non-native flowers

I think these are probably South African - Protea? I can remember my father coming home with some, on one occasion - had he just returned from a business trip to South Africa? Had they been sent to his office?  In any case, they were tightly encased in mesh, so that the flowers didn't open and crush and disintegrate on their journey, and I thought them unbelievably exotic.  Sitting in a flower shop window in Silver Lake/Sunset Junction - they are still startling, but also disquietingly artificial seeming.

 

white magic

I just love this group of witches: they are so demure.  It's impossible to imagine them doing anything with eye of newt and toe of frog: more like syllabub with thin slivers of angelica.

 

floating flower

I gave myself a day in the library today - a real treat, even if I kept swerving off into admin mode.  And I managed to fill in some important bits of material and thinking, so that was a definite plus.  The plants at the Huntington are in that late summer phase of looking grey, and a little tired - but there are some amazing bursts of color (I didn't penetrate very far into the gardens, today, however - too busy contemplating the decline of the English tree-barking industry in the mid 1880s).

And I was horribly preoccupied, and saddened, by the loss of the tree in the Sycamore Gap.  Loss?  More like murder, or arboricide.  Who would do that?  Why?  It was more deliberate, more planned, more callous than mere vandalism.  My memories of it go back a long way - although I can't find an actual photo with it in, I promise you that it was a few hundred yards away from here ... The saddest thing: when I went to try and place this in relation to it using the map, I found that the on-line maps have already been updated to read "Sycamore Stump."  

My hillwalking started young.  I now wear hiking boots ...

 

outdoor and indoor gangs

What a thuggish collection of raccoons charging down the outside steps just before dawn!  At least this time they didn't disturb all the stones on the waterfall ... (they are rather wonderful: look at those stripey tails).  You never know what you're going to capture on the security cameras - earlier in the summer it was a bobcat with a large rat swinging in its mouth. 

It's hard to know how much the indoor gang know about what happens outside (unless it's birds or squirrels, which are clearly there for their entertainment). Here - although they are probably largely thinking about their immanent supper, they are perplexed by noises in the street, which are caused by Alice pulling forward the trash bins. Scary stuff, they think.  Little do they know about life on the wild side.

 

waiting to catch breakfast

Turning onto our old street, heading to work, there was a hawk - probably a sharp-shinned hawk, since it's so small - and I know that they love mourning doves (for breakfast, not as friends), and there are lots of those around.  I'd have thought it could be a sparrow hawk, but I don't think that we have them in LA (despite there being a perfectly decent Californian wine company called Sparrowhawk ...).  I know Blake spoke of "perfect symmetry" in relation to his tyger, and that therefore the phrase probably had something to do with stripes, but I do like how the hawk is at the apex of ... of what? One of those mysteries one doesn't see until one looks at one's own photograph: overgrown door?

And in other, important, and wonderful news: LOOK!  We exchanged contracts this morning.  Completion is on November 3rd.  I'll say more about who's bought it when I have the purchasers' permission to do so, but I'm very happy, and I know that Joy and Ray would have been, too.  For now - that is, from November 4th onwards - it'll be a teenager spill-over house, and that's great!  I hope they move a table-tennis table in - it would fit very well.

 

bedroom view (aka The Deck From Above)

Early-ish this morning, I was so dramatically felled (as always) by the Covid vaccine that I thought I might never make it out of bed again to take a picture - at least, not till late ... the icicle shivers lasted from 11.27 p.m. to 1.38 a.m., and then the aching and exhaustion began ...But by the last afternoon I was recovered enough to eat a few Triscuits and even to go to a terrible, terrible documentary in Glendale - Radical Wolfe, which Alice wanted to see because of her current book project ... It was sheer hagiography, including fervent praise from both Niall Ferguson and Peter Thiel; good on Tom Wolfe's style, but didn't ever come close to anything analytic.  Also - we were the only two people in the entire movie theater, which was weird.  

At least I think I may be returned to humanity tomorrow.  Thank you so much, everyone, for expressing concern...

