Mermaids greet a Captain Hailborne

A mermaid from a clip-art collection. The picture caption reads "Capt. Hailborne At St. Johns Newfoundland", the details suggest the 1600s, but the mermaid's welcoming gesture is a fantasy.

Jane Ash Poitras, a deliberate artist

 Virginia Eichhorn Consecrated Medicine. (2004) An illustrated monograph about Jane Ash Poitras, to accompany an exhibition at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. Poitras is deliberate artist, she plans her works with meanings and messages in mind. Here, the meaning is indigenous medicine, and the colonial dismissal of indigenous knowledge and wisdom.

 

     The pictures are not easy; they’re neither elegant nor pretty. They are layered compositions of collaged images in several media, surrounded by or overlaid with painted symbols and figures and texts. These add up to densely complex and not easily grasped meanings. One must read the work like a book, which I think is Poitras’s intent. Reading is both an intellectual and an emotional investment in constructing meaning. The layered images make us re-read the texts, and create both ironic distance and dissonant emotions. We both deconstruct and reconstruct meanings.  It’s a journey from comforting cliche to unsettling insight. I think that’s what she intends.
     Her personal history is I think the impetus for her art. She was a homeless indigenous child found and raised by an elderly German immigrant woman. She embarked on a conventional career as a university-educated micro-biologist. She apparently always maintained links to her heritage. She was not assimilated after all. But reconnecting to her indigenous self meant deconstructing the settler persona acquired in her adoptive home, and reconstructing her Cree self. Making art was her method. Her artworks invite us to share in her journey. Reading her art, we follow her on that journey, and we deconstruct the comfortable settler persona we’ve developed. What do we construct out of the wreckage? I hope it’s a new awareness of and respect for the indigenous people who were here first.
     Poitras is part of the quest for what it means to be Canadian. It doesn’t mean what it was in colonial times. It doesn’t mean what it’s become in our multi-culturalist present. What does it mean, then? I don’t think we have the answers, but Poitras’s work contributes to the conversation. It’s a conversation whose meaning is constant reconstruction of the answers.
     Go look at Poitras’s art if you get a chance. ****

The Song of the Three Holy Children (Illustrated by Pauline Baynes)

 

 

    Pauline Baynes. The Song of the Three Holy Children (1986) A beautifully illustrated hymn from the Apocrypha, beginning O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: Praise him and magnify him for ever. It’s an addition to the Daniel, each verse names of lists one of the works of the Lord. Baynes had a good career as an illustrator, good enough that she could choose projects like this one. She adapts her style to the text, in this case alluding to medieval paintings and book illustrations. She has an eye for the telling line, and loves bright colours. Her books are always a pleasure to look at.

     A lovely example of the book as object. ***

 

Gardening Advice

 

Gerald M. Knox. Lawns, Groundcovers, and Vines (Better Homes and Gardens pamphlet 1988) Nicely done summary on the topic, good photos, useful information, but no warnings about invasiveness of some of the plants described. Good reference for a beginner, good reminders for the experienced gardener. Begins with the “fundamentals” (soils, water, fertilisers, tools), then treats each title topic, and wildflowers and summer bulbs. The climate zone map that ends the book is drawn in black and white, which makes it hard to read. Good buy if you find it at a yard sale. ***

A Mixed Threesome: Art, Model railroading, Tolkien.

Notebook Magazine (Issue Two, 2007) Issued by a “An Edmonton Art and Writing Collective”. Works are accompanied by answers to a standard interview. The art is generally pretty good, some with a regrettable tendency to shock and annoy, the rest interesting experiments in style and media. The writing is at best average, most of it should have been edited. Much of it assumes that if you have an interesting story to tell, you don’t need to make it interesting.
     I looked up all the contributors online. Most have disappeared from public view, but Timothy Atherton (photos), Heather Millar, Stephanie Jonsson, Bruce Barry are among the few that have continued to make art. Interesting mag, not a keeper. **

Art Curren. Kitbashing HO Model Railroad Structures (1988). Kitbashing??? The art of using the parts of kits as raw material, rearranging them, cutting and splicing them, and of course painting them and adding new signage, in order to create a structure that better fits the layout design. Curren was a master at doing this. Some of his creations are fairly obvious variations on the basic kit, e.g., Maple Street, five houses made from the same farmhouse kit. Others are new designs, e.g., the Perry Shibble Fruit & Produce Co-op, which began life as a small brewery. That name shows his skill at creating groaners, too, but by the mid-80s punning names were already becoming unfashionable.
     Curren writes well, tossing in the odd warning of possible mishaps, and ‘fessing up to changes he made when he realised his original concept didn’t work out. As inspiration this book is excellent. As a set of project instructions it’s pretty good, too, as most of the kits are still available, most in new packages. Cheap plastic kits will be with us for a long time, and for the modeller willing to ignore instructions, mess with a perfectly good kit, and practice painting and weathering skills, they will continue to provide raw materials for unique buildings better suited to a layout theme than the originals..
     Out of print, but recommended if you can find a copy. ****

