President Obama "saved" the Detroit automakers, instead of instituting guidelines for smaller cars with higher fuel efficiency, we porked out on bigger SUVs and 4X4s--souped up trucks so big they roar down residential streets like tanks. Flamboyant displays of power going nowhere!
Item: Sitting in a movie theater as far from home as you can get and not tread on Asia, we waited for a showing of "The Life of Pi." The previews were for shows you're supposed to see with kids. The screaming sound tracks nearly broke my eardrums. The images of mayhem and destruction were so huge and menacing, so "in your face" that I had to hide mine in my lap.Yet all around me, wriggling, jumpy kids kept eating their candy and popcorn, taking it all in.
Item: We know nothing, not really, about the 20-year-old who broke into the elementary school in Connecticut with enough ammunition to kill everyone in the school. We do know that his mother bought the assault-style weapons and the ponderous bullet cases he used. Is it possible that she, who never let anyone close to her house, was engaged in full-fledged terrorizing of her son? Is it possible that his horrendous act went twenty-eight shots beyond what he was experiencing at home?
I've just talked to educators who work with protection against, and prevention of school violence. About lock-downs, one said, "We practice what to do--lock classroom doors, never let anyone in during a class. But within days, all the doors stand open and anyone can appear at a classroom door and get the teacher's attention." The other one said, "Prevention is even more important than protection--talk to students who seem depressed. Ferret out the suicidal and get them help. It's often the suicidal who kills others, then himself."
Item: When I was in high school, we practiced what to do if someone dropped "the bomb." We filed out into the halls and hunkered down, our arms draped over our heads. Then on Saturday night we danced ourselves silly to loud rock 'n' roll. But there was only one shooting in my small South Carolina high school--it was an accident. A brother cleaning a shotgun killed a younger sibling at close range. He was a pariah afterwards, always walking alone, his head down. No one had ever heard of assault-style rifles. Television was silly comedy shows, boring new commentaries and Saturday morning cartoons on our small screen.
Item: My father drove like a maniac, arguing with my mother, lifting his hands off the wheel. In the back seat, I was terrified and furious. Even as a girl, I knew that he was using the car as a weapon to intimidate her.
There is only one conclusion and many corollaries: Humans will be violent, loud and bullying.
Corollaries: Arms control doesn't mean only a detente over the bomb. It also means removing the most dangerous weapons from civil society. Assault weapons and huge magazines of bullets should not be available to anyone except the military. Period.
Violence needs to be channeled to do the least harm: sports and challenging outdoor activities are the best. Children (and that includes teenagers and young adults) are particularly vulnerable to huge, loud, repeated images of aggression. Fed such junk long enough, they will be unable to distinguish between what is playful and what is harmful. The two will become melded. Fear will curdle in their chests and they will spew it on others.
Instead of such a diet, they (and the rest of us) need gentle, quiet, thoughtful activities. We as humans need to learn how to protect and care for living things smaller than and bigger than we are. We need to learn empathy for those around us. Otherwise, we all grow an exaggerated sense of our own power and place in the world, which is an awful set-up for dealing with the biggest challenge we face: repairing the planet in hopes of saving life as we know it before it's too late.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Margotlog: The Laysan Albatross and the Ocean of Plastic
Margotlog: The Laysan Albatross and the Ocean of Plastic
At the northern edge of Kauai, the most northwesterly of the main Hawaiian Islands, a point of land reaches out to a lighthouse. This is the Kilauea lighthouse. Once there were 14 lighthouses studding the rugged coast of Kauai, in the days of sailing ships and many ports of call, in the days before sonar. Now this one remains as a beacon for those who enjoy watching seabirds and searching the ocean for whales. We visit every time we come to Kauai, our favorite of the Hawaiian Islands, the greenest, least marred by urbanization and volcano activity. For spewing lava and plumes of smoke, go to the "Big Island." For high rises and Waikiki beaches, go to Honolulu. We've done both, and still love Kauai the best.
