The great literary experiment falls into a crevasse and dies

2014 is almost over, and I haven't written about my epic Books-I-Hated-in-High-School Literary Revisitation Experiment since April, when I discovered my affinity for literary characters who most other people think are evil. There the experiment ended. I left my hero, Madame Dufarge, in the middle of her revolutionary subterfuge; may she continue to knit secrets in perpetuity.

Was whatever spark I once had for reading permanently dimmed by the literary canon forced upon me in high school, when I was too young to appreciate it? Yeah, probably. Did I enjoy rereading any of it as an adult? Yeah, OK, some.

To cleanse myself after the year of dutiful experimenting, I turned to a genre I usually enjoy--Survival Literature--and reread Alive for the third time. If the High School Literary Canon Committee ever wants to drop Siddhhartha, they could surely pull some excellent replacements from Survival Literature, which offers real-life tales of self discovery to shock and awe any teen. Consider the following:

* Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read. A Uruguayan rugby team charters a plane that crashes in the snow-covered Andes in 1972. The narrative explores the emotional and physical endurance the survivors tap into to stay alive during their 10-week ordeal, including their difficult, respectful, and transformative decision to cannibalize frozen corpses. Although search efforts are launched by friends, families, and Chilean, Argentinian, and Uruguayan government agencies, rescue comes only after two survivors trek 60 miles through the mountains to find help.

* Touching the Void by Joe Simpson. Simpson and his mountaineering acquaintance Simon Yates pair up for an ill-fated climb up the north face of the Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. When Simpson breaks his leg near the beginning of their descent, Yates rigs together a pair of ropes that he uses to lower Simpson down the mountain. At one point during the descent, Simpson unexpectedly slips over the edge of a cliff; dangling from a taut rope, can neither lower himself down nor climb back up. Yates, holding onto the other end of the rope a few hundred feet up the mountain, is unable to help without also sliding off the cliff. After a few hours, Yates cuts the rope. Simpson falls into a crevasse, but miraculously lands on an ice table; knowing he's presumed dead, he spends the next four days dragging himself physically (and mentally) back to the base camp, arriving just before Yates' departure.

* Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston. The author does what parents always tell kids not to do: he goes hiking without letting anyone know where he's going or when he'll be back. While exploring a remote canyon in Utah, a boulder slips, crushing his arm against the canyon wall. The emotional drama isn't told with the same quality prose as Alive or Touching the Void, but the story is nonetheless riveting; near death after being trapped for several days with barely any food or water, Ralston amputates his own arm--and then manages to hike out of the canyon and several miles back to a trail for help.

* Into the Wild by master story-teller Jon Krakauer. This isn't really Survival Literature, since the protagonist doesn't survive, but Into the Wild would make a great replacement for Siddhartha, should the Canon Committee ever feel so moved. Christopher McCandless does what Aron Ralston did, to the nth degree: he not only goes hiking without letting anyone know where he's going or when he'll be back, but he does it for months at a time and on purpose, intentionally cutting himself off from family and friends to live an ascetic life in the wilderness. Whether he was seeking Nirvana or something else, no one will ever know, since he didn't have any maps with him when he died of starvation in Alaska in 1992.

Paint colors

How does one get a job naming paint colors? I would like to offer my services to this needy industry,

There are a lot of awful paint color names out there--names of things that few people should rationally want smeared on their walls. Food, for instance. Behr offers an extensive menu of sweet and savory puréed edibles, as well as a range of non-puréed but generally easily-digested solids: cranberry whip, pumpkin butter, sweet marzipan (vs. unsweet? do they know what marzipan is?), cilantro cream, hummus, creamy mushroom, rye bread, toasted wheat, tapioca, cherry cobbler, and seaweed salad.

From the Let's Imbibe! palette, Behr offers several alcohol colors that probably won't complement the meal: mojito, reisling grape, coco rum, so merlot (vs. for/and/nor/but/or/yet merlot), and royal liqueur. Alcohol accent colors include intoxication and cork.

In the Relics of Imperialism palette, Behr offers colors such as folklore, ethiopia, tibetan temple, tribal pottery, japanese kimono, congo, kenya, and amazon jungle.

Perhaps it was after a night of inhaling fumes in a room freshly painted with cranberry whip, hummus, and congo that Behr's color namers came up with lizard breath.

Over at Sherwin-Williams, the color names are more matter-of-fact (or the color namers are more depressed). People who don't already spend enough time staring at computer screens should consider web gray, online, and software. For those who see paint colors as expressions of personality, a limited range of hues are available, including notable hue, sensible hue, spicy hue, and nervy hue (roughly speaking, light blue, gray, yellow-green, and brick red, respectively).

To my delight, someone with a sense of humor has infiltrated the depressed Sherwin-Williams naming think-tank and has inserted, in the midst of the many many shades of gray, the color names dorian gray (which ages nicely in your living room but not in your attic), gray matters (for the cerebral citizen), gray area (for equivocators), amazing gray (how sweet the sound), rock bottom (for those who aren't feeling sufficiently depressed), spalding gray (for avant-garde autobiographers), and anonymous (which would probably go very nicely with stenciled wall flowers).

