Bookshelf issues, part II

Different bookshelf, but very much the same Gramsci: he's never encountered a bookshelf he didn't want to sit in.

For my part, I'm delighted to have a new bookcase.  It's one of the ones from Alice's office that have been rehomed here.  But ... the arrival of multiple bookcases, and those things that go in them - books, not cats - and the furniture (and painting) re- arrangment that that's necessitated has been quite an upheaval, and let's just say that this has been on a day in which I would have very much appreciated a quiet day in my own university office doing all the admin that I'll have to do - when?  It'll get done - it always does.  But.

 

very May grey

For those of you who envy living in sunny Southern California ... this month and next - and with luck for longer - we often have a marine layer in the mornings, that sometimes lingers right on into the later part of today.  This morning it was drizzling, too.  So this view from our walk down by the Zoo, a couple of miles from our house, but looking up onto the same hilly part of Griffith Park - this might as well be Scotland.  No sheep, though.

 

Joe Boone's retirement party

Very excellent to get to celebrate Joe Boone's retirement today - a celebration that had to be delayed, but that was so very well worth it: a great gathering of colleagues and former grad students; and moving speeches that only conveyed a fraction of the love and gratitude that was ... I was going to write "in the room" - in the garden?

That would be Meg Russett's beautiful garden.

Bill Handley giving a heartfelt speech: it's a long time since I first met Bill, when he was a grad rep on the Faculty Board in Oxford, where he was already eloquent, but I don't know that I ever foresaw that he and I would be colleagues in Southern California ...

and then there were plenty of dear friends, colleagues, and former colleagues: the summer may not exactly have started yet (another week and a half of duties); but it felt like we're nearly there!

 

May Day

The poppies are still going strong!  So, indeed, are plenty of other native flowers and flowering plants, although admittedly the dominant color here is green.  Alas, between the Lugg movers arriving with the contents of Alice's office (and balking at the idea that it would be possible to carry tall unwieldy bookshelves down stairs that have rather a lot of corners in them, so plans will have to change); and endless end-of-semester grad studies admin stuff, there wasn't a whole lot of time to consider the joys of a rural retreat.

 

bookshelf issues

Tomorrow is the day that Alice's books, bookcases (thank goodness), and such like make their move from her (former) campus office to our house.  I'm sure we'll be able to fit them in, somewhere - it's remarkable what a logistical puzzle that turns out to be, even in a big house (electrical outlets, central heating vents, windows, doors, etc etc).  This bookcase will move from my study up to a bedroom - presumably without the tabby and white ornament - and something taller, and with more shelves, will take its place.

 

the worm within the bud

Actually, I don't really think this is invisible worm damage to this Blakean Sick Rose - more like very hungry greenfly.  This is Wedgwood, a David Austin rose that succumbed entirely to various forms of floral-hating blight last year.  This time round, I doused it in soap and water a month or so back; and it's just had another round of Neem oil.  It has a number of buds at different stages of opening, and I have hope for some of them, even if others look a little wan and drooping (rather like me, at whatever point of the endless semester we've got to).

 

very Los Angeles

I'm sure this could, really, be very many American cities, but the combination of signs - smoke shop and electric car charging - and stylized wall painting - and scrappy and unsafe looking electrical cables says LA to me - plus the blue sky.  Or at the least, it's a little typical corner from my drive to work.

 

Californian clouds and mountains

These were looking particularly fine today.  I know the flight path between Albuquerque and LAX so very well, in large part because I know the ground beneath so well - so I can look out of the window and check off town after town as we fly slightly south of I-40, and then drop down to follow I-10, roughly.  But as we go over the mountains of the Mojave - Coxcomb Mountains; Eagle Mountain, and so on - I always feel less oriented; the roads are less obvious - at least until we get to Salton Sea and Palm Springs territory.  And today, the clouds were clumping over these mountains, and making the ground invisible, and creating a momentary sense of strangeness and wonder instead of the very familiar (all intimations of the wondrously strange are, of course, instantly shattered when one drops down and sees the endless sprawl of LA).

 

more or less green

I'll let you think that there's some obsession at work with whether or not the locust trees are going to come out into respectable leaf or not.  I promise you that even on a grey, blustery day, one can see a green haze against the sky.  But I'll have to wait - how long before I'm back here? - six and a half weeks or so before I know.  In the meanwhile, it's been a day of different sorts of chores - spring cleaning, so that it's a pleasure to return (it gets so dusty here - the winds, the endless winds these days) and graduate admin, dissertation reading, teaching reading ... (two and a half more full weeks of that).  All this explains, I'm sure, why I'm gazing with longing at the hope symbolized, albeir rather tentatively, by green leaves.

