Sunday, January 31, 2010
I have finished reading Last Night I Sang to the Monster and am now on to reading Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood and He Forgot to Say Goodbye. Saenz's Last Night... reminded me in ways of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces - similar themes, similar scenarios, but oh so different writing. The fact that Saenz is a poet, really comes through in the craft and language of this young adult novel for adults. You will not find unending run-on sentences or vertical pages of text where there is a confusion about who is speaking, and pages of texts that could be trimmed - I am thinking of Frey's work. The teenage protagonist, Zach, finds himself in a detox/rehabilitation facility and has blacked out and forgotten how he got there. Throughout his healing journey, he makes connections to others in his therapy group who model certain behaviors and attitudes which help to push Zach towards working through his wounding. Zach finds himself connecting particularly with an older male father figure (like Frey's friend Leonard) who helps him to both love and allow himself to be loved. The monster is a metaphor for the wounded child inside all of us - in Frey's book it was the green-eyed monster that he could never look in the eye in the mirror. This is so much a better book than Frey's, in that although it is a work of fiction, it deals completely with emotional truth and the process of uncovering and working through one's pain from the perspective of a victimized young person who is trapped by circumstances. Zach is not the overprivileged white protagonist of Frey's pseudo-memoir, but a poor kid who is the son of an alcoholic father and a manic depressive mother and the brother to a rager who murders his parents in cold blood and then commits suicide in front of Zach, leaving him the sole survivor of family dysfunction. The sorts of violence that happen in Saenz's books are real, true-to-life, and severely damaging. I found myself in tears at least 5 times, reading Last Night... and came away feeling that this work was a sort of gift/offering, something that I did not feel after reading Frey's memoir when it first came out.
Went yesterday afternoon to Jack Myers' memorial service in Dallas at SMU. Tony Hoagland, Brian Clements, Ralph Angel, Joe Ahearn, Gillian Connolley, and Mark Cox, all spoke on their profound friendships with Jack and his ability as a master teacher, who had so very clearly had a huge impact on each of their lives. Jack's older brother played a chorus of "Around Midnight" by Thelonious Monk (a song that he and Jack would play together as adolescents) and Jack's eldest son and wife performed an elegiac musical piece with cello and piano. The service itself lasted about an hour and then the group proceeded to the reception where Thea, Jack's widow, had organized several small exhibitions of Jack's interests - things like his favorite foods (lobster and black licorice), manuscripts, books, esoteric interests of study, etc. There was also a station with his ashes enshrined inside a beautiful wooden box that was beside an image of him in his hospital bed. Jack was never a teacher to me, nor a close associate, but someone who gave me a chance to teach at SMU, by letting me take over his class. In truth, I probably had more interactions with his wife Thea over the years, and wanted to go to the memorial to show our support for her.
Though we've been gone from Dallas for three years now, there were a lot of familiar faces, and individuals with whom I left relationships at loose ends. In the end, gatherings like yesterday's remind me of why it's important to move on and how Dallas never felt like the right fit, and probably never will.
We've been getting used to the long and regular road trip from San Marcos to Dallas and come up with conversations to entertain ourselves. We wondered yesterday for instance why no one has invented an air freshener for a car that smells like freshly baked bread. Or why no one has invented a chewing gum that tastes like chocolate chip cookies.
Though we've been gone from Dallas for three years now, there were a lot of familiar faces, and individuals with whom I left relationships at loose ends. In the end, gatherings like yesterday's remind me of why it's important to move on and how Dallas never felt like the right fit, and probably never will.
We've been getting used to the long and regular road trip from San Marcos to Dallas and come up with conversations to entertain ourselves. We wondered yesterday for instance why no one has invented an air freshener for a car that smells like freshly baked bread. Or why no one has invented a chewing gum that tastes like chocolate chip cookies.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Kaz Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World.
