Infospigot: The Chronicles

Modern Marketing, March 2010 Edition

One of my private convictions, or delusions, is that I'd be a great marketing writer given the right outlet. The right outlet would have no rules: no house style, no retail "voice," no lifestyle image to promote. In fact, it probably wouldn't have merchandise except for the stuff you're trying to get out of the house; stuff that might not be fun but that could be fun to sell. It turns out I'm talking about Craigslist. We've managed to sell stray household items there for years, and writing the item descriptions is always the most engaging part of the process.

Here's the current item on offer (as posted on Craigslist):

Ikea Henrik student desk, with chair

An Ikea classic that may or may not have been named after a famous Scandinavian literary figure. This desk played a prominent role in a student's career at Berkeley High School and may even be partly responsible for his successful completion of studies at the University of Oregon.

Features:
--Classic Ikea design: a Scandinavian thought this up. 'Nuff said.
--Classic Ikea construction: manufacture of this item caused minimal rain forest destruction
--Conforms fully to U.S. and international safety standards, including Newton's laws of motion

And check out these extras:
--Recently dusted
--Family friendly
--Desk chair may be comfortable for hours on end

We got three responses within an hour. Since no one commented on the brilliance of the sales pitch, I have to conclude they were moved by price ($60, with vague offer of delivery).

Reinvigorating the Haiku Economy

Robert Hass's introduction to "The Essential Haiku" includes a short, unfussy description of where haiku came from and a brief explanation of some of what's going on behind the scenes in these 17-syllable miniatures. Here's part of what he says:

"The insistence on time and place was crucial for writers of haiku. The seasonal reference was called a kigo and a haiku was thought to be incomplete without it. ... For example, the phrase, 'deep autumn' or 'autumn deepens,' is traditional and accumulated references and associations from earlier poetry as well as from the Japanese way of thinking about time and change. ... [In Buson's poems] the reference to snow--yuki, which can also mean 'snowfall'-- ... is always connected to a sense of exposure to the elements, for which there is also a traditional phrase, fuyuzare, which means 'winter bareness.' The practice was sufficiently codified and there was even a rule that the seasonal reference should always appear in the first or third unit of the three phrase poem.

"... These references were conventional and widely available. They were the first way readers of the poems had of locating themselves in the haiku. Its traditional themes--deep autumn, a sudden summer shower, the images of rice seedlings and plum blossoms, of spring and summer migrants like the mountain cuckoo and the bush warbler, of the cormorant-fishermen in summer, and the apprentices on holiday in the spring--gave a powerful sense of a human place in the ritual and cyclical movement of the world."

Reading the several hundred poems Hass chose for the book, you intuit the importance of season and nature. Here's just one, having opened the book at random:

Mosquito at my ear--
does it think
I'm deaf?

All of which got me thinking that what we very badly need to revivify the American haiku industry is an updated list of seasonal references--urban, rural, whatever works--that evoke season and nature and reflect the way we think about change. This would work best as a group exercise, and I'm just one would-be haiku apprentice. But anyway, I'll go first:

Slushy shoes
Icy sidewalk
Frozen socks
Stinging snowball
Fingers numb
Grimy snowbank
Deserted luge track
Oil-drum fire
Catchers and pitchers
Spring ahead
March Madness
Smart-ass robin
Mockingbird
Ants again
Termites swarm
Yellow Peeps
Tinactin time
Prom queen pimple
Unharvested prune

After Christmas, Calaveras Road

A couple days after Christmas, we were driving up I-880, the Nimitz Freeway, from San Jose back to Berkeley. The Nimitz is a grind. Lots of traffic; lots of fast traffic; lots of trucks; long stretches of heavily built-up suburbs, malls, strip malls, big-box centers, and auto rows. But even from the Nimitz, you glimpse what a gorgeous piece of territory we've converted into a metropolis. A long line of hills runs parallel to the highway. High hills, up to about 2,500 feet. When it's clear, they're beautiful. They're beautiful in the winter, when they're green. After a storm--they're beautiful then, too, with a backdrop of towering, dramatically lit clouds.  

