the matilija

This is just one of the many flowers on the magnificent matilija poppy.  When one looks down on it from upstairs, it's as if someone has been making lots of huge white and yellow paper flowers and tying them to bushes in the garden, very unconvincingly.  I'm hoping that this one - and one of its friends - has definitively taken, because they are finicky plants - native only to a relatively small coastal-ish stretch between San Diego and Santa Barbara, and either dying after a few months, or spreading and spreading - they are rhizomic.  But since not a great deal else (other than regular poppies) truly likes growing on the slope where this is, I'm wishing a long and fruitful family life for it.

 

to the point

Such a solid, respectable house; such a solid, respectable, direct message.  I couldn't agree more.  To be honest, when I turned into the street (I was on foot, walking to have my hair done, having parked a couple of streets away because all the possible nearer parking spots were occupied by serried ranks of waiting-for-collection Friday trash cans) I thought - surely someone can't have a banner celebrating T - ... and then I got closer, and found that no, indeed, these patriots didn't.

 

health care in LA

This is, I think, a pharmacy, but it seems to be advertising dental braces ... On the way to Keck (usual derm check - seven separate bits of my face/scalp frozen, but no biopsies: I'll count that as a win).  The balloons are a clear attempt at optimism, but somehow the whole scene was not only gloomy in itself, but a polar contrast to the USC hospital's shiny surfaces.

 

signed!

I'm delighted to say that today I signed the contract for the book provisionally/definitely known as "Habitatscapes: Environmental Futures in Nineteenth Century Art" - all 110,000 words and 100 images of it - to be published next year by the University of Chicago Press.  I have two and a half months to pull the manuscript into final shape ...

Many, many thanks to all of you - you know who you are - who have helped get the book to this point: reading versions of it; workshopping it; coming to talks and asking great questions; feeding me images and quotations.  I really wouldn't have reached this moment without you.  

 

performances

Two very different mediums.  In the morning, my terrific Honors student (in Art History, this time!) Sophia Soll talks about what nineteenth century American landscapes can't show directly in terms of the transcendental; in the early evening, Nigel - on a very flying visit from Princeton - plays us his version of John Donne's "The Flea," set to - adapted to - hmmm, early prog rock?  Think Soft Machine or early King Crimson.  Gramsci was not at all sure what to make of this, but (presumably grasping that this was a song about Fleas) thought that the safest course of action was to wash himself, vigorously.

 

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.