academic conversations

It's time for the annual Getty Graduate Student Symposium, preceded, this afternoon, by a get-together of Directors of Graduate Studies/Chairs and lots of Getty Research Institute staff, discussing - discussing what, exactly?  The state of graduate studies; the form that PhDs should/might take; preparing grad students for a world in which they might start thinking earlier in their graduate careers than they do of ways in which their skills might be used for things other than academic jobs and high-flying curatorial positions.  But we never got to the nitty gritty of how to manoeuvre students away gently, ever so gently, from the fantasies of jobs that just don't exist ... (and that carry with them, of course, the privilege of having a glass of wine outdoors on a warm February night, with the sun setting on the Pacific in the background).

 

the annual magnificence

For a couple of weeks, this is the view from my bedroom window in the early morning, when the sun is turning Griffith Park gold (I know it looks like autumnal leaves, but it's just grass and shrub), and the Asian Pear is ... blossomy. We think it's as old as the house, which is why it's so unusually huge, despite (or maybe because of) its annual pruning.  I know I post what must look like the same photo every year ... but it's a celebratory ritual, or has become one.  Looking back, I see that when we first moved in - thirteen years ago this week!  Can that really be the case? - I thought it was a Camphor Tree.  I wonder why ...

 

perched on the handlebars

Very springlike, to be sure.  These birds are on a slightly decrepit bicycle parked outside Taper Hall: an endearingly normal, non-electric bicycle - in other words, one of the vehicles that's marginally less likely to run you over on campus.  The electric bikes, the scooters - not too long ago, there were Campus Safety goons on their own bicycles making people get off and walk in the crucial central parts, but these days there is zero effort made to stop speeding students mowing one down.  To state the obvious, this must be a nightmare for people with mobility or vision issues.

 

not getting excited

I've been passing this hoarding for a week now on my way home (underneath it says that Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted, but I doubt that Bill will get into all that much trouble).  It's hard to say quite which aspects of the advertising for this new adaptation of Wuthering Heights turn me off the most: the mock Victorian mirror vignettes? The lettering, like the cover for some really bad supernatural drama set in a New England boarding school?  The vague sense that the mirrors are hanging on cheap Victorian boarding house wallpaper?  I will be phenomenally surprised at myself if I go to see this: thank goodness I haven't taught a course on Fiction Into Film in living memory, and so don't feel semi-obliged to go and see whether, in all its awfulness, it would make a good compare-and-contrast with the 1939 version with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, or (quickly glancing at Wikipedia), the Hindi or the Urdu or the Filipino or Japanese or any of the previous English language versions.  Of course, checking all of this out makes me feel fleetingly nostalgic for that course ...

 

full moon and blossom

I haven't had the greatest success, tonight, with taking a picture that captures both moon and the Asian pear's luminous blossom well: I've tried both my iPhone and a camera, and have come to the conclusion I need to spend more time practicing ... in any case, it's a beautiful night out there, apart from the deep roar of motorcycles down on the 5.  Sometimes, from the garden, one hears the traffic so loudly, and at other times one's hardly aware of it at all: it's best when the neighbor has her fountain on, which distracts the ear.  Memo to self: I keep meaning to get a fountain ...

 

sky slices

Why, yes, it was warm enough to go out to brunch today and sit outside, and then later the temperature went up to 85 degrees.  This is, of course, as much a result of global weirding as is all that snow and ice and bomb cyclones, and I'm not the biggest fan of hot - really hot - weather in any case, but I'm not arguing with the pleasures of eating on a patio in January.

 

sidewalk scene

Seen this evening in Mount Washington, and very, very bizarre.  It doesn't seem to have been deliberately posed, but it's a strangely satisfying juxtaposition.