Gladwell's book focuses on breaking down the myth of the self-made genius, analyzing a variety of case histories/stories where opportunity, privilege, access to resources, and circumstances played a large role in ensuring success and/or genius. He spends a fair amount of time analyzing why Asians are good at math (attributing abilities with math to the linguistic system and the short/compact words which form the basis of numbers in the Chinese language system, which allows even the youngest child learning how to count, to count to a higher figure than his/her Western counterparts). He talks about statistical odds, generational/historical opportunity, time investment, and the ancestral legacies that shape experience. While I didn't love this book, it did give me much to reflect upon, in terms of analyzing the privilege and resources that were available to me, and the sacrifices made by my parents to provide some of those opportunities. I would not be the person that I am, if I had stayed in Riverside at the age of 17. I would not be the person that I am now, if my my mother and I hadn't worked very hard to pay my way to studying abroad in a foreign country during my college years. I would not be the person I am, if my father had never decided to leave Taiwan, when he did. Does my dad's work ethic come from cultivating rice paddies and farming (which he literally did), as Malcolm Gladwell would suggest? And does my own work ethic stem from the transmission of these values? And would I be a very different artist/writer, if I put in 10,000 hours a year into my writing? I don't know, nor is this necessarily a practical or relevant question. We live the lives that we live and balance multiple priorities and commitments.
Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World also took me awhile to warm to. But the book really picked up speed for me when the protagonist of the novel, a famous painter who uses his talents to further the Japanese nation-making project, renounces his past activities and beliefs for the sake of marrying off his 26-year-old daughter. The whole story takes place post-War, under the American occupation, when the island is beginning to rebuild and rapidly transform. The story is told in flashbacks. Ono remembers his early days as a painter, training under various teachers, and his relationship with his major teacher who sought to reinvigorate the style and subject matter of Utamaro, using Western techniques and aesthetic approaches. But Ono tires of painting pictures of the pleasure district, geishas, and night scenes lit by lantern light, applying himself to political themes and images which estrange him from his studio. But there is much to be learned in the master's efforts, in his understanding that the floating world is ephemeral, though its pleasures and joys are no less real because of that quality of ephemerality. There is a message here too about living and practicing one's art and life with conviction - whether for political or aesthetic impulses of the heart. Did Ono and his teacher log 10,000 hours of painting time a year, qualifying themselves as savants? I think the more important question is did they practice their art deeply.
Gladwell's book focuses on breaking down the myth of the self-made genius, analyzing a variety of case histories/stories where opportunity, privilege, access to resources, and circumstances played a large role in ensuring success and/or genius. He spends a fair amount of time analyzing why Asians are good at math (attributing abilities with math to the linguistic system and the short/compact words which form the basis of numbers in the Chinese language system, which allows even the youngest child learning how to count, to count to a higher figure than his/her Western counterparts). He talks about statistical odds, generational/historical opportunity, time investment, and the ancestral legacies that shape experience. While I didn't love this book, it did give me much to reflect upon, in terms of analyzing the privilege and resources that were available to me, and the sacrifices made by my parents to provide some of those opportunities. I would not be the person that I am, if I had stayed in Riverside at the age of 17. I would not be the person that I am now, if my my mother and I hadn't worked very hard to pay my way to studying abroad in a foreign country during my college years. I would not be the person I am, if my father had never decided to leave Taiwan, when he did. Does my dad's work ethic come from cultivating rice paddies and farming (which he literally did), as Malcolm Gladwell would suggest? And does my own work ethic stem from the transmission of these values? And would I be a very different artist/writer, if I put in 10,000 hours a year into my writing? I don't know, nor is this necessarily a practical or relevant question. We live the lives that we live and balance multiple priorities and commitments.
Ishiguro's Artist of the Floating World also took me awhile to warm to. But the book really picked up speed for me when the protagonist of the novel, a famous painter who uses his talents to further the Japanese nation-making project, renounces his past activities and beliefs for the sake of marrying off his 26-year-old daughter. The whole story takes place post-War, under the American occupation, when the island is beginning to rebuild and rapidly transform. The story is told in flashbacks. Ono remembers his early days as a painter, training under various teachers, and his relationship with his major teacher who sought to reinvigorate the style and subject matter of Utamaro, using Western techniques and aesthetic approaches. But Ono tires of painting pictures of the pleasure district, geishas, and night scenes lit by lantern light, applying himself to political themes and images which estrange him from his studio. But there is much to be learned in the master's efforts, in his understanding that the floating world is ephemeral, though its pleasures and joys are no less real because of that quality of ephemerality. There is a message here too about living and practicing one's art and life with conviction - whether for political or aesthetic impulses of the heart. Did Ono and his teacher log 10,000 hours of painting time a year, qualifying themselves as savants? I think the more important question is did they practice their art deeply.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Things I learned in Spanish class today:
Tango was once an art form for the poor in Argentina, though today it is for the very wealthy and privileged.