Several things have happened to the endemic birds of the islands. Odd word, endemic. For a while, every time I saw it, I read "epidemic." But it means "native only to this spot." High up in the sharp-sided mountains of Kauai, there remain some truly unusual birds--bright red with deeply curved beak, or bright yellow or bright red with black wings. They all have sonorous names in native Hawaiian, which of course I don't remember. It's hard for an Anglo to speak Hawaiian, though lovely to hear it, like whoshing wind or lapping waves. But one little endemic bird of Kauaii caught my attention: the apapane, reknown for its varied melodies and (poor thing) for being preyed upon by endemic and imported owls. When the apapane finds an owl in the vicinty, it hides in the leaf clusters of the ohia tree, and whimpers.
What does it take to extend empathy to other living things, the empathy we usually reserve forour own kind? Awe at its physical presence and splendor? Or a sign that it quakes with fear just as we do? Relief from our busy, demanding lives also helps. Quiet attention, absorbing into our very being what the other creature is experiencing. Then responding from our "deep heart's core."(quoting Mathew Arnold)
It's helped me to know that elephants mourn the one of their family. They will lie down beside the suffering one, and remain with it after it dies. If this isn't grief, I don't know what is. Whether elephants, surely one of the smartest animals, will also grieve the death of a creature not their own, I don't know, but there are reports of other kinds of animals forming close bonds--dog and duck, deer and goat.
Visiting the lighthouse at Kilauea I marveled at huge Laysan Albatross on the wing, I was awed by their wide wings (grey on top, white below), at their hooked beaks so close that I could see the hooks, and their regal white heads with goofy tilted eyes, which make them look cross-eyed, but probably are set this way to give wide range of vision--sideways, forward, maybe even above their heads.
They do not nest on the cliffs beside the lighthouse, as do the boobies, all white and not at all dumb. But instead the Laysan Albatross nests on the small islands that stretch west from the main Hawaiian chain. Laysan Island was ruined by a German named Max Schlemmer who introduced rabbits (among other irritants) who so denuded the foilage that all critters and eventually the rabbits themselves died. Eventually Schlemmer was hauled off the island. Rightly so, and the land somewhat restored. I can't tell you what happened to the Laysan Albastross during this environmental mess.
But I can tell you about the fate of a Laysan Albatross chick who was hatched on Green Atoll, which, I assume, lies not far from Laysan itself. (Here I advise you to take a deep breath and let it out slowly.) "Shed Bird" hatched beside a shed and proceeded to be raised by its parents. This was in the early 2000s. Humans of the atmospheric and oceanic type took note of Shed Bird but didn't bother it until they found it dead after (I'm guessing) maybe 4-5 months. By that time it was about a foot long.
Cutting into the stomach, they discovered it had been perforated a number of places. The stomach itself was crammed with junk, so much so that there was little room for jelly fish or flying fish, common food of the Laysan Albatross. Now here's where you and I come in. Two-thirds of the junk was plastic:
plastic bottle caps
aerosol plastic disperser tops
flat pieces of plastic with sharp edges
There was part of a wooden clothespin, part of a small paintbrush, part of a rifle shell.
Laid out in a circle and photographed, the junk inscribed a diameter of maybe two feet. Somewhat artistic in its diversity of shapes and colors. Horrible when seen photographed inside the cut-open bird who obviously had died of starvation. Dumb parents, you might say.
Albatross do not dive for food. They skim it off the ocean surface. Especially where currents meet and offer an upswelling of jelly fish and flying fish, their natural food sources.Dumb humans, I say. Dumb and heedless and ultimately accessories to murder of creatures too dumb to tell the hard crack of a small piece of bright-colored plastic from an iridescent jelly fish.
I stood at the display case where there were charming blue-green waves below the wall of photographs, waves inscribed with details of hump-back whale mating, of monk seal navigation, waves that made the ocean around Hawaii and Laysan and Green Atoll come alive with stories of creatures not human.
