walking in a straight line

This looks like some kind of sobriety test: if so, I promise I had no difficulty in walking straight down this path alongside the golf course in Griffith Park - the one that's bifurcated by Crystal Springs Drive.  I'd say it was good to get away from campus, only the amount of emails and Instagram posts and, well, everything that have been flying around means that I've been living there in virtual reality.  These were enlivened by a message from the President - yes, she's woken up, or located her speech writer - too little, too late, too absurd.  "The current pressures and polarization have taken a toll in ways that break my heart."  Maybe.  Maybe that's written from the very core of her being. But ... it's missing rather a lot that it might be helpful to address.  And when it comes to Commencement, "We are working around the clock to infuse this special day with new activities, surprises, and celebrations, while upholding traditions that are uniquely USC."  What might they be?  Egg and spoon races in academic robes?  Traveler galloping across campus, scattering families in all directions (they probably won't have been allowed to bring chairs and blankets, in any case, since these surely count as camping equipment).  Caleb Williams parachuting in?  Doubtless the "surprises" will amount to an appearance from Will Farrell, who always, mysteriously, gets wheeled out as entertainment - so frequently, indeed, that his presence wouldn't be a surprise ...

 

campus today

... had, in the morning, an eerie and rather depressed quiet hanging over it.  The parking structure was half empty, which made me suspect that more than a few of my colleagues had taken the soft option and were teaching via Zoom.  We, in AHIS 366, "Picturing Democracy: American Art 1750-1900" rounded off the semester by discussing the Statue of Liberty - or rather, all the liberties that at the time were fully recognized as not being present in the figure; considered the gender implications of Woman on a Pedestal; and tried to tie up the semester while munching the chocolate chip cookies.  One students complained, or at least noted, that there hadn't been enough about strikes and the growth of the union movement, which is quite possibly true, though the Delacroix-style liberty-woman of the Haymarket Martyrs memorial did creep into today.  

Of course, with 93 students and colleagues having been arrested yesterday at what was essentially a very peaceful protest on campus, this was all horribly timely.  Those radio reporters who claimed that there was no activity on campus today - not the case: there was a substantial group of students and faculty (including my colleague in Sociology, Nina Eliasoph, who'd made the placard she's holding here) on the lawn outside THH when I left this afternoon.  Where there was very little visible activity was in the central administration, apart from (quite a big "apart from") a letter from the Provost saying that the main Commencement ceremony had been cancelled (so not only no valedictorian's speech, and no honorary degrees, but no speech from the President - just lots of satellite ceremonies for each of the schools).  But where is the President?  Carol Folt has been missing in action for 10 days - at least, that was the date of her last post to Twitter.  She's usually such an infuriatingly chirpy cheerleader, but after announcing the "USC-Capital One Center for Responsible AI and Decision Making in Finance" (I kid you not) on April 15th, not a peep from her, or her office - not even a congratulatory chirp that our star quarterback, Caleb Williams, was #1 in the NFL draft.  This is, for her, weird.  

Then I turn the corner on the way back to that half-empty parking structure, and find a ferris wheel.  There's some symbolism here, I'm sure, but I'm expending so much energy in anger at the inept administration that I can't muster the energy to work it out.

 

USC - on campus and back home

I made two brief visits to the protest on campus day - brief, because of graduate exam, and aching (and bandaged) head.  What I saw was peaceful, good tempered, and conducted in the spirit of wanting peace - with Muslims, Jews, and people who most likely identify as neither, but know murderous wrong-doing when they see it.  They had a program for the day, pinned to a tree - including yoga and meditation, poetry reading, reporting on Palestine, an Israelism discussion, a Kaddish reading and a sunset vigil.  What did the University end up doing?  There was an escalating number of Trojan Alerts; and of closures on campus; a half-hearted and mealy-mouthed letter from the Provost (probably written by McKinsey & Co) which made a limp attempt to say oh yes, we do support free speech - and then, by the time I was home, the LAPD were there in force, rubber bullets and riot batons at the ready.  Although I don't think I knew any of the protestors who remained in the center of Alumni Park calmly waiting to be arrested (after being told to vacate for trespassing.  Trespassing? Really? In the center of campus?) I was proud how they calmly and, yes, peacefully, one by one, gave themselves up to be arrested.

Moth's expression shows how horrified she was by the turn of events.

