Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Primary Colors, Red, Yellow, Blue


One of the early things about grade school I remember. Do they even teach it any more? Primary colors; secondary colors; tertiary colors . . . What would I think it important for grade school children to know now? Will they learn it? Will they care? It is sort of terrifying to think that they will no longer have to practice handwriting. But I remember hating the boredom of doing the same thing over and over, even though I thought I did it just fine. I can almost feel the texture of the pale green paper cover on the Palmer Method flexible book.

I read an oldish interview with Ha Jin from the Paris Review Facebook link today; it was great and very informative. I have really been enjoying these things from PR. I had heard Jin's name and didn't know anything about this Chinese-American writer (who writes in English) with the fascinating life. I've just now ordered some of his books. (Because I don't have enough reading already lined up? He writes poetry, too.
When he took a class from my beloved Frank Bidart, Bidart showed the poem to the Paris Review, which printed it. And of such stories is the life of writing made. Ha Jin was studying here at the time of  the Tiananmen Square Protests, and never went back to China.

I think the line of primary yellow in the photo above is a mustard field, or rapeseed for oil; we saw it on the way here last year. Tonight in the Camera Club of Eagle, Jane showed pictures of oollites that she took in a place near here. Here is a paragraph about the oolites found here (and the ancient Lake Idaho) from Wikipedia:

"One of the world's largest freshwater lakebed oolites is the Shoofly Oolite, a section of the Glenns Ferry Formation on southwestern Idaho's Snake River Plain. 10 million years ago, the Plain formed the bed of Lake Idaho. Wave action in the lake washed sediments back and forth in the shallows on the southwestern shore, forming ooids and depositing them on steeper benches near the shore in 2- to 40-feet thicknesses. When the lake drained (2 to 4 million years ago), the oolite was left behind, along with siltstone, volcanic tuffs and alluvium from adjacent mountain slopes. The other sediments eroded away, while the more resistant oolite weathered into hummocks, small arches and other intriguing natural "sculptures." The Shoofly Oolite lies on public land west of Bruneau, Idaho managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The physical and chemical properties of the Shoofly Oolite are the setting for a suite of rare plants, which the BLM protects through land use management and on-site interpretation."

So, very cool! I hope to make a field trip there. Maybe when the wildflowers bloom. And so, again planning, again getting more reading than I can ever finish, and keeping on keeping on. . . We did our third walk this afternoon, and I wrote haiku! Still no sketching, but the materials are all out! Sleep well.

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