It took me a while to read all the stories and rest my eyes on the cut-open chick, on its inside stuffed with human junk, and to read the all-too-obvious message: the chick's death belonged to me as surely as if I'd shot it from the air. Then I wept. For the heedless stupidity and carelessness of my kind, for the beautiful flyers that are the adult Laysan albatross, and the danger that awaits their chicks in the wind-swept middle of the Pacific. Wept for all the pieces of plastic I pick up as I walk, even when I'm tired and grouse to myself that this is stupid, this is not my job, this particular green water bottle top will never reach a body of water.
But I usually pick it up anyway. And I urge you to do the same. Plastic filth is our business. It belongs to all of us. We throw it away to imperil all kinds of living things who are not human. But who are beautiful and deserve to live in a world that is not imperiled by our throw-away habits. Instead of throwing away, let's think about keeping and treasuring. About admiring and preserving. Let's think about our own chicks potentially threatened by minute pieces of plastic in their drinking water, the soil where they dig for fun, the air they breathe. Let's think about places where currents meet and where what we've thrown away returns to haunt and kill. Let's remember there is no place on earth where a substance as unnatural as plastic will not come back to haunt us.
I, for one, am ready to say Good-bye to plastic. Not better, recycleable plastic, but any plastic that can be thrown away by casual, heedless users. Glass is far better. Yes, it stays around a while, but its sharp edges are eventually ground smooth by wave action. It does not float, and eventually it returns to the sillica that is found in sand. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, except in the case of plastic, which is light-weight, and breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, but will still be plastic forever.
At the northern edge of Kauai, the most northwesterly of the main Hawaiian Islands, a point of land reaches out to a lighthouse. This is the Kilauea lighthouse. Once there were 14 lighthouses studding the rugged coast of Kauai, in the days of sailing ships and many ports of call, in the days before sonar. Now this one remains as a beacon for those who enjoy watching seabirds and searching the ocean for whales. We visit every time we come to Kauai, our favorite of the Hawaiian Islands, the greenest, least marred by urbanization and volcano activity. For spewing lava and plumes of smoke, go to the "Big Island." For high rises and Waikiki beaches, go to Honolulu. We've done both, and still love Kauai the best.
Several things have happened to the endemic birds of the islands. Odd word, endemic. For a while, every time I saw it, I read "epidemic." But it means "native only to this spot." High up in the sharp-sided mountains of Kauai, there remain some truly unusual birds--bright red with deeply curved beak, or bright yellow or bright red with black wings. They all have sonorous names in native Hawaiian, which of course I don't remember. It's hard for an Anglo to speak Hawaiian, though lovely to hear it, like whoshing wind or lapping waves. But one little endemic bird of Kauaii caught my attention: the apapane, reknown for its varied melodies and (poor thing) for being preyed upon by endemic and imported owls. When the apapane finds an owl in the vicinty, it hides in the leaf clusters of the ohia tree, and whimpers.
What does it take to extend empathy to other living things, the empathy we usually reserve forour own kind? Awe at its physical presence and splendor? Or a sign that it quakes with fear just as we do? Relief from our busy, demanding lives also helps. Quiet attention, absorbing into our very being what the other creature is experiencing. Then responding from our "deep heart's core."(quoting Mathew Arnold)
It's helped me to know that elephants mourn the one of their family. They will lie down beside the suffering one, and remain with it after it dies. If this isn't grief, I don't know what is. Whether elephants, surely one of the smartest animals, will also grieve the death of a creature not their own, I don't know, but there are reports of other kinds of animals forming close bonds--dog and duck, deer and goat.
Visiting the lighthouse at Kilauea I marveled at huge Laysan Albatross on the wing, I was awed by their wide wings (grey on top, white below), at their hooked beaks so close that I could see the hooks, and their regal white heads with goofy tilted eyes, which make them look cross-eyed, but probably are set this way to give wide range of vision--sideways, forward, maybe even above their heads.
