In the giant hamster ball

Three Coronavirus novels for your consideration.

Early in the pandemic when I could still concentrate I read Lawrence Wright's The End of October about a global pandemic as told by an epidemiologist. The fictional doctor's explanations and musings helped me get a grip on the terminology and the workings of our nonfiction virus. Over half a year later, I mainly remember the description of the U.S. vice president placed in a giant hamster ball to keep him safe from the virus, and to protect the succession of power. 

There are many persons of power and influence I've wanted to put in giant hamster balls this year, more for my protection than theirs.

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks, considers the social aspects of a 1666 pandemic. How could a small village stop the spread of Bubonic plague to the rest of the country? How could the residents not destroy each other in the process? Told by a young widow who becomes a midwife and later n a healer, this is satisfying historical fiction with cautionary tales for our time. Rather than become a superspreader, the village self-quarantines at the urging of a popular pastor, but the experience brings out the worst in the residents' natures. The need to blame, to spread fake news, to hunt witches, and the struggles between religion, superstition, and science resonate in 2020.

The Silence, by Don DeLillo, is a very short, spare novel about a different cataclysm, a different type of disease, an existential epidemic that could happen any day now.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2022 an unexplained event makes screens go dark, and airplanes fall from the sky with no flight control, no technology. No media can bring an instant 24/7 news blitz about the cause, because there's no media. The novel is the best dark DeLillo distilled down almost to poetry. 

To paraphrase artist Paul Klee, science explains the visible, but fiction makes visible.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder

Omelet with mushrooms

The Renwick Gallery has become one of my favorite DC destinations, and the current installation of "No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man" is every bit as exciting as "Wonder" for the gallery's reopening in 2015-2016.

As an art teacher I emphasized the fine motor skill of paper folding and the transformations from two to three dimensions that this basic action could create. FoldHaus pushes the limits of size and kinetic movement, and I wish I could have beamed my former students into the exhibit with me.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Trade-offs before breakfast

Ya gotta git up mighty early to wrangle with the US Postal Service about re-delivery of a previously attempted delivery of ten pounds of bird feeder seeds. Do not attempt the email query function at the website. Typing in the twenty-one digits of the tracking code before the first coffee of the morning took too many tries.  Deanna at the help phone line may have solved the problem. Or not. At least the re-delivery confirmation number is only eleven digits.

Lately the benefits of online shopping seem offset by the time suck of dealing with the post office, UPS, FedEx, Amazon, and the apartment management office that sometimes receives my packages and grudgingly releases them to me. I even had to track down the delivery of postage stamps purchased through the online postal gift store. They are really cute stamps, though, from one of my very favorite picture books, Ezra Jack Keats' The Snowy Day.

E-gift-giving seems cold and impersonal. Yet there's a lot of family togetherness during all those phone calls asking "did the gifts for Duane arrive?" The group texting about "who sent the cute hippo onesie?," was as heart-warming as caroling with cocoa.  Amazon's failure to send the witty gift enclosure forced me to speak one-to-one with a son about sentimental memories of Grandma Fritzi's joy of birdwatching.

The balance sheet was at work again when a thoughtful friend flagged me down to tell me my headlight was out, probably sparing me a traffic stop and warning or ticket. On the downside, after I talked to her the Buick side window would not go all the way back up. On the upside, we've come out of a very cold snap for Texas. My Christmas bonus will go for window repair.

Stopped at AutoZone on the way home to get the headlight bulb. Sometimes the salesperson will help with the bulb replacement, but the guys were in a hurry to eat their po'boys. Plus, it was dark. Early this morning I tried my Helen Reddy imitation again, but the bulb would not fit. Arrgh.

Did those guys sell me the wrong bulb? No, they did not, and AutoZone opens at eight on Saturday morning. An extremely polite salesperson tactfully explained that I was trying to put the low-beam bulb in the high-beam gizmo. And the high-beam bulb did not need to be replaced. By 8:10 all lights were working, and my day was on the positive incline.