 

back in the Galen Center

... first home Pac-12 game of the season: we pulverized Oregon State 3-0, and for much of the time it was like a good practice for our offense.  Here's our star outside hitter, Skylar Fields, making a kill - look at that elevation!  So good to be back in the Galen ... 

... waiting for the effects of my latest booster to kick in.  They will, oh, I'm sure that they will.  So if you're waiting or expecting to hear from me tomorrow, make that Tuesday.

 

hanging out in the trees

The party down the street seems to be expanding ... this girl gang has turned up to join the Bad Girls on the steps.  And the leaves on the trees en route to the Huntington (always my bell-wether for knowing that autumn/fall is on the way) are just beginning to change, too ...

 

LA signage

One of those flat grey days when absolutely nothing is illuminated, no tricks of light to catch one's photographic eye ... But I'm always taken by the appeal of old Los Angeles signing, and a board that looks as though it's been there for ever ... though, disappointingly, it hasn't: it was founded in 1981, so this 50s look was fake vintage, even then.  Nor have I ever been to it - maybe, since it's Dodgers themed, I should drop in for a grilled cheese sandwich, one day.

 

working in the kitchen

 I had to work in the kitchen for a lot of today, to be accessible to the hordes - or so it felt like - of assorted workpeople who were smartening up the fence that's been built at the back of our new deck, or mending the front garden's waterfall where the raccoons had dismantled it and broken the pump - or whatever.  The trouble with working in the kitchen ... is that one is very close to food sources.  Not just for me, you understand - lunch was a tub of Green Pea Soup that, according to its label, had been in the freezer since 2018 (but I'm still alive, thankfully) - but, well, Kibble.  Gramsci thinks that my attempts to work on the apparatus necessary to sort out next year's teaching schedule is a total waste of time, and that I should be doing something more immediately related to his needs.

plumbago

The huge bank of plumbago to the left of the garden is blooming beautifully - this doesn't do it justice.  It's not actually on our land, so I hope that no one ever decides to clear it all out - it's holding the whole hillside up there in place... Its name, from plumbum agere - resembling lead - seems rather unclear in terms of the reasoning behind it: it was first used by Pliny the Elder, but is that strong pale blue meant to resemble lead, or is it because the sap leaves lead-like stains on the skin (I'm not going to try that one) or because, as Pliny thought, it acted as a cure for lead poisoning?  It's non-native (but considered friendly) - it comes originally from South Africa, so there's another question: how did Pliny end up with it?  From how far south did Roman soldiers come?

 

the party girls are back!

 

I know it's only late September ("and I really should be back at school") - but apparently, in our 'hood, we're already gearing up for Hallowe'en.  I'm not complaining - I love all of these cheerful skellies ...

no más cuca's

So here's a linguistic conundrum, nailed to a palm tree on my way home (for the record, the house, fence, vegetation add up to a very, very typical commuting view for me).  Cuca, in Spanish, is a decidedly rude word - denoting women's genitalia - and probably not what you'd expect to see exterminated (though one never knows).  But that upside down brown beetle, waving its legs in the air - that's definitely a cockroach.  So - No More Cucarachas.  Cucarachas is, after all, a long word to fit on a little placard.  But is it a deliberate pun?  And do cockroaches, internationally, attract vulgar punning?  After all, in Bahasa Indonesia - the only word I can remember in Indonesian - "cockroach" is "likas".  Don't even get me going on how I know that: it involved my bag, in which there were some rice cakes - and, well, cockroaches notoriously don't come singly, do they?

 

Flyaway, the hobby horse

When it came to the point, I couldn't throw him out.  As I was clearing the garage at 20, he emerged from a stack of canes and wood in a far corner, where he's been for the last - how long?  Sixty years?  He was made from a white sock, and once had a handsome black mane and ears, and a very eager expression, as opposed to a world-weary one.  I've no idea why I called him Flyaway (not after the LAX - Union Station bus, I'm sure, which is the resonance that the name carries for me now).  His stable mate was Triermain, which was the name of a very ruined castle near us in Cumberland, and I don't know what happened to him.  He was more poshly made from some kind of brown felt-like material - I assume by my father - and never had Flyaway's personality.  I used to gallop them round and round the garden, and jump over home-made show jumps (red and white painted bamboo canes, and bricks).  It was a huge, but wonderful shock to come upon him when I was back, even if, I'll admit, he's a little the worse for wear, and I just managed to fit him diagonally into a suitcase.