Getting your pocket picked in Barcelona is practically de rigueur.
My Spanish teacher is from Ecuador and she's lived in Missouri, Buffalo, and Nueva York.
Tango was once an art form for the poor in Argentina, though today it is for the very wealthy and privileged.
Getting your pocket picked in Barcelona is practically de rigueur.
My Spanish teacher is from Ecuador and she's lived in Missouri, Buffalo, and Nueva York.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
SIX PERSIMMONS
for Noko
after ruining another season’s harvest –
over-dried in the kitchen oven then
rehydrated in her home sauna
Aunt Yuki calls upon her sister,
paper sacks stuffed full of orange
fruit, twig and stalk still on
knows that my mother sprouts seedlings
from cast off avocado stones, revives
dead succulents, coaxes blooms out of orchids
a woman who has never spent a moment
of her being on the world wide web,
passes her days painting the diversity of
marshland, woodland, & shoreline;
building her own dehydrator fashioned from
my father’s work ladders, joined together
by discarded swimming pool pole perched
high to discourage the neighbor’s cats
that invade the yard scavenging for koi
“Vitamin D” she says, as she harnesses
the sun, in the backyard the drying device
mutates into painting, slow dripped
sugar spilling out of one kaki fruit
empty space where my father untethers
another persimmon, he swallows whole
for Noko
after ruining another season’s harvest –
over-dried in the kitchen oven then
rehydrated in her home sauna
Aunt Yuki calls upon her sister,
paper sacks stuffed full of orange
fruit, twig and stalk still on
knows that my mother sprouts seedlings
from cast off avocado stones, revives
dead succulents, coaxes blooms out of orchids
a woman who has never spent a moment
of her being on the world wide web,
passes her days painting the diversity of
marshland, woodland, & shoreline;
building her own dehydrator fashioned from
my father’s work ladders, joined together
by discarded swimming pool pole perched
high to discourage the neighbor’s cats
that invade the yard scavenging for koi
“Vitamin D” she says, as she harnesses
the sun, in the backyard the drying device
mutates into painting, slow dripped
sugar spilling out of one kaki fruit
empty space where my father untethers
another persimmon, he swallows whole
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Something I forgot to post - the new issue of Reconfigurations is online with a guest-edited folio by Page Starzinger. The interface of the journal's blog site is not the most user-friendly or easy on the eyes... but Page has curated an interesting group of work and written a terrific introduction to her selection.
Just finished Haruki Murakami's After the Quake which seems like very timely reading in the wake of the Haiti earthquake. I first came to Murakami's work in reading his nonfiction project Underground, a series of oral history interviews with survivors of the Tokyo subway gas attacks. I have yet to read the novels and other short story collections for which Murakami is best known, but was very impressed by the stories in After the Quake which follow the thread of several different characters living in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake - witnessing the horrors of the natural disaster through the mediated image of news broadcasts, relief workers traveling to provide on-site aid, and those removed from the situation but with ex-husbands, estranged parents based in Kobe.
It's a been a weird week for passings - my best friend lost her grandmother, and another friend from adolescence, lost her mother to complications from a leg amputation caused by diabetes. All within the same 24 hours.
At work, the lead curator of the Collections finally retired after 13 years on staff, signaling some much needed growth and change, [I hope].
I finished reading Michael Ondaatje's book Anil's Ghost and wonder what it might have been like to read the book, while I was working on writing Adamantine and wonder about how my reading of that novel might now inform any revisions that are made to the collection. There are several wonderful passages in the book that include an exposition on the ritual act of netra mangala, the act of painting in the eyes of a buddha or god, as the last step of activating an idol. Stone is also a theme throughout the book - monuments and their destruction - including the blowing up of religious statuary akin to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. This novel was hauntingly beautiful, political, and deeply interdisciplinary, in its weaving together of poetry, anthropology, history, and religion and I think in some ways triumphs over English Patient.
Happy to report that we officially have cover art for Adamantine, courtesy of the great Keith Carter.
It's a been a weird week for passings - my best friend lost her grandmother, and another friend from adolescence, lost her mother to complications from a leg amputation caused by diabetes. All within the same 24 hours.