We're told that we can teach on-line tomorrow, if we like.  NO WAY am I missing teaching my last undergrad class of the semester in person!  I have just taken a fine batch of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven.

 

classroom cover-up

It seemed the only possible way to teach without looking like a Hallowe'en zombie: I was delighted when a student told me that I Rocked That Hat.  In turn, I told the class that my work with them would be done if they all made sure that their parents and grandparents and of course themselves had their skin checked regularly ... then we slid back into normal gear and discussed the function/destruction/preservation of monuments (and I showed them the first ten minutes of the Met's video about the making of the Seneca Village Afro-Futurist installation, too).

Yes - it still hurts, especially where they had to press into the side of my head to stop veins from bleeding - that feels as though I've been thumped with a small mallet.  But better today than yesterday ... and thank you, everyone, for your concern!

 

the abstraction of waiting rooms

 

Not that I myself was lost in abstract thought - plenty of teaching prep for the week - the last week of teaching! - to get me through ... Reader: wear sunscreen.  Admittedly, the damage done to my skin - which needed two small skin cancers removed from it today - was probably done on French and Greek beaches in the 1970s, but all the same.  And think yourself lucky I'm not posting images of my huge stitched flaps (there's not a lot of skin round one's hairline) not of my bandaged, Bride of Dracula self (the bandages will shrink a bit in a day or two).  Of course I took documentary selfies of such things as I was being patched up. I may try and conceal myself on campus under a floppy hat.  Also, it hurts (that's to be expected, apparently). Also I will probably have a black eye tomorrow or the next day.  Better off/out than on, but youch.

it's spring! let me out!

I don't believe that I've ever fully noticed before that among the galloping horses on the Bryant Park carousel that there's a galloping orange cat - still shrouded in winter protected plastic.  Presumably he'll be liberated soon.

I'm now back in LA, and it's the last week of the teaching semester coming up ...

 

spring in NYC (and some painting details)

When spring arrives in New York, it can be absolutely stunning - and I was lucky today ... Largely I was in the Met, visiting the Harlem Renaissance show, which is every bit as good as everyone says (go, if you haven't already, and you can ...).  This is from one of my very favorite pictures there, Palmer Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints, from c. 1937 - indeed, Hayden was something of a revelation to me.

Five rooms, maybe, later, a woman turned to another behind me - but ever so much so that I could hear - "This lady's only taking fotos of cats."  (this is from William Johnson's Mom and Dad).  Well .... er ... not quite guilty as charged: 

... there was a wonderful flash photographer in Jacob Lawrence's The Photographer (1942) - how have I missed that before? unlike so many of the paintings here, it's actually owned by the Met.

So very many good things - I'll just add Horace Pippin's The Artist's Wife (1936).

Then downstairs, this collaboratively constructed and curated Afro-Futurist room, Before Yesterday We Could Fly, building on the history, excavations, and imagined futurity of Seneca Village [that largely Black (with some Irish) community that was "cleared" when Central Park was constructed...this opened just after my last visit to the Met, and I can't wait to share this with my students next week, since we discussed Seneca Village earlier in the semester in the context of Central Park.

And of course, having been talking about Jerome Thompson's painting, I went to say hello to it (and photographed a few details so that I have some even clear images than I currently do of details), 

and - this is real research! 😀 - found a dandelion that was new to me, in Bierstadt's Lander's Peak - since that's an invented mountain, it's almost certainly an imagined plant, too ...

 

other people's departments

Having this framed Frank Stella poster for the Attica Defense Fund in one's corridor rather raises the bar: we have posters for LACMA, back in Taper Hall.  (The Attica Rebellion, as you'll recollect, was a protest in 1971 that took place in the Attica Prison in upstate New York, against racial disparity there, inhumane living conditions, and demanding that prisoners be granted political rights: it led to the deaths of 33 inmates and 10 officers/employees of the correctional facility). It's a pretty sobering reminder, as one comes up the stairs towards Princeton's Art and Architecture reminder, that even if the rebellion led to some relatively short-term improvements, things slid back again: a far cry from being served danish pastries and fruit and coffee before I led a seminar with a terrific group of 14 or so students.  And one subsequently sent me some slug art I didn't previously know!  It's really invigorating - I know I said this yesterday - to spend a couple of days outside one's customary intellectual habitat.

propitious?

