The Jesusita Fire took almost everyone by surprise when it began on the afternoon of May 5. It’s the third major wildfire in Santa Barbara in just nine months, and many here are still recovering from the devastating Tea Fire last November.

The blaze is still out of control and details are sketchy, but we know that dozens of homes have already been lost. I witnessed some of them go up in flames myself before being forced out by the authorities.

Here are some of my photos:

This image was taken from Painted Cave Road at 3:30 p.m. on May 5, just a couple of hours after the fire began. The trail of the smoke shows the typical sundowner pattern — blowing across the city and out to sea, just as the devastating Gap and Tea fires did last year.

The Jesusita Fire burns in the hills above Santa Barbara, California. Taken from Camino Cielo in the late afternoon on May 5, 2009. The small black dot in the center is a fixed wing aircraft surveying the hotspots.

Smoke and ash darken the sky above Santa Barbara as night falls on day one of the fire.

On the evening of the first day, the fire was still confined to a relatively small area of less than 200 acres, as seen in this long exposure taken from Elings Park.

Thick smoke drifts out over the city on the second day of the fire, as seen in this shot from Las Tunas Road on the Riviera.

The flames rage in the hills perilously close to Santa Barbara’s historic mission. It seems fitting that local firefighters and police would use the spot as an ad hoc staging ground.

Santa Barbara County firefighters gather at the mission to plan their next assault as the fire continues its spread east and south toward the city.

Fanned by strong winds, flames and smoke wreak havoc in the densely populated neighborhood above Foothill Road, just west of Mission Canyon Road.

Huge flames ravage the foothills above Mountain Drive.

Putrid smoke and ash choked the skies and obscured the sun, bathing the city in an eerie red light.

A chopper dumps water over a structure burning on Mountain Drive.

Intense sundowner winds scatter and fan the flames, as seen in this photo taken from Stanwood Drive.

The size and sheer force of the inferno was staggering.

A terrifying firestorm erupts in the hills above Mission Canyon.

A palm tree scorched in the recent Tea Fire stands on a now vacant lot on Conejo Road, as smoke and ash from the new Jesusita Fire darken the skies above.

The eastern edge of the Jesusita Fire was still burning out of control late on Wednesday night. This photo was taken on Ortega Ridge Road in Summerland.

Strong offshore winds continued to fan the flames of the Jesusita Fire above Santa Barbara, as seen in this image taken at Elings Park.

Intense smoke and ash covered the city of Santa Barbara as the Jesusita Fire continued to burn on several fronts on Wednesday night.

Relatively calm winds during the morning and afternoon of day three kept the Jesusita Fire confined mainly to the mountains near Cathedral Peak.

As the afternoon wore on, the winds intensified and fanned the flames westward.

A dark plume of drift smoke could be seen all the way to Ventura and beyond. This photo was taken from Carpinteria at 6:30 p.m. just as the sundowner winds kicked up and stoked the fires anew.

Strong early evening winds fanned the flames and sent black smoke into the skies above Santa Barbara. This image was shot from Ortega Hill at sunset.

As the sun set on the third day of the Jesusita Fire, the sky turned ominously red and ash started falling like snowflakes. The palmettos on Channel Drive can be seen bending in the strong wind.

By 9:00 o’clock on Thursday, the fire was raging out of control across a wide swath of the Santa Barbara foothills, from San Roque Canyon to the east all the way to Highway 154 to the west.

The Jesusita Fire continued to burn in Santa Barbara on Friday, though lower temperatures and relatively calm winds kept the flames confined mainly to the hills above the city. After sunset, the skies were still dark with drift smoke and ash, as seen in this image taken from Butterfly Beach.

By Friday evening, the Jesusita Fire had consumed 8,400 acres and cut a swath some five miles wide from the ridges above Montecito all the way to Painted Cave.

The Jesusita Fire continued to rage in the hills above Montecito on Friday evening.

Flames from the Jesusita Fire lit up the evening sky above Santa Barbara on Friday evening, as seen in this image taken at the Andree Clark Bird Refuge.

A survey-taker asks me if I’m religious. 

“No,” I say. 

“So you don’t believe in God?” 

“Of course I do,” I say. 

“So you’re a non-religious believer?” 

I suppose so, whatever that means.

Without intending to, I seem to confound bureaucrats and pollsters. Much of the time I’m either all of the above or none of the above.

Another personal favorite, this one of the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. The three small islands in the foreground make up Anacapa, the large island behind it is Santa Cruz, and in the distance are Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands. The image was taken through the windshield of a Cessna on a return flight from Catalina Island with my pilot friend Sam. A special day.

 
To create real change, we have to “language” our message so it speaks to different value structures, says Ken Wilber in an interview in the latest issue of Ode Magazine.

For example, when Al Gore speaks of global warming, he says that the entire world needs to change its behavior. “But he says so in a language that is perhaps understood by 20 percent of the world’s population,” Wilber points out. “Gore assumes that people will respond from rational self-interest based on sound science, but that’s the least of the motivations of the majority of the population of the planet.”