At work, the lead curator of the Collections finally retired after 13 years on staff, signaling some much needed growth and change, [I hope].
I finished reading Michael Ondaatje's book Anil's Ghost and wonder what it might have been like to read the book, while I was working on writing Adamantine and wonder about how my reading of that novel might now inform any revisions that are made to the collection. There are several wonderful passages in the book that include an exposition on the ritual act of netra mangala, the act of painting in the eyes of a buddha or god, as the last step of activating an idol. Stone is also a theme throughout the book - monuments and their destruction - including the blowing up of religious statuary akin to the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan. This novel was hauntingly beautiful, political, and deeply interdisciplinary, in its weaving together of poetry, anthropology, history, and religion and I think in some ways triumphs over English Patient.
Happy to report that we officially have cover art for Adamantine, courtesy of the great Keith Carter.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
New Poetics
I've been contemplating my personal poetics recently, especially after hearing Rick Benjamin's amazing interview with Chris Lydon on Open Source. Rick's a dear dharma friend and in his interview, he speaks of poetry as a wisdom tradition. And to a degree too, I think of his poetry as being a vessel for the communication of love. His new book which is out any day is called Passing Love after a Langston Hughes' poem, and speaks to the ephemerality but also the exchange between individuals, whether loved ones, reader and poet, etc.
As much as I am able to identify with the notion of poetry as a wisdom tradition, I am not able to articulate my own poetics in this way. Well, not exactly. Lately, I've been reading several books on erotic transference and countertransference in therapeutic relationships. This self-study and exploration were a way to revisit past loves, past therapists, past relationships, etc. Transference and countertransference are present in all relationships - whether with one's lover, child, parents, boss, or former acupuncturist, a friend who works as a stripper in a gentleman's club, that corny movie on the television screen - it presents a tremendous opportunity to work through past wounds and arrive at integrating archetypal symbols into one's own consciousness to become whole. The therapeutic practice is a practice of love and holding space for another, while maintaining neutrality and holding up the mirror. As the person that I am, born into the family that I was, I have had a very thin skin between myself and everything else that's out there. I am a blank canvas for the transference of others - and it is on this level too that poetry and the arts - music, painting, dance, and opera - have deeply moved and affect me. So it is in my poetry that I seek to create the experience of transference and countertransference. Poets talk about creating an immediate experience, moving a reader to identify or empathize, as a vessel to create radical change, whether social or political or personal, as a medium for healing, as a medium for wisdom. For me, I think I have grown perhaps less ambitious or idealistic, or rather that my attention is attuned now to something much finer in its sublety, more intimate, and more infinite. The poem becomes a transformational object.
From David Mann's Erotic Transference and Countertransference: Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy
"The erotic is ubiquitous and at the heart of unconscious experience. As such it is a structuring dynamic in all two-person interactions....Because the erotic is frequently the basis for the most transformational experiences in ordinary life...the therapist, because of his or her own erotic subjectivity, is outside the patient's script, and thereby, the erotic countertransference can enable the patient to experience a different reaction, a new transformational object, that facilitates change and development."
"The patient and the therapist are continuously communicating at an unconscious level. The unconscious is best seen as porous and permeable, allowing experiences and affecting their passage between individuals. In the transference and countertransference the unconscious, with its creative and pathological constituents, will be passing between both participants in the analytic encounter. The therapeutic action can be described by seeing the transference and countertransference as a mutative process whereby both participants modify their unconscious fantasies...the erotic is particularly significant in this respect: it is psychically binding, bringing each individual into a strong conscious and unconscious relationship with others. An erotic bond is forged at a deep emotional level that binds individuals into a relationship with each other at the deepest levels of fantasy. It seems that the transformational potential of the erotic goes right to the heart of the therapeutic transaction and the universality of unconscious erotic fantasy life is what connects and gives this process a good deal of its momentum."
And from Nathan Field's essay "O tell me the truth about love" -
"A four-dimensional relationship is not especially rare, but something that happens to many people at particular moments of their lives...is reached in many ways - in art, in nature, in prayer, in childbirth...just as the shift from the two dimensional to the three dimensional requires the transcending of primary fusion in order to achieve separateness, so the shift from the three dimensional to the four dimensional requires the transcending of the ego in order to achieve this paradoxical state of communion/separation. When the moment of communion happens, there is a sense that healing takes place... for long-term change to establish itself, these intense experiences need to be repeated, perhaps many times, in order to undo the massive mistrust so many patients acquire in childhood."
