Going with the Flow.

Sometimes I think the researching is nearly as much fun as the writing. I'm working on my series of "Eve in L.A." poems and got to the section on the L.A. River and came across a great essay, written by a landscape architect. Am digging his writing as much as anything--now I just have to figure out how to steal--er, adapt--it to verse:

Though there is strong advocacy for the river's renewal and restoration, there is as yet little constituency for understanding the river as it is and as it will be in the future, for the infrastructural sublime, for the freakological, for the river as artifact. Certainly, it is unfair to compare our river to the popular Edenic conception of "river," with all its associated expectations and tidy bourgeois sentimentalities. Rather, we must reassess the very definition of "river," expanding our idea of "nature" to include the parrot, the shopping cart, the weed, the sludge mat, and the stormdrain apartment. We must develop new narratives and vocabularies for our vital urban freakologies for these are the ecologies of the future.

--David Fletcher, "Flood Control Freakology: Los Angles River Watershed" in The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles

He had me at "river as artifact," although, man, that part about the parrot (which roost all over my poems right now) is amazing stuff.

Next, I get to read about the gravel pits of the San Gabriel Valley: "Irwindale's 9.5 square miles are a hodgepodge of margins, non-places, and land not wanted by the neighboring cities of Duarte, Azusa, Baldwin Park, and El Monte" (Matthew Coolidge, "Margins in Our Midst: Gravel"). Can't you just hear the poetry?

Both-brained.

Beauty and the brain, women use more than men

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID (AP Science Writer)

From Associated Press

February 23, 2009 6:05 PM EST

WASHINGTON - Beauty is in the brain of the beholder. Go to any museum and there will be men and women admiring paintings and sculpture. But it turns out they are thinking about the sight differently. Men process beauty on the right side of their brains, while women use their whole brain to do the job, researchers report in Tuesday's electronic edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

They even explain it differently.

Novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

Essayist David Hume: "Beauty in things exist merely in the mind which contemplates them."

Researchers were surprised by the finding.

"It is well known that there are differences between brain activity in women and men in cognitive tasks," said researcher Camilo J. Cela-Conde of the University of Baleares in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. "However, why should this kind of difference appear in the case of appreciation of beauty?"

The answer seems to be that when women consider a visual object they link it to language while men concentrate on the spatial aspects of the object, Cela-Conde said in an interview by e-mail.

He noted, however, that this doesn't explain why - and how - the human capacity to appreciate beauty evolved.

"The differences that we have found might relate to the different social roles that, hypothetically, men and women had during human evolution." he said.

The researchers tested 10 men and 10 women, showing them paintings and photos of urban scenes and landscapes, asking them to rate each scene as either "beautiful" or "not beautiful."

At the same time the scientists looked at images of the magnetic fields produced by electrical currents in the brains of the men and women.

For the first 300 milliseconds, there was no difference between male and female brains, and from 300 to 700 milliseconds activity was greater for objects that were rated as beautiful than for those that were not beautiful.

For both sexes the most active region was the parietal lobe that deals with visual perception, spatial orientation and information processing, but it was focused on the right side of the brain in men while both sides participated in women.

While there are differences between people as to what is beautiful and what isn't, Cela-Conde said they did not find identifiable differences related to sex.

"Any person can find beautiful a landscape, a building or a canvas that some others will find awful. But sex has little to do with those differences. Perhaps they relate with other variables, such as age or education." he said.

"It is curious that, using different neural networks, the final result is very similar in women and men. But this seems to be the case," Cela-Conde said.

He added: "Human nature is complex and difficult to study and understand. Nevertheless, thanks to scientific tools we are starting to know a bit more about some very important aspects of our nature."

---

On the Net:

PNAS: http://www.pnas.org

Off.

We've been fighting the creepy crud around here, in the cold rain no less. Who was it that said that southern California was a Mediterranean climate? Bah humbug.

Today we're headed back to Arizona. It's been nearly a year, and I'm a bit worried about how much I'll miss the high desert when I see it. We can't stay at the ranch because we have a caretaker living there now, but we need to be in town in any case, as my sister's arriving from Montana to open a show at a local Prescott gallery--the ostensible reason for our trip. For her show, she collected wishbones and wrapped them with her hair. They're then mounted on her "text dust"--dictionary cuttings. And then she does prints of the mixed media.



