Which brings me to the Blue Cheese Story, but not the bleu cheese story. One of my sons, who shall remain nameless, lives in a really nice house formerly home to a tenant who left abruptly with some unfinished financial business. It's always nice to NOT be the person with whom the IRS wants to chat, or the sheriff when they are standing on your porch.

The former resident's generous great-auntie Louise placed an online gift order of Newton, Iowa's famous Maytag blue cheese for her great niece. But, wait, auntie didn't know about the recent skedaddle. So a big misdirected box was left on the porch:

The simple thing would have been to just open it and see what was inside, but none of us were fond of blue cheese. So my son called UPS and spent over half an hour convincing them to send a driver to retrieve the blue cheese. Which they did, but they weren't pleased. When you need them, where are the porch pirates and thieves?


© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Imagine walking into Stone Moth Canyon

At the far end of the trail you pass beyond a ridge and can no longer see or hear any signs of the city. No houses, no traffic noise, not even the tinkle of the popsicle truck. Thankfully, no litter.  Just the trail and the volcanic basalt, and the markings. The canyon has a low, continuous hum. Bending low, you realize it is the sound of small bees.

Imagine the petroglyphs scratched into the black basalt are symbols of moths. Hundreds, thousands of moths marking the boulders. You would have to climb in and around the stones to spy moths on every side, even on the top to be viewed from high on the ridge. What do the moth symbols mean? Who made them? Why?

We can only guess at the meanings of the petroglyphs in Albuquerque's magical National Petroglyph Monument. We can only be open to the wonder and the connection to those artists of so long ago. Are there moths painted deep inside caves? Are there moths in the art of indigenous peoples of Africa, Australia, even the polar regions?

Thank you to the moth-makers whose images I edited onto the basalt of the canyon. They seemed like images across millennia. Here are a couple sites that intrigued me as I went on this imaginary hike:

• Capturing Similarities in Rock Art
• Rock Art Database

The petroglyphs below were made 400 to 700  years ago. Most were made by Native Americans, but a few were made by early Spanish settlers in the area. They are very young compared to the estimate of 20,000 years old for the Lascaux cave paintings.

This one is my favorite. It seems to tell a tall tale of long-billed birds eating lizards and snakes. A person with big feet walked through the story!

When I see the hand symbols my thought is always, "I am. I make."

Keep making.

© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

Pollen goes bowling

An unexpected delight at the 516 Arts "Cross Pollination" exhibit was an arrangement of  Jo Golesworthy's pollen grain sculptures. The size of a bowling ball more or less, each of the pollen sculpture forms was a fascinating insight into nature's geometry, economy, and beauty at the most minute levels.

When my young sons had bad allergy and asthma problems we spent a lot of time in allergists' examining rooms staring at the medical charts hanging on the walls. Those illustrations showed magnified pollen, tree-branch lungs, and constricted airways. Waiting for the breathing treatment to kick in, watching a child's face slowly get back to normal color, listening to each breath and cough, felt like being rolled over by another heavy bowling ball of parenting stress. During happier check-ups the pollen images were intriguing Bucky-balls, Nerf balls, or death stars.

View pollen grains here or here.


© 2013-2017 Nancy L. Ruder

A partridge in a pineapple tree

Not limiting bird ornaments to the partridge, so there are hummingbirds, cardinals, owls, bluebirds, roadrunners, meadowlarks, and origami cranes on the pineapple. It only held a fraction of my bird ornaments. My mom loved birds, and she loved ornaments, so this little "Christmas tree" reminds me of Fritzi.

Maybe I should have left the pineapple outside on the stair landing when the frigid weather hit, but this silly plant has been outperforming expectations since July 2015 when I chopped it off the fruit and stuck it in dirt for a nature kids class.

The pineapple is also a bromeliad, a plant I've painted many times. If I keep this baby alive for another year and a half it might produce fruit. The two of us still have adventures ahead.