 

frost bitten

I wrote yesterday about the bad time the locust trees had in the hard frost a few days back: this illustrates what I mean.  There are a handful of leaves that seem to be flourishing well - more on the top branches than the lower - but many that are not, and this year's pollen seems to have withered entirely, which is bad news for bees.

 

April sky

This looks like real winter, but in fact the temperature was in the high sixties when I rolled into Eldorado this evening.  I'm here on a very, very, very flying visit to check that all's ok with the house, which it is, in basic terms (by which I mean: no mouse invasion, nothing dead in the walls, and so on).  I'm not at all sure the heating's working, but there are ways round that.  However - there have obviously been some crazy strong winds - various things outside have flown in all directions, and there's a large tumbleweed nest by the front door.  The one real casualty outside seems to have been the two big locust trees in the back yard - let's hope they can make it.  I'd heard that trees had been caught by a super-heavy frost a few days ago, and almost all the young leaves seem completely withered with cold.  But if I'm lamenting what happened here, the real damage has been done to fruit trees, here and further north.  It went down to 19 in Dixon, 17 in Española - and that's a lot of people's livelihoods.

 

honors presentation

I was really happy to hear my honors student Gracie Garrett read from, and talk about, some of the thoroughly unsettling short stories that she's written for her honors dissertation in English: she toggles between realism and what she calls "environmental surrealism" - in the spirit of Karen Russell, so far as writerly influence goes, but also very much prompted by Ron Nixon's theory of "slow violence."  For she writes about the natural world gone askew: morphing; decaying; combusting; turning up in the wrong places.  One never quite knows whether she's writing about hallucination; or invention and imagination; or, most scary of all to contemplate, a kind of future reality.  Conceptually, she's driven by the question of how - in the frame of a short story - one might narrate "slow violence:" the dispersed effects and slow accretion of environmental damage.

Or, to put it another way, it's been great to be fed a bunch of brand new short stories; read them - comment on them, yes, but it's been a whole lot of fun.  

 

garden, native flowers

I go away for a few days, and the garden has exploded into flowers - the wildflowers (largely poppies, but some penstemon and other things), and the always over-the-top matilija poppy.  The tree was deliberately planted as a tree, but all the wildflowers come from seeds that I throw around just before first rains with a great deal of optimism: optimism that seems to have paid off this year except in those patches where the soil became too hot, too early.

 

seeing blue(ish)

A sizable chunk of today was spent waiting for Alice to have cataract surgery in her right eye (the left one will happen in a few months - scheduling things can get complicated, in the summer); waiting for her to from the immediate discomfort; putting drops in her eye ... I lie: handing her little bottles while she put drops in her eye, since I don't seem to inspire confidence as a drop-dispenser, and as someone who suffers from dry eyes, she's used to it.  I breathed a deep sigh of relief: I dreaded putting in drops after my father's glaucoma treatments.

And so, very soon, she should be able to see blue properly again, instead of a muted bluey-grey.  Ironic, then, that the Keck waiting room should have quite dreadful faded landscapes in a blue-ish color; an off-blue water dispenser, and so on (and if I see these object in this shade, I imagine that cataract sufferers must see a very sullen grey indeed).

The patient is doing very well - at least, so it seems to me: check-up first thing in the morning ...

 

perfect coffee shop

I always dream of finding the perfect coffee shop to work in , and today I located one: good coffee, to be sure, and an almond croissant - and a desk to work at, and plants, and art work, and bare brick walls, and doors open onto a courtyard, and interesting-looking other people (who weren't - New Orleans not being LA - all writing screen plays).  I'm glad to be home, to be sure - but Fourth Wall was perfect.

 

New Orleans - last full day

It completely poured with rain overnight, and the temperature dropped 30 degrees, so this was rather chilly weather for visiting the Honey Island Swamp - 70,000 acres of pristine wetland, full of alligators, and birds, and (though we didn't see any) raccoons and javelinas.  And bees - here are some flying in and out of holes in a tupelo tree: hence (for Van Morrison aficionados), Tupelo Honey.

It was ... swampy.  Here's a heron,

and a very young gator;

and a Common Egret admiring its reflection.

The egret then took off: this was my favorite shot of the day, and definitely an album cover of some kind.

This monstrous thing is an invasive Apple Snail - huge, and it eats crawfish, which makes them a local enemy - so big brown birds (we saw one, rootling around) called Limpkin have been introduced to eat them.  They are especially insidious since semi-amphibious - they have gills and lungs.  They also lay their toxic eggs - like lumps of gooey coral - up trees, so they're not going to get readily eaten.  Despite my snail fondness, these are like something out of sci fi.