As much as I am able to identify with the notion of poetry as a wisdom tradition, I am not able to articulate my own poetics in this way. Well, not exactly. Lately, I've been reading several books on erotic transference and countertransference in therapeutic relationships. This self-study and exploration were a way to revisit past loves, past therapists, past relationships, etc. Transference and countertransference are present in all relationships - whether with one's lover, child, parents, boss, or former acupuncturist, a friend who works as a stripper in a gentleman's club, that corny movie on the television screen - it presents a tremendous opportunity to work through past wounds and arrive at integrating archetypal symbols into one's own consciousness to become whole. The therapeutic practice is a practice of love and holding space for another, while maintaining neutrality and holding up the mirror. As the person that I am, born into the family that I was, I have had a very thin skin between myself and everything else that's out there. I am a blank canvas for the transference of others - and it is on this level too that poetry and the arts - music, painting, dance, and opera - have deeply moved and affect me. So it is in my poetry that I seek to create the experience of transference and countertransference. Poets talk about creating an immediate experience, moving a reader to identify or empathize, as a vessel to create radical change, whether social or political or personal, as a medium for healing, as a medium for wisdom. For me, I think I have grown perhaps less ambitious or idealistic, or rather that my attention is attuned now to something much finer in its sublety, more intimate, and more infinite. The poem becomes a transformational object.
From David Mann's Erotic Transference and Countertransference: Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy
"The erotic is ubiquitous and at the heart of unconscious experience. As such it is a structuring dynamic in all two-person interactions....Because the erotic is frequently the basis for the most transformational experiences in ordinary life...the therapist, because of his or her own erotic subjectivity, is outside the patient's script, and thereby, the erotic countertransference can enable the patient to experience a different reaction, a new transformational object, that facilitates change and development."
"The patient and the therapist are continuously communicating at an unconscious level. The unconscious is best seen as porous and permeable, allowing experiences and affecting their passage between individuals. In the transference and countertransference the unconscious, with its creative and pathological constituents, will be passing between both participants in the analytic encounter. The therapeutic action can be described by seeing the transference and countertransference as a mutative process whereby both participants modify their unconscious fantasies...the erotic is particularly significant in this respect: it is psychically binding, bringing each individual into a strong conscious and unconscious relationship with others. An erotic bond is forged at a deep emotional level that binds individuals into a relationship with each other at the deepest levels of fantasy. It seems that the transformational potential of the erotic goes right to the heart of the therapeutic transaction and the universality of unconscious erotic fantasy life is what connects and gives this process a good deal of its momentum."
And from Nathan Field's essay "O tell me the truth about love" -
"A four-dimensional relationship is not especially rare, but something that happens to many people at particular moments of their lives...is reached in many ways - in art, in nature, in prayer, in childbirth...just as the shift from the two dimensional to the three dimensional requires the transcending of primary fusion in order to achieve separateness, so the shift from the three dimensional to the four dimensional requires the transcending of the ego in order to achieve this paradoxical state of communion/separation. When the moment of communion happens, there is a sense that healing takes place... for long-term change to establish itself, these intense experiences need to be repeated, perhaps many times, in order to undo the massive mistrust so many patients acquire in childhood."
Monday, January 11, 2010
Hmmmm.... L.A. MOCA has announced its news hire for director who will start in June. Jeffrey Deitch is the first gallerist/entrepreneur to ever occupy the directorship of a museum. The NY Times also has a piece on the news story. And in other news, the director of the Getty has tendered his resignation.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
I just finished reading Irene Vilar's new memoir Impossible Motherhood Given the shit storm over this book, in writing and reflecting about it, it seems important to me to identify my own positionality towards the book's subject. So here's disclosure - I do not have any children nor am I presently attempting to become pregnant, I have never experienced pregnancy, and I am pro-choice.
