Nobska Point Lighthouse, Woods Hole

 1828, rebuilt as 40 foot iron/brick tower in 1876

The lighthouse was automated in 1985 and the house is now the residence of the Commander of the US Coast Guard Sector Southeastern New England based in Woods Hole. 

dusk ferry to Martha's Vineyard....a jeep invasion underway??

A modern mythology....

John Everett Millais, Ophelia (oil on canvas, 1852, Tate)

Gregory Crewdson,  "Untitled (Ophelia from Twilight)" (photograph, 2001)

350.org Day

In addition to being Zombie Day, today is also the annual day of action for 350.org, when people at 7347 events in 188 countries work together to raise awareness of the global climate crisis.  You can follow the link to the web site and see inspiring pictures of what is going on all around the world today.  Here are Stockholm activists dressed up as the sun, wind, and water thanking people on the subway for choosing public transportation.

Here is my climate update:  On September 19, 10 days later then usual, Arctic sea ice reached its third lowest recorded extent (the two lower years were 2007 and 2008).  For the first time, two yachts, one from Russia and one from Norway, circumnavigated the Arctic Sea through the northeast (over Russia) and northwest (over Canada) passages in one season.  And they didn't even have to eat their boots.

A few days ago I was talking to a colleague whose recent trip to a research station in Greenland was canceled --- instead of flying in three scientists and one writer (Simon Winchester, I hear), the Greenland authorities sent four marksmen to protect the field researchers from marauding polar bears who normally would be far out on the sea ice hunting seal this time of year.  Of course, it is shoot to kill.

10/10/10, World Zombie Day

Are you ready?

Those notorious Harvard druggies

Prof. Timothy Leary

If you are anywhere between the ages of 40 and 70 and possibly smoked pot in your youth (but of course did not inhale), I'm sure you'd find The Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin, a rip-roaring read.  Did you know that Timothy Leary,  Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass), and Andrew Weil were all Harvard professors together?  These three almost single-handedly ushered in the Age of Aquarius with their research on the spiritual, religious, and mind-altering effects of LSD.  As human experimentation on undergraduates was off-limits, the work, starting with the Harvard Psilocybin Project, was carried out with the assistance of graduate students (a specialized form of indentured adult).  The anticipated revolution in the field of psychology was to begin in Leary's home at 64 Homer Street in Newton in the winter of 1960-61.  Here is a picture of the house not a mile from mine.  Does the local historical society know about this?  Why no plaque?

 trip the light fantastic....

All these grad students tripping together under the supervision of Leary and Alpert eventually started living together as a "spiritual" family in a house Alpert/Ram Dass purchased at 23 Kenwood Avenue, around the corner (they went up against the neighbors and Newton's single-family zoning laws and won).   Everybody living and loving together---dig that Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood!

 Be here now....

The story goes on from there with much collateral damage, unorthodoxy, and ultimately, that social movement we call "the Sixties".  Weil, Leary, and Ram Dass all left, or were fired by, Harvard, moving west to Haight-Ashbury, India, Mexico, or jail and some still carry grudges for each other to this day--really, this book is a trip, pardon the pun. 

remember?

Here is one of most interesting passages in Lattin's book, relevant to ideals of Utopias, as per Morris and others before him:

"Leary and Alpert's transcendental community in the Boston suburbs was a harbinger of the hippie communes that would pop up across the country in the late 1960s. But it also harked back to an earlier social experiment conducted not far from Newton, in the Roxbury section of Boston.  One hundred and twenty years before Leary and Alpert established their three homes in Newton, a transcendentalist former Unitarian minister named George Ripley founded Brook Farm, a utopian community organized in the 1840s---the same decade in which Henry David Thoreau set up camp at Walden Pond.  Leary would soon come to see his life as a continuation of the work of Thoreau, Emerson, and Margaret Filler, the American writer and protofeminist who participated in the Brook Farm experiment.

