gardenia

Happily blooming in a pot in the front yard.  I'm going to have to rig up the watering device there before I head out of town again: despite the glum looking weather forecast for the coming week, this cool and sometimes damp spring isn't going to last for ever ...

 

concerned cats

Poor Moth and Gramsci - they had no idea why I was lying limply in bed today, and stared at me with considerable concern.  I had my second bivalent booster yesterday, and as with all my other Covid vaccines and boosters, it flattened me for 24 hours (indeed, possibly longer - this was the first time I'd had Moderna, rather than Pfizer, and it seemed to be even nastier in its effects - aches of every kind; icy shivers followed by fever; complete exhaustion).  Grammy was especially sympathetic - he barely left my side all day.  I'm hoping I've revived by tomorrow ...

 

salvaged poppies

Just before the brush clearance on Monday, Alice dashed out to forage what she could by way of blooming poppies - which have just about (but only just about) lasted the week on the kitchen windowsill.  I was so happy to see, mind you, that the mowers had left one little flowering clump - a token acknowledgement of this year's wild flower season.  But they are wilting now - as I expect to be in a few hours, when my latest bivalent booster kicks in ... (a quick plug for CVS, who were somehow much easier and less stressful than USC - who, in any case, aren't even currently offering boosters).

 

a strange head

Last day of teaching until August ... I will miss my grad class (on Land, Landscape, Environment and Ecocriticism in C19th British and American art - truly, although I've always wanted to teach an explicitly transatlantic class, that was an awful lot to cram into one semester).  They all did terrific final presentations today, so I'm looking forward to their papers. But I feel more than a little glazed eyed - this wildly staring face from my drive home today just about sums me up.

 

the remains of a wreath

... not even this last Christmas's chile wreath - that's still on the front door, not because I'm pretending that it's still the holiday season, but because it looks pretty, although I've just remembered that the last time I left a wreath there until the summer, a bird nested in it.  No, this is from the Christmas before: battered by the wind and quite possibly pecked at by birds who don't mind rather hot seeds.  And that, blowing around in the chill wind, was this morning: now back in LA and back in full harness.

 

lilac

The lilac bush by the front path has done its very, very best to come out before I leave - I'm appreciative.  Otherwise, it's been a grey, wet, hailstormy kind of day - although I did go and stand outside for a few minutes this evening to breathe in the unique smell of New Mexico soil after it rains, with a sound track of energetic and excited squealing, which - judging by some other, deeper howling yaps, could only have been a family of very young coyote cubs yipping it up.  

 

rain coming in

I wasn't wrong about that - and thunder, too.  Just before this, I took a walk - and that was good timing, given that it's been damp and chilly since.  Other than that - my head has been down working or in Zoom meetings - which means that I'm all the more grateful on those occasions when my head does come up for air to be able to look out of the window and see skies like this ...

 

spring, really

I did the season an injustice, yesterday, by saying that it wasn't really springtime yet (mind you, the temperature this morning was "25, feels like 19").  Certainly there are some trees coming into leaf, and even our lilac bush is showing signs that it will burst into flower - as usual, when we're not there to see it.  The one thing in the garden that is mysteriously growing like mad, and that weathered the winter well, is catmint.  I know some felines who will be pleased about that - I might take them a little taster back to LA (of course, my dream is to have bobcats hopping over the wall and rolling in it).

 

April sunset

I've missed these skies ... back in New Mexico for just a couple of days to check that the house is ok (I was relieved that there are no signs of mice; and the underfloor heating is, mercifully, working again once I thought to change the batteries in a thermostat - it's chilly and windy outside, with very few signs of spring).  No socializing on this trip, dear local friends - I am also, and primarily, here to write - or at least try to - in seclusion and silence before the onslaught that's the end of the semester - although some of that is, of course, happening on Zoom whilst I'm here, too.  And it really is quiet ... it's actually hard to get on with the work when it's just so great to have the sheer peacefulness of it all ...

 

recycled books

One last Festival of Books image - these books (these former books?) form part of a stand that holds a large QR code, presumably to be scanned so that one has a program and/or map to consult.  The whole thing is based on a very mock Victorian lamp post, and rests on a - what would one call it?  A cube that's roughly book-spine themed.

