Oaxaca

Highwire Moon, by Susan Straight. Houghton Mifflin. 306 pages. $24. Susan Straight has always been one of America's gutsiest writers, a storyteller with a civic purpose, a polyglot with an astonishing ear for how people really talk in places we hardly remember they are living. In books with titles like Aquaboogie, I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots and The Gettin Place, Straight has gone down deep into hard and hardened worlds' racially divided cities, the cloistered rural South, and resurfaced with tender but never sentimental tales of soul, survival, dignity.

The Ocean City Council voted overwhelmingly Monday night to approve an emergency proposal to weed out products made from salvia divinorum, a relative of herbal sage and common garden plants that is now sold openly at many shops along the Boardwalk. The police and a majority of the council members threw their support behind the move to make possession and sale of the hallucinogenic substance a misdemeanor with a possible penalty of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. The final vote was 6 to 1 in favor of the ban, which takes effect immediately.

Artist Mia Wiener embroiders provocative images on white linen because she's fascinated by the intimate nature of textiles and by the way that most people take them for granted. Emily C-D creates collages in her native Baltimore and also in Mexico from materials that other people throw away: discarded newspapers, bottle tops, string, and old pots and pans. And Ashley Minner crafts nearly life-size portraits of Baltimore's Native-American Lumbee community that revel in the beauty and strength of the people with whom she grew up. The women are part of the generation that will determine the form that the visual arts will take here in the future and are being highlighted in "Thirty: 30 Creative Minds Under 30," a group of 10 gallery talks sponsored by Maryland Art Place . The trio have been selected to present their artwork in the debut presentation on Wednesday; the remaining nine events will take place roughly once a month.

As someone who has always admired the nesting instinct in birds and small mammals but never understood the same impulses in humans, I should have viewed the idea of getting married -- and merging two households -- with some foreboding.But it was a first marriage for both of us, and though my husband and I were by most standards getting married at a late age, I, at least, was naive.I didn't give moving into his house of many years a second thought.This'll be interesting, said my brother and sister, who have been married for years.

A pot stands on the mantel about which something ought to be said, something positive. But how do you praise a clay pot, if you are moved to praise by its design, its symmetry or color?Could you contrive an ode? The poet John Keats did that to celebrate the ancient Grecian urn that famously fired his imagination. But odes refer to a more declamatory time. The exalted style would not be appropriate to the pot in question.Not that this is a simple pot. Though recently made, its antecedents reside in the pre-Christian era. It has no links to ancient Greece, as Keats' pot did. But this is not to suggest it lacks elegance and grace.

Moves Baseball ATHLETICS: Optioned P Justin Duchscherer and P Bert Snow to Triple-A Sacramento. Assigned P Heath Bost, P David Hooten and P John Rheinecker to minor-league camp. Returned IF Oscar Robles to Oaxaca of Mexican League. BLUE JAYS: Signed P Vinnie Chulk, P Pasqual Coco, OF Jason DuBois, P Mark Hendrickson, C Ken Huckaby, IF Orlando Hudson, P Aquilino Lopez, P Gary Majewski, P Diegomar Markwell, C Guillermo Quiroz, IF Dominic Rich, P Francisco Rosario, P Mike Smith, former Orioles OF Jayson Werth, C Tom Wilson.

Rufino Tamayo, the last of Mexico's great generation of acclaimed muralists, died Monday in a Mexico City hospital. He was 91.His death marks the end of an art era -- one notable as much for its political activism as for its aesthetic triumphs.With Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Tamayo was the youngest member of the movement that attempted to create the first truly Mexican art since the Spanish conquest.The three older mural painters looked back to Mexico's pre-Columbian past for their models, to Mexico's revolutionary history for their themes, and to Marxism for their ideology.

Jorge del Villar will share his Mexican heritage with students at Western Maryland College this month with an art exhibit and a day-late celebration of the Day of the Dead.Del Villar, a junior international student, will raise an altar tomorrow in memory of Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata, who fought for social justice during the Mexican Revolution.The art exhibit will feature colorfully painted wood-carved figures called alebrijes. Del Villar owns the collection -- the art originated in Oaxaca, a state near Chiapas in southeastern Mexico, one of the nation's poorest regions.

Steve Lacy, 69, an American soprano saxophonist who spent more than half of his 50-year career living in Europe and helped legitimize his instrument in postwar jazz, died Friday in Boston. The cause was cancer, according to an announcement from the New England Conservatory of Music, where he had been teaching since 2002. After performing in New York, his hometown, Mr. Lacy, who was born Steven Lackritz, moved to Italy and France, and became the most Europeanized of all expatriate American jazz musicians.

Now that the bitter election season is over, both parties will have to return to the explosive issue of illegal immigration. Increased border patrols, a 700-mile fence to stop the easiest access routes, employer sanctions and encouragement of one official language can all help solve the crisis. But once the debate is renewed, congressional reformers will be blitzed by advocates of the failed status quo with a series of false assumptions concerning the issue. Take, for example, the "shared self-interest" argument - that the benefits to the U.S. and Mexico of leaving our borders open trump the need for enforcement of existing laws and outweigh the costs to taxpayers that result from massive influxes of poor illegal aliens.