So ... I might have been talking about Bark today (tree bark, not canine voices), but the paper that I'm workshopping/discussing tomorrow morning (plus some other readings) with what seem like a super-smart load of graduate students here at Princeton is on ... yes, Dandelions.  So it should go well, no?  It's been really great being back here: just half an hour in Labyrinth Books, opposite the campus, had me feeling that this was a world in which history/the humanities actually mattered - as did the response to my talk, and dinner afterwards.  Sometimes (and perhaps this is especially true towards the end of a semester) a day or so of academic life away from home base is exactly what one needs to get one's brain and spirits working again.

 

The Nassau Inn

 

I think that the first time I stayed at the Nassau Inn, in Princeton, would have been back in 1989 - ? - when I was giving a talk on The Woman Reader at Elaine Showalter's invitation - and I thought it was quite the poshest hotel I had ever stayed in.  That might very well have been true.  There was a marble topped counter in the bathroom!  There were free toiletries!  Both those things are still true - unsurprisingly, since the Nassau Inn never changes - right down to the fact that I was the only woman in the Taproom having dinner (a surprisingly good burrata salad - there's not a whole lot conveniently open at 9.20 in the evening around here, and my choices were limited ...) But back in 1989, I was so very overawed and over excited that I literally could hardly bear to go to sleep, since it was such a treat to be in a room like this, and I thought it not improbable that I'd never stay anywhere like it again, and I wanted to savor every minute.  

Tonight, I want to sleep as long and deeply as possible, please ... 

The perfect LA license plate

I was so very happy this morning to find myself driving down N. Hoover St. behind this car!  Sometimes the commute is very much worthwhile. Admittedly I really like the commute - a chance to catch up with NPR or to muse ... but this takes in-car entertainment to a whole new level.

 

car recovery service

... or what?  The question that one has to ask of this incomprehensible scene is whether or not the two vehicles are connected.  The wrecked miniature car, I should add, has been on the verge opposite the reservoir for a couple of days now.  But has the time come to retrieve it, or impound it, or ...?

I wish Alice would get her car returned to her (she has a rental, which is slightly more substantial than the black auto here, but not much).  Someone crashed into her own car when it was parked in the street and damaged a wing and collapsed a fender: luckily a neighbor emerged and proffered the driver a pen and paper for her details ... and all is going through the insurance, slowly slowly ...

 

wilting in the damp

Will this be the end of the rainy season?  We managed to squeeze in a quick walk, but it was somewhat touch and go ... this rose, at the end of the street, seemed like it had hoped for better weather, too ...

 

reservoir hawk

A very fine red-tailed hawk at the reservoir this morning, sitting and waiting for ... well, waiting for ...? ... at this time of the year I worry a lot about the heron nests/eggs/young herons.  There were, indeed, no herons in sight, although for the time of year there were a surprising number of rather loud geese.

 

The library, echium candicans, and some sad reflections

 

Every time I go to the Huntington when these large spiky purple flowers are out - even on a dull cold day like today - I feel so happy that I get to work in the library here (these flowers are Echium Candicans, or Pride of Madeira.  As the name suggests, they aren't native here - though they thrive beautifully in the climate - so I doubt that there will be any in our garden.  Shame.  Maybe I'll sneak a couple into the front?).

But it was a day very much tinged with sadness, because my old friend Francis O'Gorman died yesterday evening - of cancer of the jaw, at the horribly young age of 57.  I knew him slightly when he was a graduate student in Oxford, and then, much better, when he was a Lecturer at Pembroke College before heading off to permanent jobs - so he was part of the Victorianist crew who would end up at our house eating and drinking after our seminars.  And after that - I'd see him often at conferences, although, in a rather startling recognition of how the pandemic warped our sense of time, and our capacity for professional sociability, I think that the last occasion might have been at the Ruskin conference in Oxford in 2019.  In part, too, I think this lack of first person contact can be attributed to the power of Facebook: he posted so frequently, and with such astute observation, that one felt his presence vividly almost every day.  But virtual presence isn't real presence, and I just wish I'd seen more of him in recent years.

