Coming soon: Fall 2010 syllabus and readings

Fall 2010 readings and assignments -- coming soon!

in reference to: Leslie Roberts: Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts (view on Google Sidewiki)

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

...I just finished reading Cesar Aira's book (check out the interview in BOMB Magazine's winter/2009 issue)  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter -- which is a trim 168 pages and boy, what a masterful book. It is the sort of book that makes writers excited to do their own work. Why? Great short books make us feel like there is a chance that we, too, can finish our books -- shorten what we have, tighten, and smarten it up.  And call out, fini! As we are want to do.
...We were in Los Angeles recently (hence the blog silence) partially to tour UCLA with our son who is now 18 and a senior and a year away from sailing off to the Academy, and partially to inspect the Dennis Hopper show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The MOCA show is curated by Julain Schnabel and displayed in a former police garage, repurposed into a museum by Frank Gehry. Sounds promising, no? And indeed it is. The questions it raises, not about the practice of actors taking candid photos of other actors etc, include what will museums "be" as we plough ahead into this century. They still seem inclined towards a specific sort of spatial performance. I'd be curious to see what art looks like with a slightly lower ceiling. Or in a room that has real human presence -- stacks of papers, messy desks, tea cups from yesterday with dregs of tea in the bottom. Surely the paintings and photos came from these humble beginnings? Or do we treat paintings as pageant for reasons that make it much more celebratory and obvious and gives it the feel of "event" as opposed to "looking."
...The final big news from LA stinks of my suburban gawker core: On Saturday I had lunch at Ivy's my delish high school and college friend, Sally Kushner. Kushner texted me from while I was en route: "Check (discreetly) who is at the bar. It's a good one.) The good one turned out to be Javier Bardem. He was seated at an adjacent table. Then Penelope Cruz came in and joined him. They necked and laughed and were very tender. (Not that we were gawking between sips of Pimm's Cup.)
...A few people have been asking when the two books will be "done." Taking a page from Cedar Aira, we are shooting for no more than 200 pages per. And a deadline of December 1.

The Unique Relationship People Have With Trees

(It would be great to report it is not 50 degrees and windy and silver-skied here in the Presidio, but alas, that report would be a lie. But I have made progress in describing the effect -- if you took a piece of heavy, toothed wastercolor paper in a lightish grey, then used India ink to create the outlines and complex structures of trees, then you laid a piece of vellum over the whole thing -- this is my daily view. An Antarctic glaciologist in our acquaintance used to describe being pinned down in a white-out in a tent, "imagine having the car radio stuck between stations, all static, turned up as loud as possible." Imagine this as a visual. Weather caught between stations -- neither sunny nor rainy. Wind steady. A set designers concept for an indie film where everyone looks really tired and bad things happen.)

While we spent Friday cracking into ideas for our first International Institute for Climate Change Art installation (April 2011) -- we took time out to lunch at Limon on Valencia Street  (brilliant ceviche, yum Argentine rose, and charming conversation with our friend Linda, fresh back from Kenya where she documented giraffes)  and  wander into the coolish "pop-up workshop" -- the  nearby Levis workshop. We arrived as the "48-hr" book project was about 12 hours into its life -- lead by one of our Graduate Design students at California College of the Arts -- Zach Gibson.

It's the sort of making environment that puts a spring in the step. Bits of paper and cardboard and chalkboards stuck to the milkshake-white walls featuring alphabets letters epigraphs, etc, meant to make us all want to make stuff and feel better about our oddball lives and the risks and the abandonment of status  -- "all the forces in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come" -- this from Victor Hugo. The print shop features presses more than 100 years old as well as a photocopier, computers, a terrific bashing together of old methods and new. 

Anyone can go in there through the month (they pack up and head Easterly for New York City where the pop-up will be photo based) and make whatever she or he wants. We're going back to make a 'zine on the photo copier.

One of the event organizers, Kevin Bosch, told us there is only one item they will not allow you to produce. Guess.

Give up?

Wedding invitations.

To read: Seth Meyer and John Wells discussing their own unique relationship with trees,  "Finding  New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees," (NYTimes, 08-08-10).