     J. R .R. Tolkien. Smith of Wootton Major (1967; 2nd edition 1975) Illustrated by Pauline Baynes, a distant connection through an aunt. That’s why I bought the book, a very handsome object, beautifully printed on heavy paper. The story itself feels like an experiment in folktale, with its chronicle-like stringing together of events, minimally sketched characters, and matter-of-fact assumption of magic and Faery as realities.
     At a feast of the Great Cake a boy swallows a Faerie star, which not only gives him a talent for singing, but grants him access to Faery, which he visits regularly. The cook’s Prentice is implicated in all the major events, guiding the human actors into making the choices that are best for them, and for Faerie too.
     I enjoyed reading the book. The black and white drawings are well done, but lower the production values of the book-as-object. Apparently, the publishers didn’t think it worth the cost of commissioning colour. No doubt a collector’s item for the Tolkien fan. It merits its own entry in Wikipedia. ***

Once more with feeling: Climate Change (longish read)

A comment based on my current understanding of the science

     Climate is a chaotic system. It consists of a web of interconnected feedback loops. For example, cloud cover cools the ground below, which reduces evaporation, which reduces the amount of water in the air, which reduces the odds that there will be rain. However, water doesn’t cool as rapidly as the ground, so evaporation from large lakes continues, which increases the amount of water vapour in the air, which increases the odds that there will be rain. Which is why cloud cover over the Great Lakes usually signals rain, while cloud cover over the Prairies does not.

     These links between feedback loops makes it difficult to precisely model the weather and hence the climate. Some feedback loops cancel the effects of other loops, and some feedback loops enhance the effects of other loops, and all of them are entangled with one or more other feedback loops. Such systems are characterised by non-linear relations between causes and effects. Small (sometimes very small) changes in some factor can become magnified into huge effects. Hence the sometimes rapid development of afternoon thunder storms after a bright, cloudless morning.

     A chaotic system cycles through a series of states ("the seasons") that vary within some range but average out over time (average annual seasonal temperatures, etc.) This average is called the attractor. "Regression to the mean" is a common effect: Think of a baseball pitcher's performance over time. Pitching is the influenced by many factors, most of which affect each other. The pitcher's performance is a chaotic system: sometimes he's hot, sometimes he's not, most of the time he performs near his average level.

     Chaotic systems can change radically. If some factor or factors exceed some limit (too much or too little), the whole system will shift into a new series of states, some or all of which are radically different from the previous ones. Hence climate change, or global warming.

     There is no question that burning fossil fuels has increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, now (about 400 parts per million) coming closer to double the concentration of pre-Industrial Revolution levels (about 280 parts per million). (See this graph) This is having an effect on climate, the  annual weather cycles. The important questions IMO are:
a) How fast is this happening?
b) Is it happening faster in some climate zones than others?
c) How far will it go?

     Answer to a) Unknown, but climate models so far have understated the expected changes. This is shown in:
     Answer to b) Yes. For example, the Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the temperate zone. Predictions of the extent of summer sea ice have repeatedly underestimated the numbers. The general trend is melt beginning earlier and proceeding more quickly than predicted by the models available at the time. Thus, there is less sea ice, and it’s thinner. The last ten years or so have seen record ice loss almost every year.
     Answer to c) Nobody knows for sure how far climate change will go. Models are continually updated and tested with new data, both current and historical (from Greenland ice cores, for example). As these models get better, they imply what I think are several important conclusions:

1) Climate can change very rapidly from one normal limit to the other. For example, the Little Ice Age, a fairly sudden cooling of the northern winter, which among other things destroyed the Viking settlements in Greenland.

2) Seasonal weather patterns can change in opposite directions, for example, rainfall shifting from winter and summer, hence wetter springs and falls, and dryer summers and winters. This means flash flooding and drought when neither was common in the past.

3) Weather patterns can change from historic averages within two or three years, for example the now five-year drought on the West Coast of the USA.

4) There's a lag between the warming effects of CO2 and climate change because of heat-sinks, chief of which is the ocean: Over half of the recent rise in ocean levels is caused by the expansion of water as the oceans warmed up.

It's true that climate models aren't good enough to satisfy the non-scientist's yearning for certainty. But I think the certainty is higher than required in a civil law case ("balance of probabilities"), and close to that required in a criminal case ("beyond reasonable doubt”, emphasis on "reasonable").

(Revised 2020 09 21)

Three Elegies by Rilke

     Rainer Maria Rilke. Requiem (1909) Three of Rilke’s elegies, for Paula Modersohn-Becker, Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth, and an unnamed boy, the last in the boy’s own voice.
     I’ve always liked Rilke. He uses an almost purely Germanic lexicon, and the simplest German syntax to create dense lines of poetry. He avoids poetic diction, and turns the vernacular to his purposes. Few poets in any language can match his ear for the music of vowels, or for subtle variations in rhythm. Repetition enlarges the meanings of words, extends our grasp of his intent, focuses the imagination:

So hab ich mich dem Allen aufgedrängt.
Und war doch Alles ohne mich zufrieden
und wurde trauriger mit mir behängt.
Nun bin ich plötzlich ab-geschieden.

[So have I urged myself onto the All.
Though All had been content without me
and became sadder when with me adorned.
Now sudden have I disengaged me here.]

      So speaks the boy, after relating his discovery, his naming, of the world.
      Written in 1908, published 1909 by the Insel Verlag, which set itself the task of printing and reprinting the best available classic and contemporary literature. I’m glad I found this little book in my father’s library. ****