Posted by mofembot
Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:32:00 GMT
I was in tears earlier today, having learned via A Siegel’s diary on DailyKos this morning that one of my favorite diarists, JohnnyRook, is not expected to live through the weekend. JohnnyRook has been writing about “climaticide” (his term, as reflected on his website, “The Climaticide Chronicles” at http://climaticidechronicles.org) for a while now, and I have found his articles to be well-researched, compelling, superlatively illustrated and documented… and totally scary.
JohnnyRook has AML—acute myeloid leukemia—the same wretched, fast-acting cancer that killed my old boss and friend Janet Mattei a few years ago. Barring a miracle, he will soon leave behind his wife and teenage son, many “real-life” friends, and many more virtual friends like me. He is, I believe, 55.
I hate thinking of his voice going silent, his website material archived…. I’m not a scientist, and I don’t think I’d be able to continue his work to inform people about the critical state of our biosphere, but I would be willing to help if I could. Given all the craziness of these past few years, the chaotic economy, the rapid disappearance of so many species of flora and fauna, devastating wars (and so on, infinitum ad naseam), it’s been easy to think that there is really nothing that I as an individual can do to counter such overwhelming entropy. But I think JohnnyRook’s reaction to learning about his cancer is a right and proper way to respond to the global mess:
My initial response to learning that my life was likely to be shorter than I had expected was, not surprisingly, rather selfish. I thought about the time that I would lose with my family and friends, of the traveling that I would not get to do, of the books that I would not get to read.
But something else happened too: the world became more poignant to me. I’d always thought of myself as a caring, empathetic, compassionate person, but now I found suffering, cruelty, and abuse to be intolerable regardless of the form it took. Debeaked hens crammed into tiny cages and stacked in factory-farm warehouses, infants shaken to death by their parents because they wouldn’t stop crying, genocide in Darfur, my countrymen in Appalachia and on the Gulf Coast treated as if they lived in a Third World Country, Iraqis bombed by us and by Al Qaeda… It was all too much. I was feeling the world’s pain.
And I realized, pardon my presumption here, that I didn’t want to die with the world in such terrible shape, which, finally, brings me to global warming. Of all the insanities that bedevil human beings on this planet none is greater than global warming.
From this realization, the Climaticide Chronicles were born, supplying information and arguments to counter the willfully ignorant claims of the naysayers and deniers. Our biosphere is in desperate trouble, and still there are individuals and groups and corporations and even entire nations that put their short-term comfort and profits ahead of any hope of long-term survival.
We have largely been, both individually and collectively, such poor stewards, preferring dominion and exploitation to conservation and selflessness at every turn. I have asserted in religious forums that if Jesus were to come again, he will not wave a magic wand and presto!—all will be clean and pristine; rather, he’d look around and in righteous wrath and disgust tell these “faithful” types, “You’ve got a thousand years. Clean up this mess!”
Well, anyway. To cry real tears at the thought of someone dying whom I’ve met only through his words and occasional exchanges in the comments may seem overblown to some, but oh, the grief is real. Very, very real.
I hope writing this is completely premature, but — requiescat in pace, JohnnyRook.
no comments
Posted by mofembot
Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:54:00 GMT
Remember what I wrote yesterday? Do you? Do you? Huh? (If not, scroll down. It’s still there.)
I said that doodling helps me focus during boring meetings. And guess what, ha ha ha. It does. Read this and marvel:
Researchers in the United Kingdom found that test subjects who doodled while listening to a recorded message had a 29 percent better recall of the message’s details than those who didn’t doodle. The findings were published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
“If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream,” study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade, of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, said in a news release issued by the journal’s publisher. “Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.”
http://health.yahoo.com/news/healthday/takenotedoodlingcanhelpmemory.html
So there.
no comments
Posted by mofembot
Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:39:00 GMT
“Adventure” is a bit strong. This post is about cutting. No, not self-mutilation (although I had to deal with that god-awful phenomenon when I was a school principal), but more like cutting out paper dolls. Only what I’m cutting out (endlessly, endlessly) are the zillions of doodles I’ve drawn over the years (nearly always during interminable meetings of one sort or another).
First of all, the doodles: I figured out that doodling is not a distraction: rather, it helps me focus. It is the manual equivalent of something I seem to do subconsciously when driving: humming/singing the same tune over and over again (but in a “theme-and-variations” kind of way). I have not been formally diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder), but I sure have all the classic signs, and yes, the “extra activity” (be it humming or doodling) takes up enough of that part of my brain that is distractible to allow the rest of my brain to focus on the meeting at hand (to listen and actively participate). My doodles are sprinkled throughout my notes.