The International Institute for Climate Change Art

The International Institute for Climate Change Art met today (Friday, August 6) for two hours at Axis Cafe in San Francisco. The purpose of the meeting was to outline guidelines for submissions for our 2011 show, Naked Antarctica, as well as to delegate tasks.
This is an exciting time for the Institute. Naked Antarctica is our first installation and we anticipate close to one dozen final pieces. Complete details and guidelines will be available on our Web site. We will be inviting artists who have worked in Antarctica as well as those who have not to submit proposals. This will be a collaborative effort, and we look forward to seeing how scientists and artists can collaborate within the context of our map.
Our Web site should be up by early September. Until then, we'll blog about the institute and its projects via theentireearthandsky.blogspot.com.

An Episode in the Life of Landscape Writer + Questions Commonly Asked of Our Life in the Presidio

Remember, we need to sell at least another 500 copies of The Entire Earth and Sky in order for it to go to paperback.
The reader who gives me the best idea about how to push out a snazzy marketing campaign to achieve this wins: An autographed copy of my book. If the idea is really good, I will phone you and read to you from it. If it is a brilliant idea, I will come to your home and cook you dinner and then read aloud from the book. What are you waiting for?


My mind is occupied with the work of Cesar Aira, in particular An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions in a neat little format.

Bob Halliday, my dear friend in Bangkok and perhaps the world's foremost authority on both Thai food and coolish fiction, suggested I read it in our recent Skype call.

"I bet there's a copy right now sitting on the shelf at City Lights, waiting for you," he said. And indeed there was a copy on a bookstore shelf and now it is sitting next to me, as I gaze out at the rotting rope hammock in my backyard -- twisted, greenish-ropey gymnast, gone mad in our 52-degree, winds from the SSW at 13 miles per hour days -- (yo! check this out -- I made up those numbers up and went online to check and voila! spot on except for the wind direction -- solid W on that one. Call me a sailor who knows how to read local weather as text -- wind, cloud, humidity.)

Aira's novel documents a moment in the life of Johann Moritz Rugendas. For me, he articulates feelings so clearly about the challenges of framing, decoding, documenting landscapes.

Aira-inspired Thought: While we can work to understand the vertical dimension of The Presidio, the temporal or geologic, the serpentinite, graywacke sandstone, melange, the Monterey cypress and pines, the blue gums, the clarkia and banana slug, when it comes to the horizontal things become more obscure. No amount of study will yield an absolute set of answers. How can words begin to make a picture of the horizontal aspect of this place when what it is and what it claims to be diverge with such a spectacular lurch?

While I read Aira, stories of a landscape painter making sense of a wholly unfamiliar place, I also ploughed ahead into Here Is Where We Walk...now moving towards a finish date of 1 December.

I began making a list of the most common questions asked of us when we tell people we live here and from here we operate The Bureau of Landscape Narrative.

1) How often have you been to the statue of Yoda at the Lucas Film offices?
2) Are you a military veteran?
3) Where do you shop for groceries?

(This last one always makes me laugh. Why, after they lock the gates on this former military base at sundown, there are no trips to the shops. This is why we all have community gardens. So we have something to eat while watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey.)

By the way, the first word of this Aira book is Western and the last word is watch. A writing trick Bob Halliday taught me when we were colleagues at a Bangkok newspaper: First and last words matter. Choose wisely.

Do we each get a daily allotment of words?

I sat with my friend - now a bestselling novelist who appears on national TV - but back then we were all writing obsessively, driven to tell our little stories, and hoping for the best - on a farmhouse porch in Iowa.
It was Halloween and inside the living room shook with dancers decked out in complex, tongue-in-cheek, conceptual costumes. The sort one imagines from MFA students holed up in Iowa trying to get books done -- and using any excuse not to write, such as making the most clever Halloween costume.
We were both finishing MFAs at the university. We were both deep into our first books. The horizon offered the pale orange glow of halogen lights and the fields stretching out before us were turned over, uneven, yet still marked by the neat of rows of monoculture corn estates.
She announced to me that there would be no more emails on a daily basis -- a habit I had come to adore of her -- lively, bright, witty missives, seemingly taken from the Victorians' habit of writing notes and sending them round during afternoon tea.
Her rationale was simple. She believed that each of us only has so many words in us to write each day. Email, she proclaimed, was sapping her strength for the important work, her book.
This statement has been much debated by the two of us and others over the ensuing years. Do we really have a finite number of words each day? Do we drain the supply via email, blogs, and Tweets?