I know there are real books inside the tents, by now, and presumably people will be reading from copies, this weekend.  But I wouldn't look so askance at these blue-painted books (and there are other similar piles, all over the center of campus) were it not for my growing suspicion that, slowly, there are fewer three-dimensional books with pages in our library.  There are certainly many, many more available on line - something for which I'm often very grateful.  But, you know, I do like having the material object in my hands if I want to read it, as opposed to checking something or skimming.  One mightn't want to read these particular books, and indeed they most likely didn't come from our library at all, but there seems something ominously prophetic in their re-purposing as thematic decoration.

 

more tents

I feel I should apologize for having recourse to the tents again - but by this stage of the semester I am running out of - out of what?  Visual attention, I think.  Who ever thought fifteen week semesters were a good idea?  One week to go. This one has been especially lengthy - looking back, my father's funeral during its first week seems light years ago - and of course since then, I've been living in various parallel worlds - Los Angeles and Wimbledon; eight hours between them, and juggling paper work on two continents ... I wouldn't mind crawling into one of these tents, pulling the flaps over, and falling asleep.

 

this year's calla lily portrait (and things you never knew about the calla lily)

I do love how our calla lily clump comes up, each year, in April, despite fading away to alarming non-existence for a whole chunk of the year.  And I always take a ritualistic photo.  But today was the first time that I actually wondered - why calla lily?  Linnaeus, of course, gave the genus its taxonomic name, following the lead of Pliny, who called it - yes! - "calla" in Latin.  But there's more to it than that, although the OED stops at the Latin.  Because apparently the Latin was derived from the Greek kallaia, which means - wait for it - "rooster's wattles."

The Gardeners' Monthly in August 1887 says it was also known as the "Ethiopian Lily" and - this is more familiar to me - the Easter Lily.  I found some instructions in Ladies' Fancy Work for 1886 for making wax models of calla lilies.  And a short-lived Southern Californian magazine, Land of Sunshine, waxed lyrical about them in 1894 - reports that acres of them are grown near Santa Barbara and - then south of LA - in Vernon (things have changed a lot round there), and also says that one can eat the bulbs - prepare them like a potato, and they taste just the same.  I'm not going to try that - I value their annual reappearance too much ...

 

tent time

It's that time of the year again, when the LA Festival of Books comes to the campus - they're setting everything up for the weekend, when means that tents with flags are everywhere.  The flags are in different color groups and are meant to signify different zones - the blue zone, the purple zone ... - but look ever so much like clumps of tents set up for a medieval tournament, with jousting a much more likely activity than poetry readings and author signings.  

 

in which my car has an interesting morning

A couple of weeks back, I had an email from the LAPD inviting me to a Free Community Event - indeed, inviting me to reserve my own time slot, as I've been a recent victim of catalytic converter theft ... I didn't get persnickety about details - but in fact, last summer and early fall, the car was vandalized twice - though on neither occasion did they manage to isolate the cat converter, but rather took the whole muffler (that's "exhaust," to those of you who speak English) system.  However ... the invitation was to have the converter engraved with the car's VIN ID number, which makes it almost impossible to sell for its metals, and makes it far easier for the police to return it to its rightful owner - and hey, maybe even catch a thief or two.  They - the catalytic converter thieves - prowl the neighborhood at dawn with the assiduousness of coyotes after rabbits, and 2007/8 Lexus RXs, and just about any early Prius, are their favorite targets.  My car is super vulnerable, so I've been driving it in and out of the garage all the time - a tricky task, given the high bump of the curb (to deter water - the road is on a bend); the trash cans; the angle of garage and road, and, right now, the construction workers' portapotty, or whatever they're called here.  It was, today, a very satisfactory piece of outreach, and one for which I was extremely grateful.  Oh, and "morning"?  It took five minutes.

 

a different kind of spring bloom

I don't really think about algae in the Venice canals here - although it's a big problem in the real, Italian Venice.  But here it is, in big, bright green clumps.  Around this time of the year it gets gathered up, using poles, and then taken off to the Maintenance Yard (or so the Canal Association's website assures me).  But then what?  Does it become fertilizer, or ...?  