 

Gramsci's afternoon

It's not a bad life, being a cat, sometimes ... Here's little Grammy (who knows what colors suit him) curled up on the Victorian nursing armchair, with one of my mother's needlepoints behind him - I think a William De Morgan design.  If only all her needlepoints had been like this ... there are a couple of cats, and one rather detailed La Dame et la Licorne tapestry replication in miniature, and I think a few more that are packed up, and probably just setting sail from Bristol as I write.  But then there were three of drear and depressingly undistinguished flowers, and one of shells, in dull shades of beige and cream.  I looked at them, half wanted to keep them, knew that if my mother hadn't taken pleasure - I hope! - in executing them I wouldn't have given them a moment's thought.  So off, in the end, they went, buried in the unwanted blankets and sheets, to Battersea Cats and Dogs home, knowing that they would give some animal some happiness (not aesthetic, but to sleep on), and that surely that was a worthy end for these pieces of adorned fabric.

 

Gramsci's morning

This is Gramsci's current favorite place for spending his mornings - right in the center of his three-way crinkly tunnel (usually, he's wrapped into a tight little tabby and white ball, but he got wise to the fact that I was taking his portrait).  I mean - we can't see him in there, can we?  And if Moth were to approach from any angle, then he'd be perfectly positioned to jump out at her ...

the deck's progress

We're getting there!  Being able to have friends for pre-dinner wine and cheese and staring out at the green lawns - lawns can't be the right word - the green greens? - of the Junior Golf Academy is a considerable advance.  Behind, a fence grows ... those are sample planks lying on the ground.  

And yes! that is a bottle of pink fizz.  We were celebrating ... probate on my father's estate coming through!  And that is a huge relief - it's been quicker than I'd dared hope, judging by the considerable amount of online doom-mongering around the issue ...

 

LACMA (and tarpits)

To LACMA, to the opening of the absolutely stunning Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction show - at least, all I saw of it was stunning, but I'll go back and look at it properly when I'm not socializing and drinking ginger beer margaritas.  Here's the Santa Fe meets LA contingent ... Harmony Hammond, with one of our newly minted AHIS PhDs, Ashton Cooper - Harmony figured centrally in her dissertation - and Alice, who was on her committee.  So much fun to get together - and with other friends too - at this.  You can't see, but I too was wearing suitable New York black ... 

And I can't go to LACMA - or I rarely can - without dropping in at the tarpits.  Not literally dropping - that's how all those sabre toothed tigers, and mammoths, and so on got stuck there, millennia ago: it's always good to remember that LA is built on a primeval swamp.

 

Ruskin - and Dinah - at USC

\

It was both slightly surreal and very wonderful to have an old friend from England talking at USC (without me having any hand in it) - Dinah gave a talk to the Ruskin Art Club of Los Angeles - which has been going since 1888 - and which was meeting in our Library.  Indeed, I learned much about the Art Club from her talk, even though that wasn't its main focus: it was founded by four women as a kind of self-directed, self-educational, and highly serious project, and had its analogue in various Ruskin clubs in England.  Central to all was the importance of work - although she slightly soft-pedalled when it came to Ruskin's disapproval, if one could call it that, of paid work for women.  It was a pitch perfect talk to a room (and on line audience) that was extraordinarily heterogenous, and hence not a little challenging; it was a talk, I think, of which Ruskin himself would have thoroughly approved.

 

mystery

Admittedly, it's not a very exciting mystery - but in an admin-filled day in which the other unusual thing was avoiding someone dressed as a rather disconsolate carrot, it does rather sum everything up.  Everything, that is, from the moment that I came out of the house early this morning to find that the entire street was blocked - it still is - by men and machines digging up what seems to be a burst water main.

