5/25/23

Thursday, May 25, 2023

In bed @ 9:30, awake at 4:10, and up at 4:24, thinking back about the  the publication of  my law review article on new civil procedure rules with DPL in 1976.  46℉, beach hazards warning still in effect until 9:00, high of 57℉, wind E at 9 mph, gusts up to 20 mph.  Sunrise at 5:19, sunset at 8:18, 14+59.

I 43 Project  Looking out the kitchen window this morning I saw two semis hauling big earth-moving equipment up into Mequon.  I wondered whether the equipment was destined for a project in the upscale residential neighborhood north of us, or was from the freeway reconstruction project just west of us.  In any case, the heavy equipment reminded me of how impressed I am by the enormity or the magnitude of the highway project.  It extends from Capitol Drive in Milwaukee through Glendale, Fox Point, Bayside/River Hills, Mequon,  all the way up to Grafton.  Miles and miles of heavy construction, roadways and bridges, entry and exit ramps, narrowed traffic lanes, and concrete guard rails.  Seemingly millions of traffic cones and stanchions, hundreds of heavy tow trucks, dump trucks, other trucks, hundreds of powerful earth moving, earth tamping, pile driving, tall cranes, bulldozers, frontend loaders, trenchers, hundreds of construction workers wearing bright yellow and orange vests and hard hats, unimaginable numbers of months and weeks and hours of planning, monitoring, supervising, scheduling work and workers.  I find it all thrilling to see.  I'm reminded too of ballets and symphonies, especially symphonic chorale performances that require the joint, coordinated efforts of so very many artists, all having studied and rehearsed hundreds, thousands of hours to deliver a live performance of a work of art.  Add to those hours the time and effort devoted by the composer of, say, Bach's Mass in B minor, or Mozart's Mass is C minor, or Verdi's Requiem, or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.  These works requiring and obtaining such quanta of coordinated human effort still astound and thrill me.  Deo gratias.

Some Hopkins to start my day.

Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Casey DeSantis, Melania Trump, Madame Nhu.  Why is it these women remind me of Madame Nhu?  There is the physical similarities, of course.  They are (or were) all conventionally beautiful, dark hair framing symetrical faces, dramatic eyes top-framed by notable eyebrows. lips highlighted and dramatized by lipstick.  Blondes may "have more fun," but dark-haired beauties have all the advantage of contrast framing, definition, and highlighting.  I became more aware of this when I started pencil drawings of beautful faces, beautful heads like, e.g. Ingrid Bergman's and Margaret Brennan's.  A pale blonde head of hair over a pale face with blonde eyebrows lacks dramatic definition and framing and  is highlighted only by red lips and to a lesser extent unframed pupils - hard to draw effectively.😕  But beyond the physical similarities, all three women are (or were) married to powerful, autocratic, ruthless, and cruel thugs.  Why would anyone marry and bear the children of a Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, or Ngo Dinh Nhu?  There are marriages of course in which the partners are very different in personal values, attitudes towards others, etc., but I suspect it is more common for marital partners to share, at least generally, basic values, outlook on life, attitudes towards others.  Without such shared values and outlooks, it's hard to sustain a long relationship.  Pares cum paribus congregantur.  So one assumes that Melania and Casey share many of the moral characteristics of their husbands and it is in that respect they remind me of Dragon Lady, or Madame Nhu.  From her obituary in The Guardian:  "She accumulated vast wealth and power, but was reviled for her puritanical social campaigns and her callous dismissal of Buddhist monks who burned themselves to death to protest against the brutal rule of Diem and her husband Ngo Dinh Nhu. "I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show, for one cannot be responsible for the madness of others," she wrote in a letter to the New York Times. The world was stunned by photographs of monks sitting shrouded in flames; Madame Nhu simply offered to bring along some mustard for the next self-immolation. She later accused monks of lacking patriotism for setting themselves alight with imported petrol."  Can it be surprising that I am reminded of Melania's "I really don't care, do U?" jacket which she wore after visiting a migrant children detention center at the Mexico-Texas border?

A gouache sketch I did of the infamous jacket in 2018