At every turn the tree reflections are stunning ...

Ooh, look who's swimming up to the boat!

- to be thrown a lump of - of what? gator kibble - by our guide.

By the time I was back in the city, the sun was vaguely coming out: a bit more house admiration round the French Quarter;

including a very large crown on a porch: left over from Carnival, or from a No Kings demo?

Waling round the Louis Armstrong park (yes, there was another procession, with tubas, etc), I cam upon this boarded up, desperately in need of restoration, complex.  The building on the left is one of the oldest Masonic Halls in the US, built in 1820 as a Masonic Lodge for Creoles of Color, and home to some very early jazz performances.  The others have mostly been moved there - and the whole site has the most vexed and complicated history, belonging for a while to the National Parks Service, who then handed it over to the Preservation Resource Center a few years back; damaged by Hurricane Ida - the more one digs in online, the more one finds so many people want to save and renovate them, but who has the money? whose responsibility ultimately is it? The whole area, indeed, has a troubled history: about ten blocks were demolished in the 1960s, largely displacing lower income Black people, for the building of a big (also didn't look at all functioning) concert hall that would supposedly encourage more white people to come to the area ... but leaving 18 or so acres of empty land, which in the 70s was turned into a memorial park (lakes, bridges, trees and shrubs, turtles) for Louis Armstrong.  

Heading back into festival land, here's a timely sign (if you look closely, it says YALL MORE BOOZE LESS ICE)

and here's a performance by Jade Perdue, who is, among many other excellent things, an educator and a National Parks Service interpreter for jazz history.  She can really sing.

 

New Orleans, cont

It was good to get out of town today, on a small tour to the Whitney Plantation (this is the one plantation tour that concentrates on the experience of the enslaved, and also that really puts on display, and explains, the importance of slow, detailed, archival history).  It made a fascinating compare-and-contrast with similarly oriented former plantations that I've visited in North Carolina (tobacco), and northern Louisiana (cotton): so much that's similar, but I did learn a lot both about sugar (and molasses) production, and also about the history of resistance and rebellions in southern Louisiana.

They did a great job in not romanticizing, or even venerating, the Big House, except as a place where enslaved people could hear and pass on news and gossip, and, above all, as a place of sexual vulnerability and danger for women.

There was a rather fine stencil over the fireplace - but overall, it was a house that brought home how much power was wielded from a center that by the standards of many plantations was relatively modest - a good-sized farmhouse.

This is from the kitchen - removed from the house, of course, because of the danger of fire - and as in so many little corners of the place, there was a dried yellow rose.  There was a great deal of quiet, respectful memorializing.

A reminder of the plots that were cultivated by the enslaved - and then, post Reconstruction, by sharecroppers, since few ever had the money to move on - on Sundays.

And here are some of the many, many, many huge sugar boiling vats - boiling down the syrup from crushed canes until it started to crystalize and turn into granulated sugar.

I'm not sure who this guy is - maybe a young blue heron?  Not easy to locate his identity on line ...

As well as quiet memorializing, there were more pointed treatments of the past throughout - especially this monument to those who had been executed after the 1811 German Coast uprising.  We'd been shown the levee where their heads were left to rot on our drive up; told that the enslaved nearby were marched to see these heads every day, as a reminder of what would happen to them if they rebelled.  It's by Woodrow Nash (who's actually from Akron, Ohio);

and he also made the statues of the children that occasionally appear in the grounds, on a porch,

and then in the church, at the end of the tour: not exactly accusatory, but, in their realism, decidedly haunting.  I didn't see any children visiting today - odd, actually, now I think about it (and I checked: there are some sober cautions about the exhibit being most suitable for older children, and to talk with them beforehand).  If I'd visited as a ten year old, I think it would stay with me for ever.

Then back to New Orleans, and I walked as smartly away from the French Quarter and its Fest as I could - down Magazine, past many lovely houses; painted fences; plants; more plants, and had a weirdly Southern lunch of a collard greens and mustard grilled cheese sandwich and a (very weak) glass of Pimms made with ... dill pickle brine and ginger beer at Turkey and Wolf (not a drink, you'll be glad to hear, that I'll rush to recreate at home.  But of course I had to try a Pimm's Pickle Princess.  

I'm glad to see that New Orleans tells it as it is.

Back in my room, eventually (another nearly 15,000 step day, and the temperature was 86 and humid), I thought I'd have a quiet few minutes or so.  But no!  A full scale krewe wedding, complete with brass band, and costumes, and everyone wielding umbrellas and white handkerchiefs, processed slowly under my window ...