 

physical geography

Something that absolutely fascinated me in geography lessons at school - and I loved geography - was learning about oxbow lakes: how bars of silt slowly developed at the bottom of river bends and increased the angulation of the bend - until eventually, the flow of the river decided to take a line of least resistance and cut across the bend, leaving a crescent-moon shaped relic of its former self in the form of a lake curved in the shape of an ox collar - the kind of collar used when ploughing.  In finding the origin of that term - I'm not sure we dived into the etymology at school (but I may have been too busy drawing the phenomenon with my mapping pen and colored inks: the amount of drawing involved was one of the reasons I loved it so much) - I discovered that in Australia, oxbow lakes are billabongs.  Now I've learned something - I thought that billabongs were common or garden ponds that jolly swagmen camped by, not such specific topographical features.

So flying over the Mississippi on my way to Dallas (to wait for a delayed flight to LA) I was very happy to see a perfect example of such a lake in formation.  Apparently there are many of them along this river, created artificially as the river was straightened out - but this particular watery formation seems to be following the natural course of things without assistance.

 

Light in mid-Sptember

I'm only off by nine days ... Faulkner thought that Light in August was pretty distinctive as an effect - and, of course, as a title.  This was his house, Rowan Oak - just on the edge of Oxford, and with a history that clearly haunted his novels: the grandiose and aspirational quality of Greek Revival architecture, the edge of decay and menace, and the kitchen/smoke house that had been the quarters for the enslaved workers of the original family who lived on this property.  The University of Mississippi - who own it - are doing a great job not just of restoring it, but of hunting down the history of the enslaved people who built it, and the connections between its bricks - made from clay from the property - and bricks used to build the university - and hence the whole relationship of the university to enslaved labour.

When it came to Faulkner's own occupancy of it, however, not only does it reveal him to have been a complete jerk - he built his study over his wide's rose garden when she was out of town.  He wouldn't, apparently, install a/c - his wife made that happen the day after he died.  I just couldn't help think how their furniture looked awfully like the stuff that I'm fining it hard to get rid of in Wimbledon.

Oh, yes, I'm at a conference/worskhop.  It's very satisfying to bully one of one's former students into the swimming pool during the after-party ...

 

discussion at the depot

What an excellent conference room!  A small, and wonderful Vcologies meet-up - workshopping papers and socializing in Oxford, Mississippi - and quite apart from the intellectual heft (which has been considerable), the setting, in a former railroad depot, is such an upgrade on the usual seminar room.  And we got our own ecofriendly conference waterbottles, and a stunningly good Southern dinner in a James Beard Award winning chef's restaurant.  Today has been the very best of academic life ... though I just wish that our organizer hadn't been prevented by Circumstances from being at all of it, since she did a mind-bogglingly good job of bringing us all together.

 

Memphis and Oxford

The gardens of the Dixon Art Gallery and Gardens in Memphis are stunning - beautifully designed and curated and shady and watery.  They're attached to an art gallery with some in many ways unremarkable French Impressionists (which therefore are the more interesting for being hardly known), and a handful of much more striking late C19th US paintings - like a tiny oil on board Evening Illuminations at the Paris Exposition of 1889, by Charles Curran, with gas lighting to the left, electric lighting to the right.

The really strong part of it was a large visiting show from the American Folk Art Museum in NY, including Jessie Telfair's 1983 Freedom Quilt -  but many, many things, too, that will find their way into my US Picturing Democracy course next semester.

And now I'm in Oxford, Mississippi, which seems a very vibrant college town, albeit, so far, very conspicuously white ... though that's first impressions; and staying in the University Inn - as is the South Dakota State Women's Volleyball team, who - who knew this? - are called the Jackrabbits.

 

conference travel

You'd have thought that I'd have had enough of airplanes this week.  But, evidently, no ... On the other hand, I really get a whole lot of work done in them, so I feel very caught up.  This is Dallas Fort Worth, en route to Memphis.  Tonight I have the Mississippi outside my window. I think my love of this river must come from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn being two of ... if not the very first two ... the American novels that I ever read (and I went around cramming the pockets of my corduroy trousers as full as I possibly could of all kinds of things - like my tiny little penknife - because Tom's pockets were full, too.)  And I desperately wanted to see a paddle steamer.  Maybe, in the morning ... it's pitch dark, now.  