As for entertainment, the hotel has an indoor pool, which should satisfy the little one. And we should get snow there, which means she gets to make her snowman this year.

Off.

Poetry as Cultural Touchstone?

Skimming the LA Times's "Calendar" section the other day at breakfast, I note that poetry has now become synonymous not with high art, per se, but with an even more amorphous cultural currency: authenticity. To be a poet--or, in the least, to appreciate poetry--is apparently to plumb the depths of one's authentic core. Despite having been relegated to the dusty half of bookshelves everywhere, poetry nonetheless acquires cultural valence as having--or, rather, as denoting--substance:

In the end, the big reveal of ["The Real Housewives of Orange County" (Bravo)] is that there is no big reveal, beyond the news flash that money does not make you happy or nice or even very interesting. This is 2009. There is no poetry in the suburbs, no art to be gleaned from the battle between society and the individual. Society won, pal, and what's wrong with that?
No one in these suburbs is secretly yearning to live in Paris or be a painter, and if there is any self-doubt, it's buried under the silt of professionally prescribed pharmaceuticals and the belief that looking straight at the camera makes you seem more serious. Hedda Gabler left the building years ago; these heroines are tragic only in their lack of conciousness . . .
It's hard not to worry, just a little, that given the tanking economy, the wives and their gated communities may soon be stormed by disgruntled O.C. peasants bearing pitchforks and tiki torches. But even if "Real Housewives" does make it through the lean times, these women will no doubt remain right where we all want them to be: trapped in the fabulous shabbiness of their lives, having conversations that run back and forth like trained rats along dim and narrow mazes of the mundane.
Which is precisely why we will always need our poets. Now more than ever, no one more so than those housewives down in the O.C.
("Decay at play in the O.C.," Critic's Notebook, Mary McNamara, 2-10-09)

While I appreciate the endorsement, I am suspicious. If what we've set up is a continuum of lived experience and of understanding that imagines rote laboratory experiments at one extreme and an appreciation of poetry at the other, haven't we just basically tapped the last nail into poetry's coffin?

By the way, I have been known to watch an episode or two of Real Housewives. Not that I'm in any way endorsing it.

If there were no limits, where would you like to wake up?

By the way, the location where the question was asked is London. That's not necessarily the answer. Although it might be.


Fifty People, One Question: London from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Completely Tickled. On My Chinny-Chin-Chin.

So, yesterday I entered this.

And, today, I humbly--and here I think of Wilbur--accept my award: one pound of Bristol Farms very best butcher counter bacon, hand-delivered by the contest's gracious host.

Woohoo! I'm having a bacon party!

I've never quite won an award like this for my poetry. I can't wait to inform my long-suffering husband that--despite his protestations to the contrary--my chosen career path can indeed bring home the bacon.

Thank you!

Always Up for a Challenge.

I just came across this challenge today as I was surfing some blogs of folks who are actually local to me, and I thought, why not?

The fact that I've never written a poem about bacon before--or, in fact, about any meat product whatsoever--does not deter me. I heart bacon, after all.

BLTS (and their southern Californian sidekick, BLATS) are always on my list of the Top Five Foods You Would Take With You To A Desert Island--the others being raspberries, sushi, pesto, salt bagels, and the crab dip my mother used to make at Christmas.

Oh. Yeah. That's six. *Sigh.* Food, I can do. Math, not so much.

Anyway. The rules are this: "You have one week to post something that will appeal to the masses' love of bacon." I am squeaking in under the wire, which I believe is 8:54 PM tonight.

Here is my entry into the The Great Bacon Caper, which requires one to know something of this other poem by Ezra Pound.

On the Stove in the Kitchen
(after Pound)

The anticipation of this bacon in the pan;
Pastries for a salt-tooth girl.


After I jotted down the poem, I got hungry. Then I re-read the title of the challenge and thought I should have included something about capers. 'Cause they're like #6 on my list of Food I Would Take With Me To A Desert Island. Just ahead of black olives.