To be successful, Wilber says, “Al Gore has to ‘language’ his message in at least four different value structures to get, say, 80 percent of the world behind him. Anything less than that will simply not work.”

• See Ken Wilber’s Take On Saving the World Through Cross-Cultural Communication in Ode magazine.

After almost six years, I moved my office out of the old Lobero Building last week. I was astonished by the amount of stuff I’d accumulated during that time — the papers, yes, but especially the books. I receive a lot of review copies, but I’m also guilty of buying too many titles. It’s a tough habit to break.

As I was disassembling the bookshelves and moving the volumes out to the car, box by box, I was reminded of a time I had done the same thing two decades ago, only then it was vinyl records, not books. That record collection used to take up a small room, but today I can fit all my music on a single hard drive. In the same way, the arrival of the Kindle and other electronic readers, coupled with incredible search technology like Google Scholar, have rendered much of my book collection dead weight.

It’s not just that books are going digital. Used bookstores have now migrated online, which makes it possible to track down and order an out-of-print book in a matter of minutes. And if that’s too expensive a proposition, your local public library can quickly scan the holdings of other collections across the nation and have a copy in your hands in a matter of days via inter-library loan.

What this means is that it no longer makes sense to own a lot of books. If anything, it becomes a real burden, as I discovered in the course of this last move.

It seems I’m not the only one contemplating the future of books. As we know, the publishing world is in deep turmoil right now partly as a result of our changing reading habits. Publishers are “feeling the same chronic pain as other media businesses,” writes Brad Stone in the New York Times, “with layoffs, corporate restructurings and a general sense of gloom, doom and kaboom settling over name-brand giants like Random House and Simon & Schuster.” 

But amid all the anxiety, there is also a sense of optimism about the arrival of the Kindle and other readers that offer a glimpse of the future. “Just this year,” Stone says, “new electronic reading devices have emerged from Amazon, Samsung and Fujitsu, while mobile phones like iPhone from Apple have flowered seemingly overnight into acceptable reading devices for many bookworms.” (See Is This the Future of the Digital Book?)

The question is whether this represents a gradual shift or a watershed event for the publishing industry. Many have been asking this question with a mixture of dread and fascination in recent months. Bestselling author Paulo Coelho put this question to the readers of his blog recently and it stimulated a flurry of interesting responses. See Your Opinion: Will Books Survive?

Another valuable series called “The Future of Reading” appeared in the New York Times last summer. It took up the question of how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. See, for example, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

What we’re all wondering is how this shift will it affect the way we do our reading and, more broadly, the way we make sense of information?

This morning, I ran across yet another interesting quote about the demise of the book: “The book, the most traditional means of preserving and communicating thought, has been for a long time destined to disappear, just like cathedrals, walled battlements, museums, and the ideal of pacifism.”

What’s remarkable about this quote is that it was penned not this year, or even this century. Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote these words in 1919. Museums are mostly doing fine, and the ideal of pacifism seems, thankfully, to be enjoying a renaissance. But it’s true, the book does seem to be on its way out. 

Obviously, Marinetti couldn’t have predicted the rise of computers and the wonders of Google, but he saw that the arrival of cinema as a powerful new art form was already beginning to transform the way we present and take in information.

I ran across Marinetti’s words in Richard Lanham’s fascinating and prescient essay collection, The Electronic Word. In the book, Lanham looks at the ways electronic text is changing the structure of communication. Unlike printed text which is fixed and authoritative, digitized text is interactive, dynamic, and capable of blending word with image and sound, he explains. The electronic word challenges the traditional concept of “text” derived from the printed book, and since printed books are still the cornerstone of Western culture, it also prompts a basic reassessment of the liberal arts and how they should be taught.

Lanham makes many important points in the book. He says, for example, that the most precious commodity is no longer information itself but rather the attention required to cope with it. In today’s digital society, we are confronted daily with a deluge of information. “Dealing with this superabundant flow,” he writes, is like “drinking from a firehose.” It means that how information is presented is critical. Digital text makes this point clear in a way that printed text does not. 

What Lanham does in the book is help us to get beyond the old argument of which is better — printed books or their digital equivalents — which is irrelevant in any case. He takes us a level deeper by asking a series of provocative follow up-questions. (More about Lanham’s book in my review of it here.)

And that’s the conversation we need to be having. The question, as I see it, is how to preserve and enhance the best of both printed books and electronic texts and make sure that we retain the essential qualities that make reading such an valuable — and, at its best, deeply fulfilling — activity.

“Be anything you like,” Thomas Merton once said, “be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”

I love this quote. It’s a reminder to slow down and reexamine what we’re doing.

The fierce drive to accomplish something and make a name for ourselves too often takes us down the wrong path. In the end, the qualities we’re looking for are those that go with being free of worldly success.

Ultimately, the aim must be to become indifferent what people think of us — to become immune to applause and unmoved by criticism. There is integrity in that.

The goal must be to be present with what we’re doing — so present that we do it gracefully, effortlessly. There is great joy in that.

Success, when it does come, tends to be relatively short-lived in any case. That means that we’re all thrown back on ourselves sooner or later. When that day arrives we have no choice but to find something more lasting to pin our hopes to.