They do not nest on the cliffs beside the lighthouse, as do the boobies, all white and not at all dumb. But instead the Laysan Albatross nests on the small islands that stretch west from the main Hawaiian chain. Laysan Island was ruined by a German named Max Schlemmer who introduced rabbits (among other irritants) who so denuded the foilage that all critters and eventually the rabbits themselves died. Eventually Schlemmer was hauled off the island. Rightly so, and the land somewhat restored. I can't tell you what happened to the Laysan Albastross during this environmental mess.
But I can tell you about the fate of a Laysan Albatross chick who was hatched on Green Atoll, which, I assume, lies not far from Laysan itself. (Here I advise you to take a deep breath and let it out slowly.) "Shed Bird" hatched beside a shed and proceeded to be raised by its parents. This was in the early 2000s. Humans of the atmospheric and oceanic type took note of Shed Bird but didn't bother it until they found it dead after (I'm guessing) maybe 4-5 months. By that time it was about a foot long.
Cutting into the stomach, they discovered it had been perforated a number of places. The stomach itself was crammed with junk, so much so that there was little room for jelly fish or flying fish, common food of the Laysan Albatross. Now here's where you and I come in. Two-thirds of the junk was plastic:
plastic bottle caps
aerosol plastic disperser tops
flat pieces of plastic with sharp edges
There was part of a wooden clothespin, part of a small paintbrush, part of a rifle shell.
Laid out in a circle and photographed, the junk inscribed a diameter of maybe two feet. Somewhat artistic in its diversity of shapes and colors. Horrible when seen photographed inside the cut-open bird who obviously had died of starvation. Dumb parents, you might say.
Albatross do not dive for food. They skim it off the ocean surface. Especially where currents meet and offer an upswelling of jelly fish and flying fish, their natural food sources.Dumb humans, I say. Dumb and heedless and ultimately accessories to murder of creatures too dumb to tell the hard crack of a small piece of bright-colored plastic from an iridescent jelly fish.
I stood at the display case where there were charming blue-green waves below the wall of photographs, waves inscribed with details of hump-back whale mating, of monk seal navigation, waves that made the ocean around Hawaii and Laysan and Green Atoll come alive with stories of creatures not human.
It took me a while to read all the stories and rest my eyes on the cut-open chick, on its inside stuffed with human junk, and to read the all-too-obvious message: the chick's death belonged to me as surely as if I'd shot it from the air. Then I wept. For the heedless stupidity and carelessness of my kind, for the beautiful flyers that are the adult Laysan albatross, and the danger that awaits their chicks in the wind-swept middle of the Pacific. Wept for all the pieces of plastic I pick up as I walk, even when I'm tired and grouse to myself that this is stupid, this is not my job, this particular green water bottle top will never reach a body of water.
But I usually pick it up anyway. And I urge you to do the same. Plastic filth is our business. It belongs to all of us. We throw it away to imperil all kinds of living things who are not human. But who are beautiful and deserve to live in a world that is not imperiled by our throw-away habits. Instead of throwing away, let's think about keeping and treasuring. About admiring and preserving. Let's think about our own chicks potentially threatened by minute pieces of plastic in their drinking water, the soil where they dig for fun, the air they breathe. Let's think about places where currents meet and where what we've thrown away returns to haunt and kill. Let's remember there is no place on earth where a substance as unnatural as plastic will not come back to haunt us.