I had some problems with the title that was ultimately arrived at to market the book - the full title is Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict. Every word in the subtitle is loaded. If this is a "testimony", I'm not sure who the audience for that testimony is - Vilar doesn't have an explicitly political message to deliver in the book. She also writes of her early identification with Anne Frank's written testimonial of life during Nazi occupation. Perhaps the word screams to much of legalese to me - a sworn statement of the author's experience, asserting credibility vs. allowing the narrative to gradually win the reader over to empathy. The "of an" are in italicized typeface on the cover, spine, and cover page of the book - this again seems deliberately conspicuous - a way to highlight and undermine a particular kind of authority - while the "testimony" establishes the veracity of the narrative, highlighting "of an" attempts to undercut the universality of the testimonial. "Abortion Addict" - abortion on its own may have been less of a red flag, but there is an undertone of clinical diagnosis and illness here with the addition of the word "addict" that seems perhaps too shocking. And it is this title which I think has created a certain amount of backlash for the author - the lay criticism that came out before the book's release reflected to me that these critics had not read the book, as the comments that they were making about abortion and abortion rights are actually addressed within Vilar's book. Namely that she knew that she abused a legal right, as did many of the doctors in the book who expressed concern and reservation about her case. But the title, I think, evokes a certain kind of resistance and aversion from a certain kind of reader, which makes it difficult to give the book a true chance.
All that said - This is a haunting and well-written memoir which I read within the course of a day. While the topic of repetitive abortion (the first abortion does not occur until about 1/4 into the book) as birth control is the organizing subject of the book - this book is really about feminine wounding and the author's journey towards awakening feminine strength within herself to be able to mother herself, extricate herself from unloving, life-depleting relationships, and to ultimately transform her own life and experiences through the act of breaking a pattern, choosing differently, and having a child after 15 successful abortions. At the age of 12, the author loses her mother when she commits suicide. Vilar then willingly goes off to American boarding school at 15 to escape this loss. From that time on, she only returns to her family in Puerto Rico sporadically. Entering college at the age of 17, she becomes embroiled in a relationship with a professor, about 30 years her senior - a man who has married and remarried and refuses to have children. He is himself a writer, and full of ego and plagued with boundary issues - particular to empowerment and money and gender roles. A man who may have never received much mothering, or fathering, in his own life. Vilar eventually marries her professor who she clings to as a sort of heroic figure, but after so many abortions and years of marriage and her growing success as a writer, the marriage breaks down completely. There are other relationships with men that the author details, but the professor is central. There are many moments in their relationship when she longs for his love and approval and he is a stand in for both an absent mother and father.
The book ends with an epilogue that breaks the structure of the narrative before it. Rather than being written in prose chapters, the final section is split into dated journal entries and gives the sense of life-in-progress, vs. history in the far past. In the last two sections of the book before the epilogue, the author begins her wind up and reflection over the project - connecting the dots between her family's various addictions to her own treatment of her body. It is in these final sections that she talks about the highs and lows of going off of birth control pills, discovering that she was pregnant and going through an abortion. It is understandable, given the long-term therapeutic process and how integration occurs slowly and layers of meaning surface piece by piece - however, I think that the narrative could have been strengthened by weaving these strands and realizations into certain sections of the book - yet realization occurs after the fact of our experiences in therapy, but I think that more reflection and insight throughout the main retelling of the story, could have deepened a connection with her reader.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Kort and I received an invitation to climb Enchanted Rock and eat black-eyed pea soup on New Year's Day. The combo of starting out the year at a high point and partaking in a Southern good luck ritual was irresistible. I didn't take many pictures of the main rock, but here's a photo of the Little Rock for illustrative purposes:
And here we are at the top of the rock dome at the geo marker.
Approaching the rock reminded me of climbing up the sand dunes in Dunhuang. Distant figures scrambling up the incline. But rock is a lot easier to climb then sand, though my boots slid quite a bit on this surface.
Not a lot of vegetation on the rock surface (no soil) but scatterings of prickly pear and bluestem. Factoid: there are a number of small pockets on the rock surface that fill with water when it rains. A microscopic-sized shrimp regenerates in this habitat and can be seen swimming the surface of the tiny pools.
And here we are at the top of the rock dome at the geo marker.
Approaching the rock reminded me of climbing up the sand dunes in Dunhuang. Distant figures scrambling up the incline. But rock is a lot easier to climb then sand, though my boots slid quite a bit on this surface.
Not a lot of vegetation on the rock surface (no soil) but scatterings of prickly pear and bluestem. Factoid: there are a number of small pockets on the rock surface that fill with water when it rains. A microscopic-sized shrimp regenerates in this habitat and can be seen swimming the surface of the tiny pools.
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