Mesothelioma

Late this afternoon I finished the jury service which began May 11th in the Court House on the corner of McAllister & Polk in San Francisco's Civic Center. Throughout the trial the judge would instruct the jury to "remember the Admonition" whenever we left the courtroom. "The Admonition" was his order not to discuss the case with anyone and not to let anyone discuss the case with us. This afternoon after the lengthy, formal ritual of reading the verdict and polling the jury individually on each of the ten assigned questions in the case, the judge said we were no longer bound by "the Admonition" and could discuss the case as much as we liked, so I now have a legal license to blog about it, and that will probably be a good way to make it stop running around inside my head like a hamster on a wheel in a cage.

The image above shows a pleural mesothelioma, a cancer of the pleura (a membrane that covers and protects the lungs). Nearly all cases of this rare form of cancer are caused by inhalation of asbestos fibers. The exclusiveness of its cause is the reason that mesothelioma has become somewhat notorious as a generator of lawsuits, since the origin of most cancers cannot be traced back with certainty to a single source. Even better, from the lawyers' point of view, a high percentage of asbestos exposures occurred in the workplace, and that means there is frequently somebody with significant assets and/or insurance who can be sued.


The disease typically develops decades after the minuscule asbestos fibers (as seen above, greatly magnified) have lodged in the lungs, but once it starts almost all patients die within a year or two. At present there is no cure. Even treatment is largely limited to pain control. One lawyer in the courtroom used the analogy: "your lungs turn to concrete and then you suffocate to death."

The case I was on involved two days of jury selection, nine days at trial, and two days of deliberation. We took a week-long break in the middle of the trial because, as the judge cryptically explained, "there is a matter in another court that affects the matter in this court." During the nine non-consecutive days of testimony we learned bits and pieces (in no particular chronological or thematic order) about the life of a 72-year-old African American man who received his mesothelioma diagnosis last August. The lawyers on both sides of the case agreed that this man is very unlikely to live even until the end of this summer.

This was my second long trial as a juror in San Francisco. The first was ten years ago in a landlord-tenant dispute. That first experience was so tedious and badly organized that I could appreciate the relative coherence imposed by the judge on the conduct of this asbestos trial. All the same, there were more similarities than differences in the two long trials. The lawyers in both cases were manipulative and clumsy to about the same degree. Worse, the juries in both cases were distressingly inclined to make adverse moral judgments against parties in the cases who were not like the jurors themselves, who were, in other words, not educated, not affluent, not privileged.

The already-privileged are overwhelmingly the ones (at least in San Francisco) who answer the jury summons in the first place, and show up. Our initial jury pool in early May consisted of about 120 people. Of that number only one was African American. In San Francisco African Americans comprise 7% of the population, so a true cross-section of the community would have included eight or nine African Americans. That single African American woman who did show up was questioned during jury selection and dismissed. Latinos were similarly under-represented in the initial pool and completely unrepresented on the final jury.

The twelve who ultimately deliberated consisted of eight White Americans and four Asian Americans. Ten of the jurors were college-educated professional-class people. Two represented what used to be known as the working class, with some or no college. On my previous long trial in San Francisco the jury composition was essentially the same as to race and class. In both cases the yawning gap between the life-circumstances of the jurors and the life-circumstances of the victim-plaintiffs created major frustrations for me, and resulted in what I would call limited or partial justice, if not outright injustice.

I suppose the problem is really my own naivete in assuming that affluent educated San Franciscans understand that the biggest chunk of their successful stable lives is due to unearned privilege that attached to them at birth. Not so. Judging by these two juries, a few privileged individuals do accept that fact, and do try to compensate for it by stretching their minds to understand people who are cheated and exploited as a matter of course from cradle to grave. But most of the privileged jurors look at the chaotic lives of the poor and then eagerly set about the business of blaming the poor themselves for allowing their lives to be so messy.

The corporate defense lawyers know this. In the just-concluded case they harped ceaselessly on the lifelong heavy drinking and heavy smoking of the low-wage laborer who had contracted mesothelioma. Nobody can get mesothelioma from drinking or from smoking. Mesothelioma is caused by asbestos. Yet the drinking and smoking, for all their irrelevance, worked successfully as a coded message to the majority of jurors that this man's self-destructive habits should reduce his credibility in the eyes of reasonable people. Not only that, his bad habits reduced the value of his life itself. When asked to assess the monetary value of his anxiety, grief, humiliation and loss of enjoyment due to the onset of a terminal illness caused indisputably by environmental conditions where he was employed, many jurors suggested that the emotional cost was less for him than it would be for somebody who was younger and healthier and more responsible. It made me want to vomit, this freely discussed concept that his pain came at a discount to the extent that he failed to resemble the jurors themselves.

As it worked out, an informal alliance (forged mainly by eye-contact) between me and two like-minded women succeeded – after many, many hours of persuasion and negotiation – in shifting the trial decision toward a small award of money for the dying man. Just about enough to pay for a very modest funeral..

Dance

A lazy post pulled from a personal archive of favorite miscellaneous ballet pictures sourced from here, there and everywhere. 

Am exhausted by a long day of jury deliberation. More deliberation tomorrow.

Peonies

An arrangement of peonies in one of the large ground-floor foyers of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. I had lunch at the excellent Museum cafe today during a break from jury duty in the nearby court house and almost made myself late in returning to my civic duty when I got beguiled by photographing these flowers. A printed card credits Dennis Marino and MaryAnn Forrest of the AAM Flower Committee with creating this consoling assemblage in the style of the Sogetsu School.