Professional obituaries for Francis will doubtless write about his professional distinctions; about his enormous productivity - whether on Victorian subjects or beyond; and about his musical talents.  He was an impressive organist; and after he took early retirement a couple of years ago, he had much more time to be happy at the keyboard, in his and his wife's Kate's extraordinary garden, and with his orange and white cat Oscar, who just, and with terrible timing, predeceased him.  Francis was, indeed, a tremendous cat lover, and when I first met him he had, of course (as a Ruskinian) a particularly dear one called Effie. I could go on and on about the things that Francis felt about passionately, from birds to Venice - but what distinguished so many of them, and what ties them both to the origins of this blog, and to Ruskin, was his attentiveness, his capacity to find beauty and pleasure in small and ostensibly ordinary things.  He will be so missed.

their introduction to the world of work

I'm sure that this is a valuable lesson to learn right at the start of one's working life ... Today the Career Fair had taken over campus: long lines of students standing - resumes in hand - to talk to recruiters behind tables.  The instructions for budding bankers, or whatever, seem very specific, at least as set out online:

What to Wear

Wear professional attire in accordance with your gender expression. Overall suggestions:

Dress in a dark or neutral color matching business suit.

Wear freshly pressed clothing and polished dress shoes.

Keep makeup as natural as possible. Avoid flashy or bright nail polish.

Minimize jewelry: leave out the nose ring and tongue jewelry.

Grooming is important: hair and nails should be neat and clean.

What to Bring

Copies of your resume

Your elevator pitch

Your Action Plan (see below)

The elevator pitch!!  I'm sure it was a foreshadowing metaphor - like the food sign - that the doors in the elevator in the parking lot didn't fully open when I was trying to exit yesterday morning, so I walked thuddingly into what should have been a gap.  I am so very glad that I never tried to join the corporate world, even if my father advised me, when I was about 24, to think about a career in merchant banking.  His rationale was that I'd make enough money to retire when I was 45 and then spend the rest of my life doing things that I actually wanted to do - but he left out any consideration of whether I would have any actual ability in that sphere...

geranium by porch light

Back late, for us, from a dinner party - and with that sinking feeling that it had been such a busy day - or at least one in which my hours had been very much accounted for - that I hadn't yet taken any picture.  Thank goodness for the reliability of geraniums, greeting us by the front porch.

 

a perfectly abstract ... garage

 

There's a house newly for sale up the street and round the corner from us, on Lowry.  We've watched it turn over the last few years from an old-style very run down sub-Spanish house - maybe from the 30s? - to a sleek new dwelling. "Some people might call this a flip," the realtor said to Alice when she dropped into its Open House on Sunday. "We prefer to think of it as a re-imagining."

Something that will need re-imagining, or at least fixing, fast will be the garage door.  It seems to have broken already - and it's being guarded by two very bright fluorescent pink lines of tape.

eclipse, muted style

These are some of the least dramatic eclipse photographs that you're likely to see ... I'd been waiting for the sky to darken some (it did - but not even as dramatically as it did during the anular solar eclipse in New Mexico last October, when, driving back from town - and having forgotten all about the event - I thought my car windows had suddenly become very dirty).  No, today, I was completely ready - not to look at the sun through cardboard spectacles, but to enjoy the strange effect of leaf-dappling shadows, overlapping like sand ribbed by the waves.

Only - there were some strangely alarmed bird sounds, and the shadows certainly thickened, but I felt that I'd rather missed out on the excitement of the main event.  All the same, it was gently eerie.

 

cat portrait photo shoot

Over to the West Side, for a kitty photo shoot (and to watch basketball).  I had an extremely photogenic subject in Ms Blueberry.  It took her a little while to get into it (and a fair number of squeezes of Churu), but she did herself proud, in the end.

 

views

Perfect hiking weather today - absolutely clear sky, and sunny, but not at all hot.  So Véronique and I went more or less straight up the hill behind the house - a bit of zig-zagging on streets, because I wanted to try a new way up into Griffith Park, which indeed led us onto a very steep trail up to Cedar Grove, and onto the rough road called Visa del Valle Drive.  Only one vista?  There were vistas in all directions, as well as plenty of yellow mustard, and some spectacular wild, or escaped, wisteria.  Then we looped round to the trails that overlook this house - little glimpses of it all the way down. 

And when I say "steep" - my Apple Watch, at the end of it all, claimed that I'd scaled 62 flights.  Quite so.

 

garden surprises

Even if it's still shockingly cold, the fact that it's April means that every day, seemingly, something else starts to bud or bloom.  I didn't know that these irises - Canyon Snow White Irises - were going to emerge suddenly today, underneath my study window, but they're ever so pretty, even if looking a bit like a rather disastrous omelette.