"Leary and Alpert liked to compare their ouster from Harvard with the earlier banishment of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wore out his welcome with a famous 1838 address to the graduating class at the Harvard Divinity School.  In that speech, Emerson condemned the odious errors of historical Christianity, calling its depiction of the Son of God a "noxious exaggeration".  True religion, Emerson proclaimed, would allow "every man to expand to the full circle of the universe."  Twenty years after he was kicked out of Harvard, Leary would cite the transcendentalists as the inspiration behind his call that every man "turn on, tune in, drop out."

"They, too, were saying turn on, tune in, go within.  Become self-reliant.  Before Emerson came back to Harvard in 1838, he was in Europe hanging out with notorious druggies like Coleridge and Wordsworth," Leary said at a 1983 Harvard reunion. "They were expanding their minds with hashish and opium and reading the Bhagavad Gita.  Then he came back here and gave that famous speech where he said, "Don't look for God in the temples.  Look within."  Find God within yourself.  Drop out.  Become self-reliant.  Do your own thing."

 Now the mushrooms go in Weil's $50 an ounce youth-assuring face-creams....that's what I call moving with the times.  Or maybe he's just still moving the times himself?

 

Eel Pond, Woods Hole

 

eel pond at 3 o'clock...

Mind the gap

I'm a Lumberjill and I'm Okay

These are the members of the Colby College Woodsmen Club, a team that competes in traditional woodsmen skills with other college teams in Maine and the Northeast.  Cross saw, bow saw, chain saw, ax-throwing, log-rolling, pole-climbing, log hewing, log throwing----it's all here!  Think of it as a track & field meet for lumberjacks.  It was a total treat to hang out with them during their daily team practice yesterday. 

The ceiling of their clubhouse is covered with the plaques and awards this epic team has accrued over decades.  Nice axe rack.

Any activity that requires specialized footwear is okay in my book.

 

Lastly, I did not expect to be throwing axes when I got dressed in the morning.   And, I kid you not, that is my second throw----almost a bull's-eye (although not quite from regulation distance)!

Cute versus cool

Which is it?

Love the balcony!

Words you'll like

One app I enjoy on my iphone is called Slango---each day it gives me a new word from the Urban Dictionary.  Today's word is cell phone samba, "the erratic movements of a person trying to get better cell phone service.  Example:  The other day, a man ran into me while doing the cell phone samba in the grocery store."  (You can get the word-of-the-day on the Urban Dictionary web site as well.)

Another (real) word I came across a few months ago struck me as so funny I wrote it on a post-it:

The Dunning-Kruger Effect  When someone's incompetence denies them the ability to recognize their own incompetence.  Named by two psychologists (and if you guessed Dunning and Kruger you'd be right), you can read the interesting history of this word here.

So this morning I was quite entertained to read Douglas Coupland's op-ed in the New York Times entitled "A Dictionary of the Near Future", his choice of words we need to describe our modern lives.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Deselfing  Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. (See also Omniscience Fatigue; Undeselfing)

 Portrait of Katie Lewis, Edward Burne-Jones

Fictive Rest The inability of many people to fall asleep until after reading even the tiniest amount of fiction.

Frankentime  What time feels like when you realize that most of your life is spent working with and around a computer and the Internet.

Intraffinital Melancholy vs. Extraffinital Melancholy   Which is lonelier: to be single and lonely, or to be lonely within a dead relationship?

 The Mirror of Venus, Edward Burne-Jones

Limited Pool Romantic Theory  The belief that there is a finite number of times in which one can fall in love, most commonly six.

Memesphere  The realm of culturally tangible ideas.

Rosenwald's Theorum The belief that all the wrong people have self-esteem.  (added by me: these people might also suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect).

Undeselfing The attempt, usually frantic and futile, to reverse the deselfing process.

I wonder if Morris made up words?  It's hard to believe he wouldn't have given his extraordinary creativity with language.

"Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue"

James Hansen in front of Kayford Mountain, a mountaintop removal mine site

A few weeks ago a friend and photographer J. Henry Fair sent me a link to a photo essay that will be in his new book The Day After Tomorrow: Images Of Our Earth In Crisis.  The pictures were of a scientist I first met when I was a graduate student, Dr. James Hansen.  Jim, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies and one of the leading climate scientists of our age, had recently driven with Henry to Kayford Mountain in West Virginia to protest the scourge of mountaintop removal coal mining.  Indeed, over the last five years Jim has been crisscrossing the globe educating people about the perils of global warming due to unchecked fossil fuel consumption.  These activities have included testifying on behalf of citizen's groups suing large corporations, writing personal letters to many of the world's leaders in hopes of influencing their energy policies and, on occasion, getting arrested during peaceful protests.  In short, he is an activist, a label he proudly embraces, even in the face of much head-shaking, even scorn, from some of his fellow scientists. 

Like Hansen, William Morris excelled at and became a world leader in his chosen profession (in his case Arts and Crafts, later referred to by him as "ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich").  And, by the second half of his adult life, he also had become an activist, founding the British socialist party, fighting for worker's rights, and laying the foundation for today's "green" movement.  No doubt many of his upper-class family and friends likewise shook their heads in disbelief and dismay.

Shuttered stores at night in Whitesville, WV

If you are the least bit curious about global warming and whether you need to worry about it, I recommend you read Hansen's engaging two page essay Activist (follow this link then look for the line beginning with "Aug. 25, 2010").  When you find the "Hypocrisy" quote about half way through you will begin to understand the full might of the short-term political and economic status quo when it comes to the energy industry.  Not all of us are cut out to be activists but we can all be part of an educated citizenry.

Finally, the coal miners of West Virginia understandably advocate strongly for their jobs and livelihood.  In "Art and Socialism", a talk given by William Morris in 1884, he asks "What are the necessaries for a good citizen?  First, honourable and fitting work.  The second necessity is decency of surroundings, including:

1) good lodging,
2) ample space,
3) general order and beauty.

He goes on to elaborate on these three requirements including, for the third, to say "Order and beauty means that not only our houses must be stoutly and properly built, but also that they be ornamented duly; that the fields be not only left for cultivation, but also that they be not spoilt by it any more than a garden is spoilt; no one for instance to be allowed to cut down, for mere profit, trees whose loss would spoil a landscape; neither on any pretext should people be allowed to darken the daylight with smoke, to befoul rivers, or to degrade any spot of earth with squalid litter and brutal wasteful disorder."

Storefront at night in Whitesville, WV

I can't help but think that if Morris was alive today he also would be in these sad bleak towns of West Virginia, with Hansen and Fair, working to establish new economic models based on craft and agriculture.

James Hansen in front of Marsh Fork Elementary School, which is adjacent to a Massey Coal processing plant.

Thank you Henry for letting me share some of your very moving photographs.  Looking forward to the book!

Yowzer! nice blue bench

Here's another bench-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden pic, brought back to life by a coat of paint in a great color.  Nicely done Pop.

A few of you have noticed what a blog slacker I've been lately.....I have an excuse.  On top of extra busy day job and getting my house ready to rent, I've moved---from a city of 100,000 people outside of Boston, to a seaside village of less than a 1000 people on Cape Cod---Woods Hole.  I would post requisite pics of "adorable harbor", "sweet gray shingle cottage" and "gorgeous sunset" but the cord that connects my camera to computer has been lost in the move.  Many interesting things go on in WH (mostly involving the science of oceanography) so, despite local consensus that there is no place more boring than the Cape in winter, I hope inspiration will be found.

In the meantime, I continue to search for cord.

Magical Worlds

 Printing textiles in Merton Abbey, Photo c. 1890, published 1911 in a book commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Morris&Co.

A continued pleasure of maintaining this blog is getting to know fellow Morris fans, artists, and travel enthusiasts around the world.   The picture above of Morris's textile "factory", aka ground-zero of the Arts and Craft Movement, was sent to me by a doctoral student/designer named Andrei who lives in Finland.  He also happens to be an incredible photographer....here are a few of his hauntingly beautiful images.

The Wood beyond the World?

Needs flying reindeer?

A collection for the Land Santa?