Boethius

The late Latin writer Boethius (d. 524) is best remembered for his compilation and commentary called The Consolations of Philosophy. It is a poignant book, not least because Boethius stood in such need of consolation, living at a time when the grand edifice of the classical world had fallen into ruin all around him.

The book illustrated here, though, is one of his less-famous works, an explication of Aristotle's system of logic, usually known as De Dialectica. The edition I cataloged last week was printed on thick linen-rag paper by Vincenzo Valgrisi at Venice in 1559 (the year after Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne of England).


The woodcut initial A above has an illustration of Apollo drawn through the sky in his chariot.


And just as the A stands for Apollo, I am guessing the H above stands for Helen. A depiction of her abduction by Paris, setting the stage for the Trojan War.




The printer relied on typographic ingenuity to illustrate some of the logical problems within the text that cried out for visual expression.




The final page layout (above) is gorgeously proportioned. Am in love with those heavy, wide-spaced Venetian/Roman capitals.


On the inside of the vellum binding a Renaissance hand doodled this ornamental foliage (with perched bird) in a warm sepia that looks like it was set down yesterday.

Now that I have returned this week to the exceedingly unornamental world of jury duty, it is consoling to dwell in memory on this seriously beautiful book.

Humfrey Fenn

This week I have a jury duty vacation. Jury duty will continue next week. For this week I can go to my office at the library. There today one of my catch-up jobs was to catalog this Latin edition of Virgil's works, printed in Lyons in 1517. In these early days of printing, the French were famous for the delicacy and detail of their woodcut initials.





Immediately above, three dissimilar E-initials together on one page. It was a great feat of early modern technology to print woodcut initials at the same time as the metal type of the main text and to achieve even inking over both.


At some point an owner or a dealer wrote a note on the inside front cover about Remarkable Woodcuts. The illustrations in this volume are also printed from wood blocks, but are of a cruder craftsmanship than the woodblock initials. The initials look forward to the visual balance of the Northern European Renaissance while the illustrations look backward toward the rude angles and skewed proportions of the Middle Ages.


Here the moon is setting alongside seven companion stars while Apollo the Sun is ferried in his chariot to the Dawn.


Sheep safe in their fold, from the Georgics, where Virgil, the city man, idealizes country life.


Aeneas attends a banquet complete with peacock on a platter in all its plumage. If an Italian painter alive in 1517 had seen the treatment of perspective in this picture, he would have died laughing.


The Trojan Horse, with a door quite visible along its side and the capacity to conceal no more than half a dozen soldiers, squeezed tight.


The Emperor Augustus mourning over the body of the dead Virgil laid out on a very sturdy-looking table.


About halfway through the book I was brought up short by this exercise in penmanship: Humfrey Fenn is a good boye. "Who was Humfrey Fenn?" I wondered. Later I discovered a slip of paper tipped along its left edge into the front of the book, dense with writing on both sides in a 19th century hand –



Clearly this slip was also supplied by a collector, though not the same one who wrote the note about the woodcuts. The writer had evidently done considerable research. Here is my best transcription of the first part of this note:

Despite the rather unconvincing appearance of the binding, which has been severely cleaned, I believe it to be genuine. The arms is that of COVENTRY town (and Grammar School). Humphrey Fenn I was at Queen's Coll. Camb. in 1564 and in 1598 became vicar of Holy Trinity, Coventry. He had a son (& a grandson) of the same name. I incline to think that it was the son whose name is on the title (& on the v. of the fol. preceding the AEneis) who is described as a native. "Ex dono Humfredi Fen Coventrientis" ...


Humfrey Fenn's initials appear also further along in the book. I picture the small son in the large old vicarage keeping company with his father's large old Virgil, safe in the provinces during the dangerous reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. Imagine an age when a literate child could express an unabashed pride in being "a good boye."

The Upper Crust

The orderly rows of pollarded sycamore trees in San Francisco's Civic Center are coming into leaf this week.






Drawing closer to City Hall the observer notes hive-like structures woven into the tops of some of the civic sycamores.






A sandwich board supplies the Project Description:

"On February 5, 2009, artist Patrick Dougherty and a crew of five assistants began the process of creating an environmental artwork entitled The Upper Crust which consists of a series of sculptural forms made with recycled willow saplings at the Joseph L. Alioto Performing Arts Piazza, across from San Francisco's City Hall. The artist carefully weaves the recycled willow branches through the sycamore tree branches to emerge through the treetops. The sculptural forms rise to a height of approximately 8 feet above the tops of the trees. The sculptural form is created by the artist without an internal structure, wire, hardware or any outside means of attachment. The artist explains that twigs and saplings have a propensity to entangle and intertwine with everything. Dougherty bends and flexes the material resulting in a joyful and exuberant collision of art and nature in his large cocoon or hive like forms.

The sculpure will continue to evolve in appearance with the seasons as the trees begin to bear leaves in the spring and as the foliage changes color and the trees lose leaves in autumn. Three of the assistants hired for the installation are local San Francisco artists.

The willow branches used in the sculpture are a natural by-product of the pruning and life cycle of the willow trees. The saplings used range in size from finger to wrist width. The saplings were obtained from The Willow Farm in Pescadero. Some of the trees from which the saplings were obtained are more than 50 years old."

Personally, I am inclined to like this piece, but certainly not because I find it "joyful and exuberant." (And let's be frank, the writing here is pathetic and it is sad to think that somebody actually got paid for doing such clunky work.) Not joyful and exuberant, no. The willow intrusions look like heavy parasites. They clearly represent the bureaucracy across the street, ruled by wealthy patrons and assiduously smothering the green shoots of populist aspiration. A 3-D depiction of the class struggle, paid for by the rulers who are satirized. Pace the San Francisco Arts Commission.