Today in The Presidio the sky, I am dismayed to report, is once again a silver dome. The hawks have been busy since sunrise screeching and diving -- they seem immune to the weather -- putting on a show akin to Jurassic Park scenes, diving, air fights -- all terribly dramatic.
I thought of my friends words and decided to break my usual pattern of "checking in" via iPhone (four calls and three texts await me) and not even crack open email.
If we do have a limited number of words each day -- each year, each decade -- an idea I can argue both for and against -- at least today all the words go to this book, Here Is Where We Walk.

The Complex Relationship We Have with Trees 1

Eucalyptus trees inspire a certain reverence and rage when discussed. Almost no one interviewed to date has been issue neutral on these trees. Those against note the water sucking, plant-destroying root systems, how quickly they proliferate, how they blow up like bombs when ignited in forest fires. Those who adore the trees often comment on their sound and smell...As it turns out, people have had a curiously complex relationship with these trees for some time.


From the Notebook:
Why Blue Gums Were Brought to California

Trees of the genus Eucalyptus from Australia were spread widely and numerously through California after the 1850's.
Several factors favored their spread, notably the production of timber and fuel, often with unrealistic hopes of financial gain. Planting for windbreaks and decorative purposes was also commonplace. An important and overlooked additional reason for the rapid dissemination of eucalypts in California, especially in the 1870's and 1880's, was the belief that trees of this genus, particularly Eucalyptus globulus or blue gum, could prevent or diminish the serious malaria problem that beset portions of the state.
That certain forms of vegetation, especially trees, represented sanitary influences was an ancient notion and it survived even the germ theory of disease. The supposed method whereby eucalypts achieved their healthful influence was through the trees' imagined capacity to absorb or neutralize the noxious gases that were believed to cause malaria. This erroneous and antique miasmatic etiology of malaria, together with belief in eucalypt prophylaxis, was demolished in the late nineteenth century when it was revealed that the disease was caused by blood parasites transmitted by the bites of anopheline mosquitoes.
--
35 The Pacific Rural Press, May 16, 1874, p. 20.

Meanwhile, similar comments were appearing in the authoritative British scientific journal Nature: "The subject of the introduction of the eucalyptus as a sanitary agency in fever-stricken countries has of late been so much talked about that some authoritative preliminary inquiries have been made with the view of planting Eucalyptus globulus on a large scale in Mauritius;"Nature, June 11, 1874, p. 112. "…the Italian government, following the course that it has already adopted on previous occasions, will gratuitously distribute this year 5,000 plants of the Eucalyptus globulus, for cultivation in the Agro Romano, especially in the spot infected by malaria;"Nature, April 1, 1875, p. 436.

Shorelines

We've lived above the Pacific's shore in The Presidio for five years. From the perch here in the dunes, water invites the eye to extend beyond the Golden Gate, out towards the Farallon Islands, and then take an imaginative journey further west -- Hana, Papeete, Moorea -- moving effortlessly across those blue waves. The Golden Gate Strait is three-miles long and one-mile wide and gives its name to the famed orange-oxide bridge. The current runs at healthy 4.5 -7.5 knots, one of the first things we decided to learn about how the sea works in these parts.
Golden Gate as place name was not derived from the sun's color across this water -- particularly in September and October when we can see the golden light. Mais non.
The topographical engineer for the U.S. Army, John C. Fremont, named this place "Chrysopylae" because it reminded him of a harbor near Istanbul called Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn. (A human trait or folly to demand places be "like something else" -- we all seem desperate for analog when it comes to the land.)
For a mighty view of the Golden Gate unsullied by bridge, climb to the highest point in The Presidio: Rob Hill Campground.
It is also a good place to start a meditation on wild, semi-wild, not-so-very-wild places and the sh*t we do there.
Rob Hill is the only campground in San Francisco. It rests on a wind-pounded hill. It has been a source of much hand-wringing here at the head office. Why? Well, the Haas family gave The Presidio about $15 million to fix up The Presidio and the campground was thus reborn.
They took down many, many trees. While they were redoing it, the place looked like a bomb crater. The footprint spreads out like an enormous canker across newly cleared land.
Before, it was a messy, fusty place -- which for some of us is what camping is all about. (Although I have to say, camping in a city is not really my idea of camping. It's something else -- perhaps a new category under the heading 'how we spend time outside.' More on that later.)
So.
With this dim view of the whole fancy-camper operation uphill from our home, we set out each day for Baker Beach, along a road clogged these days with cars and expensive bikes ridden largely by middle-aged white men in extremely tight shorts and tops. Some of these men talk on cell phones, connected to the cell phone via Blue Tooth devices.
We walk along, trying to stay calm in the face of this onslaught of fancy stuff in our beloved park.
On a recent morning, we followed our usual path -- stairs to the beach and then the sand ladder, on this morning packed with children in the last throes of true child-ages -- maybe 10, 11? Most were either Hispanic or African American. Most were not dressed for camping in a way outfitters like REI or Patagonia would recognize. They were dressed for camping the way we all used to dress before expedition clothes became widely available at malls across the world.
Over-sized pea coats, pink shiny windbreakers, ragged sneakers. Laying down each jacket and shoe on a blanket on the sand, then shrieking when blown sand gathered on their coats and other clothes.
We came to see quite quickly it was a group that had perhaps never been to an actual beach. Talking to one of the group leaders, we found out the children came from just across town, a few miles of streets, a million miles away in the neighborhoods that don't make the coffee table books about San Francisco.
The big, fat, overpriced campsite had been their only invitation to explore a beach here, explore with borrowed clothes and all sorts of ideas of what it would be like.
We tarried there, watching the wildish play -- throwing, splashing, running -- that beaches draw out of each of us.
Then, we noted one girl standing alone at the water's edge, carefully pushing her toes into cold waters.
She turned, hands clamped to her head to keep hair from going awry -- a losing battle, we wanted to tell her, but the beach will school her soon enough, so we kept silent -- and she called out to her teacher: It's so loud! I didn't think the ocean would be so loud!
There you have it. A moment when ideas and impressions crack open.
For reasons we have yet to fully grasp, explore, and articulate, this scene made us weep. A story of one girl, wind, sea, and sky, and the day she came to hear the waves.