As a snarky, over-degreed artist who experiences only mild depression, I feel I would be a perfect fit for the Sherwin-Williams family of paint namers. Naturally, I find inspiration and joy in the vivid colors I encounter daily in the world around me. Thus, Sherwin-Williams (whose sky high, maison blanche, bittersweet stem, and pebble now freshly grace upstairs walls in my house), I gift you with damp freeway, gravel shoulder, white stripe, yellow dash, and dried weeds.

A thank you poem for our local independent bookstore

Reason #412 to love The Regulator Bookshop: when your child is waiting for you in the car, bored, so he plays around with his brand new Regulator gift certificate so full of potential, leans it against the window to admire it, and it slips down the window and into the door, whereupon his lower lip trembles and salty tears leak out of his eyes, and the mechanic up the road laughs and tells you it's gonna cost way more than the value of the gift certificate to retrieve it, and, while your child stands by avoiding eye contact and feeling mortified, the kind folks at the Regulator listen to your story with a reasonably straight face, agree that it's too strange to make up, ask you to burn the gift certificate if you ever manage to get it out of the car door, and write your child a new one.

Ocracoke

We went to Ocracoke Island with friends for Thanksgiving break. We don't visit the coast very often, maybe every 2-4 years or so; but we wanted to get away over break, far but not too far, and after much late-in-the-game searching, we finally landed on Ocracoke. Only one of the eight of us travelers had ever been there before. We left pre-dawn on Wednesday, driving three-plus hours through pouring rain and wind to Swan Quarter, where we arrived, full of adrenaline, with 5 minutes to spare before the ferry departed for the 2.5 hour scoot across the sound. Ocracoke was spectacular, and well worth the trek.

Leaving Swan Quarter

Cormorants

Our first beach day began with lots of clouds...

...but the sun poked through...

...and drove almost all the clouds away.

E's a sandcastle kinda guy...

...while his friend E prefers running with pelicans.

After a few hours of wading and building sand
castles in wind and sun, boys needed to rest.

J and I came across a dead turtle at the northeast end of the island. J reported it the next day to the Park Service.

On the sound side of the island, sandpipers run in the water; they're more cautious on the ocean side.

Orion and Taurus over the beach

Harbor view

Wishful thinking

Lighthouse

Like father, like son

We ran into friends from home as we were getting on the ferry back to Swan
Quarter. They had left their car in SQ and were travelling by little red wagon.

When we left Ocracoke, the sky and ocean were almost indistinguishable. Then the sun broke through...

...and the clouds cleared away. Several dolphins waved to us, but none agreed to pose for this photo.

Durham County Pottery Tour

This: http://www.durhamcountypotterytour.com/
and this: http://www.heraldsun.com/news/localnews/x132734075/Durham-County-Pottery-Tour-offers-inside-look-at-ceramics
and this: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/durham-news/dn-community/article10116605.html

MoSAIC

The pair of interlocking sliced tori that went to the Bridges 2012 conference are now part of the permanent collection of the Bridges Organization and are traveling with a series of weekend math-art conferences called MoSAIC (Mathematics of Science, Art, Industry, Culture; what a math-artful acronym!). MoSAIC landed at Berkeley College in Berkeley CA this past weekend; it's next stop will be Columbia University in New York City, followed by my fist Alma Mater, the University of Illinois in Urbana IL, next month. The complete schedule for this year is here; check out a conference if it comes your way!

Porcelain and a spider

One of the joys of culling together three part-time jobs doing three different things I (fortunately) really enjoy and that require reporting largely only to myself, is that when things pile up, they really pile up. At some point, I will take photos of the new glazes I've been using. Initial results have ranged from truly spectacular to good-for-under-plants to not-even-its-mother-could-love.

I'm experiencing some impressive, unpredictable bloating in my dark clay (Standard 266). This was something a friend had warned me a while ago to expect with this clay but that I've never had problems with until recently. For some reason, only bowls bloat; chickens, zigzags, salt rocks, and mugs have been fine. Meanwhile, my favorite white clay, Li'l Loafers, is leaving annoying little bubbles in the new glazes (unless the clay is super thin). From what I've read, I suspect there are impurities in the clay that can't quite burn out through the glaze. Slower bisquing hasn't seemed to help, so I'm trying a switch to Helios porcelain.

Porcelain and I haven't gotten a long so well in the past; it's finicky, while I'm generally an impatient kludger. Having avoided porcelain for a few years, I'm currently pretending we're just meeting each other for the first time, and I plan to try to get to know porcelain for what it is, as opposed to what it isn't. All I shall observe at present is that, astonishingly, I can throw a bowl out of two pounds of porcelain that's about twice as big as what I can throw with two pounds of Li'l Loafers or 266. Also, porcelain doesn't rinse off as well as the other clays. (I'm shedding clay dust on my computer as I type; new studio cleaning habits will commence shortly.)

Since I don't have a photo of pots, I'll post this photo of a hard-working spider that was hanging out near the porch studio last night.