I, for one, am ready to say Good-bye to plastic. Not better, recycleable plastic, but any plastic that can be thrown away by casual, heedless users. Glass is far better. Yes, it stays around a while, but its sharp edges are eventually ground smooth by wave action. It does not float, and eventually it returns to the sillica that is found in sand. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, except in the case of plastic, which is light-weight, and breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, but will still be plastic forever.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Margotlog: Day of the Dead in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico
Margotlog: Day of the Dean in San Miguel
The small plane from Houston banked lower, the clouds parted, and there lay a wide, dry plateau spread with cactus like huge Gumbies ready to jig. The word arroyo came back to me: deep fissures in the earth, which would turn into torrents in sudden rains. But the rainy season had passed, said Daniel, our van driver from Leon. Daniel, with dual citizenship, had just finished his stint in the U.S. Marines. Which was worse? one of us asked, Afganistan or Iraq?
Iraq, he answered. There the enemy hid behind buildings. In Afganistan you could see them coming acriss the high desert. Just like here, I thought, and remembered Mary Morris' foray into the desert beyond San Miguel. Dangerous, she wrote in her book Nothing to Declare. Dangerous especially for a gringa, yet the landscape called, and jumping a sewage ditch, she climbed higher. A green hummingbird delighted her, and there at the mouth of a cave she spied a woman in white watching her. Perhaps a bujo, witch; perhaps her guardian spirit.
I came to San Miguel de Allende to teach a memoir class in the home of a friend. Thus my first significant impression was that home which one entered like a white labyrinth, winding back and back until the dust and noise of the street disappeared before a small green oasis of jade plants. On Pat's third floor terrace, we sat and drank wine, and I fell in love with the high sky full of puffy white clouds. A small bird landed in a nearby mesquit tree: brilliant red with black wings. Vermillion flycatcher, said the Aves (Birds) of Mexico book.
San Miguel is a city, not a town. A city of many faceless houses along narrow cobbled streets. Walking can be treacherous. The City of Fallen Women, I learned, and vowed not to fall. But the third day I got sick with some intestinal bug. I was the teacher stretched out on the sofa under the turquoise wool blanket. The concrete, modern house with its many small balconies and roof-top terrace was chilly. That night I asked Pat for an electric blanket and sank into the pleasure of chill-warming heat.
The Jardin (pronounded "hardeen") is the center of civic promenade. Like every other public park I saw, the Jardin (garden in English) is composed of rows of benches set under laurel trees pruned to look like boxes. It's a very odd sensation: box after box of green facing a church like a pink drip castle. Pat's grand-daughter, meeting this Parrochia, asked, "Does Cinderella live there?" She has a point.
We had come to take part in Day of the Dead, which began on our Norde Americano Halloween, with kids and parents threading through the Jardin with open tins or sacks. Many little girls were dressed in fluffy, elaborate outfits, yet their faces were skulls--Cristinas, I believe they are called. Death decked out in her finery! Very odd, indeed, embodied in children. Why am I not spooked by U.S. kids with skull masks, yet these girls troubled me? I think it was the combination of sexy beauty on a child, plus the skull face. Very creepy, but the kids seemed fine, if a little solemn.
Before we left, Pat and I visited the very old cemetery, recently cleaned of ancient filth, and the old tombs, odd-shaped, above-ground bulbous shapes, painted pale pink, grey, yellow, blue. To honor the dead, there were only marigolds--the traditional flower. Orange petal blankets around the tombs, bouquets of orange marigolds, marigold blossoms tucked in crevasses and climbing up trees. The brilliant simplicity took my breath away. Its beauty was both strange and commanding; Stop here, notice and honor, the flowers seemed to say, and we did.
The small plane from Houston banked lower, the clouds parted, and there lay a wide, dry plateau spread with cactus like huge Gumbies ready to jig. The word arroyo came back to me: deep fissures in the earth, which would turn into torrents in sudden rains. But the rainy season had passed, said Daniel, our van driver from Leon. Daniel, with dual citizenship, had just finished his stint in the U.S. Marines. Which was worse? one of us asked, Afganistan or Iraq?