 

Bechdel

An excellent start to the day, pre-teaching (alas, I had to slope away in order to get to my class): Alison Bechdel was in a q and a session with a couple of USC colleagues in English and Gender Studies, and with a large room full of students, with a few stray faculty scattered around the perimeter.  It was terrific to see and hear her - she was absolutely like - well, like she's always portrayed herself, so it was as if graphic memoir/Dykes to Watch Out For had sprung to life. 

Two big takeaways, for me. First - she takes photographs of herself in various poses before drawing the figures in her images - not just when she's representing herself, though, but when representing others.  And she says that doing this helps her imaginatively get into the body - and hence, I guess, the being - of others: her mother, say, or her therapist.

And then - she's currently writing a graphic novel about life on a pygmy goat farm. I will be first in line for that (of course, I've already been googling "pygmy goats," and find that they cost about $350, but of course I don't think that they would be exactly compatible with all the new garden plants).

 

lunchtime view

Perfect blue sky, today - and a rare Wednesday on which I didn't have a meeting or some other reason to go in. So how could one resist lunch outside?  Almost all bunches of flowers end up outdoors, because so very many (like tulips, indeed) are poisonous to cats, and although neither Moth nor Gramsci share what was LucyFur's alarming propensity to chew on anything green, we play it safe.

And the black walnut is just coming into leaf!  It looks as dead as one can possibly imagine during the winter, and is always so late unfurling that one thinks it never will - but it's happening, at last.

 

campus at night

One of those evenings when campus seems to look like a page from a recruitment brochure ... I'm sure that the lighting at the top of Waite Phillips Hall of Education never looked like this before, though - somehow very corporate, like an insurance office in the mid west.  And then that tower is a weird mauve ... However: there in order to celebrate a good friend, Sofia Gruskin, receive a suitably prestigious academic honor - and by chance witness some other friends and colleagues also be honored for various things.  These things do go on for a very long time, though, to be sure ...

 

Gramsci, shoulder cat

Breakfast can have its challenges in our house!  (so can going upstairs, sitting anywhere - desk, bathroom - or, on dire occasions, just standing up, unsuspecting - until this arrives on one's shoulder).  We do love him - but he's not very light.

 

the other redbud tree

... is situated right outside my office's side window, together with the rather nasty green fence that our neighbor has inexplicably put up all the length of her boundary. It's not as though she has a dog ... I guess, though, it's some kind of visual symbol of a desire for privacy.  On the right, and currently on the ground, you'll see a bas relief sculpture that used to be in the garden at 20.  Like so many things, it looks very much smaller here ... but I love seeing it as I come down the stairs and into the room.

Expect these plants to grow and grow very soon: we had another inch or so of rain last night.

 

rainy lemons

It did, indeed, rain hard in the night (and the bottom section of the drainpipe fell off with a satisfyingly resounding sound at 2.46 a.m.) - and there may be some more on the way.  The new ferns look as happy as if they were in a tropical rain forest; the lemons - well, they're wet.  

weather coming in

There's another storm on its way - the last of the winter?  Late afternoon saw us trying to reposition a detached gutter downspout (Alice had better luck with that than I, but it still seems rather precarious ...), and sandbagging the garage once again.  I'm just hoping that it holds off until the end of the Dodgers game ...

I always tell people that I park my car on the roof of the parking structure so that I can remember where I left it, and there's some truth in that.  But really I head up there so that I can admire the sky.

 

celebrating (but lamenting) a retirement

We went out for an evening walk just now, and all along Effingham - the street below us - were balloons and hand-made notices.  And as soon as we saw that very many of them featured mailboxes, and thanks for the delivery of parcels, and so on, we realised the sad truth: our mail man is retiring.  He's been terrific ever since we got here - he knows who we are (no small thing, because the temporary replacements of course never do), and is super alert to "hold" notices when we go out of town, and is always - always! - cheerful.  So I hope he enjoys a wonderful retirement.  Meng, incidentally, is a Chinese name which apparently translates as "energetic" - feel free to put me right here! - although in ancient Chinese signifies the first born of a concubine.  I'll stick with the first meaning since it suits him so extraordinarily well.

 

pastel protest

Opposite the reservoir.  You have to get up close (in the photo, in real life) to see that what's chalked on the garage door is "Free Palestine."  I can hardly be the only person who walks by and is immediately led to think of all the chalking on garage doors that children in Palestine can't even remotely think of doing right now: the message works not just through its words, but through the mode of production that brought it into being.