ones!

All-ones day . . . Gay and I were going through Building One day before yesterday and there was a table set up by the Korean student organization, handing out lots of delicious cookies . . . eleven’s a lucky number in their culture.  So don’t play poker with any Koreans today.  (Actually, my experience with Korean soldiers who were in the Sixth Convalescence Center with me in Vietnam would indicate that playing poker with them at any time would be sort of a losing proposition.)
 
I always sort of brace for the nutjobs to come out of the woodwork on any day with numerological significance.  You read it here first.  Though it probably has crossed your mind independently.
 
Judith Clute is in town, and we’re doing artistic, or at least arty, things.  Drew and painted in the rain yesterday, sitting in a café under an awning.  My picture doesn’t have much to recommend it, except as a record of the moment, people rushing through the rain.  I’ll post it in LiveJournal.
 
We went to the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and marveled for a few hours at their ethnographic displays.  A very well set-up collection, going back more than a hundred years.  I can see all those Teddy-Roosevelt-type manly explorers setting out to gather trinkets and shrunken heads.  For the greater glory of the Crimson.
 
A very nice temporary exhibit, “Wiyohpiyata,” “Lakota Images of the Contested West.”  Primitive drawings by warriors recording the interesting things they did to the U.S. soldiers and civilians who were attempting a land grab. 
 
The colored, or tinted, drawings are from a ledger found after the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876.  It’s not a unique artifact; Plains warriors often recorded their exploits in tablets or blank books traded from the Euro-American invaders.  The naïve art is exceptionally powerful in a “you-are-there” way.  You can see the warriors squatting around the fire the night after a battle, passing around precious pencils and chalk to record what happened.  A real time trip.
 
Of course, Wiyohpiyata looks like some kind of acronym.  Why Are You Ho’s Playing In Your Absent Tenants’ Atelier?  A phrase that comes up all the time.
 
We’re going to crawl around the Harvard  Art Museum this morning.  Meeting Jag and Antony (who visited Judith in London) for lunch at the big vegetarian joint – Vegan, I think — on Central Square.
 
Joe