Iraq, he answered. There the enemy hid behind buildings. In Afganistan you could see them coming acriss the high desert. Just like here, I thought, and remembered Mary Morris' foray into the desert beyond San Miguel. Dangerous, she wrote in her book Nothing to Declare. Dangerous especially for a gringa, yet the landscape called, and jumping a sewage ditch, she climbed higher. A green hummingbird delighted her, and there at the mouth of a cave she spied a woman in white watching her. Perhaps a bujo, witch; perhaps her guardian spirit.
I came to San Miguel de Allende to teach a memoir class in the home of a friend. Thus my first significant impression was that home which one entered like a white labyrinth, winding back and back until the dust and noise of the street disappeared before a small green oasis of jade plants. On Pat's third floor terrace, we sat and drank wine, and I fell in love with the high sky full of puffy white clouds. A small bird landed in a nearby mesquit tree: brilliant red with black wings. Vermillion flycatcher, said the Aves (Birds) of Mexico book.
San Miguel is a city, not a town. A city of many faceless houses along narrow cobbled streets. Walking can be treacherous. The City of Fallen Women, I learned, and vowed not to fall. But the third day I got sick with some intestinal bug. I was the teacher stretched out on the sofa under the turquoise wool blanket. The concrete, modern house with its many small balconies and roof-top terrace was chilly. That night I asked Pat for an electric blanket and sank into the pleasure of chill-warming heat.
The Jardin (pronounded "hardeen") is the center of civic promenade. Like every other public park I saw, the Jardin (garden in English) is composed of rows of benches set under laurel trees pruned to look like boxes. It's a very odd sensation: box after box of green facing a church like a pink drip castle. Pat's grand-daughter, meeting this Parrochia, asked, "Does Cinderella live there?" She has a point.
We had come to take part in Day of the Dead, which began on our Norde Americano Halloween, with kids and parents threading through the Jardin with open tins or sacks. Many little girls were dressed in fluffy, elaborate outfits, yet their faces were skulls--Cristinas, I believe they are called. Death decked out in her finery! Very odd, indeed, embodied in children. Why am I not spooked by U.S. kids with skull masks, yet these girls troubled me? I think it was the combination of sexy beauty on a child, plus the skull face. Very creepy, but the kids seemed fine, if a little solemn.
Before we left, Pat and I visited the very old cemetery, recently cleaned of ancient filth, and the old tombs, odd-shaped, above-ground bulbous shapes, painted pale pink, grey, yellow, blue. To honor the dead, there were only marigolds--the traditional flower. Orange petal blankets around the tombs, bouquets of orange marigolds, marigold blossoms tucked in crevasses and climbing up trees. The brilliant simplicity took my breath away. Its beauty was both strange and commanding; Stop here, notice and honor, the flowers seemed to say, and we did.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Margotlog: Scrooge and the SPCO
Margotlog: Scrooge and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Dear Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, and beloved musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra,
Imagine Dickens' A Christmas Carol without Tiny Tim, the Fezziwigs' Christmas party, and Scrooge's redemption! That's what the cacellation of all SPCO concerts for November and December feels like. Scrooge has no ghostly visitations that turn his grasping greed into sympathy and generosity. He repents not his harsh treatment of his employees. He sends no huge turkey and trimmings to the Cratchit family on Christmas day. Offers no help to restore Tiny Tim to health. Arrives at the Fezziwig Christmas party with a scowl and threat, turning the party into a dull, lifeless affair. Finally he spends the last dark hours of the year in his cold office counting his winnings.
In its long history, the musicians of the SPCO have never before experienced such demeaning, intransigent, and potentially destructive treatment from those who "manage" their affairs. The current offer, rightly rejected by the musicians,defines the musicians as hirlings whose services may be terminated at any time, whose compensation is not guaranteed and may be changed by management on a moment's notice. It threatens that if musicians over 55 do not accept the current retirement incentive by the end of 2012, they may be terminated with significantly smaller severance payment. Moreover, it does not acknowledge that over the last ten years, the musicians have accepted significant reductions in salaries without strife, creating a $2.2 million savings for the organization, and helping it balance its budget in 16 out of the last 17 years..