 

poppy time!

After all that rain, after a few warmer days, there's a fine bloom of the California poppy seeds that I planted at the start of the winter - and of some other wild flowers, too.  And I was able to get to see them, close-up, because of the kindness of the construction workers.  I'd asked them if they could find a way for me to be able to get to the plants that are temporarily cached at the back of yard, which will start to need some water soon - and they built a little plank bridge - with a handrail! (clearly they must think of me as a granny, not someone used to scampering over makeshift stream crossings out in the wild).  Anyway. it was great to inspect everything - even with the looming sadness of Brush Clearance in just over a week, which will reduce the flowery meadow to bare earth.

 

two views from the drive to work

two decaying roof tops: the first, where there was a bad fire at the beginning of this semester (a man went crazy, for whatever reason, in his sister's flat and set everything on fire and then started throwing blazing things out of the window) - a whole lot of apartments and little businesses were destroyed.  And then below - ten blocks or so further down S. Hoover Street - somehow one mightn't have a whole lot of confidence in the legal services (accidents, immigration) that are being advertised - although, peering at the signs on the actual frontage, the notary probably functions well enough.  I never tire of the drive to work: there's so much to take in, and the streetscape keeps subtly changing.

 

why?

There have been a number of mysteries today - like why it rained last night, and why it's pouting with rain now, when there was no rain in the forecast and - even odder - when the radar doesn't show any precipitation.  Or take our Art History seminar room - which has grown a large Jackson Pollock poster.  The grad students say that it wasn't there earlier in the week.  It must have come from somewhere ... though we all gazed at it balefully in class today: it's one of those Pollocks that looks like very unappealing linoleum.

 

table decoration

Of course, the true pièce de resistance here is Gramsci's black and grey tail.  But in back-up position, a painted gourd - black on the outside, gilded within (there's a larger, white and gold one too, further down the table).  We saw these gourds for sale at Los Poblanos, outside Albuquerque, and I ordered a couple for Alice's birthday, earlier this year - they really are lovely, simple objects (unlike Grammy, who, if lovely, is definitely a complicated cat - still fairly traumatized today by the workers outside ...).

 

solidarity in numbers

It was a tough day on the kitties.  Not only were there hordes - well, five or six - workmen outside, but they were pouring concrete - masses of concrete, sent down a long thick snake of a tube from a concrete mixer parked outside our garage - which filled up the trenches and pillars, and presumably, when it sets, will make our hillside far, far more stable than it's ever been in its life.  At least, that's the plan.  

It took this phenomenal construction effort to bond Moth and Gramsci.  For much of the day, they hung out together (apart from the odd moment when Grammy tried to bite Moth).  Now Gramsci is demanding to be held, safe from whatever may be happening outside tomorrow (wall building, we're told).  

 

the abstraction of construction work

The view from one of our balconies - or part of the view - looking down onto a trench that will, I believe, be filled with concrete, with that awkward spiral thing representing the top of one of two concrete pillars that go down some 40 feet.  This is all a very impressive piece of engineering - so much so that I keep wondering whatever we got ourselves into, but there should be a very impressive deck and back yard at the end of it all ... right now, I wouldn't mind just being able to sit out there, in the sunshine, and certainly to go and water the plants that are sequestered down the very far end, with no feasible access unless you're a squirrel or a raccoon.  And even the raccoons are having problems, by now.

 

grey/silver lake

Another weekend morning, another reservoir walk.  Today, some of you may be relieved to know, I have something resembling a voice again - a day's monastic silence did it good.  Truth be told, I've always rather fancied going on a silent retreat for a few days or so - I think I'd find it extremely relaxing and anxiety-depleting (although to do this in full style, one would have to have no electronic devices, either - and that would mean an unprecedented gap in the writing of this blog).  

For those of you who don't know the reservoir, it probably looks quiet and meditative enough ... this picture, though, is taken through a wire fence, while dodging the massed hordes of runners, joggers, and people walking their dogs, some of whom find us irresistible, presumably because we smell of Cat.

 

an extremely quiet walk

... nay, an absolutely silent walk by the reservoir.  I think my laryngitis is still very much there, so I've had a completely silent day - well, apart from a squawk when the Diamondbacks took a definitive lead against the Dodgers.  With three weeks to go, I want to have something of a voice, and I know how these things can go with me ... So communication has been writing on paper pads, and on the Notes app on my iPad, and via mime - though I don't think that my skills, finely honed on charades many decades ago, were especially appreciated.  I vividly remember one New Year's Eve, in Munich, when I did a wonderful - wonderful what?  Performance, translation, rendition? - of Slaughterhouse Five.  Or for all I know Schlachthaus fünf.  It was already quite late in the evening ...

wisteria time

Down the street from us ... one of my favorite houses, which is even more spectacular when the wisteria blooms.  Indeed, it's blooming all over the neighborhood, which has suddenly sprung into serious springtime the last couple of days, just ready for Easter.

 

hall flowers

Last week, someone (not me!) kindly sent Alice a well-deserved bunch of flowers.  After a long day distinguished by struggling through laryngitis and coughing, it was good to come home to their cheerfulness - they are lasting so well!  Mind you, they are dangerously close to USC colors ...

 

it's getting to be that season

... that is, about five weeks before Commencement, and when it may, possibly, have stopped raining, when hitherto cracked and peeling bits of paint on canvas get to look new again.  It would be good if there was some similar kind of renovative make-over that could be applied to Faculty ...

 

sometimes

the young Gramsci - who will be an unbelievable two years old next month - still looks just like a kitten.  

 

heading off to auction (and a sad story)

All packed up and ready to go - someone from Bonham's picked up this flat packet this morning.  Inside, two letters from J.R.R. Tolkien.

A couple of months back, clearing through a filing cabinet, I discovered a little cache of my mother's things, including these two letters, which she'd kept - out of reverence? Knowing my mother, out of some sense of awed proximity to the Oxford Famous.  But if I'd been her, I'd have torn them into little bits and burned them.  For Tokien was, towards her, when she was a graduate student in the late 40s, a rather unhelpful Senior Figure on the English Faculty.  To be sure, his area of work wasn't hers - whatever hers was, and he was positioned to help her sort that out.  But he was on the doctoral qualifying committee that failed her - both because she had been allowed in the first place to propose a preposterously broad topic - "The Rose in English Literature" - and then because she, shy at the best of times, wasn't able to utter a word in the exam itself.  At least, that's the story she told.  It seems that she then looked to him for some advice, which was far from forthcoming.

What I hadn't realised until after her death is that she had subsequently enrolled for the MLitt - a lesser graduate degree than the DPhil - and wrote a perfectly competent thesis on Shakespearean sonnets.  There was a copy, buried deep in a cupboard.  The very fact of her writing it seemed to come as news to my father.  I had to find out what happened by following this up with St Anne's, her (and my) college.  It looks as though she submitted - but again failed.  Was she again mute? 

This goes a long way to explain her ambivalence towards my career, of course.  And it also explains why I feel so absolutely dreadful, for days, if I'm ever on a qualifying committee that ends up not passing someone.  But what I've known of her story has left me with a lifelong loathing of that Inklings group - Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Hugo Dyson (I met him: he fiddled endlessly with pieces of string), Charles Williams and the rest.  The tone of these letters epitomizes their supercilious paternalism.  

I didn't ever get past three pages of The Lord of the Rings, though I liked The Hobbit well enough when I was six.  Even if I had adored them, I don't think I'd have been comfortable keeping these specimens of the Oxford male arrogance that undermined my mother's confidence - and, worse still, the authority of which she internalized.  So - these may not be destined to fetch very much money (the thought of any little epistles from a supervisor fetching anything is of course decidedly improbable).  But off they go ... I am so glad to see the back of such bad karma.

 

climbing flower

since I can't clamber close enough to take a picture of the Californian poppies out back, you'll have to make do with something of a very similar color round the front ...

 

golden morning

Unequivocally, a golden, sunny day all the way through.  You'd think that living in Los Angeles, that wouldn't be particularly remarkable, but it's been a long, grey, damp, cold spell.  It's still going to be on the cool side at the start of next week, but after that ... well, the problem will be how to get to the far side of the construction work to water the plants that are marooned at the end of the garden.  That will pose quite a challenge ...