So, a couple days after Christmas. We were driving north, and little gray shreds of cloud were hanging onto the top of the ridge to the east. It was late in the afternoon. I asked Kate whether she'd ever been up in those hills. No, she hadn't. There's a road up there I've cycled on long rides--Calaveras Road. Among other times: some other riders and I ended up out there, going from Berkeley down to the edge of San Jose, then back up to Fremont to catch BART home. I asked Kate whether she'd like to see the place if I could find it. She was game, so we got off at the Montague Expressway in Milpitas, then headed east, toward the hills, until we couldn't go any farther, the intersection of Piedmont Road. Then we went left, north, until we hit Calaveras, then went right and up hill for a long time. Eventually we hit a steep uphill left into a steep, narrow ravine--still on Calaveras--and shortly popped up on the east side of a ridge above Calaveras Reservoir.

The light was fading, but we found a place to get out and walk. Oaks were silhouetted on the hillsides, and cold-looking gray clouds were starting to slide down the ridge across the lake.

Sunday Morning Walk: Hats

The Sunday morning walk consists of a stroll from our place, across a corner Ohlone Park, over to University Avenue, and down to a restaurant called Fellini. The place does pretty good, pretty cheap dinners. In the morning, it's winning because it has a walk-up cafe window and the coffee there is pretty good, too. As a plus, they give The Dog a treat. He knows that and begins getting enthused about the impending visit when we're two or three blocks away. This morning's walk featured these two hats, and people, who were in line ahead of us. I tend to think most of the hipster headgear in our current Hat Renaissance is a sign of a New Meathead Age. These two chapeaux--is that the plural?--did nothing to change my mind, though I will allow it's an interesting pairing.  

After we got our coffee, we headed down to the old Santa Fe Railroad right-of-way. On our way back home from there, we encountered a mockingbird in full virtuoso voice. Wish I'd brought a sound recorder.

Terremoto

 

UC-Berkeley seismogram image of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake off the coast of Chile. 

California Water: 'The Way of Seizure and Exploitation'

A snippet from "American Places," a 1981 book of essays by Wallace Stegner, novelist and chronicler of the West, and his like-styled son, Page. This is from a chapter Page Stegner wrote called "Here It Is: Take It." It describes how Los Angeles siphoned off a rich, remote supply of water from the Owens Valley and details the valley's ongoing disputes with the city. (The chapter title is taken from the words spoken in 1913 by William Mulholland, the principal architect of the Los Angeles water system, when he opened the valve that brought the first Owens Valley water to the L.A.) I can't help but think of the current court and legislative disputes over California water when I read this. s

"...The American Way of seizure and exploitation has a long history but a dubious future. It has produced ghost towns before this when the resource ran out and the frenzy cooled and the fortune-hunters drifted away. Without suggesting that Los Angeles will become a ghost town, one knows that in the arid West there are many communities whose growth is strictly limited by the available water. To promote the growth of any community beyond its legitimate and predictable water resources is to risk one of two things: eventual slowdown or collapse and retrenchment to more realistic levels, or a continuing and often piratical engrossment of the water of other communities, at the expense of their prosperity and perhaps life.

Man, the great creator and destroyer of environments, is also part of what he creates or destroys, and rises and falls with it. In the West, water is life. From the very beginning, when people killed each other with shovels over the flow of a primitive ditch, down to the present, when cities kill each other for precisely the same reasons and with the same self-justification, water is the basis for western growth, western industry, western communities, Eventually, some larger authority, state or federal will have to play Solomon in these disputes. ..."

We've got a Solomon of sorts--at least one of them--working on the problem now: U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger of Fresno. But more on that later.

California Water: The Judge's Questions

The judge's questions: Last Friday, federal Judge Oliver W. Wanger issued questions to a panel of experts he appointed to consider the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's biological opinion on endangered smelt in the Delta. To really make sense of the list, which focuses on a narrow range of issues concerning the service's scientific conclusions about smelt migrations and the effect of Delta pumping on the fish, you'll need to go and wade through the evidence presented in the trial so far (when you get done with all the motions, declarations, statements, and supporting research, you might be looking at tens of thousands of pages). But the list is interesting even without that file trek, because it sheds some light on what subjects Wanger sees as central to the case. (Here's the order, in PDF form: Judge Wanger's Questions).

Who are the "706 Experts" he refers to therein? They're a group of scientists Wanger chose last November after nominations from the water contractor plaintiffs who are challenging the smelt biological opinion and from the federal agencies who are defending it. "706" is a reference to Federal Rule of Evidence 706, which provides for court appointment of expert witnesses. The panel is: Paul Fujitani, an employee of the Bureau of Reclamation, as an expert on Central Valley Project operations (the bureau is a defendant in the case); Thomas P. Quinn, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington; Andre Punt, another UW professor, an expert in fish population dynamics and statistics; and, "if necessary," John Lehigh, an employee of the state Department of Water Resources, as an expert on State Water Project operations.