For many of us who have learned to love these players for their many seasons of glorious music, such wrenching treatment by the "handlers" is offensive to the core. We believe they deserve far better. And with the hope of fostering this, we offer the following pot pourri of suggestions:
* That you, Mr. Mayor, declare a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Musicians "day or week or month."
* That you press current management to accept independent arbitration of this contract dispute
* That you gather a group of supporters and under the city auspices, sponsor one larger or many small musical offerings, for which enthusiastic audiences will pay significantly. All these funds will go to help the musicians survive this period of no salaries, and to encourage them to remain within the organization until a decent contact is reached.
As a friend who recently retired from corporate America pointed out: applying dictatorial, top-down, demeaning threats to human beings who are, in fact, the body and soul, the "product and equity" of an organization, not only displays the greed and high-handedness of management, but also poses a real threat to the viability of the endeavor itself.
Mr. Mayor, help us keep our beloved orchestra playing throughout our season of lights and many years beyond.
Dear Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, and beloved musicians of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra,
Imagine Dickens' A Christmas Carol without Tiny Tim, the Fezziwigs' Christmas party, and Scrooge's redemption! That's what the cacellation of all SPCO concerts for November and December feels like. Scrooge has no ghostly visitations that turn his grasping greed into sympathy and generosity. He repents not his harsh treatment of his employees. He sends no huge turkey and trimmings to the Cratchit family on Christmas day. Offers no help to restore Tiny Tim to health. Arrives at the Fezziwig Christmas party with a scowl and threat, turning the party into a dull, lifeless affair. Finally he spends the last dark hours of the year in his cold office counting his winnings.
In its long history, the musicians of the SPCO have never before experienced such demeaning, intransigent, and potentially destructive treatment from those who "manage" their affairs. The current offer, rightly rejected by the musicians,defines the musicians as hirlings whose services may be terminated at any time, whose compensation is not guaranteed and may be changed by management on a moment's notice. It threatens that if musicians over 55 do not accept the current retirement incentive by the end of 2012, they may be terminated with significantly smaller severance payment. Moreover, it does not acknowledge that over the last ten years, the musicians have accepted significant reductions in salaries without strife, creating a $2.2 million savings for the organization, and helping it balance its budget in 16 out of the last 17 years..
For many of us who have learned to love these players for their many seasons of glorious music, such wrenching treatment by the "handlers" is offensive to the core. We believe they deserve far better. And with the hope of fostering this, we offer the following pot pourri of suggestions:
* That you, Mr. Mayor, declare a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Musicians "day or week or month."
* That you press current management to accept independent arbitration of this contract dispute
* That you gather a group of supporters and under the city auspices, sponsor one larger or many small musical offerings, for which enthusiastic audiences will pay significantly. All these funds will go to help the musicians survive this period of no salaries, and to encourage them to remain within the organization until a decent contact is reached.
As a friend who recently retired from corporate America pointed out: applying dictatorial, top-down, demeaning threats to human beings who are, in fact, the body and soul, the "product and equity" of an organization, not only displays the greed and high-handedness of management, but also poses a real threat to the viability of the endeavor itself.
Mr. Mayor, help us keep our beloved orchestra playing throughout our season of lights and many years beyond.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Margotlog: The Tuba, the Orchestra, and the Business Model
Margotlog: The Tuba, the Orchestra, and the Business Model
No offense, Senor Tuba, but you mostly don't belong in a symphony orchestra. Like your overgrown business compatriot--the contemporary "business model"--your music is too raucous, too lumbering, too prone to go awry in favor of swagger and ump-pa-pa. Good for a military goosestep, or "down home" flashy parade, but not flexible enough for sonorous blends or wild, heroic shouts at the white whale of the world.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul are currently in the unenviable state of having both symphony orchestras "locked out" by managing boards composed largely of the "business model." I am not privy to these "heads" who are wielding the cleavers, but I've learned enough during the recent recession to be suspicious. Let's recall how the business model brought the world to its knees within recent memory.
