With winter weather closing in, limiting outdoor activities (at least for me), indoor activities make their appearance. After pushing away the giant stacks of jigsaw puzzles accumulated over the past year and a half, I’ve pulled out my drawing tools. Every artist who is serious about drawing acquires a monster stash of art supplies; graphite, charcoal and colored pencils, markers, crayons, art pens, erasers, blending stumps, rulers (yes, it’s okay to use rulers), sharpeners as well as boxes to store all this material in.
I play around with coloring books, but when it comes to serious sketching, I do my own artwork. I’m currently using graphite and charcoal pencils. I’m planning on branching out into colored pencil as well as pastel drawing and watercolor, but I think I’ll always be partial to graphite and charcoal.
I have always drawn free-hand ever since I developed enough coordination to pick up a crayon and apply it to paper. It’s something that’s always come naturally to me. Attempts to use the grids recommended by some artists feels too cramping for me. Other artists advise against this method as it can make you too dependent on the grid for getting your drawing’s proportions correct. I’m inclined to agree and the following sketches are all free-hand.
A good book, if you are interested in drawing accurate birds is The Laws Guide to Drawing Birds by John Muir Laws. It provides instructions for getting not only the basic anatomy of the bird itself but the pattern of feathers, how they are distributed on the body and accurate looking feet. Following his directions, I was able to draw a cardinal.
A common complaint I see on reviews for art books is that the artist doesn’t give enough step-by-step instructions for illustrating a subject. While this may be true for some books, it’s important to realize it’s not the writer’s job to frog walk you, a budding artist, through every single step of a drawing. They are only showing you how they achieve their results. This is why you buy dozens of practice sketch books (I get the cheapie ones from Walmart) and draw over and over and over again to achieve the results you’re looking for. Like the old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall, you just have to practice a lot. It took several tries to get an recognizable bird of prey.
Or accurate looking shore birds.
But again, it’s simply a matter of practice.
When including birds in your art work, it will not be necessary to draw in every single feather or leg scale but knowing how everything is placed can help in rendering more accurate images which please the eye and don’t look cartoonish. Once you get the basics down, then, if you want, you can graduate to using colored pencils, watercolors or pastels to make your artwork really pop.
The first full month of Fall has come and is nearly gone with Halloween just around the corner. Blink and you’ll miss it. Why time insists on whizzing by so fast these days is uncertain but may involve the fact that the older you get, the more time seems to speed up. Science data suggests that as we age, our ability to process images and experiences decreases even though time is actually moving at the same pace it always does. That may very well be, but one reason I almost never watch television anymore is the increasingly frantic pace of cutting from one scene to the next as well as the endless barrage of truncated ‘sound bites’ which convey little information that’s of any use. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this and like others I find it obnoxious.
Maybe that’s because I’m getting to be an old fuddy-duddy now or maybe my tolerance for baloney has permanently tanked. In any case, I’ve changed to walking more, paying more attention to reality and taking my entertainment in bite size chunks of my own choosing, rather than having it spoon fed to me by faceless corporations out to make a profit at my expense.
On the morning of October 10, about 11:30 AM, many people in southern New Hampshire, as well as parts of Maine and Massachusetts reported hearing a loud boom. Curiously neither of my brothers who both live in the southern part of the state heard anything out of the ordinary or if they did, attributed it to nearby noisemakers and thought nothing more of it. Scientists say there was no earthquake and the FAA says there was no military plane activity in the area. Most likely explanation is a bolide coming in from space exploding in the upper atmosphere. So unless the Air Force fesses up and admits one of their boys was hotdogging, the meteor explanation will have to suffice.
The Covid panic proceeds apace with no signs of letting up. There’s been a minor surge in the past few weeks here in New Hampshire, no doubt largely due to the influx of germ laden tourists during fall foliage season. It will no doubt subside in the coming weeks and resurface with the holiday seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Let’s face it, folks. Covid is here to stay and become another one of the ailments we have to chronically deal with, like influenza or norovirus.
The tree foliage here in Northern New Hampshire has peaked and leaves are now being shed with increasing speed, piling up at the side of the road, on top of lawns or spinning around madly in the backwash left by speeding cars. Colors were good but are quickly fading away from bright yellows and reds to less flamboyant yellow ochers and bronze shades. I’m trying to stay on top of the raking by going out in good weather (with hopefully no wind) and using an actual rake that I hold in my hands and scratch the ground with. Yes, people still use those things! Much quieter than a leaf blower plus you get a good aerobics workout.
Birds have begun migrating through, with the bulk of them being robins, sparrows and juncos. I’ve heard both flickers and pileated woodpeckers in the woods with their loud characteristic calls. Crows and blue jays are flying back and forth, probably checking out their digs for the winter and calling out anybody who tried to invade their territory. Squirrels and chipmunks are packing away the bonanza of acorns to help them tide over winter and mice are trying weasel their way into the woodwork of the house looking for a warm place to shack up in for the winter.