The Long Plunge to Greatness

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums gave his State of the City talk last night. He says he's confident that his term--regarded by many spectators as an era of continuing police department scandals, continuing economic problems, continuing high crime rates, and continuing malfeasance among some high-paid public officials--will be remembered "as the period when Oakland laid the  foundation for success." He further opined, "We're on the precipice of the greatest period in Oakland's history." Mr. Mayor: might want to look up "precipice" again.

(Thanks to my KQED compatriot Nina for the image idea.)

California Water: 'The Master Condition'

"The master condition not only of any future developments in the West but of the maintenance and safeguarding of what exists there now, is the development and conservation of water production. Water, which is rigidly limited by the geography and climate, is incomparably more important than all other natural resources in the West put together."

--Bernard de Voto, quoted in "American Places," by Wallace Stegner

As elegant a statement as you can find to explain what all the ruckus is about.

California Water News Flash: The Pumps Are On

Allowing that one person's misconception is another's gospel truth, I still have the impulse to correct others when I hear them say something that I know or believe to be, well, wrong. So here's something from the current battle over California water that always makes me want to say, "Hey, wait a minute."

San Joaquin Valley water interests and their allies, including members of Congress, want more water than they've gotten the last few years. Their biggest problem is that nature has not cooperated. The previous three winters were drier than normal, and the amount of rain and snow that fell on the state's watersheds were far below normal. That circumstance happened to coincide with Endangered Species Act litigation that has led, for the time being at least, to limits on the amount of water the state and federal water projects are allowed to pump from the Delta to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California. Those limits, set by federal wildlife agencies and designed to protect the Delta smelt and runs of chinook salmon, have led the aforementioned water interests to scream that the Delta pumps have been shut down, that farmers are being wiped out and valley communities sacrificed for a few lousy fish.

Now, whatever you happen to think of the last part of that formulation--that those who are trying to figure out how to save the fish want to see the San Joaquin Valley "dry up and blow away" (as Rep. Jim Costa, a valley Democrat, put it)--you shouldn't have to think much about the first part, that the pumps have been shut down. That's because it's not true. The pumps are running, day in and day out. The major destination for a lot of that water is the San Luis Reservoir, a key storehouse for valley water, and it's filling up.

But despite all the readily available data on Delta water shipments, the untruth that the pumps have been switched off is too good a propaganda point for some people to pass up. Rep. Devin Nunes, who represents much of Fresno and Tulare counties in Congress, says about water resources policy: "Its [sic] Simple: Turn on the Pumps." Since last session, he's been pushing a bill called the "Turn on the Pumps Act." (The bill is, in fact, very simple: "In connection with the operations of the Central Valley Project, neither the Bureau of Reclamation nor any agency of the State of California operating a water project in coordination of the Central Valley Project shall restrict operation of their projects pursuant to any biological opinion issued under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, if such restrictions would result in levels of export less than the historical maximum levels of export" (italics mine).

Got that? No limits on pumping to protect endangered species, period, unless the limit results in as much or more water being pumped out of the Delta than the projects have ever pumped.

Rep. Tom McClintock, a Southern California Republican who relocated to and won the northeastern California congressional seat in 2008, is also a source of unrelenting "turn on the pumps" rhetoric. Earlier this month, he issued a broadside against Democrats in the House Water and Power Subcommittee for blocking consideration of Rep. Nunes's excellent bill. "For the sake of humanity, Madam Chairwoman and my Democratic colleagues, turn on these pumps." You have to admire the way these folks keep their rhetoric on a short leash.

If I were in Congress myself, I'd rise to tell my good friends and respected colleagues, "I have good news. The pumps are on! Even as I speak, rain is sweeping over your districts and on your thirsty constituents, helping fill the reservoirs not just with water, but with hope. And in that spirit of optimism, here's a nonpartisan, nonsectarian suggestion: Pray for more rain. I am. That way, the reservoirs will keep rising, agriculture will get its water, and maybe there will be some left over for smelt and salmon and the thousands of people who depend on them. And maybe we won't have to hear you shriek 'Turn on the pumps!' again."