What Business Have We in the Woods?

In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?
—Henry David Thoreau

Recently, I found myself wandering the forests of southeastern Tasmania. En route, I pulled the car over at Geeveston to inspect the Forest & Heritage Information Center. Constructed of wood, and filled with information about trees and their commercial uses, one of the myriad facts I picked up was this, "Forests managed for timber production remove more carbon out of the air over time than unmanaged forests locked up in reserves." Because this was written and distributed by people who view trees as things that need to be made into something else -- ie, wood chips, boats, two-by-fours, etc -- I read this with narrowed gaze.
On my return to America, hunched over stacks of dusty volumes, I came across the "Analytical Model of Carbon Storage in the Trees, Soils, and Wood Products of Managed Forests," by Roderick C. Dewar in the journal Tree Physiology.
The fact is, so-called managed forests do have a higher C02 intake than so-called unmanaged forests. Why? The fact is, while a forest is growing, it is a net sink for C02 while mature trees are essentially in equilibrium with the atmosphere.
What Dewar and other researchers seem to be saying, (which the Tasmanian foresters have deployed in a somewhat simplified and self-serving way) is that yes, young, growing trees will suck out more C02. However. It's a far more complex equation than young/managed vs old/unmanaged. Factors such as soil, tree species, what the trees are made into (ie, products with a short or long shelf life?) all play key parts in figuring out the C02 equation.
Facts, those pesky details, and how we twist them to our own ends.
It circles us back around to ideas of who runs the narration of life on Earth -- how proper science with all its tedious reports actually answers complex questions with complex responses. How other sorts with more commercial/exploitative interests maybe shouldn't be allowed to build "information and heritage" centres. I know that sounds incredibly bossy and Che Guevara-ish. But it's true. Leave the histories to those interested in the whole text, (from texere, to weave.)
In some places, Yosemite, for instance, it's good enough to simply be a giant tree. Your life is spared and nurtured. In some places it just isn't. Go figure that one out.
The Australian filmmaker and dancer Lisa Roberts (no relation) told me many of the trees felled in Tasmania become woodchips bound for Japan these days.
Sitting along the side of the road in Geeveston, while a huge logging truck whizzes by, shaking my car, I see the long, soft trunks stacked like -- wood. I imagine their life in these woods. I see them soon-to-be made into what -- packing materials? particle board?
I press my hand to the windshield glass as they roll northward towards the harbor in Hobart and their sea journey. Then I drive deeper into the woods.