 


© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Cramped quarters -- freedom within structure?

• Amor Towles' novel, A Gentleman in Moscow begins with Count Alexander Rostov sentenced to lifetime house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel for the crime of writing a poem. The count is removed from his suite in the hotel and sent to a sixth floor cubby of a room with a low ceiling and barely enough square footage for a pirouette. 
• When the Woolly Mammoth and I visit the Whitney and I am fascinated by Andrea Zittell's 1993 "Living Unit." Everything one needs for life packed in a box!
• For twenty years my walking buddy and I have been scouting places where we could live in a cardboard appliance box when we are old or broke.
• My walking buddy just got a new refrigerator. Where is the box?
• Also at the Whitney, a corrugated cardboard and notebook clip geodesic dome. Aw, Howie, why didn't we try that?!

• I'm wishing for a snow day to hunker down under a quilt dome and read in a very condensed version of home. Om. Instead we get a the coldest temperatures in two years. I must bring in the ridiculously huge pineapple plant from my balcony. Its circumference is the same as my dining table. 
• Nina, a major character in Towles' book, drops a pineapple off the Metropol's ballroom balcony to test Galileo's theories.
• Like a Christmas tree the novel is a structure for hanging bright ornaments of philosophy, Cold War history, literary criticism, etiquette critiques, and Russian culture observations.
• Where on earth would I fit a Christmas tree, fake or "real," in this apartment? Besides the giant floor space-eating pineapple plant there's the sweater drying contraption in the living room next to the ironing board.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Churches--Rice Chex and diamonds

Wandering the pedestrian district of Alghero's Old City I found some of its churches. without the help of maps or apps. I'd been admonished against walking around with a big doofus tourist paper map. My phone with Google Maps and I are still getting acquainted. So I just moseyed around trying to be observant of my surroundings to build a sense of direction and location, and to not twist my ankle on the cobblestones. Very old school, and not terribly efficient, but I did not fall of the edge of the earth or into the Sea of Sardinia.


Speaking of old school, do kids get to make salt/water/flour maps any more? That would be a good for extra credit on my Sardinia report. I would also like to make a model of the Old City out of boxes, tp tubes,  and three-penny school milk cartons! Thanks to Wikipedia for the map idea...

As soon as I passed the final exam of Medieval and Renaissance Art History my brain erased everything about cathedrals except a few vague hints for crossword puzzles. In my defense, it was a very early morning class in a cold, dark basement lecture hall with machine-dispensed ten-cent coffee in paper cups.

My room at the Hotel San Francesco had "sober furnishings" according to the website. It was perfect! The very helpful Franciscans at the desk 24/7 were never surprised when I dropped off my key to leave, or found my way back to retrieve it for shower and sleep. Wish I could have heard a concert in the cloister as part of the Musica & Natura 2016 series.

 

Just imagining the cloister accoustics!  

Church of Saint Francis

The Cathedral of Saint Virgin Mary was the setting for the religious ceremony, so I was too preoccupied to properly study the architecture and sacred art. The Cathedral has a diamond floor and a Neoclassical facade (narthex for crossword folks). It was the only Neoclassical architecture I saw in Alghero, and it felt out of place. We did not throw rice at the newlyweds, although it is a Sardinian custom.

 

It also had a section to the right under reconstruction, and some challenges for wheelchair-bound visitors.

 

 
It took a long time to catch on that the Gothic bell tower was part of the same church. I could still be wrong. This is the portal to the bell tower, approached up a shaded narrow street in the early evening:

I liked the wooden doors of the entrance to the Orthodox Church of Saint Barbara:

The dome of the Chiesa di San Michele is a stunning, colorful landmark of Alghero. The dome has a diamond pattern of tiles, but the floor inside is checkerboard. The polychrome dome tiles may date from the 1950s, if my translation is correct.

Barrel vault

Happy wandering!

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder