wintry English gardens

It was Very Cold and Frosty this morning - look at all those whitened leaves.  And those bell cloches?  Protecting the tender dahlia tubers.  It is such a treat to get some real English chilly weather, and a wintry back garden - oh, yes, and the Black Atlantic exhibition at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum, and all the pleasures of hanging out with friends and wandering round twon ...

 

England at dusk

 

The thing about a late flight out of LA - at this time of the year, one sees very little daylight.  This fading light was glimpsed from the train between London and Cambridge - little workshops, and leafless oaks against a wintry sky. 

Also - I’m locked out of my computer, because it didn’t like the change of country and didn’t like the password that I thought was mine (it’s a relatively new computer).  So at this rate,, communication may be challenging for a few days …

en route

Last class of the semester taught, and on my way to England for a few days ... trying, to be sure, to juggle too much admin with too few hands, but looking forward ... although about to juggle too little time, too many people I want to see, etc etc.  I am truly looking forward to the peace and quiet of the airplane ...

 

sleigh delivery

Where, until quite recently, there were skeletons heading up the funicular, now there's Santa Snoopy - and the reindeer.  I still, after all these years, find Christmas decorations amid greenery and sunshine something that I find myself shaking my head at - this would be far more appropriate with snow, or at least frost - but I have to applaud this house's serious decoration skills.

 

bottom of the street

Just another golden Los Angeles evening ... we headed out in what seemed like dusk, but when we'd walked a few hundred yards and turned onto Griffith Park Boulevard just where it dead ends, and looked behind us, it was clear that the hills and mountains above Glendale were still in sunlight. Yes, it's winter - and it will be somewhat cooler this coming week.  But when I compare the weather here with what the forecast is in England ... hmmm.

 

late season

And still the tomatoes on this plant keep growing and ripening!  I intend to consume this one tomorrow - the last tomato to ripen was eaten by one of the landscapers.  At least, that's the only plausible answer to its disappearance - I think raccoons or squirrels would have marauded some of the greener ones, too. But this looks on the brink of perfection.  This plant has been going strong since the spring - quite amazingly, I grew it from a large beefsteak tomato that I cut in half one day, hoping to eat it for my lunch, and found that it had sprouted internally into a whole lot of tiny green tomato seedlings.  So I planted it, as a kind of experiment, and here we are.

 

garden pots

Sitting in our front yard, and currently empty - so part of the whole Work In Progress. This isn't part of the officially designed space - but these pots are perfect together, just where they are, once I've added a few geraniums or such like.

 

Thanksgiving miscellany

So many things to be thankful for!  But let me offer our view at dinner; our host, Connie, and the excellent main course - baked salmon by Alice; superlative carrot salad and mashed potatoes by Connie - carrot salad might sound a little unfestive, but this had dried apricots and pistachios and ricotta and all sorts of other tastes;

the best pumpkin cheesecake I've ever made;

and then home to Moth, and my wonderful shoulder cat, the one and only Gramsci.

 

a cheerful wall in the 'hood

It's very nearly Thanksgiving - so we treated ourselves by going out to breakfast in Silver Lake (before heading into campus, which was almost as empty as it was during the lockdown).  And if that seems like undue zealousness on our part, it was that or be tripping over our housekeeper all day.  One thing that we can certainly be very thankful for is living in a neighborhood where a wall can be decorated like this ...

 

getting into holiday mood

No, this can't possibly be a holiday card picture, because Gramsci is far too prominent.  But the pomegranates and oranges; the rather vividly green sweater - let alone the lighting - they are, at the very least, preparing for Thanksgiving.

 

experiments with squash

It's the time of the year when different types of squash proliferate - at least, they do in our Farm Vegetable Box.  Lots of butternut squash, and what's probably my favorite, delicata - and today, kabocha.  It lived up to its on-line reputation (once I'd hacked my way into it - a small chain-saw would have helped) of being sweet and slightly floury, like chestnuts.  I baked it (once the seeds were removed and it was sliced up) with miso sauce and ginger, and much recommend it.

And why, yes, if the background should look weirdly familiar but out of place - I couldn't bear to leave all the kitchen tiles at 20 Hillside to their fate, so a neighbor helped me wrench off the hatch door, and I carted it all the way back to LA, where it's acting as a kind of backsplash in our own kitchen.

 

fall - ready for planting!

