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.