And that, I believe, is what Merton was saying.

Incidentally, he became very successful himself. But he understood what few of us, in our quest for worldly recognition, realize — that celebrity, when freed of the trappings of ego, is simply another path of service.

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observed that just as thought can corrupt language, so language can corrupt thought. “A bad usage can be spread by tradition and imitation,” he said, “even among people who should and do know better.”

Academic prose is the most obvious example. Many scholarly books are full of not only bad habits, but sentences — and sometimes entire paragraphs — that are completely unintelligible. Here are a couple of specimens I ran across recently:

“One should not draw the conclusion that ‘new nations’ may not be created or become viable, but rather, that the process by which this occurs is fraught with inappropriate borrowings from extraneous experiences. Legitimation of such new arrangements may be produced at the end of a gun barrel, but more significant is how pivotal elites play the major role in advancing or retarding the process.”  (Donald Warren, “Displaced Majority Politics”)

“There is no easy path between cold cognition of an overdetermined structural analysis and the hot cognition of misplaced concreteness.” (William Gamson, Talking Politics)

But even ordinary speech has become increasingly contaminated by meaningless language. If Orwell were alive today, I’m sure he would be fretting about the way many buzzwords and catchphrases are bandied around today that try, as he put it, “to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Australian writer Don Watson has a name for them: “weasel words.”

What is perhaps especially worrisome to me is how marketing language has come to infect ordinary speech. Everywhere you look, people have started using stock phrases like “pitching an idea,” “enhancing visibility,” and “making concepts stick” that come straight out of the advertising world.

This tendency is also reflected in the virtual obsession with “branding.” Now even individuals seem to think they need to brand themselves, whatever that means.

Take, for example, a book by Brenda Bence with the remarkable title: How You Are Like Shampoo. The book’s subtitle exemplifies the kind language that has become increasingly common, and apparently acceptable to many of us: “The Breakthrough Personal Branding System Based on Proven Big-Brand Marketing Methods to Help You Earn More, Do More, and Be More at Work.”

A recent variant of personal branding is the idea of 15-second marketing and the so-called “elevator pitch.” Authors, speakers, consultants, bloggers and other independent professionals are advised to spend time crafting a short spiel or pitch that sums up their “unique selling proposition.”

See, for example, Steve Pavlina’s 15 Second Marketing and ProBlogger’s Write an Elevator Pitch for Your Blog

It’s a tantalizing idea, and perhaps a fun parlor game, especially for hyphenated professionals who are cook-musicians, say, or artist-realtors. How do you sum up your professional identity in ten words or less, especially at a time when more and more people are working independently (or not working at all) and trying to stake out a niche online?

The trouble, of course, is that it doesn’t work very well. We’re human, after all, and no slogan or catchphrase can sum up what we do very well. And why should it? In order that we might stand out in a crowd? In order to be memorable?

Yes, some say that’s the key to success. But let’s face it, it’s also a kind of vanity. We’re so busy objectifying and packaging ourselves that we forget what it is we do, why we love it and how it nurtures us — and perhaps especially, how we can be useful to people and help them be more of what they want to be.

I like the organic approach advocated by people like Merlin Mann and John Gruber. In a talk at the recent SxSW conference with the deliberately buzzword-riddled title 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! they make the case for doing what you do well enough, and with enough passion, that it sells itself. Then you don’t have to.

I love the English language, but I don’t think we need to reform or preserve it in all its purity. It’s not about purging everyday speech of jargon and contemptible words. Rather, it’s about being mindful of all the subtle ways our own thinking is polluted by meaningless vocabularies.

As Orwell said, one can’t change the language but at least one can change one’s own habits. “And from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.”

I Madonnari was the name given to street painters in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, itinerant artists who traveled from town to town and city to city rendering images of the Madonna on sidewalks and in public squares. Like street musicians, the “Madonna painters” supported themselves by small donations — usually coins thrown to them by appreciative passers-by and festival-goers. Using chalks and handmade pastels, the artists sometimes created works of remarkable majesty and scale. But the art was always ephemeral, vanishing with the first rain.

Today, the tradition of street painting lives on in cities across Europe and in a growing number of communities in North America. 2009 marks the 22nd anniversary of the I Madonnari Festival in Santa Barbara, California. When it started in 1987, it was the only street painting event of its kind in the United States. Today, the three-day event, held each Memorial Day weekend in the plaza in front of Santa Barbara’s historic mission, draws crowds of 25,000 or more from around the world. The art ranges from small chalk drawings by local artists to large-scale street murals by nationally recognized street painters. There is also a special chalk-drawing area for young artists.

I Madonnari is a fundraiser for the Children’s Creative Project, an innovative program that provides visual and performing arts education to public schools in and around Santa Barbara. At a time when arts education has been all but eliminated from school budgets, entrepreneurial communities have to take matters into their own hands. The I Madonnari Festival represents one of the more successful such initiatives — a community-building effort aimed at both making art and ensuring its survival in the local school system.

This photoessay brings together images from 2006-2008. Some of them are included in the cover story of the Spring 2009 Broughton Quarterly, a travel and lifestyle magazine.

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