I love the fact that our new garden will include trees that behave as though there are real, genuine seasons here.  This is the Western Redbud (Cercis occidentalis) - which should be covered in pink blossoms for a couple of months in the spring, and in the fall - well, I'm delighted to see that its leaves yellow, and become mottled, and then fall off.  No planting next week - the landscapers are busy having Thanksgiving - but all will resume on the 27th ... 

 

local color deliberations

Up the street - a house, rather run-down, that sold a few months back, and that's been undergoing flipping-style Improvements ever since.  Probably some new paint will help it sell at a profit?  Should the garage door be off-white, with very dark blue-grey or black trim?  Or vice-versa?  Oh, decisions, decisions.  For a decade now, a monochrome palate has been de rigueur, both in Los Feliz and Silver Lake - to the extent that it becomes rather boring (says the person whose house is still obstinately in Tuscan ochre with green trim, because Mediterranean).  The best bit of this near-abstract composition, in any case, are those thin, subtle stripes of masking-tape orange.

 

Fight On!

Our university's motto, reflected in a very shiny floor.  One might think that this was a Jenny Holzer installation, were it not for the fact that it's in the newly renovated (and spacious, and improved) Galen Center, where we just saw USC make slightly heavy weather of beating an ok Cal women's volleyball team.  I feel that I lured Alice there under false pretenses, since it was billed as a Disco Night (with free USC lava lamps - yes, truly, such things exist - for the first 500 people to arrive, which didn't include us ...).  But DJ Malski played pretty much his usual repertoire, with only a quick short blast of "Stayin' Alive."  Misleading ...

 

fortune telling?

To my enormous disappointment, this year there's no Ferris Wheel on campus - only a large stage ready for tomorrow night's Conquest bands (that's the big campus dance party the night before the USC/UCLA football game).  And then there are a lot of other smalls, like this one, that look as though they're getting ready for a summer fête on the village green, to be opened by the vicar - alongside the tombola and the home-baked cakes and the used book stall and the geraniums.

 

work in progress

It was a dull, dank day, with spasmodic outbursts of heavy rain - so in fact there were no landscapers actually at work.  But you can see how exciting this is - there's actually a real garden developing before our eyes.  And of course this rain will be preparing the ground very well, and doubtless cheering up the apprehensive, dislocated plants and trees, and making them feel welcome.

 

celebrating a colleague

One of the genuinely great bits of being a chair (or a reluctant interim chair, in my case) is that one gets invited to celebrate one's colleagues successes with them - in this case Sonya Lee being given a Senior Raubenheimer Award for research/teaching/service (and it was also very lovely that she brought her father as her guest).  And not only did we have a surprisingly good lunch, but we were all - every single guest - given a Dornsife backpack as swag.  Sometimes our university makes it fun.

 

the plants are here!

I am, of course, teasing you ... no view of the plants themselves, today.  But I promise you that this truck disgorged a whole lot of tubs and pots, containing everything from redbuds to ferns to agave cacti ... all which should be going into the ground very very soon.  It's absolutely the right week for rain - not, supposedly, torrential rain, but a few days of persistent damp - to be forecast.  We're getting to the end, I think, of what's been nearly a year-long process - it's going to be so exciting when we can actually claim that it's finished.

 

fall leaves

I do realize that for many of you, fall leaves are not a novelty.  But the ones on display on Indiana's campus today really were quite spectacular.  After a few days conferencing when I only seemed to emerge from the building after dark (a consequence of staying on site that I hadn't fully thought through), it was great to have the time to walk around.

 

graveyard

This may be Bloomington, Indiana - but the view through the window outside the conference rooms (the Tree rooms, that is - Walnut, Dogwood, and, yes, Oak, and Persimmon, and a whole forest of others) could be any November day in England.  This seems about right for the cognitive dissonance of spending three days discussing things Victorian in the middle of the US - with some stretches out into the broader world (as with Sukanya Banerjee's terrific keynote today) - while in England itself today, there was both a huge pro-Palestinian, pro-cease fire march, and a scarily unpleasant display of aggression from British fascists. Sometimes (especially when hanging out with British friends) it's hard to know where one's mind has settled down to roost.

 

a very red tree

This really is a very red tree. Plus the tiniest wisp of a white cloud.  Not enough of Outdoors today - but what I saw of it was quite spectacular.