Chipmunks are especially amusing to watch as they cram seeds and acorns into pockets they have in their cheeks until they look like they have a dreadful case of the mumps. Very industrious, they don’t hibernate but do stock food away for the winter so they have something to feed on while the weather is foul and they have to lay low. These energetic little ground squirrels are surprisingly territorial, calling out their ownership with loud piercing bird-like chirps and pounding on any chippie who crosses the line, trying to invade. People get fooled by their cute appearance, thinking they’re sweet little animals. Don’t you believe it! These guys are little scrappers and are not above trying to bite off their opponent’s tail to assert dominance. It’s a rough and tumble world if you’re a chipmunk.
On a somber note, I recently witnessed the funeral procession of a local fireman who passed away suddenly. A twenty four year veteran, he had just retired, but sadly never got a chance to enjoy it. I watched the procession begin just after the services at the local Catholic church. Dozens of firemen from around the north country attended, in full dress uniforms with white gloves, standing at attention and saluting the flag draped coffin as it emerged from the church. The coffin was then loaded into the back of a fire engine for one last ride down Main Street past the local fire station where a huge American flag had been hung over the road.
Though I didn’t know the fireman personally, it was still a moving ceremony to watch, a recognition of his years of service and the respect he was held in.
Lastly is the weather. While we are experiencing fall like conditions now, it wasn’t until this past week that the first light frost hit some of the plants in my garden. This is extremely unusual as the first light frosts usually occur in mid to late September and a hard freeze usually by mid-October. While I’m not sure if this is a record for this area, the local weather reporter for WMUR did state this is the latest frosts have made their appearance in many years. While some may dispute global warming, I have seen too much evidence of it in recent years to doubt its existence.
Well, that’s all for this month. Have a peaceful Autumn, everybody.
A recent posting on Ecosophia which was part of a series on the topic of American occultism, covered the subject of a grand old American tradition: the fine art of tinkering. In this case the kind of tinkering done by people often kindly referred to as ‘cranks’.
While Mr. Greer’s posting was occult oriented, he pointed out that while the majority of people regarded by those about them as ‘cranks’ often were out in left field in terms of what they were working on, not all were failures. One of the most notable inventions of the 20th century came out of a home bicycle shop run by a pair of tinkering brothers named Wilbur and Orville Wright who created the first successful powered flying machine large enough for a man to pilot. While another tinkerer Samuel Langley created a successful small unmanned steam powered aerodrome, the design did not scale up well and manned test flights of his design failed miserably.
Tinkering has long held a special place in American history, associated with do-it-yourselfers, inventors and the occasional mad scientist. While some dictionaries define tinkering as an attempt to improve something in a casual or desultory way, that is not the reputation it has had in American culture. For us, tinkering is a way to improve or invent. It can be a way to allow the tinkerer to become familiar with his or her material in such a way that innovation becomes more likely. And it still continues to hold a place dear in our hearts. What’s the first thing you do when something in your possession is no longer working right? If you’re like me, you go straight to YouTube looking for how-to videos.
Reading the comment section of Mr. Greer’s posting shows that tinkering is still alive and well. Commenters put up dozens of links to documents, some off-the-wall and but others profoundly useful. People don’t just love to tinker, they seem to have a deep seated yearning to tinker, something probably connected to our having opposable thumbs, as old as our urge to hunt, garden and gather. It’s not enough just to download a new ‘app’ on your I-phone anymore. People actually want to do things with their hands and express their creativity. There’s a feeling of self-mastery which comes when you do it yourself, something you don’t get when a machine does it all for you.
Long before everything went high-tech, there was no end to the gizmos cooked up to accomplish any task you could think of. The LowTech Magazine website is filled with articles describing various low tech ways of doing tasks which anyone with a little mechanical skill could achieve.
Who was the innovator who came up with this little beauty? A hot-water radiator with a built-in warming oven for keeping food hot until you are ready to bring it to the table? Talk about killing two birds with one stone!
While toilets are not really a new invention, the gradual adoption of the water closet and the indoor plumbing which went with it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did much to end the cholera, dysentery and other water-borne diseases which shorted the lives of many people of those times. Not exactly high-tech but then it didn’t need to be. You just needed a good knowledge of valves, woodworking and how water flowed.
Tinkering is not enough, of course. In order for your tinkering to have results, you have to be a keen observer of your surroundings and spot an opportunity.
Noting that stone and brick walls would hold and release heat even after the sun went down, led to the creation of fruit walls. This innovation allowed for the cultivation of fruit trees far north of their usual range, taking advantage of the micro-climates the fruit walls created. The curving design of the above walls increased their stability and made small niches that fruit trees could be tucked into and trained to grow up on.