Most of my doodles are of faces, and these faces come from… I don’t know where. I learned early on not to draw people in the same room: for one thing, if people think they’re having their portrait drawn, that becomes a distraction to them; for another, the reaction of the “portraitee” tends to be one of two kinds: either they love the caricature or portrait and then start bugging me about doing a “real” drawing of them, or they hate it and are insulted. Best not to draw people in the meeting.
It would be a facile thing to say that the expression on the faces I draw in some way reflects how I am feeling at the moment, but given the wide range of expressions, styles, and so on, that burst forth from one minute to the next in the same meeting, this seems unlikely. I can say, however, based on numerous fancy calligraphic renderings, that my most common feeling is expressed by the word BORING. In the worst or longest-lasting meetings, yawning faces (sometimes accompanied by a ballooned calligraphic “YAWN” emanating from the drawing’s mouth) are present.
I have been drawing faces since my earliest childhood. My paternal grandmother saved a drawing I did when I must have been around 3 or 4: if I recall correctly, it’s a picture of a policeman from the waist up, in profile (even if the nose-in-profile is on the order of nonexistent).
When I was in kindergarten, I won a district art contest (in the kindergarten category) for drawing three men’s faces. I was indignant when people assumed I’d drawn The Three Stooges (I don’t think the faces looked anything like Moe, Larry, and Curly): I most certainly had not: these were faces from my own imagination. By then, I assume I had figured out that mustaches belonged underneath the nose, not above, but I don’t remember if any of these three faces sported a mustache or not. I vaguely recall one wore a hat. (The only other memory related to this art contest was how hard a time I had choosing the prize: I could either have Are You My Mother? or A Pickle for a Nickel. My teacher, Mrs Sullivan, patiently read both books; then, as I still couldn’t make up my mind, put both behind her back and instructed me to pick left or right. I ended up with A Pickle for a Nickel, long out of print, I believe—whereas Are You My Mother? is still available… and I’m happy with the choice.—But I digress.)
Anyway, I’ve been drawing faces for my entire life. I regret that there’s pretty much nothing from my elementary school days, nor even junior high, but at some point during high school, I started saving my doodles and made a “scroll-collage” out of them (on the paper that carpet-cleaning companies would put down after shampooing our wall-to-wall). (I still have an envelope with more doodles that need to go on the last part of this collage, by the way.)
Collage, you see. That’s what I’m after, that’s why I’m spending the time culling and painstakingly cutting out these doodles. I’ve already done one framed work, “The Engineering Meeting,” which I hope that daughter no. 2 recovered from the start-up on whose walls it hung for awhile. I recently put together a smaller collage, but discovered to my dismay that the rubber cement wasn’t holding on the drawings after a short time: I think the problem was that I’d forgotten to check if the base paper was acid-free (it was not). I will have to peel off everything and try again on the right kind of paper.
Acid-free base is important… but I wonder about the paper on which my doodles are drawn. I intend to scan everything, of course. And I suppose I will have to rely on scanning and printing out to deal with another unfortunate phenomenon: the fact that at one point I doodled on both sides of the page. Very bad. I don’t do that anymore (well, hardly ever). Which of the faces to use? Well, I want ‘em all.
Meanwhile, I find myself occasionally cutting in meetings instead of drawing, but I think people find the cutting more distracting in the larger sense than the doodling itself, so I’ll have to confine myself to cutting in, say, doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms and other “down-times.” I wish to heck I could cut out my doodles while waiting for a plane, but since gott knows that I’d use my scissors as a weapon… that’s usually a couple of hours of cutting time down the drain. So far I have remembered to put my scissors in my checked bag, but I can just imagine that one of these days I’ll forget. And then I’ll get royally angry at this kind of stupidity-in-the-name-of-security yet again as I watch the agents confiscate my “weapon.”
I am tired of cutting, but It Must Be Done for the Sake of Art. N’est-ce pas? Mais oui!
ADDENDUM: I want to point out that I did not doodle in all meetings: If I was conducting the meeting, for example, or if the meeting was convened expressly to deal with (say), the school I ran, especially if the meeting was held in the presence or at the behest of Big Cheeses, I rarely if ever doodled. In France in particular, I think my doodling would have been misconstrued as a sign of inattention (or worse, disrespect) rather than a technique to aid focus. I rarely doodled (or doodled only a very little bit) at school board meetings, for example, but I doodled a lot during “Conseils de Classe”—class councils, mostly because at best we’d have a handful of American students in those classes, and since all students were discussed one by one… I had a lot of time on my hands. But again, I took notes, jotted down ideas and observations based on what I was hearing—and hearing better, I think, for allowing my Right Hand free rein to draw at will.
no comments
Posted by mofembot
Thu, 26 Feb 2009 08:36:00 GMT
Well… I hesitate to say that I tentatively think that I might have possibly decided to stop bothering with writing comments in response to letters to the editor in the Salt Lake Tribune. “Oh!” (I hear you say.) “I didn’t even know you were writing comments in the Salt Lake Tribune.” Well, yes, I was. And sometimes lots of comments. But after taking a bit of a break over the past couple of weeks, I went back the other day, posted a couple of things and decided that I really wasn’t enjoying it.