 

conference dinner time

 

I'm sure that conveys the appropriate message.  We entered FARM as sober as we left it.  Maybe.  But no cars or combine harvesters were involved.  So great to go out to dinner to celebrate our art historical NAVSA panel (on "Nostalgia and Nationhood") - with very many thanks to all who came!

Indiana - art, etc

As promised, the wonderful Bottleworks hotel by daylight.

I was really here, though, not to sample Indianapolis's lodging, good though it was, but to visit Newfields, the Art Museum - above all to see this huge snail (by the Italian collective Cracking Art).

 

The museum had a good, if fairly small collection of C19th US art, too - as ever, the surprises are very often local art works, like this view of the city at dusk (look at all those different kinds of lighting!) by Theodor Groll (another figure in my never-to-be written book on Germans and C19th US art - I mean, I'd need decent German to write it, but there's an interesting and lively book there) - which was full of wonderful details.

And then this very Japanese-influenced (look carefully at the woman crossing the canal) view by Richard Buckner Gruelle.

This is quite some picture frame!! (Abbott Handerson Thayer, Margaret McKittrick, ca. 1903).

And then the saddest memorial portrait, Joseph R. Mason's depiction of Maria Jane Andrew (1841) - with her dead brother's picture on the wall behind - this was painted days after she died, aged 7 - possibly as a result of too much serious reading, judging by that pile of books.

An excellent Kara Walker projection/image, They Wax Nice White Folks While They Lasted (Sez One Gal to Another) (2001).

And then wonderful grounds - this is a wonderful bonus of autumn conferences away from Califonia: leaves.

And a stunning sunset on the shuttle ride down to Bloomington,

and pretty good lighting effects on the campus, too!

staying in an old Coca-Cola bottling plant

Here's the view from my window, of the old Coca-Cola garage (now a food hall), and below, the view from outside my room.  I've never been to Indianapolis before - only past it - and it seems really lively.  One of my great pleasures of conference-going, if I possibly can, is to stick a day on one end so that I can go and see some art - so that's tomorrow.  But how could I resist a night in an old Coca-Cola bottling plant (now the Bottleworks Hotel) - which is terrific?  I'll get a view of the hotel's outside, too, which is like a great big Art Deco ocean liner.

 

Geometric architecture. With pumpkin.

The question is ... are we looking at a piece of exquisite artistic chic minimalism, or someone who just hasn't got round to taking down their Hallowe'en decorations (few people have, in fact - skeletons carry on hanging from trees for an awful long time around here)?  

 

how do I get down?

The trouble with being a shoulder cat is that sometimes you think it'd be fun to jump on top of something that's, let's say, five feet off the ground.  And then ... well, apart from posing for one's picture, one's got some decisions to make.

 

a commemorative cocktail glass ...

Here's another entry in the Ridiculousness of USC contest: do other institutions serve special cocktails in a commemorative glass in their Presidents' Suites at football games?  This one happened to be very good, involving vodka and hibiscus and limeade and soda (there was an ingredients list at the bar).  If only we'd actually won the game (Washington 52 USC 42.  Yes, that is a lot of points.  No, neither side had much by way of a defense.  But it was entertaining ...).

So that's the end of our Pac-12 title game hopes.  And next season we join the Big 10.  The date that I have circled on my calendar?  October 26th, when we play Rutgers ... Fight On vs Chop Chop.

 

one last seasonal family photo

This family of skellies don't really look too happy in today's strong sunlight (nor, perhaps, were we - we hadn't quite realised that the temperature was 82 when we went out for a walk ...).  The neighborhood ghouls are starting to disappear - I took our Day of the Dead cats down today - these ones look as though they might be waiting for a very overdue ride to turn up.

 

graffiti

There are real advantages to not having a car: one gets to see more, and can take photographs of the view from the bus window ... in this case, on the very efficient shuttle bus between USC's Health Sciences campus and the University Park Campus (and for the record, this was the first time in an age that I've been for a dermatology check up and not had bits frozen off my face - I thought I was going to have to go to NAVSA looking like a Dalmatian, but all is well).  

On the other hand ... coming back from campus, the traffic on Vermont was wedged solid ... and frustration started to set in ... this would usually have been ok, but I was trying to get to our anniversary dinner (married 10 years! can you believe it?!) and becoming increasingly fretful (Alice, at least, was in a restaurant with a glass of wine in front of her).  But I made it in the end ...