 

rosehips

These seem like the first signs of fall, just changing color ... I'm probably being over optimisitic, knowing how hot Los Angeles may get over the next couple of months.  And they aren't nearly as impressive as a bush full of bright red ones outside 20 Hillside.  But these are, nonetheless, impressive - Wedgwood - and, as these things go, very English.

 

pipes

 

Yes!  It's the first day back reservoir walk ... today, the smaller of the two reservoirs was looking like an industrial wasteland.  But evidently these pipes - which are new - promise some function or another, before too long.  In the meantime, the reservoir reflects an improbably sunny, blue-skied day.

the advantages of a late flight (and symmetry)

I've never taken such a late flight back from LHR: 3.45 p.m., supposedly - it actually left at 4.55 ... Advantage 1 was that it was much cheaper than earlier ones; Advantage 2 - it was the only international flight arriving at 8 p.m., and that meant the passport control and luggage claim were, for once, amazingly speedy.  But as well, there was time to go for a walk on Wimbledon Common and into Cannizaro Park this morning - here's the pond in Cannizaro;

the glade where I took my first steps -

and the back view of the hotel.  I'd love to say that I owe my enthusiasm for dandelions to Cannizaro, but I suspect it's more venal: my parents used to pay me a penny per hundred dandelion heads (weeding, apart from the time Ray made dandelion wine, which exploded on our cellar steps at Naworth).

But the real symmetry lies in the fact that 20 Hillside wasn't finished when we moved back to Wimbledon in January 1961, so we went to live for five months in a Residential Hotel, the Southdown Hall (demolished in the late 60s, I would think).  I don't know who stayed there in the 1930s - image below - but in 1961 I was the youngest person there by thirty years, and ten there was probably another 25 year gap between my parents and the yuongest of the rest of the residents.  They were mostly - or so it seemed - retired administrators and military from British India, sitting reading The Times in the dining room (I can't remember much about the food, other than poached haddock, and bread and butter pudding, in which the currants were inevitably burnt.  I guess it was, also, cheap.  It seems right, somehow, that my time at 20 Hillside should be bookended by stays in Wimbledon hotels ...

 

'bye ...

How does one say Goodbye to a house that's been Home for 62 years?  That's both a practical question - how does one spend the last ten minutes or so there? - and an aesthetic one: how does one document it? (and let me say - this is just a selection of the many, many photos I took today, with a sense of Never Again).  Of course, there's something a bit arbitrary in this - I could, after all, go back there tomorrow morning, before my flight (but I won't); I may have to go back if, heaven forbid, the sale doesn't happen because probate drags on even further than it is doing (but I hope that's improbable).  In other words, I still own it - or my father's estate does, technically - for another month or so.  But so far as I'm concerned, today was the final day.

I'd only planned a couple of things - not least, I read quite recently that prehistoric Britains used to have a ceremony when a house had reached the end of its livable-in years, and so I left a little bouquet of rosemary and lavender on the inside threshold.  What I'd not anticipated at all was my last ten minutes or so there - I found myself going room by room - and of course into the garden - and thanking each room, aloud, for all it had given us, and reminding the house of my favorite memories in each of those places.  But other than that - after the final cleaning, and throwing away, and sweeping - it was melancholy in the extreme.  Of course so many of the pictures that I took are of shadows, and spaces, and emptiness (even though there's some furniture still to be retrieved by friends that's there) - or of the poignancy of things like all the taps and pipes that my father labeled in the airing cupboard.  His plumbing, perhaps I needn't add, worked, but is a mystery to me.

It's all poignant not just because this is, effectively, a Condemned House (and the more I emptied and cleaned it, the more it revealed itself to be held together with hope and a prayer), but because it wasn't just Home to me as a child, and while I was an undergrad, but - and perhaps especially - once I went to the US twenty two years ago: it was always where I returned to; where I felt grounded (not, of course, necessarily the same thing as happy) - it was my firm hold on my English self.  This was especially true this last year, since Ray died - I might have been permanently dismantling it, but I realised that I loved it now, and not because it was stuffed full of memories.  It's been a good, and wonderful, house.  Thank you, to 20 Hillside.