For one thing, the same old crowd is there (as one might expect). The waves of conservatives vs. the waves of liberals. Both camps have a couple of articulate writers. Given my own political sensibilities, I have found the points of view expressed by the conservative camp — especially the articulate ones — to be singularly misinformed, reliant on very questionable sources.
Some people on both sides of the political divide are inarticulate, semi-literate, frequently rude, and sometimes just downright nasty. I have cringed more than once at some of what “my” side has produced.
Well. It isn’t that I’ve gotten thinner-skinned. Nor is it the slightly disturbing phenomenon of finding myself praised by some of the most virulent conservative types who dwell in the Trib’s comments section. It is true that I very rarely lose my temper online. It is true that I have a pretty damned good memory for things that I have read and can (and if necessary, do) track down sources. I argue the issues, I provide facts along with anecdotes, I avoid ad hominem attacks, and generally manage to respond “masterfully” to such attacks when thrown my way by those who become furious at the notion that I might not accept their assertions, nor their sources, as reasons to change my mind.
I… think I need to spend my time more productively overall. (OMG, when was this not true?) I want to start supplying more writing (as in diaries, for example) to sites such as DailyKos and a few other places where my thoughts and even my artwork might get more traffic. It would be nice to think that people might start coming to the mofembot site from efforts expended on dkos and all, but I need to have more content here to make it worth their while to stop by.
As for my book (on the nonlynnear site). Well. I got some feedback the other week that I’ve been pondering about, with the net result that my project has come to a screeching halt. (I think I’ll write about this more on the nonlynnear blog rather than here.) Suffice to say, however, that I am no longer going to spend much if any time over at the Trib. The people who hate and fear Obama will continue to hate and fear him no matter what I may say in the comments. (And yes, I’m well aware that the “real” audience is not those who are arguing in the comments, but those who read the comments; I guess I have to wonder just how many people that ends up being. I’m pretty convinced that the traffic is quite light overall: after all, people who actually subscribe to the physically-delivered paper are not especially likely to look at the online version; and while there’s a hard-core group of about 30 or so fairly regular commenters… based on the number of thumbs-up and down, I just don’t see that the traffic warrants continued investment on my part.)
I reserve the right to change my mind. I will say, however, that commenting in the Trib has at least gotten me to write something about political and moral and religious issues on an almost daily basis, and I have culled my comments each month … not just so as to preserve my Sterling Prose in its entirety, but also to serve as a possible basis for longer pieces (whoa, maybe some pages herein!) about issues I care about.
As the French say, “On verra.” (We shall see.)
no comments
Posted by mofembot
Sun, 22 Feb 2009 17:41:00 GMT
This particular post is going to sound like one of those wikipedia entries: “this is a stub.”
I haven’t written anything on this blog for February. This does not bode well for good intentions. Yes, I’ve been sort of kind of busy. But not enough to justify the lack of loquaciousness.
I will try to expand the stub shortly.
I wish I were as consistently witty as Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert). I don’t always agree with his political positions, but his blog is always entertaining, and often laugh-out-loud funny. (Have I said how much I hate “LOL,” especially when it’s pronounced the way it’s spelled? Spare me. LOL. Gag.)
I am witty. I know this. Sometimes other people recognize this quality in me, too, but I am by far my best audience. And often when I think of something that amuses me, it amuses others. I have managed from time to time to write some pretty witty stuff. My favorite piece is still my “lighter minds” article in Sunstone some years ago, “Buttons, or Her Strength Lies in Her Principles,” which was based on a great drawing by Elizabeth Layton that I saw in (I think) the American Heritage Museum National Gallery of American Art in Washington, DC. (This drawing, “Buttons,” can be viewed on http://elizabethlayton.com.)
However witty I am, however, I am not consistent in my efforts to reach a broader audience. So I am not yet a rich and famous comedian nor comic writer. And until such time as I have the discipline to post on a regular if not daily basis, I have no one to blame but myself for the lack of income from this direction. And I suppose I will have to throw off the cloak of anonymity as well. Shoot. Kept me warm in the thought that TSA would have to work a little harder to figure out who I am.
no comments