As I understand the financial mess circa 2008, huge insurance companies were betting against their wealthiest clients. This meant insiders would benefit mightily if clients failed. Picture tall columns of glass and steel filled with computer savants who rigged schemes of gigantic proportions, so out of touch with real-life below that they believed they could tweak the strings of the world with impunity.
Compared with such high-flying machinations, cutting a symphony orchestra down to size is small potatoes. But the mentality may very well be the same. Something along the line of a tuba swaggering its big bulk and flashy golden bell, drowning out everything less brassy and exaggerated in its wake.
In the place of the tuba, substitute large expenditures on building renovations. Both Twin Cities orchestra boards have committed their players/audiences to expensive building renovations. One of them, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, has also kept ticket prices so low as to be offensive (especially now, given the cry of threatening insolvency).
I've seen similar moves in another area where the business model has taken hold: i.e. higher education. How many smallish, liberal arts institutions have been "blessed" with new buildings on campus, while within those buildings, staff and faculty are trimmed so tight that credible functioning is called into question?
Bricks and mortar versus the people that actually play the music. Big donors getting their names on glass and steel, while, horror of horrors, it's revealed that nearly 50% of the orchestra's budget is musicians' salaries! What else should an orchestra management be spending its money on?
A lovely young lady of my acquaintance recently commented that she thinks these orchestra boards simply don't want, in their heart of hearts, to do their jobs. Consequently, in her gentle parlance, they "need to be asked to step down."
I'm for it. It's time for the swaggering tuba to exit stage left. And let the serious tinkering necessary to preserve both orchestras begin.
No offense, Senor Tuba, but you mostly don't belong in a symphony orchestra. Like your overgrown business compatriot--the contemporary "business model"--your music is too raucous, too lumbering, too prone to go awry in favor of swagger and ump-pa-pa. Good for a military goosestep, or "down home" flashy parade, but not flexible enough for sonorous blends or wild, heroic shouts at the white whale of the world.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul are currently in the unenviable state of having both symphony orchestras "locked out" by managing boards composed largely of the "business model." I am not privy to these "heads" who are wielding the cleavers, but I've learned enough during the recent recession to be suspicious. Let's recall how the business model brought the world to its knees within recent memory.
As I understand the financial mess circa 2008, huge insurance companies were betting against their wealthiest clients. This meant insiders would benefit mightily if clients failed. Picture tall columns of glass and steel filled with computer savants who rigged schemes of gigantic proportions, so out of touch with real-life below that they believed they could tweak the strings of the world with impunity.
Compared with such high-flying machinations, cutting a symphony orchestra down to size is small potatoes. But the mentality may very well be the same. Something along the line of a tuba swaggering its big bulk and flashy golden bell, drowning out everything less brassy and exaggerated in its wake.
In the place of the tuba, substitute large expenditures on building renovations. Both Twin Cities orchestra boards have committed their players/audiences to expensive building renovations. One of them, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, has also kept ticket prices so low as to be offensive (especially now, given the cry of threatening insolvency).
I've seen similar moves in another area where the business model has taken hold: i.e. higher education. How many smallish, liberal arts institutions have been "blessed" with new buildings on campus, while within those buildings, staff and faculty are trimmed so tight that credible functioning is called into question?
Bricks and mortar versus the people that actually play the music. Big donors getting their names on glass and steel, while, horror of horrors, it's revealed that nearly 50% of the orchestra's budget is musicians' salaries! What else should an orchestra management be spending its money on?
A lovely young lady of my acquaintance recently commented that she thinks these orchestra boards simply don't want, in their heart of hearts, to do their jobs. Consequently, in her gentle parlance, they "need to be asked to step down."
I'm for it. It's time for the swaggering tuba to exit stage left. And let the serious tinkering necessary to preserve both orchestras begin.
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