Tree-ish Rappinghood

What's a tree's worth? The other morning, slammed in traffic -- first vehicular then human -- en route to the Mariposa Grove of redwoods, I kept thinking of the Tom Tom Club's Wordy Rappinghood. It's a rat's race at a fast pace. Don't we go in search of trees to leave this stream?
What's a tree's worth? In Mariposa, French, Spanish, Japanese, here a language, there a language, heads tilted backwards, cameras held aloft, children standing next to unearthed root systems resembling a woodcut for Blake's lines. All a day's work for the redwoods.
What's a tree's worth? I walked 2.2 miles (or so they told me) shuffling dust with my children and a bunch of complete strangers. And while I usually find over-stuffed outdoorsy activities not to my liking -- give me solitude and a less scenic route any day -- I would fight the crowds again to stand among those trees.
My friend the poet Susan Gevirtz said we like big trees because they remind us of the passage of time. We can put our hands on their trunks and feel time.
Is this the reason we go to them?
Or do we like superlatives so? Largest trees on the planet -- almost. Oldest tree in this grove. Branches bigger than tree trunks in most of the world's forests.
From my notebook: Four trees called The Bachelor and Three Graces. While sneaking a closer look, a tractor trailing hauling open-air cars, wheezes by, a little bit of the Garden State Parkway right here in California. Passengers all wore headsets. Me: jealous. Hold deep, secret love of "audio tours" (don't tell) -- both because of whom they choose to read the script (always better when it's either someone who also performs Shakespeare or an inordinately sincere expert) and because it is so directional. When most things that get audio tour treatment (art, trees) are actually invitations to be wildly creative and free.
Facts on these trees -- shallow roots, only six feet beneath where I stand...down there, drinking...as I write this, drinking 1,000 gallons a day, these four trees so entwined there will be no separation for them -- if one falls, they all go down. The whole root system is said to cover half an acre.
The problem with tree facts? We get too much at one time. One or two ideas is enough. Enough. Stop reading the placards lining the route.
I like the Taoist idea of trees. How lucky they are to be content to stay in one place and grow.
After I write this, it is time to rejoin the stream, pressing, crying children in dusty strollers, crying children told sotto voce to shut up, squirrel loudly named Chubb by a teen-age boy feeding it crumbs, well-turned-out French hikers jutting lips and wiping brows saying d'accord, the whole place snapping, yapping, clapping.
What's a tree worth?

Tasmanian Pademelons

We're just back from Tasmania -- where we attended and presented at the Antarctic Visions Conference at the University of Tasmania, Hobart.

How did the talk go? I believe it is always ill-advised to begin a new slide deck at 3:30 am the day of -- because one suddenly has a "great new idea."

And yet this was the predicament I sucked myself into, suddenly obsessed with capturing larger ideas of how we understand and talk about place. And the name I gave it was Lyrical Geomorphology. (Expect to see more of these notions here, as I tease them out for my book.)

The rest of the panel "killed" (modish high-praise lingo vectored into my brain via my 13-year-old daughter) that day. Bill Fox, Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent, gave a rousing discussion of his own path to Antarctica -- how understanding The Ice as Place began with conversations -- with Barry Lopez and Stephen Pyne. Gretchen Legler, author of On Ice , detailed her ever-expanding list of women's writing on The Ice.

I quoted my good friend David Campbell's brilliant Antarctic book The Crystal Desert , showed slides from my exploding collection of Antarctic images, and chatted about how "personal" stories offer us writers a sort of wild creativity and freedom.

When the conference ended we drove south towards Recherche Bay, to a solar-powered shack in the forests.

Unexpected, dominant piece of each day: In the land of nocturnal animals, road kill takes on stunning proportions.

Part of our morning ritual entailed pausing to shovel small, unfamiliar animals off the road. It felt like the right thing to do.

While doing so one day, Ed said to me, "What the hell is this one?" The grey-brown back and reddish belly, the muscular forearms, stocky, short legs.

Only yesterday as I culled photos from the trip did I sit down to add name to image. I came again to this guy and found it to be a male pademelon -- and Aboriginal name, sometimes called the rufous wallaby.

Looking at its living rellies online, I considered how islands like Tas tell a specific wild story of adaptation, how this adaptation is often portrayed as "exotic" and how site-specific plants and animals hold us in their thrall.

Thanks for that inspiration, pademelons. More about native plants and animals and how their life The Presidio in our next post.

Dream of a Butterfly Dreaming

Don't tell anyone: Ed and I stole away from work to a matinee of Inception. We were the only souls in the theater. The story is built like a Chinese box and it represents all that is great about stories, the imagination, and matinees. For the two or so hours it cranked along, Inception gave me something to think about -- other than how ghastly the weather is currently in The Presidio, which seems to be Thought No. 1 these days.