Tinkering is a non-stop process which requires great perseverance and a high tolerance for failure. Not everything you tinker on will pan out as hoped. Thomas Edison, a famous inventor from the late nineteen hundreds into the twentieth century, once remarked that he never failed, he just found 10,000 things that didn’t work. In the case of the incandescent bulb he was working on, he went through thousands of fiber types before he found a carbonized cotton filament that succeeded in giving the steady light he was searching for. In our instant gratification culture multiple failures may be hard to swallow but it’s essential if you want to reach that moment of success.
All too often these days, tinkering takes the form of pre-packaged kits with directions to be slavishly followed and creativity taking a back seat. We need to get away from this. With climate change, resource depletion and a host of other issues threatening us, genuine human creativity will need to come back front and center. It’s gotten us through quite a few bumpy spots and can do so again but the sooner we start, the better.
A large number of non-fiction books occupy my shelves. Many are quite scholarly and more than a few of them are sprinkled with Latin quotations. Many authors are thoughtful enough to provide translations (usually at the bottom of the page as a footnote). However some make the assumption that if you are scholarly enough to read their book then you must certainly be fluent in Latin and so don’t bother with helping the poor reader out. Since my formal Latin training has been confined to what was covered in high school Latin umpteen years ago and now long forgotten, I have often been left scratching my head.
Granted a surprising number of English words are derived from Latin, it is dimly possible to get a sense of the gist of what the quotation means. For example, nauta is Latin for sailor, hence our modern word of nautical. Circum means around and has found its way into circumference, circle, etc. But other words are more ambiguous. The word Acta in the above quote can mean several things. It can be a noun meaning seashore. But depending on how it is conjugated, it can also be a verb meaning ‘to act‘ or ‘to drive’. The precise meaning of the above phrase is ‘Deeds, not words’. If you have no idea how many different ways Latin words can be parsed, you might inadvertantly read the above as ‘Acting is not talking,’ or ‘the seashore doesn’t talk’. Yipes!
This just won’t do, of course. So rather than curse the darkness (so to speak), I’ve decided to light a candle and relearn Latin. With many English words derived from Latin, acquiring a basic vocabulary isn’t too difficult. The real challenge is grappling with all those conjugations and declensions. The late British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, described in his autobiography My Early Life his introduction to Latin at the boarding school he got incarcerated – ahem – enrolled in. It’s obvious from the dialogue that the Headmaster was a sadist who had no interest in teaching children, only in collecting the money the parents of the unfortunate child paid for the poor little sod’s education.
So what are conjugations and declensions? Declension, to put it as simply as possible involves changing the ending of a noun as a way of indicating its position in a sentence. For example (in Winston’s case), the sentence, ‘the table is in the room’, has table as the subject (referred to as the nominative) so it would be mensa. If the sentence is ‘I have a table’, then the word table is now the direct object (or accusative) and would be mensam. In ‘The room has a chair with a table’, table is now an indirect object (dative) so would be mensae, if it’s ablative, it would be mensa often spelled with a little line over the letter ‘a’, called a macron, to help distinguish it from the nominative singular. The sentence, ‘The table’s color is red’, has table as the genitive, meaning possession, so it would be mensae. The Mensa or ‘O table’ young Winston was baffled by is known as the vocative, which is what you use when greeting someone. To give you an idea of how complex declensions can be, be aware there are five declensions in Latin, based on whether a word is feminine, masculine, neuter, and so forth.
Conjugations follow the same pattern only with verbs. There are four conjugations, all dependent on person, gender, tense, mood as well as other factors. The verb endings tell where the verb falls in the sentence, whether it’s plural or singular and so on. No wonder poor little Winston was so confused! Having only covered the first two declensions myself, I can already appreciate the frustration countless schoolchildren before me have experienced. Context is everything and you must always pay close attention to a word’s position in a sentence as well as what the sentences around it say to give you an idea of the word’s correct meaning. To help in my memorization I have written down the declensions and conjugations on large size index cards for quick reference as I go along.
Then there’s the matter of pronunciation. There are two ways of speaking Latin. One is called the Classical way, meaning the way we think Latin was spoken by its natives at the height of the Roman Empire. This was introduced by 19th century scholars, after their research seemed to indicate this is how it was pronounced by the original Romans. Since nobody has Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine, there’s no way to go back in time to verify this so it’s really an assumption rather than an established fact.
Then there is what is called the Ecclesiastical way, meaning as it was spoken in the fading years of the Roman Empire going forward into modern times in the Catholic Church. The differences between the two are relatively minor. In Classical Latin the letter ‘c’ is given a hard sound, as in catch while in Ecclesiastical Latin, it’s often given a soft sound (circle) or a ‘ch’ pronunciation. The letter ‘v’ in Classical is given a ‘w’ sound while it’s spoken the modern way in Ecclesiastical.