Do you know what happens here in The Presidio in July and August? Well, it's not summer. Unless it's some sort of Christopher Nolan-devised anxiety-inducing dream-state. (Actually, if you wonder what the sky looks like here in summer, take note of how the sky looks in the crumbling world DiCaprio and his partner imagined in the film. Same-same.)

The sky is a silver dome. As someone who spends as much time as she can outside each day, this sky is both depressing and infuriating. On the really bad days, I am convinced someone has rigged this sky, Inception-style, to drive us all mad. Not that a few odd days of the big, glowing silver bowl -- (do we live in some hotel buffet steam-table serving vessel? Will a great spoon come and pull me out and slap me on a plate?) -- wouldn't offer some coolish variation on shades of blue and luminous clouds. But what happens in The Presidio is bright grey arrives, slaps down on us, and we live this way until September.

During these months, I walk around my writing studio, patrol the beaches and fields, and try not to scream.

I've been told there are more microclimates in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else on Earth. Can this be true? I know if I walk about a mile over the hills here, I will hit true summer -- hot sun, tanned legs, tall, sweating glasses of iced tea.

However. Do I flee my home because the weather doesn't meet my needs? Or do I stick it out, go all white and pasty, and shove my weary brain into books and matinees? This feels like the more noble path: The weather and I are meeting, eye to eye, and I am learning what it is to feel honestly blue because I cannot, will not see the blue sky.

What is the weather learning from my resilience? Am I schooling the sky?

Part of my reading-to-ignore-the-silver-sky takes this form: The skeptical philosophy of Chuang Tzu. Does Christopher Nolan read Chuang Tzu? His work suggests so. At any rate, for obvious reasons given this oppressive and relentless sky, this work resonates for me. Perhaps this is the question: Is the weather trying to tell me something via the writing of Chuang Tzu? Or am I Chuang Tzu dreaming of the weather and how I will write about it in my book? Or am I Leslie Carol Roberts dreaming of a sky that is still weeks away holding tight with the trees and the great band of nesting migratory birds that keep me company each day?

"Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things."
(The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans Burton Watson, Columbia University Press, New York, 1968)

Paperback Writer

I recently found out that if you have a great hardback edition of your book -- ie, a book people call "beautifully designed" as I do, paperback days may have to wait. Well, it's not truly the fault of the book design. The fact is,

THE ENTIRE
EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica October 2008: 323 pp.; 5.2 inches x
8.5 inches; 11 photographs.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1617-4



(800-755-1105)

while doing "great" in sales (particularly for a book with no marketing except for a few ads and a personally funded book tour) cannot go paper until we sell more hardback copies.

It's not like I'm not already trying. While the book came out over a year ago, I continue to give readings across the U.S. and abroad (try buying the book in Australia or New Zealand where I did much of my research -- ha-ha on that idea) and make cold calls to bookstores to see if they carry my book.

The main resistance to purchasing it by bookstores? Price. The book costs over $20. "We'll carry the paperback," they tell me. "Cheaper to stock. And for a traveller's book like yours. More portable."

I come home, vaguely defeated by this news. It's all so much to manage these days for us writers. Remember when making books was about assembling a bunch of pages, stapling them together, then calling it a day? Ha-ha on that idea, too.

My husband Ed, who closes large deals on fiber optic cables for a living, finds this paper-back edition log-jam appalling.

"Get me a copy of your contract! Who makes this decision?" he squawked from our orange couch, where he balanced a bowl of pistachios and a Stella Artois beer while reading the latest on hybrid Lexus sedans.

"Nebraska has the paperback rights," I sniff. "They say we have to sell more of what we have first. But they've been really good to me. It's just the book business right now. Tough."

And it's true. Nebraska is an excellent press and I love working with them. And these are weird, paradigm-shift times for all of us in publishing

So.

This leaves me with no other route than to try and sell as many copies of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY: Views on Antarctica as I can. I mean, this is what we polar explorers do, isn't it? Take charge and keep going with good cheer, even in the face of adversity?

This is my first foray into direct marketing, and I can say as a writer who prefers to sit for long hours in wide-open, wild places, like Antarctica and New Zealand (read about it in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY) -- it sort of freaks me out in a way canoeing a rough river or sliding down an icy hillock do not.

But what are the options? Sit here in silence, writing away on my new project and give up trying to get more eyeballs on THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY? Wait til I see it in five years, dust-covered on the outdoor remainder table at Green Apple Books on Clement Street in San Francisco, next to faded copies of How Not to Act Old?



Someone suggested I do a YouTube author video where we get creative and show both what the book's about and what I went through to get this book written -- how I travelled to Antarctica in 1988 for three months, then reported the news in other places around the world, then found I thought about Antarctica every day.

So I began my slow path back to The Ice, reading and researching the people who went before me, the treaty and legal conventions, and the state of the ice and wildlife. A deeply personal quest, first as a reporter then as a single mother with a Fulbright working out of Gateway Antarctica International Research Centre in Christchurch.

Fifteen years after first setting foot on Ross Island, near Robert Falcon Scott's famous hut, I wrote my book about my life in Antarctica and subsequent explorations into the "little known" stories of that continent's exploration.

Why do I think Antarctica matters so much, to stake my life on this project for more than a decade? Well, I think Antarctica offers us much to consider -- and I felt and feel we can only fully embrace all we have here on Earth via close inspection. I love how Antarctica contains more than 60 percent of the Earth's fresh water, how the ice is more than 20 million years old, how the ice covers 98 percent of the continent. I love how penguins have evolved as birds who swim rather than fly.

And I loved the chance to take a nice long chunk of time and turn all this over in my mind and into the thing call book, to slow down my thinking from the rapid-fire worlds of mothering and journalism, to allow the feel and reach of The Ice to inhabit the feel and reach of my creative work.

More on the path to making the book in the next post. In the meantime, any thoughts on ways to get the book to more people's eyeballs?

Let me know.

Field Notes: Here Is Where We Walk -- One

Presidio National Park
San Francisco


An Unofficial Look at Place Known Since 1776 by Handle “Presidio” Gathered by Our Research Department

1. San Francisco Bay is relatively young: only about 8,000 years of ocean water flooding into what was once a large valley. Melting ice from the last glaciation raised ocean levels and thus the bay began to form.

2. Interesting rocky base in these parts: The Franciscan Complex. (Sometimes called the “World Famous” Franciscan Complex.)

3. Rocks Beneath Our Feet: Graywacke sandstone and argillite also lessor amounts of greenstone (altered submarine basalt), radiolarian ribbon chert, limestone, serpitinite (altered mantle material), and high-grade metamorphic rocks such as blueschist (high-pressure), amphibolite, and eclogite – these words typically fractured and mixed together to form a “melange.”

4. Range in age from 200 to 80 million years old

5. Franciscan Complex composed of semi-coherent blocks, called tectostratigraphic terranes, which were episodically scraped from the subducting oceanic plate, thrust eastward and shingled against the western margin of North America.

6. The Earth is a coolish design concept -- a dynamic place of moving pieces. Some of the best geologic detective work centers on the understanding of tectonic plates -- and how the lithosphere is broken up into seven or eight major plates and many, many minor plates.

7. A piece of the Presidio is an interesting rock called Chert. Chert epitomizes how movement and change define life on Earth.

(We spend so much time with rocks here because of recent the rocks call the shots – they determine what grows where, what the terrain is like, how much any species, even humans, can survive given their chemical composition.)

Note: This is not to suggest the rocks care, mind you. From our careful observations, we can say they are entirely absorbed with their own (losing) battle with wind and water, as well as with tectonic shifts. Thus their understandable (and forgiveable) wild indifference.

Big News on the Big Salmon

Wondering what's happening in Rakaia, New Zealand, home to the world's largest public salmon sculpture? (There's a larger one in a private collection in Japan.) In addition to the Salmon Tales Restaurant, they have added a "4-D" salmon educational and entertainment center. But don't take our word for it: http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/4d-cinema-comes-rakaia/5/53329

Field Notes: Here Is Where We Walk

This begins the next iteration of The Entire Earth and Sky blog.
Goals for 2G Entire Earth and Sky blog:
1. Over the next 246 days, I will complete my book, Here Is Where We Walk, posting bit and pieces as I go.
2. Figure out if it is ethically OK to print a book about trees on any sort of paper.
3. Make and document a series of interactive "maps" -- of my two current favorite topics -- trees and how they grow and behave in general and Antarctic geology and ice.
4. Learn to use the laser cutter at work with such proficiency that I can create many iterations of my maps for a "show" that will tour the world.
Well, our team here in the Presidio clearly has a lot of work to do.
This blog will be refreshed weekly for the summer, more when school begins in September.