There seems to be a fuss going on about the merits of either system which is strange if you think about it. After all, this is a language nobody but scholars and Catholic clergy speak anymore. To me it’s all a tempest in a teapot. My goal in learning Latin is to just be able to read it. How it’s pronounced is a minor matter to me. I am using two self-education books, Getting Started With Latin and Keep Going with Latin by William Linney. His preference is for the Classical pronunciation so I’m following his lead. Someone online was thoughtful enough to scan the Oxford Latin Course :Part 1 (second edition) into PDF format which I have downloaded. They also seem to favor the Classical pronunciation. Wheelock’s Latin (7th edition) which I purchased secondhand from Thriftbooks also uses the Classical while a discarded high school first year Latin book (which looks like the one used in my high school class) which I found up at the local recycling station also seemed inclined to Classical though in a desultory sort of way. If your preference is for the Ecclesiastical that is fine. I doubt the Latin Pronunciation Police are going to come down on either one of us.
So if you are chafing from boredom under the Lockdown, you could do worse than to introduce or reintroduce yourself to Latin. Unlike poor Winston you won’t need to fear a thrashing from your Headmaster. You can take your time, review and practice to your heart’s content without worrying about a semester deadline. And best of all – NO FINAL EXAMS OR TERM PAPERS!
We’re all familiar with Uncle Sam, the iconic military recruiter, who glowers at the viewer inducing him (or her) to sign up or be considered an unpatriotic wimp. But not many people seem to realize he has a female counterpart named Columbia.
Uncle Sam came into being around the time of the War of 1812 while Columbia originated about a century earlier. It was not unusual back in the day to have female personifications of various nations; Britannia for England, Marianne for France, Germania for Germany. Her evolution was a complex one and various images of her often are eerily reminiscent of the current super-hero Wonder Woman. A cartoon by Thomas Nast shows her sitting at the opposite end of the table from Uncle Sam. Note the starred epaulets and the Wonder Woman-like tiara.
Or this one. Definitely not a lady to argue with!
One wonders if William Marston had this image in mind when he created the iconic super-hero Wonder Woman.
Now comes the question. What happened to Columbia? Why don’t we hear about her anymore? She was a frequent figure seen in World War One propaganda posters, boosting victory gardens,
or blood donations.
Or even just advertising the latest gimmick for the kitchen.
One likely reason is that she began being seen by people as an antiquated figure, no longer relevant to the views American people had of themselves. By the time World War Two rolled around, it was largely macho Uncle Sam rolling up his sleeves to give the Nazis a pounding. The newer image of Lady Liberty pushed aside the older image of Columbia. About all she seemed to do is hold her torch high and look noble.
Given that Columbia and Uncle Sam were sometimes portrayed as a couple, my own secret personal theory is that they had a falling-out, probably over that floozy from England he was occasionally seen traipsing around with.
I’m sure she didn’t think much of that! Can you imagine what the neighbors were saying? So, no surprise, there was an unpleasant break-up and Columbia departed the public eye for the most part.
Now, in light of recent events, it is high time she made a reappearance. I think the depiction of Liberty, best known as the Statue of Liberty, actually fits in very well with the idea of Columbia as a symbol not just of Liberty but the ideals of equality, respect, justice and plain old-fashioned common sense. While all the partisan bickering and hysterical rhetoric has occupied people’s attention, this figure has stood quiet and unnoticed in the background. A number of state capitol buildings have a variety of Liberty-like figures on or near them.
There’s a statue of the Liberty figure atop the Capitol Building in Washington itself as shown above.
There’s no reason why this figure can’t be merged back with the symbol of Columbia. All the illustrations of Columbia show a wide variety of aspects. She wears many hats and can adjust as the circumstances call for. How many people have noticed that the Statue of Liberty in New York is lifting her right foot after taking a step forward? She’s not just standing there immobile. She’s in motion. Or that there are broken shackles at her feet, representing the banning of slavery? Given how times have changed, the solitary, static form of Uncle Sam is no longer enough. If anything, it’s throwing things out of balance.
It’s important to remember that Uncle Sam represents the government while Columbia represents the nation itself. We’ve lost half of the equation showing who we are by not having Columbia up and front with Uncle Sam. What good is it to ‘make America great again’ if you don’t include honor, integrity and respect? Have Columbia symbolize not just Liberty but arbitration and reconcilation. Have her serve as a means to quell the volcanic, spittal spraying ranting by both sides of the aisle and get them actually talking again.
Let this be the face we look for while we pull ourselves back together again.
